Dear Black people, you suck at coding

Megan Rose Dickey, a black blogger at Techcrunch wrote an article titled “Dear White People, You Suck At Diversity“, attacking the Dick Costello (former CEO of Twitter), Marc Benioff (CEO of Salesforce),  and Mike Moritz (legendary investor of Sequoia Capital) for not taking into account “intersectionality”. In other words, trying to hire more women is not enough, and that “racial minorities, trans people and gender nonconforming people” are left out.

If white people, aka Silicon Valley sucked so hard at diversity, then how come 21% of Google’s workforce is Asian, but only 4% of the USA is Asian? Whereas Hispanics are 3% of Google’s workforce and 16% of USA’s population. See more here (by the Verge).

Asians are 5 times over represented. Hispanics are 5 times under represented. Why is that? Both Asians and Hispanics had to migrate to the USA, learn another language, suffer outsider status, but their outcomes are wildly different.

To make it in technology, you must be extremely intelligent. Just like to make it as a model in New York, you must be extremely beautiful or to make it in the NBA, extremely tall. These are just the table stakes to participate.

Even those who do not seem intelligent like Steve Ballmer, turn out to be geniuses. Hard to believe but oaf-like, sweaty lumbering salesman Steve Ballmer beat Bill Gates in the Putnam exam in 1974, the prestigious mathematics exam.

The 2012 PISA study is an international study of 15 year old students (n=500,000, suck on that Daniel Khaneman) from around the world in mathematics, science and reading. Look below at Asian/White Americans and compare to Black/Latino Americans.

At the young age of 15, you already see a huge divergence between Black/Hispanic Americans (way below average) and Asian/White Americans (above average).

The hiring process for getting an engineering job in technology is pretty clear cut. Either you can get the code to work, or you can’t. Your skin color, gender, race, or religion does not matter. Same when it comes to fundraising. If you have good traction, you can raise money regardless of your pedigree. 

There just aren’t enough qualified Black and Hispanics applying for tech jobs. There already is a shortage of engineering talent. Why would any company not hire someone who is qualified? Our white overlords certainly don’t throw good Asian programmers away!

Silicon Valley leaders are well-meaning and nice, and are trying their best to increase diversity. You have Google, Facebook and Apple voluntarily posting diversity reports.

We are proud of the progress we’ve made, and our commitment to diversity is unwavering. But we know there is a lot more work to be done. – Apple CEO, Tim Cook

“We’ve always been reluctant to publish numbers about the diversity of our workforce at Google. We now realize we were wrong and that it’s time to be candid about the issues,” – Google SVP, Laszlo Bock

While we have achieved positive movement over the last year, it’s clear to all of us that we still aren’t where we want to be. There’s more work to do. – Facebook Global Director of Diversity, Maxine Williams

What do they get in return from the social justice activists and the press? More bashing and crap for them not trying hard enough. Just google “facebook diversity report” and look at the headlines.

Perhaps there are immutable differences between the races. Silicon Valley is like the NBA for nerds. We don’t complain that the NBA is 74% black and that there have only been 2 Asian players: Yao Ming and Jeremy Lin (who flamed out). Likewise, we shouldn’t complain when technology is dominated by Whites, Jews and Asians.

Megan Rose Dickey, is not smart enough to make it in technology. She can’t code, and has made zero contributions, but she gets all the airtime and gets to set the agenda. Meantime tech giants self-flagellate, pledge to do better and nothing improves. But it’s not their fault that black people suck at coding.