What can I say? I consider it to be one of the hardest things I've done. I have no idea how people find it easy, but clearly some do.
A lot of the horrendous complexity in our field comes from churn. But hey whatever the vector, it is (and of course this is just my opinion) hellaciously demanding.
Just a quick note, my post here is intended as a narrow response to the specific claim that programming is not demanding, not the general comment tree.
I think the whole idea of stereotype threat is ridiculous. Just because of a stereotype I'm going to get dozens of questions wrong on the SAT? That just does not make any sense. (And now that we have a black president who was from Harvard Law, wouldn't we see average LSAT scores start to converge, surely there would be less of stereotype against black people in law).
And yeah, I understand that my particular account has an ideological bent to it. I wish one account could fully represent who I am. But I am a active HN member with a long history of posts on all sorts of issues. But for obvious reasons, in cases where I believe the truth is highly politically incorrect, I have to post on a different account. I do try to respect the spirit of the guidelines, but I am not sure what I should do differently going forward.
Please don't do this; the HN guidelines ask you not to.
Also, on (understandably) emotional topics, it's best if you represent your view more substantively and less angrily. People often downvote the latter kind of comment even when they agree with it.
IQ tests are designed to be excellent proxies for what we generally understand to be intelligence. They can be better or worse proxies depending on the circumstance. In the particular case of testing black Americans, the IQ tests are quite predictive, and the world looks like what we would expect, if the tests were indeed actually testing intelligence. What is your evidence that IQ tests are poor proxies in the case of testing African-Americans?
A great deal of data seems to show that IQ still is very predictive, even when accounting for socio-economic status. That is exactly what they were originally designed for. SAT tests for instance were designed to find students from poorer and more marginalized backgrounds who nonetheless were still very smart and could achieve if given the chance. This is all covered in the Bell Curve, and well some professors thought that Murray exaggerated the degree of certainty, no one showed that his data was false, nor that the conclusion was false.
Believe it or not, I used to be much more in your camp, but after reading a bunch of sources, including the Bell Curve, Gould's the Mismeasure of Man, dozens of papers from scientists contesting the Bell Curve, responses to those papers, and so on, I came to the conclusions I did. Personally, I would much prefer if the evidence had said otherwise. I don't like being called a racist asshat. But given the evidence is what it is, I don't think it is fair to accuse Silicon Valley of judging people by race over merit, simply based on hiring statistics.
race is not accepted as a biological handicap
That's not an accurate phrasing of my view. If a black person has a 130IQ, they have a 130IQ and their race is not a handicap. No person should view their race as a handicap, or be personally stereotyped based on their race. It is just statistically less likely that a black person has a 130IQ. And that was what the original charge was based on -- the statistical underrepresentation of black people in Silicon Valley.
To see it visually, this is the bell curve based on millions of test results: http://i.imgur.com/zB1oENS.png?1 There are very simply very few black people in the far-right portion. This is not even a disputed fact (the dispute is mainly over why the curve is skewed and if it can be fixed; the existence of the skew is incontrovertible).
This was at least partly because of the way companies recruited: From 2001 to 2009, more than 20 percent of all black computer science graduates attended an historically black school, according to federal statistics—yet the Valley wasn’t looking for candidates at these institutions.
The average SAT scores at Howard are thoroughly mediocre, on par with second and tier state colleges, and you would not expect an elite school to concentrate on Howard, any more than you would expect it to concentrate on Southern Illinois University or the like. The only reason an elite company would recruit at Howard is for diversity reasons.
Foreman is strong-willed, which sometimes gets him in trouble. “I just chalked it up to soft skills, I guess,” he says, explaining that he and his interviewer had clashed. Pratt says he’d been “furious” to learn that Foreman had been passed over. Other companies said no, too.
So was he a good programmer or not? How do we the readers know that he good do the job and was passed up unfairly?
The phenomenon, “stereotype threat,” is getting more attention in the Valley, and companies have begun training employees to be aware of it.
The idea of stereotype threat is extremely dubious - http://isteve.blogspot.com/2012/10/john-list-on-virtual-none...
“She doesn’t fit the profile of what people think of when they think of engineers. Even though people think of Silicon Valley as a big meritocracy, I don’t think that’s how it works.”
There are now a number of companies that do automated programming interviews -- Starfighter, Hacker Rank, etc. Do these manage to overcome stereotype threat? Do these blind interviews allow through more African-Americans? Before throwing around slanderous accusations, one should actually show that Silicon Valley is treating people with the same programming ability differently.
The sad thing is that these tech companies cannot just admit, "We don't recruit at Howard because the SAT scores are not there." Rather these companies have to pretend that anyone can be a great programmer if they just put in the work, and a lot of people end up with false hopes that only get crushed.