I'm honestly confused by your response. Companies like Facebook, Twitter & Google hire 1% blacks in tech and 2% overall. Blacks as a percentage of college graduates in engineering or non-engineering fields are way more than 2% of graduating classes.

However most Silicon Valley tech companies under-hire from this demographic for their own reasons.

The numbers are confusing to me.

Here's an article claiming that the amount of computer engineers is around 5% of all black college majors - http://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2016-02-09/report-few....

Now we need to make an implicit assumption that the enrollment and graduation rate of blacks is the same as the rate for the general population(I couldn't really find information on that, apologies). Using demographics data, blacks are ~15% of the overall population in the US. That means that about 0.75% of the total population are "blacks" && "engineer major". That would mean all the listed companies are overhiring black engineers if simply based on a college-graduate quota.

Besides that, I liked the gist of your post, but the end seemed incredibly disingenuous. Correlating Apple's number of black engineers and its value does not imply causation, and that statement seemed like an emotional appeal.

That's really weird math since you start with engineering college graduates then jump to talking about the entire population. So you're comparing apples to oranges.

Here's something simple. Go look at the metrics for demographics of college majors by degree at http://www.nsf.gov/statistics/seind12/c2/c2s2.htm

Blacks are about 7% - 8% of college graduates with CS degrees each year. So one would assume that if tech companies were hiring US college graduates at an equivalent rate based on graduation rates then most tech companies would look like Apple that has 7%-8% black employees in their workforce.

> Blacks are about 7% - 8% of college graduates with CS degrees each year

Your data lumps together "Computer sciences," which probably includes Information degrees. If you look at CS degrees only it's about 2.5% in 2015 (https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=12101868).

Your logic is faulty, because the pool of engineering employees is (roughly) limited to engineering majors. Nobody is complaining that teachers and nurses are underrepresented in the tech industry.

Regardless, the true number is around 7-8%, as is helpfully noted elsewhere.

You're right, that was the problem :) In another of Dare's replies I checked just the engineering major numbers and the math checks out. I derped.

How do you check that? I've found reporting on race in tech to just be absolutely horrible with numbers. Whole stories where the only number is "Google repots X percent of Y race." It tells me absolutely nothing without comparing that to demographics of where google has offices, and what the demographics of cs students are, among other things, and I've never seen that info.

The article addresses that directly. The author talks about Google more or less abandoning its Atlanta office, where a diverse workforce is easier to get than elsewhere.