Is There Still Racism in IT Hiring Practices? 1085
noahz asks: "Today [now three days ago] in the United States marks Martin Luther King Day, remembering the birthday - and legacy - of the great civil rights leader. It's been over 40 years since his march on Washington, back when IT was still in its infancy and was exclusively a white, male field. But, how much progress has been made in the IT world? I recently had a recruiter tell me that I would have no problem finding a job in the current economy - not because I am enthusastic, well-educated and have good experience - but because I am caucasian - 'white'. This particular recruiter insisted that his years experience has led him to this conclusion - but I wonder: what the collective experience of the Slashdot readership has found?"
Back Of The Bus With You (Score:4, Insightful)
Re:Back Of The Bus With You (Score:3, Interesting)
Without it , I am your average Caucasian , as soon as I put the hat on I become recognisable as Jewish
Its a tough choice , do I hide who I am , even though it goes against my nature , just so I can smooth things out and avoid grief
Or do I wear it and face the possibility of losing a contract because someone thinks I am a "Yid " or a "kike"
Advantage (Score:3, Insightful)
Re:Advantage (Score:3, Funny)
Re:Back Of The Bus With You (Score:5, Insightful)
Re:Back Of The Bus With You (Score:3, Interesting)
"Be proud of your heritage!" Why? Your heritage is this: No matter the color of your skin, shape of your nose, curliness of your hair, you and every other person on the planet have a common fe
Re:Sounds like Klansmen (Score:3, Insightful)
Caucasians in America don't really have a common bonding experience. They never really had any inherent disadvantages just because of their skin color. Black people were treated like shit en masse, legally, up until about 40-50 years ago. There's still residual of that left over, and it will take a while to die down.
That said, I think the best way to get it to die down is to drop some of the PC bullshit and address the actual issues. I was so trained to automatically repeat "African-A
Re:Back Of The Bus With You (Score:5, Insightful)
(There can be no race when it's all in the head).
Re:Back Of The Bus With You (Score:5, Funny)
Re:Back Of The Bus With You (Score:3, Insightful)
Re:Back Of The Bus With You (Score:3, Insightful)
I hate to say it, but women are good at some things and men at others. I'm generalizing, I know, but there is some truth in it. I can't help it if society tells black kids they have to be basketball players or rappers. Yeah--that's racism alri
Re:Back Of The Bus With You (Score:5, Insightful)
I can't help it if society tells black kids they have to be basketball players or rappers. Which society are you speaking of? Where I'm from (Blackest city in the USA) nobody told us that. We didn't have any basketball or rap classes in my schools/churches/neighborhood organizations. Perhaps your experience is different?
Blame Death Row records or something, but not me. First of all we do know white kids buy most of Death Row's records. Second of all, who is blaiming you? Whats your complaint?
Besides, the topic of the original story is racism in hiring. Hiring managers can't hire qualified minorities (blacks) if there are none to hire, and the few out there are being snatched up quickly by companies eager to satisfy quotas.
So when a black person is hired its primarily to satisy a quota? Where I live such quotas are Illegal. I might also point out that if you think Black people (or anybody else) have an easier time finding a job than White Men you are living in a bubble.
The worse part is you seem angry about the whole thing. What a luxury.
Racism is everywhere. Some of it is malicious, some of it is not.
Re:Back Of The Bus With You (Score:3, Informative)
Local Police and Fire (Score:3, Interesting)
Re:Back Of The Bus With You (Score:5, Insightful)
I was hired for a job. The company admitted I was more qualified than the guy I replaced, but said HR would not let them pay me more that the previous guy.
Why? Becuase he was black and they feared that if I made more and he found out, he might sue them.
Interestingly enough I hired to Desktop techs to help me out. Both were equally quallified.
The HR department said I could pay the guy $32K and I should pay the girl $39K.
Their reasoning was that girls made less then men in the IT department and they wanted to boost the salaries of women to make them even.
Any system where pay is determined based on race or sex discrimminates regardless of the reasons.
Re:Back Of The Bus With You (Score:3, Interesting)
I know a married couple, both in the IT field. Woman is upset that she doesn't make nearly as much as her husband but they both have equal credentials and schooling - both work in the same company. I work with her - quiet, shy, barely speaks up, always down about something, smiles rarely, but does a good job when given a chance. Her presentation skills suck though, she mumbles and stares at her feet - no enthusiasm. did I mention she's in a management position?
One day I met her husband, ou
Re:Back Of The Bus With You (Score:3, Interesting)
Your next sentence says it all.
Blame Death Row records or something, but not me.
Why not? Because you can point to a few black people who have no business in IT?
Hiring managers can't hire qualified minorities (blacks) if there are none to hire, and the few out there are being snatched up quickly by companies eager to satisfy quotas.
Did it ever occur to you that they're being snatched up because they're qualified?
LK
Re:Back Of The Bus With You (Score:3, Funny)
Does that mean that society tells all white kids to be golf and hockey players?
There's a lot of Canadian and Russian players in the National Hockey League. The reason might just be that half the year, Canadian's and Russians have the weather to play hockey.
Golf tends to have equipment costs and green fees, which more white people can afford.
If you're a black urban youth with a low family income, the basketball court down the
Re:Back Of The Bus With You (Score:3, Interesting)
Biological fact - the average woman has a better multitasking capability than the average man.
I hate to shout here, but this really ticks me off. MEN AND WOMEN ARE PHYSICALLY DIFFERENT, MENTALLY DIFFERENT AND HAVE DIFFERENT SKILLS.
This means, for example, the average woman is usually better suited to work such as secretarial or workflow management than the average man. Likewise, the average man is better suited to b
Re:Back Of The Bus With You (Score:5, Insightful)
More directly relevant to this discussion: Is there a shortage of other minorities in the IT field? The entire Asian continent seems to be pretty well represented, especially Chinese and Indians.
Is it because they are "less black," or is it because there are a lot of Asians in the IT field that have both the education and the technical skills necessary to be attractive candidates for employment?
Any honest assessment suggests the latter.
Does racism still exist? Of course it does, and until the entire population is comprised of people that are all subtle shades of brown, there always will be. I think it's far less pervasive in the IT field, but that's only my assessment. I've been supporting myself in this industry for 16 years now, and if I had to put a number on it, I'd say that 35-40% of my co-workers over the years have been non-white.
According to the CIA World Factbook [cia.gov], Blacks make up 12.9% of the United States population. So if you work in an office of 10 people, 1 of them should be black. If 2 of them are black, then they are statistically over-represented.
Looking down the hallway, our Network Support Team is an office of 7 people. 3 are black, 3 are white, and 1 is Asian. Again, the CIA World Factbook says that 81.7% of the US population is white. Should I be screaming racism because white people are severely underrepresented on our Network Support Team? Isn't this evidence of racism? Haven't quotas and racial preferences produced an artificial result in our own hiring practices?
I freely admit to my own bigotry, not without a sense of pride. I refuse to hire stupid people for any position, especially in IT roles. I couldn't care less what color your skin is. If you're bright, reliable, and you can make me money, you're hired. Fail me in any of those categories, and I'll replace you with someone better.
The free market is the only tool that can bring about racial justice without causing more problems than it solves. Attempts to rig "the system" to ensure a specific outcome breeds resentment, and ultimately, greater disharmony. Any company that fails to hire the best candidates at the lowest possible price is yielding an advantage to the competition, and will ultimately suffer at the hands of the marketplace.
I'm sorry that those results can take so long to manifest, but they are inevitable.
Re:Back Of The Bus With You (Score:4, Insightful)
One of the things that I always loved about the "hacker" culture of the 80's and early 90's was that the *only* thing that mattered was your ability. The only bechmark was "could you do it", and, since most of the stuff was done online, color, race, gender, and physical attributes of any kind were just not issues. There was no way to tell what another person looked like online unless they told you.
Computer culture, more than almost any other is the most un-biased group of people you will meet (as long as you leave out the MS vs. M$ debate)
Re:Back Of The Bus With You (Score:5, Insightful)
In my opinion, if I can get a person in my shop that has 25 years of experience and has experienced every type of failure imaginable and sticks around for 18 months, then I'm ahead of the game. Why? Because s/he can teach my folks, even through casual conversation, how to handle said situations.
So while I don't encounter much racism, AGEism seems to run rampant.
Old Dog Teaches New Dog Tricks of Trade (Score:4, Insightful)
Dwight was an older blackman and he worked (and still does) in one mode, slow. When we began working together it fustrated me so much because he would take his (and my) precious time doing EVERYTHING. Even waiting on him to click the mouse could be excruciatingly painful for me a times. So let me say that patience is greatest value this man taught me, but more importantly he taught me how to think out problems before acting. Dwight has a determination to exhaust all possibilities before putting a practical and definitive solution into motion. Whereas most technicians, programmers, and just people in general will go into a situation with all their guns blazing using trail-and-error attacks until they get the appropriate response Dwight will methodically plan out his attack until he is sure it is going to work (for the long term).
Needless to say, in a matter of hours Dwight had the network up and going according to the client's specifications and after teaching this new pup a thing or two. This was only the beginning. Over the next two years Dwight taught me a lot about being a good technician but more importantly a good problem solver not only with computers but in life in general.
Today the values and traits Dwight taught me are still with me today as a software engineer. It has been six years since I was under his mentorship full time. Today if I had a problem in either a technical matter or a personal matter I know he is there to teach me. I have not learned as much from my peers, superiors, or college professors as much as I have from him. Besides my parents he will always be one of the greatest people who influence my life.
I know companies are out there who would not hire Dwight because of his color, age, and now he has a few medical problems which require regular care. To me this is ludicris because if he could teach some of the guys I have worked with in the past half as much as what he taught me it would be a grand investment.
I want some thank-yous from black folks (Score:4, Insightful)
I would like to thank you for recognizing this and commenting on it. I also think this country has made tremendous progress over the years, but you would never know it from the way we are still continually harangued by the self-appointed spokesmen for the black community. For them, time is always frozen in 1859 or 1963, and America is always the most evil country in the world because of the way we have treated people of African descent.
I want to say this to the leftist race-baiters: The two institutions that did the most to eradicate slavery from the face of the Earth were the British Royal Navy and the Union Army of the United States. Yes, white people owned slaves, but we also abolished slavery. I don't think we get enough credit for that, and I think it's about time for a heartfelt thank-you from Jesse Jackson and his ilk, and an apology for the vicious and racist rhetoric they use when talking about white pople.
Muslims kept black African slaves before the Europeans ever did, as well as during the whole period of European/American slavery, and long afterwards as well. There are still black Christians and animists who are treated as slaves or worse by their Arab Muslim masters. Yet what does the racially hyper-sensitive black-studies major in this country do ? He drops his "slave name" and takes on a Muslim name. It's crazy, a symptom of profound historical ignorance, ingratitude, and misdirected anger.
One of my ancestors was a conductor on the Underground Railroad, smuggling slaves to freedom in Canada at great personal risk to himself, and another was wounded at the Battle of Chickamauga while fighting in the Union Army to free the slaves. My grandfather was a teacher who almost lost his job during the Red Scare becuase of his outspokenness, including his views on racial equality. My mom and dad hired black people in the 60's when nobody else in their line of work would even consider it, and lost some business doing so.
I don't buy into the "white guilt" that the extreme leftists and racial grievance mongers are ramming down our throats. My family has already done its share to help black folks. I treat them as equals and expect likewise in return. Jesse Jackson, Ward Churchill, and the rest of the angry anti-American quota queens can kiss my ass.
--ccm
Re:A unique Black sysadmin's opinion (Score:5, Funny)
I've compiled a list of websites that you may want to spend more time on than slashdot:
http://www.mensa.org/ [mensa.org]
http://www.cerebrals.com/ [cerebrals.com]
http://www.smartgroups.com/ [smartgroups.com]
http://www.iqsociety.org/ [iqsociety.org]
You may feel more at home there ^_^
*dons flaimsuit*
Re:A unique Black sysadmin's opinion (Score:5, Insightful)
Give me a god damn break. If you experience a lot of friction dealing with other people in your professional life, it's because of crap like this stemming from your obviously overblown ego.
Re:A unique Black sysadmin's opinion (Score:3, Insightful)
Re:A unique Black sysadmin's opinion (Score:5, Insightful)
Re:A unique Black sysadmin's opinion (Score:5, Insightful)
Both of those options will allow him to leverage extreme intelligence as well as mathematical and sales aptitude. Both will get him out from the oppressive man's foot quite rapidly. With a 190 IQ, he should be able to come up with a pile of other good alternatives, too.
Honest truth here. I'm a white bastard. And you know what? I've had the exact same types of conversations The Great Oppressed Black Genius described with people when I identify an issue. It's not a racial thing. It's an "I have a brain and that is intimidating to people that want to remain necessary and keep their job" thing.
*sigh* 190 IQ multi-linguil person works as a system admin where apparently people discriminate against him. I just don't buy the whole post. I think it's BS. None of the pieces fit together. One of our VPs is a black man and he is sharp as a whip. The company offered him a CTO position and he turned it down because he had a better offer on the table from elsewhere. He was really good and everyone respected him and though he was very bright, I bet he was not even close to an IQ of 190.
Well, anyway...
Re:A unique Black sysadmin's opinion (Score:3, Insightful)
There are many different forms of intelligence , being able to dazzle a crowd with a recitation of hamlet from memory , is not a guarantee that you could explain and understand string theory.
Sure IQ is a measure of your logical problem solving skills , problem is , there are very few logical people .
Re:A unique Black sysadmin's opinion (Score:5, Funny)
Nonsense! It's a great measure of how good a person is at doing IQ tests...
Re:A unique Black sysadmin's opinion (Score:5, Insightful)
Re:A unique Black sysadmin's opinion (Score:5, Insightful)
"I state the issue. They then rephrase the issue, adding something not really relevant to the issue but closely related to show how smart they are. I, out of politeness, say oh that's interesting, or some other meaningless drivel to show them that I too understand basic Calculus, OSI, or traffic law, etc. I then move on to state my idea for solving the issue."
No matter how smart you are, or how smart you think you are, you are never, never so smart that you are always right and don't have to listen to others. Going into a conversation knowing the answer means you're not really there. Not only is that rude, but it means if you're wrong you'll never know it. On top of that, people generally can tell (you didn't notice that because you weren't listening, right?) and won't be very happy about it.
I'm a consultant these days. I used to be pretty cocky, like I knew how to solve problems and those business folk just weren't as smart, but even someone as dumb as me figures out, after being thrust repeatedly into unfamiliar business situations (where the business people really do understand the problem domain better than me) that I don't know everything.
You sound like an interpersonal nightmare. I'd never want to work with a sysadmin who couldn't listen to the reasons he might be wrong. I'd much rather work with someone willing to work with the team, more interested in getting us all to the common goal than telling us how smart he is.
As for the racial thing, I know it exists,but my personal experience in IT and dev in NY is that it's been a meritocracy everywhere I've worked. One of the things, really, I've loved about the work. I've been on plenty of interviews where I didn't get hired, but absent feedback from the interviewer I can't see how I could ever make a statement as to why.
You know, you sound like you're a smart guy. The funny thing about this field (again one of the things I love about it) is how many smart guys there are in it. Whenever I start thinking about how smart I am, I meet someone smarter. As smart as you may be, there are smarter people out there. Unless you have recently won your third Nobel you ought to tone it down a bit, and think very seriously about what other people may have to offer you. Try listening.
Re:A unique Black sysadmin's opinion (Score:4, Insightful)
So what if the person you're talking to doesn't understand your job. They understand *their* job and it's up to you to listen to them because they may just have an idea that helps everyone.
If you go into conversations with a holier than thou attitude you'll not only be a crap sysadmin, you'll be convinced you're a really good one - and be shocked when you're pushed out on the next downsizing.
Comment removed (Score:5, Interesting)
Your experience... (Score:5, Insightful)
I'm white, I grew up on a farm, the son of a tech ed teacher. I grew up constant trying to learn the hows and whys. I wiz my way through logic tests, rebuild my own engines, remodeled my own house, solder my own electronics etc...
When I got out of the military, I was a slightly younger guy who thought I knew it all and could figure the rest out. And I ran into numerous situations like the one you described.
It actually turns out that I was just an egotistical ass hat. Cocky and arrogant coming off of my last military tour.
It took a couple years, a wife, a kid, and a hell of a lot of hard knocks, but my ego finally deflated and I find myself getting a long with most people much better.
Let's face it, no matter what their skin color, all assholes are brown on the in side
-Rick
Re:A unique Black sysadmin's opinion (Score:3, Insightful)
Having worked at a lily-white organization in a large northeastern city, this phenomenon became apparent when I noticed, over the course of some five odd years, middle management was falling over themselves to hire black sysadmins and support staff.
Some of these people were less than qualified, but what could anybody do? They're there to increase the minority head count, so management isn't going to fire them. This has a de
Re:A unique Black sysadmin's opinion (Score:5, Insightful)
Flamebait or troll or not, I accuse you of flagrant exaggeration, if not outright lying. Your use of language, vocabulary, and compositional structure is self-evidently sharply below that level. As is the vocabulary and compositional quality of your other recent posts, eight of the last ten of which scored 1. Your expository and vocabulary also jarringly conflicts with your assertion of "a nearly insatiable desire to read whatever I could get my hands on."
The point of which is, don't lie on this forum. Making a knowing transgression of risking off-topic for this reply or not, I dislike letting that by, and it taints the rest of your post, the meta-moderation of which I would suggest ought consider whether the moderation points were deserved.
As an aside, also, the vast majority of IQ tests, including upper range IQ tests, are not designed to accurately test above approximately 170. Test calibration above that level is very challenging. Try and remember such tangential details the next time you fib, for better general congruence and background.
Sigh.
In inferiority complex, perhaps.
In the future, try posting without repeatedly referencing how smart you are, and how your brilliance is oppressed by vast forces opposing you. Your posts will implicitly convey deviation from the norm, if they can in fact exhibit such, without needing attempts at neon signage.
Re:A unique Black sysadmin's opinion (Score:4, Informative)
Re:A unique Black sysadmin's opinion (Score:4, Insightful)
I've a personal example of this - myself. I grew up in a rural area where it wasn't hard to be of above average intellegence. Both my parents and my grand-parents are intellegent people and knew that education wasn't just school, but experiance. So they took me to art galleries, museums, their jobs, etc... so I could experiance things outside of my day to day life. Most of the kids I grew up with didn't have these oppertunities, so in addition to being of above average intellegence I was also fairly cosmopolitan. This pretty much made me an outcast. Further, because of my appitite for music I was listening to all kinds of stuff that kids in my area had never heard of (mainly old punk and industrial). I tended to dress in a manner similar to the fashion that these bands displayed in an area where wrangler jeans and cowboy boots was the norm. Yet another reason for persecution. By the time I got to college I had such a persecution complex that I was sure that everyone I met that was different than me was going to be close-minded and would hate me. It took me a while of living in the real world to realize that this simply isn't true and that people weren't reacting to my mode of dress or my intellegence, but rather my eliteism and my attitude.
The gentleman-parent-poster seems to suffer from the same affliction. In the movies people that are smart and persecuted tend to become mad scientists. In the real world they just become assholes.
Perhaps I'm wrong. Perhaps this genetleman lives in a small town and works for a small company where he really is the smartest person and all his co-workers and dumb racist rednecks. But I have one question about that. If this man is so smart and able, why isn't he surrounding himself with the same kind of people? If he's as good as he says he is, he would be working in a large company that LOVES intellegence and is blind to skin color.
Another personal example. The company I work for, which is very large and multi-national, has a very diverse technical staff. The networking group, for example, has only one white man in it. The rest are black Americans, a black jamacian, a gentleman from turkey, and an asian American. We have Chinese, Korean, an Angolan, Sweads, Russians, 2 Iranians (both women who both wear veils), Turks, Indians and a myriad of other people. My boss is a black man. His boss is a white woamn. Our VP is a black woman. We're mostly male, but we have the largest percentage of women in any IT department I've ever worked for.
If you're concentrating on race or any other minor thing that makes you "different" or another person "different" then you need to wake up. You're contributing to the problem. Only when EVERYONE, persecutor and persecutee alike stop seeing race, creed, religion, or whatever as a dividing line, rather than just seeing another person, will discrimination end.
Frankly, sir you're logic is flawed. You say people say things like "you wouldn't understand x because your black" but the whole point of your post seems to be "you wouldn't understand me because I'm black (or because I'm a "significant deviation from the norm.") but you're not. Your not the only man who has overcome diversity, or married outside his race, or done any of those things in addition to being highly intellegent. What makes you different is you expect to be treated special because of this. You're not special, or unique. Your a human being, just like everyone you work with. And if they discriminate against you, it's probably because you discriminate against them.
Re:A unique Black sysadmin's opinion (Score:4, Insightful)
Or maybe it was because of your defensive response. Ever try just saying "No thanks" calmly and politely? I do that every time and I rarely make eye contact (mostly because I'm in the right area and I'm concentrating on finding what I need). If you look confused (and let's face it, anyone that's not looking directly at what they're going to buy looks confused to them), they're going to ask you that. Hell, sometimes they'll ask you that even if you're holding the product. It's part of their training. Ya know, that little thing called "customer service" that we're always bitching about. Anybody would likely have the same reaction that guy did. White, black, green, orange, it doesn't matter.
The only people I know of that want to be "respected" in a certain way are the gang members. But since they deserve no respect, they don't usually get any.
Re:if you were that smart you wouldn't be in IT! (Score:5, Funny)
110 eh? About the size of your disk apace allotment in kilo-, no, just regular bytes.
>clickity clickity<
Racism (Score:3, Insightful)
It's not racism, but inequality (Score:5, Insightful)
There's no conscious policy, but selection is based on merit, and in western society, inequal opportunity means that those with social advantages (money, role models in family and peers, contacts, home location, etc) are able to better maximise the value they offer to employers.
So racism is the wrong way to be trying to explain this, in most cases. Social inequality is the real issue; I don't feel there's been a lot of progress in that area.
I don't even know the race of most of our IT staff (Score:3, Interesting)
Seem to me IT, thanks to virual offices and networking is probably the most race-blind industry in existance.
Re:I don't even know the race of most of our IT st (Score:3, Informative)
Not necessarily.
I am from the American South. Thus, I grew up experiencing whites to have a certain set of accents and blacks to have another set accents. With a *high* degree of accuracy, I could pick out the highly, "middle" and poorly educated of both races.
So, it was a great shock to me when I got out into the Real World and had hundreds of hours of long-distance phonecons with people up North who had "white" accents, but turned out to be black.
You can imagine that I'm much more cautious abou
Having lost my job based on not being a 'minority' (Score:3, Interesting)
Re:Having lost my job based on not being a 'minori (Score:3, Informative)
These claims are false. Please check for yourself [eeoc.gov].
Re:Having lost my job based on not being a 'minori (Score:5, Interesting)
Many companies are scared shitless that they will be targeted under civil rights laws because they appeared to (but actually dont, they just hire the most qualified people who happen to be asian or white for the most part) discriminate against blacks or if they fire a black worker for doing poorly.
Our civil rights laws have brought alot of needed progress to society but they are a double-edged sword, in their current (and largely unchanged form). There is definitely a subculture of minorities out there who like to use their minority status as a crutch and leveraging tool in the workplace.
Re:Having lost my job based on not being a 'minori (Score:4, Insightful)
Now would be a good time to provide newspaper accounts of such things. Yes, I'm sure if this happened, many would be unreported. But surely there is one good man or woman out there who will speak up with a specific example?
While you're digging that up (no, angry bloggers don't count) perhaps you'd like to read the socialist-communist-worker's party's political organ, Businessweek [businessweek.com], whose 2001 article claimed "in an increasingly multicultural U.S., harassment of minorities is on the rise".
There is definitely a subculture of minorities out there who like to use their minority status as a crutch and leveraging tool in the workplace.
Perhaps. Whenever there is a law, even a just law like EOA, there will be people who will try to use it for their personal gain. What is without doubt it that there is a subculture of white people who have gained and retain a significant advantage in the workplace on account of their race.
Re:Having lost my job based on not being a 'minori (Score:3, Informative)
In summary (because this is
MOD parent up!i (Score:3, Insightful)
I have worked in IT over 25 years. I have seen this. It does happen.
Re:White men really do need not apply (Score:3, Insightful)
Most of the profs I know are young, thirties or early forties. The black professor (actually not African-American, but Carribean-British) is I believe in his early forties. You continue to make up facts (actually, you're no longer even pretending to state facts, only opini
Re:Having lost my job based on not being a 'minori (Score:3, Insightful)
And I know a lot more (even if you normalize for population size) whites who like to use their privilege to not have to be afraid of the police, to not get followed around in stores, to get into college because of Daddy's large gift or legacy status, so on and so forth.
Just want to point out the full story...
Re:Having lost my job based on not being a 'minori (Score:3, Insightful)
The fact is white skin carries privileges with it in the united states. Does that mean every person who is white has everything easy? No. It would be stupid for me to say that every white person had "XYZ" in common (for all non-trivial statements) but that's not what I said: I said I knew many more whites who profit from white privilege than minorities who abuse what the original poster might refer to as "minority privil
Comment removed (Score:5, Insightful)
Re:Having lost my job based on not being a 'minori (Score:5, Informative)
It happens. When doing a round of layoffs, I was once instructed (2002) by HR to select only middle-aged white males, because "they can't sue." Back in 1998, when doing a lot of hiring, I was instructed to "prefer" minorities when evaluating candidates to increase our diversity. If you think discrimination against non-minorities does not ever happen, you should get out more.
That reverse discimination card is overplayed
There is no "reverse discrimination." Discrimination is discrimination. Period.
Perhaps (Score:5, Interesting)
Yes (Score:5, Interesting)
I plan to do just that.
So, there's racism in 2006 for you. Blacks and whites together, fighting for our jobs. BTW, we're white.
Re:Yes (Score:5, Insightful)
And you're saying those of East Asian descent don't need jobs?
Racism is inherently inefficient because you end up with not the best person for the job, so the company suffers. Competitors who aren't racist will outperform and therefore the racist company will suffer. Those who are racist will complain that non-racist (i.e. "diverse" or "multi-cultural", although those are loaded words) companies get plum deals (from govt. or whoever) because they hire minorities and are getting some sort of special treatment. The reality is that non-racist companies outperform those companies which are not, and therefore deserve the deals.
best person for the job (Score:3, Insightful)
The job might require the person to speak on the phone a lot and therefore have a native command of the language. There goes all the recently imported talent. Another requirement might be that they live within a certain distance of the office for emergency on-call situations. If the demographics of the technically qualified local talent pool are 90% white, then what? Would the person then be racist for no
Re:Yes (Score:3, Insightful)
Accent is a bigger issue (Score:5, Insightful)
There is probably a lot more age discrimination in IT than race discrimination. Now for upper management there is a huge racial imbalance. A company might have a 50% minory staff, but often less than 10% minority management.
Re:Accent is a bigger issue (Score:5, Insightful)
I hear it all the time "We want someone young, energetic" - because old people are not worth the effort.
Accent can be a problem, but I don't think that this is in any way racist. If you can't understand the person because of their accent, it's going to be tough working with them. It doesn't matter what country they come from.
Re:Accent is a bigger issue (Score:5, Interesting)
Yep.
My father was a programmer. He turned 55 in 2000; in the lead-up to Y2K he did pretty well, having skills with older systems, but after that...nothing. He was out of work for years before moving on to a different field (real estate [markswiss.net].)
That made me look around the office. How many developers over 40 were there? Few. Over 50? One.
I decided to go back to school and get a job skill [earthtouchshiatsu.com] that can't be outsourced and (if I stay healthy) I can keep going into my 60s or later. (I'm still doing software part-time.)
Re:Accent is a bigger issue (Score:3, Insightful)
You see, it's much more easy to convince a 20 year old with little industry experience to work 60h weeks than it is to convince a 30 year old with plenty of industry experience (and maybe a wife and kids at home).
A great deal of the management practices in this industry turns around suckering the naive into giving their free time
Re:Accent is a bigger issue (Score:5, Insightful)
Fact is younger people can be forced to work longer and harder because they don't have a family, aren't experiencing hyper-tension, can be paid less, etc.
The sad fact is we'll be deemed worthless by the time we're 40 even if you feel invincible now.
I've already seriously started looking at going back to school like another poster suggested for a job that is just as fun but where I will never be considered too old to perform.
Re:Accent is a bigger issue (Score:3, Insightful)
That said, only 3 out of almost 50 people where I work are under 35. If you get outside of large cities the average age of IT workers seems to increase dramatically, probably because younger people are attracted to the action and older people tend to l
Re:Accent is a bigger issue (Score:3, Interesting)
Indeed. (Score:5, Insightful)
Not just accent (Score:3, Insightful)
Ability to communicate clearly with the rest of the team is vital in pretty much any IT job above the level of scutwork. In the US that (usually) means that you must be able to speak, and write, in clear, easy to understand English.
If you can't communicate clearly with the interviewer and recruiter, then you won't be able to communicate clearly with the rest of your team. That significantly decreases your value as a hire.
Re:Accent is a bigger issue (Score:5, Funny)
All big beer drinkers.
Coincidence? I THINK NOT!
I've found... (Score:5, Funny)
...that holding an MLK Day story for 3 days before posting it is just weird.
The editors should have saved it until April 1, so that the sense of cognitive dissonance I got from viewing it was well-deserved.
Re:I've found... (Score:3, Funny)
I've been discriinated against (Score:3, Interesting)
Where I work... (Score:5, Interesting)
CIO: White female
Academic tech: white male (me)
Media Services: black male
Network manager: white male
Server manager: black male
Programmers: two white males, one white female
Staff support: white female
Hardware: white female
Help Desk: one white female, one black male
Total: 9 white, 3 black, 7 men, 5 women.
Seems pretty balanced to me given the local population. Then again, we tend to hire people with little experience and promote from within. (CIO started as a secretary years ago, server manager began as a help desk grunt, etc.)
This is idiotic (Score:5, Interesting)
Christ! My department is like the freakin UN. I have a Brit, 2 black women, a kid of some undefined ethnicity and Swedish/Puerto Rican!
*I'm the white guy!*
Re:This is idiotic (Score:4, Funny)
So you spend all your time bitching about agriculture and don't actual do anything worthwhile?
Re:This is idiotic (Score:5, Funny)
Re:This is idiotic (Score:4, Funny)
I'm an old-timer that is possibly out-of-date with current lingo.
Can you define "chops" for me as it relates to IT? Is it related to "skillz"?
http://makeashorterlink.com/?A63416F7C [makeashorterlink.com]
in academia (Score:3, Informative)
Racism is much more blatant at the undergraduate and graduate levels of education (i.e., before you go on the academic job market.) In many cases, it is the result of underprepared minority students not being given the attention and training they need to get up to speed after admissions offices have "taken a chance" on students they think are bright but poorly prepared.
Our universities are some of the most successful institutions in the country; it is natural that politicians would like to shift the burden of solving racism at much earlier levels (elementary, grade and high-school education) to the universities.
Back in 1990 (Score:5, Interesting)
Re:Back in 1990 (Score:3, Funny)
He isn't black anymore!? i didn't know Jacko worked as a sysadmin.
yes, racism still exists (Score:4, Insightful)
it would be, for example, a lot easier to get away with hiring only white secretaries rather than only white IT workers. simply because a lot of people can do a secretary's job, so your selection criteria can be more and more shallow. but your business will suffer to your more enlightened competitors if you pass up on real talent in a limited pool for a shallow reason. therefore, the job market in highly technical fields takes care of racism all by itself. IT simply can't afford to be racist. to ignore a technically astute individual for the whim of skin color is too heavy a price for an employer to pay
and of course, this issue is framed in an era when IT departments everywhere are farming all of their work out to india! where's rudyard kipling to laugh at when you need him? "white man's burden?" [wikipedia.org] pffft. well that's deliciously ironic dear mr. kipling: a century after you penned those patronizing condescending words suggesting how nonwhite peoples were naturally the "inferior" wards of "superior" europeans, your "superior" europeans are rapidly becoming the wards of nonwhite peoples. the entire information infrastructure of the western world is rapidly becoming the "brown man's burden"
so to speak of racism in IT is rather obtuse. IT is definitely one of the more egalitarian work fields in the worlds in terms of proportionate racial representation
IT racism (Score:5, Insightful)
I'm racist and I'm not ashamed. (Score:4, Funny)
Forced Diversity. (Score:3, Informative)
Our second line manager said we needed to hire this candidate as a matter of diversity (the IT group was 10 guys of varying races).
It wasn't like we couldn't find qualified candidates, it's just that they were all men, and when a woman came along our 2nd line manager forced us to hire her.
This woman didn't know how to reboot a solaris box and later took out one of our larger SANs.
To this day when I interview somebody, I tell my peers/mgmt that if somebody isn't qualified, I won't recommend them 'no matter what our diversity training requires'
Things must've changed (Score:5, Insightful)
That's the neat part about the nation's obsession with skin color, we've managed to find a way to discriminate against everybody.
Finding racism (Score:5, Insightful)
In a free country, people are allowed to discriminate, but the government is not. Here, we have it the other way around - government is allowed to discriminate but people are not. If someone doesn't want to hire me because of my race, bfd. There are plenty of jobs, and they'll be worse off over the long haul for such narrow minded practices.
Discrimination is kept alive by people like Jesse Jackson, who otherwise would be out of a career. Discrimination is propped up by "affirmative action" laws. Want to end it? Let's get back to a government that truly has equal protection under the law.
Racism in IT? I'm the only white guy in my office (Score:3, Funny)
True story (Score:5, Interesting)
Once, for his job, he had to go be a liason for a brief period at another company. As it happened, this other company was one where he had applied for a job but hadn't gotten an interview the previous year. He liked the job he ended up getting, so he had no hard feelings.
Somehow the fact that he had applied at this other company came up when he was on-site. The person he was working with was actually one of the people who had reviewed his resume. "Oh, yeah, I remember you!" he said. "See, we thought you were black because of your name. Ha ha! If we had know, we probably would have given you an interview."
It's only one data point, but
jf
Re:It's it reality (Score:5, Interesting)
Hah! My first job out of college was tech support. And I forget how many people (women in particular) asked to be connected to a "real" technician. I even had one guy tell me he wasted his time talking to a woman.....
Re:It's it reality (Score:3, Insightful)
I usally ask to speak to a real technician independantly of the sex of the person who answers the phone.
I hate calling tech support for anything these days. What should be a 5 minute problem usually blows out to wasting hours of my time trying to get in contact with somebody with 2/3 of a clue.
Re:Get a last name and we'll talk (Score:3, Funny)
Re:Reverse Racism (Score:5, Interesting)
Re:Reverse Racism (Score:3, Insightful)
Racism is racism, no two ways about it.
Re:Americans are not very ethnocentric (Score:3, Insightful)
Re:Americans are not very ethnocentric (Score:5, Insightful)
I think a more accurate view would be that people from poorer socio-economic backgrounds are less likely to end up as programmers and engineers because of the lack of educational opportunities in those areas. That would be true of poor whites, poor blacks, poor Asians, or poor Martians. The fact is that the quality of education in this country depends on ones economic class.
I think a black kid from a upper-middle class home would be more likely to excel educationally than a poor white kid who lived in poverty.
Now it may APPEAR as if blacks are less capable academically because they, on average, might be more likely to grow up in poorer homes. However, it is important to keep in mind that CORRELATION DOES NOT INDICATE CAUSALITY. Now you would think that somebody like you who is supposedly a member of the "educational elite" would realize this, but I guess even posting on Slashdot does not necessarily indicate that one has the ability to think logically (in other words, even monkeys can click on the Submit button!)
Re:Americans are not very ethnocentric (Score:4, Insightful)
Actually, I think and even more accurate view would be that people tend to want to fit in with those they identify with. Call it cultural inertia, but dumping educational opportunities into poor communities doesn't make as big an impact as one would like to believe. In general, the culture in those areas ridicule intellect and honest ambition. I'll leave it to someone else to hypothesize why it got that way, but the end result is that children from those communities reject becoming like outsiders, as it might feel they are "selling out".
Even if the kids are moved to a better area, if they are recognizably different (e.g. black) they are likely to latch on to others that they see as similar. If that subculture is not education oriented, they won't be either. However, if the child has nobody obvious to identify with on race, they may choose to identify with some other group -- say "nerds" or "jocks" or whatever, and will likely pick up habits and culture from those groups.
It works both ways, as the more intellectual Asian and Jewish cultures tend to maintain their identity even when mixed in with any variety of other cultures with varying degrees of intellectual respect.
I recommend The Nurture Assumption [amazon.com] for some insightful thoughts on this topic.
Cheers.
Re:Maybe not? (Score:3, Insightful)
You cost significantly less than 7000/9500 of the candidate who can do 9500 wph? Or you are willing to work more than 9500/7000 longer (but remember there are only 24 hours in a day).
If the tasks involves entering ordered sets of data by a certain date, it could cos