Facebook is really diverse (SAUL LOEB/AFP via Getty Images)
America is being torn apart by a harsh paradox. On the one hand, the US Declaration of Independence thunderously declares “all men are created equal”. Yet on the other, the country’s Gini coefficient (a measure of income inequality) ranks it alongside heavily stratified Bolivia.
The contrast is even sharper if you consider the “equity” that various social justice movements seek to achieve, in which every sub-segment of society — at least those we fixate on — must be proportionally represented at every echelon of society. Or really, only in the elite reaches of the social firmament; nobody bothers with the racial diversity of lumberjacks, fruit workers or commercial fishermen.
Nowhere is the paradox between Darwinian competition for success and the progressive pursuit for equality more apparent than in Silicon Valley. Titans like Facebook or Apple — where, until recently, I worked — relentlessly race to recruit the best talent and put them through an absolute wringer of an interview process designed to filter for The Perfect Software Engineer or The Perfect Product Manager. I’ve been through it myself many times — sometimes successfully, often not. The hiring rates, a handful among hundreds of candidates reviewed, resemble the acceptance rates at the universities that typically grace the CVs in question.
Once our lucky candidate is given the job, the measurement doesn’t stop. Every tech company has an involved performance review process, aligned with whatever management gospel they believe. Employees, having spent long hours both working in Zoom meetings and bonding in “offsites” — imagine a school trip combined with group therapy — are then asked to submit “360-degree feedback”. Similar to East Germans writing Stasi reports on their neighbours, employees rank all their colleagues according to whatever rubric is deemed most important.
The calculus is even harsher among Silicon Valley’s high-growth startups. Here, returns on techno-capital can be stratospheric, way beyond even other capitalism-soaked boom times of the past. A single well-timed investment can make good on a venture capitalist’s entire fund, and a few choice years at the right company can set up an engineer for life.
But herein lies the problem: if venture-capital-fuelled technology is one of the most brutal, though effective, amplifiers of human talent, then the outcomes will be spectacularly unequal. Which is why the diversity agenda — the thought that all groups must enjoy equal representation everywhere we choose to measure — reaches such a crusading fervour inside the tech industry. The economic peaks and valleys that must be pummelled smooth are Grand Canyon-esque in their proportions. But in the current American zeitgeist, that enormous discrepancy in outcome is instantly projected along a single obsessive dimension: race and ethnicity.
The diversity reports from large public tech companies — they’re all required to publish them nowadays — reflect this one-dimensional focus. Consider a table from Google’s 2021 US diversity report below. Asians constitute over 40% of all of Google; that’s a seven-times overrepresentation versus their population percentage. Whites form barely 50% of Google, which is less than their percentage of the population as a whole.
More amusing in Google’s report is the crude racial categorisation which perfectly captures the progressive agenda’s simplistic approach to “diversity”. Here you can toggle the region to any part of the globe, and all of humanity in its spectacular diversity reduces to essentially the same five buckets: Asian+, Black+, Latinx+, White+ and Native American+. In true American style, it takes all the world’s real-life cultural diversity, puts it through the meat grinder of American racial politics and pops out five flavours.
A closer look at the “diversity data” reveals just how unhelpful this approach is; Silicon Valley is one of the most open and diverse industries in the United States.
According to data from the American Community Survey, something like 39% of software engineers in 2015 were foreign-born, many times higher than the baseline 17% of foreign-born in the US workforce. More anecdotally, in my thirteen or so years working in numerous companies, I was routinely the only American-born citizen and the only native English speaker. (Put to one side the irony that as Mr. García-Martínez, I’m actually an utterly basic Cuban-American exile type from Miami.)
The same people who highlight the supposedly glaring deficiencies in Silicon Valley “diversity” are often the first to point out how roughly half of Silicon Valley “unicorn” companies are founded by immigrants, or how two-fifths of the FAANG quintumvirate are led by immigrants. Such figures are counterintuitively cited as proof that increasing diversity is good and we should have more of it. But is Silicon Valley a den of white privilege, or is it an avenue of enormous success for non-American, foreign-born minorities? It can’t be both.
Indeed, today “white” doesn’t really refer to a skin tone: it’s the set of people not offered any sanctioned sympathy in the otherwise ruthless battle for talent and resources. Arguably, “white” has always been something more metaphysical than biological: the Italians, Irish, and Jews and various flavours of non-WASP (White Anglo-Saxon Protestants) were not “white” in decades past, and only slowly acceded to “Whiteness” as social mobility climbed and prejudice receded. In a sense, how quickly a group “gets to white” is a measure of their success in the ever-churning American assimilation machine. What will “white” mean in twenty years’ time?
As with many other social trends, I suspect the answer will come from Silicon Valley. When discussing tech’s “dismal” diversity record, Asians are simply dropped from the picture. This is a form of functional “whitewashing” that will likely expand to include other successful minorities. Yet outside of this absurdly reductionist Diversity Inc. worldview, Silicon Valley continues to be just a roaring machine for recognising and rewarding — to often ludicrous extremes — any talent it can find by whatever means.
Want to make American companies still more diverse than they already are? Forget “equity” targets and institute a points-based immigration system like Canada and New Zealand have, which streamlines global STEM graduates working at US companies. Let’s give the much-coveted US “green card” to every engineering graduate of an American research university, so that they don’t have negotiate bureaucratic black holes to stay in the country.
Those bosses desperate for corporate photos with lots of non-WASP faces in them — beaming, hoodie-clad, from inside the shiny gleaming interiors of Silicon Valley’s plush corporate campuses — could only be supportive of the idea. Let’s have accented English be (even more) the norm inside the country’s most successful companies. We might just be surprised at the result.
Antonio García Martínez is the author of Chaos Monkeys. He writes regularly about tech on The Pull Request.
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SubscribeAs a Skilled Tradesman who does construction, our unskilled workforce has been largley taken by the single male Hispanic Migrant to the vast loss of the poorly educated White and Black youth. They have been displaced from their traditional work – and pay has decreased accordingly.
Biden opening the borders to mass illegals will decimate the already decimated unskilled native workforce.
How weird the reality is – that skilled workers are excluded, the ones who bring prosperity and are net tax payers – and unskilled, the ones who are net tax revenue consumers, are allowed in by the million.
This is the insanity of the Biden, Democrat, administration, they are out to cause as much destruction as they can, as the more people need government assistance, the more clients they have.
“How weird the reality is – that skilled workers are excluded, the ones who bring prosperity and are net tax payers – and unskilled, the ones who are net tax revenue consumers, are allowed in by the million.”
That’s because those arguing for open borders are the privileged upper middle / upper class, college educated elite, who argue for open borders but certainly don’t want lower class immigrants next to their gated communities, or higher educated Asians to take over their jobs
That’s why the diversity quotas assume Asians to be White – you might think they are poor immigrants and add a lot of cultural diversity, if you care for that (why should you though), so our feminist / diversity / anti racist grouips would love them.
In reality, they are the enemy, just like whilte males, because the idea is to hand over high value jobs to the preferred “victim” groups, diversity etc is just an excuse. And Asians, at least the ones between the India – China – SE Asia triangle, definitely aren’t victims, more like traitors to the cause who work hard and do well, thereby proving the claims that the West is waycist.
Which is also why diversity never comes up in low value professions, or in high value professions where the “victim” groups dominate,, say sports like Football or teaching / media jobs. Diversity is neither a virtue nor an objective, just a convenient tool for the “victim” with a posh schooling and non-STEM victim studies degree who wants a slice of the pie
I completely agree with this. I’d love to see publications like The Guardian campaigning for migrant journalists to take over their jobs in order to add to the economy.
“Want to make American companies still more diverse than they already are? Forget “equity” targets and institute a points-based immigration system like Canada and New Zealand have, which streamlines global STEM graduates working at US companies.”
I would suggest dumping ‘equity’ targets and reducing all immigration and most of what remained would be, as the author suggests, a points-based system.
Instead invest in the technical education and retraining of America’s citizens and lawful residents. Heavily subsidize STEM courses at the expense of the liberal arts which is the source of the woke rot.
As Donald Trump said (and was heavily mocked for saying): America (and Americans) first.
The American student is too spoiled to work hard enough to do STEM on the required scale, at the required quality.
Also true of British students. But there is also another issue here. STEM subjects are difficult. Too difficult for 95% of the population. That is why we have the liberal arts
I am an immigrant from India, came here at age 16. Went to college (engineering school) in the 70’s in California. The class of about 100 EE students had one woman (me), two Chinese and on Vietnamese student, rest all American born. I disagree strongly with you that there is something missing in American students and that they are not as hard working as say Indian or other foreign students.
What you said is rubbish. Infact, I found American STEM graduates to be generally more creative and better prepared. What you say about American students does not conform to my experience having worked in silicon valley for 40 years as an engineer.
This is the right direction.
In the IT industry however, cheaper manpower options from asia or eastern Europe are often favoured over UK and Western options, purely down to cost and in spite of skill level.
It might be we simply do not have the demographics to compete, at least in one sector of this area
Because accountants run many traditional businesses now who only see the hourly rate for the yearly financial reports. It ignores how many outsourcing companies end up bilking the client by doing such a poor job (as in many such companies engineering is a job done by the lowest rung) that they end up having to be signed on for multiple contracts.
Competitive success (often measured by financial rewards these days) drives all things (survival of the fittest) , the racial background of the participants is irrelevant. Diversity is a gaming strategy for losers in the competition.
How does one pronounce Latinx?
Do people actually say it out loud?
I hear it as latinks but I suspect it’s something else.
For a start, what on earth does it mean??? I had to look it up.
Anyway, here is what I have found on pronunciation:
“Latinx was originally formed in the early aughts as a word for those of Latin American descent who do not identify as being of the male or female gender or who simply don’t want to be identified by gender. More than likely, there was little consideration for how it was supposed to be pronounced when it was created. Nevertheless, people have attempted to assign some pronunciations to it. The most common way to pronounce Latinx is the same way you would Spanish-derived Latina or Latino but pronouncing the “x” as the name of the English letter X. So you get something like \luh-TEE-neks\.”
So that would be how many, maybe 5 or 6 people in total?
Actually I think Latinx is gender neutral and replaces Latina or Latino. The people who are Latinx may certainly identify as male or female.
Yes. Nothing to do with trans. A few people decided that Latino was itself gendered (which it is – Spanish is a gendered language) and rather than use just Latin they added an x. There is no x in Spanish. The people who did this were English speaking mono-linguists. Spanish speakers hate it but it was never about them.
Yes, I have also read that the ‘Latinx’ community doesn’t like the name. Latin seemed perfectly fine.
I thought it was like Latinaux, French – pronounced Latino, like chevaux, or for Unherd – journaux.
Sadly, in English we often use men when referring to individuals and as a collective for people. Latino in Spanish is much the same. The dilemma is for those that can’t abide the notion of manhole thus calling it maintenance hole, a bit of nonsense. In the case of latinx, they had to invent a word.
I pronounce it as latin -X, exactly as spelled. It’s becoming an insult to most latinos because it denies their cultural background. Most prefer Hispanic else latin. Latinx is a pseudoword created to avoid gender by whites who are clueless (IMHO).
A ridiculous reading, straight from the loony-left Herd. That refers to the equal right to earn a living, not the bogus ‘right’ to be equally productive and so earn equal wages.
Bit odd to call unherd “left wing”.
Bit odd not to. Which political strand do you think justifies state-organised robbing of the rich to pay the poor ?
This article would not be out of place in the Guardian.
This guy was kicked out of Apple for not being leftwing enough.
He didn’t mention anything about “state organised robbing” of the rich. He just mentioned the inequalities. He’s pointing out the inconsistencies of a highly competitive and unequal industry also paying lip service to race or group equality.
And even if we’re pro tax, UnHerd has many different commentators, of different stripes. Not being libertarian is not equal to being left wing.
Well of course he’s not honest enough to mention robbery out loud. But he’s presumably in favour of advancement based on diversity taking preference over merit, which achieves something similar in a more sly way. Which is certainly leftwing.
“ he’s presumably in favour of advancement based on diversity taking preference over merit, which achieves something similar in a more sly way. ”
Did you read the article? He’s doing the exact opposite.
I think I know where exactly you stopped reading. The first paragraph after he mentioned the Gini coefficient.
Eagerly awaiting a substantive answer.
Seems to me you have either misread the article from beginning to end, or not read it through. The first paragraph, for instance, is merely a kind f sitrep, not a credo. In fact it seems clear to me that his general outlook is pretty much the opposite of your interpretation of the same. Maybe next time he writes he should be a little less nuanced.
Substantive answer to what. You haven’t read the article. You’ve now edited your first comment on this thread to include the only paragraph you have read on the article.
Substantive answer to what I actually said originally, obviously. (This would be a good time for you to actually read beyond the first one or two words before flying off in a switch-and-bait tangent)).
(And changing ‘skills’ to ‘merit’ hardly changes the meaning).
More hard-left woke cretinism, with race/sex/ replacing merit for jobs.
Diversity: All ethnicities and sexualities are welcome as long as their thoughts and opinions are identical to mine.
Der Mann, die Frau und das Kind. When is the German language going to be purged? Next step would be the Slav languages that apply a similar system. Do we expect Russian obstruction and meddling in elections?
All Romance languages are gendered, all Slavic and all Germanic.The issue is only live in English speaking countries.
When I worked at Amazon I saw the madness of their diversity and inclusion program up close.
For a start, they didn’t even know how to define the term. In our orientation week, for example, we had a talk from a useful-idiot in the D&I department on what they were doing to increase D&I. A Polish guy put his hand up and said, “How would you aim to have 30% black people at the Polish branch, I have never even seen a black person in the nearby village.” The D&I person mumbled something nonsensical in response, which told me he had never even thought about what demographic measuring stick they should even should use, and where. Clearly applying their American baseline in places where black people don’t even exist, much less work for Amazon, would be an impossible feat to undertake (probably all the more reason they undertake it).
I worked in the tech department in Luxembourg, which was overwhelmingly Asian. Amazon, even at that time, could not decide what or who Asians were. On the one hand, since they were non-white, they counted as “diversity”, but on the other hand, they were over-represented versus every other group. Moreover, not all Asians themselves were equal, with some more represented than others. There were many Chinese people, for example, but no Bengalis. Plenty of Indians, but no Pakistanis. The other problem was, as the author of this piece points out, that they all had to pass 9 interview steps to get where they were, meaning that, in truth, Amazon were not interested in diversity (certainly not intellectually) when it came down to it, but in what a worker would do for them, and at what price.
It occurred to me that D&I was, in fact, a way of justifying bringing in cheap, hardworking geniuses from Asia and making them work in de facto tech sweat shops for a fraction of the price of the equivalent skills in the USA. The D&I drive in these companies has an unspoken economic dimension that suits them, which is why they support it.
I don’t think that is what you call a paradox, in the first paragraph. A paradox would be the Founding Mothers declaring “All men are created equal”, in the US Declaration. Even more so were they to pound their fists on the table, emitting Hear-hears! round the room, “thunderously” so. The example you give as a paradox is as paradoxical as one Oliver Hardy’s cinematic catchphrase of “That’s another nice mess you’ve gotten me into”. In other words, all it is is that’s a little ironic. But, as usual, hyperbole overtakes the mind. Such that we have “America is being torn apart by a harsh paradox.” It would just not do to have “America is being torn apart by a harsh irony.” I just get the feeling that it’s in the world of ironies that freedom rests, not in the world of paradoxes. Paradoxes are Stalinesque. The faint whiff of disdain for the past is in that use of the word “thunderously”. As if in declaring that all men are equal, the Founding Fathers really did pound their fists in unison. The opening two paragraphs to this piece are nearly the most dispiriting opening paragraphs to any article I have ever read. America was called the world’s policeman. Now the world is America’s bossy boots that it has to contend with.
‘all men are created equal’ is ridiculous/stupid and has enabled a world of greed and vicious competition that, patently, many can not keep up with – and who therefore must be just ‘lazy’ = clear conscience for the selfish………………