The NBA is much smaller than entire industries: there are more CEOs than NBA players.
He's saying that within the Black community, there are fewer people who (for whatever reason) have the skills necessary to be a CRUD developer.
Reasons may include, but are not limited to:
- poverty and access to education
- cultural factors pertaining to the value of higher education
- cultural factors pertaining to the types of jobs that are valued (e.g.: perhaps Blacks take jobs that confer a certain status or that are seen as directly giving back to the community)
If this is true -- and I personally find it plausible -- then we would indeed expect blacks to be under-represented in software design.
tl;dr: Perhaps the bias in hiring is a reflection of a bias in competence. Perhaps Blacks are, on the whole, poorer candidates? If that's true, then the correct approach is to focus on education rather than punishing employers.
Whether it was intended or not, OP was dog-whistling the genetics argument, which I do not buy.
Again, no it wasn't, and even if it were it does not change the veracity of my (more nuanced) rendition.
For what it's worth - I do not disagree with your argument, but I do not think it adequately explains the situation.
OT: it's somewhat surreal for me to experience HN going all out for the status quo (regardless of subject). I just wanted to get that off my chest - carry on.
There are pieces of the system that don't have equality of opportunity. People aren't born with the same amount of money or into the same social circles. There are actual racists in the world doing actually racist things. Different role models. Different cultures. Everyone already knows this.
You have to fix the causes, not the outcome. Mitigate poverty with a universal basic income. Punish overt racism. Change the culture so that black children want to be coders instead of basketball players.
You can't fix it at the end. Not only does it not work, because every qualified woman or minority that Oracle hires is just one less working for Apple or Microsoft and vice versa, it also isn't justice.
Because the ones who would get the coding jobs aren't the disadvantaged ones. The consequence of inequality manifests as working on the janitorial staff. You can't help those people by making a coder out of some already college-educated person who would otherwise have been a physicist or nurse or tax auditor. And not all of the people who are stuck cleaning toilets because society has been unfair to them are women or minorities.