Diversity is an issue within the tech industry. Currently, there is an extreme bias towards white males being hired in the Silicon Valley area. However, I do not feel this lack of diversity is as big of an issue as the public and media believes it to be. I agree with the Martin Fowler article that diversity is needed and should be fostered, “Lack of diversity is itself a problem. Different people think differently, and consequently come up with different ways to solve problems. If you have a bunch of people with the same background, they miss lots of ideas – leading to inefficiencies and lack of innovation.” I truly believe that diversity should be fostered and developed in order to increase innovation and create new and unique ideas. But it should not be a forced event where minorities and women are hired purely for getting the diversity numbers but based on their merit.
The idea that there is discrimination within the industry doesn’t seem to ring true to me especially in the world we live in where there is so much political correctness and activism. The PBS article about Google’s diversity, in the non-tech positions there was about a 50-50 split between men and women. I think a root of the issue is not discrimination within companies but more that there are not lots of female, Hispanic and Black engineers and CS students. The main issue is that there simply isn’t a large enough pool of minority candidates for companies to adequately fill their diversity needs without hurting the quality of their employees. This relates back to the hiring process where companies clearly stated they are very risk adverse in hiring candidates.
One way these issues can be slightly solved are by companies investing in programs that help get more minorities and women into the tech majors in colleges. This is exemplified by Apple fostering improvement by donating to organizations that work to develop and inspire women and minorities to become tech skilled and major in the field through scholarships. The best way to remove the barriers and stigmatization of nerdy programmers is to just advertise to the minorities and women as much as possible.
Another barrier I believe is the “boys culture” within companies. These cultures have been fostered for years of not really having many women around in the workplace. While I feel like it will be an initial barrier, once more and more women enter the workforce I feel this issue might naturally fix itself, but maybe I’m a naïve optimist.
programming ethics 