Let me put it bluntly: I grew up in the rural south. I NEVER meet other programmers who have a background remotely similar to mine, ever.
When was the last time you worked with a coder who grew up in a place that wasn't a wealthy suburb or a nice city?
How many people who grew up in trailer parks work at Google or Apple?
The author is right: not enough black folks at these companies. What is sad is that this is a symptom of the real issue, which is socioeconomic and geographic in nature, and the companies trying to do something about it are only focusing on the symptoms.
This means that even companies like Apple will never fully address the underrepresented groups. America doesn't have a race problem, so much as a culture problem. Obviously culture is extremely aligned with race, but think about it this way: the geographical and socieconomic layers that are excluded by these tech companies are filled with people of all colors, and nobody gives a shit about the people that look too similar to the white folks from wealthy cities that have every advantage.
It's not an either/or proposition; it's both/and. According to the article, Google, Facebook, and Twitter are all ~2% black. The population of Silicon valley is just shy of 8% black. The national number is about 18%. Silicon valley is an unusally white area, and the staff demographics are skewed even relative to that baseline.
For what it's worth, I am originally from a small industrial town in rural Arkansas, and I am white. Getting hired in a tech firm was actually quite easy for me, given that I was willing to move away from where I grew up to an urban area with a thriving tech sector. I'd like to think that would still have been true even if I were black, but...
Some of the poorest people in the country (most of them white) surround this little bubble all through the Ozarks, extending east into Appalachia. You're from here, and you know that. Moving to an "urban area with a thriving tech sector" isn't exactly cheap. Getting into a good college is a nice precursor to that, and that is radically helped by having a decent public school system.
I don't think it's a stretch to say that these are very difficult obstacles for people, no matter there color.
In fact, I'll say it now: a black kid who attends school in Fairfax County, Virginia is going to have a better shot at a tech job down the road than a white kid who attends school in Ft. Smith, Arkansas. These are extremely different places, but I'm pointing this out because while race matters, waaaay too much emphasis is placed on it compared to the structural factors that impact people independent of ethnicity.
Unfortunately, we also have a very real racism problem, and I don't think it's helpful to say "the real problem is classism". The very real problems include both racism and classism. It's too hard to get into tech as a poor white man. It's too hard to get into tech as a middle class black man. For that matter, it's too hard to get into tech as a middle class white woman. And it's way, way too hard as any combination of those.
In general, responding to "we have a huge racism issue" with "we actually have a huge classism issue" isn't wrong, but it isn't helpful either. It derails the conversation from a very real problem into arguing about who has it worse. And the worst part is that most of the changes that would help the racism issue would also help most of the other -isms. Blind hiring, more support for remote work, and less dependence on specific universities in hiring pipelines helps everybody. And even very targeted interventions help indirectly to the extent they erode the stereotype that only upper-middle-class 20-something white guys need apply.
What if the classism problem is a significant cause of the racism problem? Race and class correlate, so if someone has a problem with a particular class they are going to learn to associate certain races with that class, and their classism issue becomes a racism issue to the outside observer.
I think that is one of the big impediments to actually solving many of the current problems that involve race.
For instance, take the issue of people getting shot by police. It is a fact that blacks are shot at a higher rate than whites in the United States. It is also a fact that blacks commit violent crimes at a higher rate than whites. Most people get hung up on one of those two facts and won't go farther.
The liberal side (I'm going to be doing some broad generalizations from here on...) gets hung up on blacks getting shot at a higher rate and attributes it to obvious racism on the part of police. They don't want to consider that the police may be shooting blacks at a higher rate for non-racist reasons.
The conservative side points to the higher crime rate among blacks, takes that as a satisfactory explanation for the police shooting data (and they are probably reasonably right, at least for the proximate cause of police shootings), and then gets hung up on that. They don't want to consider that there may be some factors that are disproportionately pushing blacks into conditions that tend to foster higher crime rates among people in those conditions regardless of race.
In particular, there is a pretty solid correlation between race and wealth in the US. Black people are disproportionately in poorer cites and states, where schools are worse, prospects are dimmer, and there is high population density. Those kind of areas tend to produce higher crime rates regardless of the race or ethnicity of the people that live in them.
(Well, to be accurate, that should be "higher crime rates for the kind of crimes that often gets you shot by police". White collar crime tends to be a lot safer during the arrest, because those arrests tend to come at the end of a long investigation and the arresting officers know your movements and can put a lot of planning into your apprehension. When you get arrested for robbing a liquor store or shooting a rival gang member, the arrest tends to be a more hastily organized affair, with a lot more improvising).
I've seen dozens of articles in newspapers and magazines that have looked at the police shooting data, and heard numerous stories about it on my local public radio station, but none that I've seen/heard have looked at how this relates to wealth levels. I realize that would be harder to do because that's generally not something that is directly in the data. But without that analysis being done, we are just going to be stuck at the "police are racists"/"blacks commit too much crime" level, which is not productive.
Unless you are counting Asians as "white", that is not correct. The nation as a whole is between 63% and 77% white (depending on whether or not "hispanic" and "white" are considered disjoint). In Silicon Valley, whites are only about 35%, and are not even the largest racial/ethnic group, having been surpassed by Asians.
Just looking at stats and pretending that's the whole story is disingenuous.
Assuming everyone who graduated with a CS degree from the US was hired at an equivalent then one would expect something closer to 7%-8%.
None of these things mean that negative racial discrimination or stereotyping don't exist, just that we shouldn't expect numbers for a particular industry population to match the aggregate stats on who graduated last year.
When I look at the data, I see that 2.5% of graduates are black. I'm looking at PhD, Master's or Bachelor's in CS in 2015.[1]
The totals exclude those with unknown ethnicity:
15 black CS PhDs out of 1442
110 black CS Master’s out of 8,923
425 black CS Bachelor’s out of 11,974
(15+110+425) / (1442+8923+11974) = ~0.0246
[1] 2015 Taulbee Survey, Computing Research Association
http://cra.org/wp-content/uploads/2016/05/2015-Taulbee-Surve...
EDIT: I believe one big source of the difference between our numbers is whether you count "Information" degrees as a CS degree. My number only looks at "Computer science" degrees, whereas your data looks at "Computer sciences" degrees.
2009 data:
(numbers are CS/All, CS% from all CS, CS% from all graduates in category)
Total graduating with a CS degree: 38,496/1,619,028(100%, ~2.37%)
Total White: 23,021/1,069,016(~60%, ~2.15%)
Total Black: 3,868/145,988(~10%, ~2.64%)
Total Asian/Pacific Islander: 2,894/105,246(7.5%, ~2.75%)
Total Hispanic: 2,999/137,746(7.80%, ~2.17%)
Interestingly, both Black and Asian/PI are significantly above the number of CS graduates per capita, and White/Hispanic are below.
Ideally, you'd check the proportions starting from something like mathematical success or career intent in high school. Then you move on to college majors, graduation rates, and applicant pools. This is really important, because otherwise you end up focusing energy on non-leaky parts of the pipeline and achieving nothing.
This article focuses on interviewing, but the segment on black colleges and office siting is crucial. Ensuring unbiased interviews doesn't stop you from drawing interview candidates from disproportionately white colleges. Holding local code-ins won't save you from having offices in overwhelmingly white cities. "Lowering the bar", which companies are (according to this) hugely concerned about, still wouldn't solve the problem.
If you're studying the mismatch between 13% of the population and 1% of your workforce, the numbers you want are the ones that show where things went wrong.
E.g. if the expected percentage of black engineers if there were no bias in the hiring process was 2%, that seems like important information to include.