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As an Hispanic I do not believe tech companies should be forced to hire based on race/gender. The best candidates should always get the job. There is just not enough minorities and women earning computer science degrees in the U.S. Nothing Google can do about that.
Google Says It Supports Diversity, Yet Just 2% Of Its Employees Are Black. Is It A Racist Company?
Perhaps, though some of it may have to do with certain groups interest in STEM fields.
Google does not have only STEM related positions. Any company should have a sizeable support operations such as HR, Accounting, Building management, Legal team, business and risk analysts, lots of corporate paper pushers that don't need STEM degrees. Anyone with a communications degree can work in a Public relations dept or marketing team.
I believe most hiring done is 50% subjective 50% competancy. This is why good looking people often win jobs over not good looking ones and whites typically beats out other race with the same skills and capabilities.
When I became a manager, I made sure I gave minorities other than my own race a chance. I didn't hire just people of my own color I also hired whites and people of different backgrounds and gave them a chance to promote their talent.
I was greeted with a color barrier as I move higher and higher in the ranks. Often there are silent racism at play when several white managers obviously had other conversations or made decisions without managers of other races at present.
It's not going to change until more minorities get into business startups. Companies owned by minorities often hire more minorities than ones owned by whites.
IBM was heavily a hardware/chip company, not a software company. It had huge quantities of employees for various manufacturing plants. There was far more potential for things like that.
Google is not. They do not make physical objects, and when they do it's contracted out to another company, not made in house. They need very few people for roles like that, the vast majority of the employees are highly technical and highly skilled.
Additionally, I consider the suggestion that company should have to locate their facilities somewhere specific to be able to hire minorities (as there are few in Silicon Valley) ludicrous.
Beyond that, I don't think the people currently complaining would be any happier if they hired all-black janitors and cafeteria staff.
As someone who majored in computer science at a state SUNY school, where there were plenty of minorities overall, the graduating CS class was about 5-10% female and <5% black, and electrical engineering/computer engineering was similarly bad. The people don't exist to hire.
If you want it to improve, then push heavier support of CS/Engineering at the lower school levels for poorer/more minority districts. Starting percentages in the major, while not high, were higher. But a secondary problem is that CS/Engineering are majors that don't "start" in College. It's extremely hard to succeed if you didn't start preparing for them as a kid, because everyone else did.
IBM was both a hardware and a software company back in the sixties, seventies and early eighties. Moreover they had large software development facilities located across the world. However, system software at that time was included in their hardware purchase or lease prices, it was not separately priced.
I think the greatest mistake in industrial history took place in Boca Raton, Florida, which was the original HQ of IBM's PC Division that was headed up by Don Estridge. He famously thought that the real value was in the hardware, not in the software. However, Bill Gates and Steve Balmer thought just the opposite and were elated when IBM allowed them to sell the PC-DOS code that they had written for IBM's PCs to third parties, such as Compaq, Dell, Acer, HP, et al.
We know who turned out to be right and what the repercussions were for IBM.
Still, Google has long known exactly what their incredibly poor diversity numbers inside the company represented while they went about applauding in public the Democrat's diversity program. The level of hypocrisy that this represents is truly obscene in my mind.
Well that's easy to answer. There's not many black people in IT. Even much less black people in Silicon Valley. That's why there's less than 2% of them working at Google. On to the next.
I'd actually like to know how to get an interview, because that's all I'd need. I have a friend who works there who recommended me for a job, but the requirements were a stretch and didn't fit my background. He knew, and I knew, that if I had been hired there, I would be able to do the work, but that the learning curve was too steep for HR to be comfortable with me.
Also, what is preventing any black person, or an race, from obtaining those qualifications themselves? Are you saying black people are so dumb that they need their hand held to obtain these things, while other races do not? That is an insult in itself stating that blacks need to be cuddled like a five year old, while other races can go out on their own and do it themselves.
There are a lot of things beyond the control of Blacks and other minorities that are stopping them from achieving a certain level of success. I think someone else mentioned this; "A 2004 study showed that resumes with recognizably African-American names were twice as likely to be ignored as other resumes. Black job seekers with advanced degrees have reported removing any indication of race from their resume just to get a shot at job." Black Job-Seekers Hide Race For Corporate America : NPR. It is ridiculous to believe that there is nothing preventing Blacks or other minorities (but especially Blacks) from not only obtaining certain qualifications but being rejected even after obtaining those qualifications.
But it is important to realize that there is such a small number of 4 year degrees held by Blacks especially in the STEM fields.
6,945 Blacks earned a 4 year degree in computer science, 4,959 in Engineering (doesn't specify which field), and 805 in Mathematics in 2004. In total, Blacks earned 131,241 degrees in 2004. I know 2004 is quite a while ago but I couldn't find any more recent data. The Solid Progress of African Americans in Degree Attainments
The problem is I don't know how many of their jobs are tech based vs non tech based. According to the 2004 data most Blacks earn a 4 year degree in Business Management.
Yes, Google is a huge hypocrite. They (and us) obviously knew how bad their lack of diversity really is b/c they kept with holding the numbers. And their is bias (not hatred really, more preference) during their hiring process , we cannot deny that. I know we cannot necessarily prove it but it would be ludicrous to think it didn't happen. And Google should and in a sense obligated to do more.
But, I think someone else posted this idea that what this highlight is a much bigger issue. Our children are not getting exposed to science and math. Especially, under represented minorities.
According to the US Census EEO data tool for 2000, the total nationwide availability of blacks in the science, engineering, and computer professional job group is 5.3%. Hispanic it is 4.2%. White 77.6%. Asian 10.8%.
If you look at the report in the OP; whites are represented only at 61%, this is 16% below availability, whereas blacks are represented at 2% which is 3% below availability. Whites are well below availability, whites are the most under represented group at Google. Asians are at 30% which is three times their availability.
Blacks and Hispanics are the closest to accurate represented groups at Google.
Likewise for women; women have a nationwide availability of 23.6%, yet are represented at 30% at Google; women are over represented, men are under represented.
"Women, persons with disabilities, and three racial/ethnic groups—blacks, Hispanics, and American Indians—are considered underrepresented in science and engineering because they constitute smaller percentages of science and engineering degree recipients and of employed scientists and engineers than they do of the population" http://www.nsf.gov/statistics/wmpd/2...304_digest.pdf
Representation is based on population, not the #'s of a certain race in an occupation.
"Women, persons with disabilities, and three racial/ethnic groups—blacks, Hispanics, and American Indians—are considered underrepresented in science and engineering because they constitute smaller percentages of science and engineering degree recipients and of employed scientists and engineers than they do of the population" http://www.nsf.gov/statistics/wmpd/2...304_digest.pdf
Representation is based on population, not the #'s of a certain race in an occupation.
Representation in regards to employment is based on the availability of the skill in the population; the EEOC, OFCCP, and Justice Department base their investigations off the availability as shown by the US Census EEO data tool.
The accusation here is Google uses discrimination in hiring; I just showed you that the only discrimination occurring at Google, if any, are against whites and males as they are the two most under represented groups at Google.
I doubt it, blacks just don't do computer careers, but the black millennials that are in school are realizing that their computer geekism is actually useful. This is coming from a black person.
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