It likely will. You revealed an unconscious bias you have. You think that focusing on diversity is lowering the hiring bar. This is a fundamentally biased position -- it assumes minorities are worse tech workers. You're the top comment on a popular HN thread, many people are rebutting you, and are getting linked from many external sources.
All it takes is one hiring manager to read this thread, realize their unconscious bias, and then realize that focusing on diversity does not compromise employee standards. Then a black person gets hired.
Your ability to repeat your talking points is impressive. But you demonstrate zero engagement with any other views, zero understanding of the lived reality of minorities in tech, and zero understanding of the decades of research and discussion around racism and employment.
The charitable assumption is that's accidental. There's no reason white people end up knowing about this stuff automatically. I sure didn't. But at some level of repetition and entrenched defense of an apparently naive position, it gets pretty hard to say, "Oh Steven2012 just doesn't know."
It begins to look like you don't want to know. Which is also fine, really, as long as you own that and move along in spite of it. Maybe try that? It seems better than being the poster boy for statements like "I don't read HN often. But it can be instructive. You get to read unfiltered sentiment from ppl who don't realize they're misogynist/racist."
Actually what is even more remarkable is your ability to smugly pooh pooh everyone's ideas and point out how everyone is a closet racist, despite their good intentions.
What, pray tell, is your idea to increase diversity, and what have you personally done to increase diversity?
Ah, yes, let's turn this around. No matter that you haven't addressed any of the criticisms of your comments. No matter that when you get replies you don't like, you just delete what you wrote rather than owning your words and working through your mistakes. (Let me know if you'd like a copy; I saved it for you.) No matter that I encouraged your one actual idea, which was to maybe start volunteering. No matter that you don't know anything about the research on or the history of this topic, yet feel qualified to judge other people. Let's do it.
My idea? I don't need to have "my idea" to increase diversity. Other people have already had plenty of ideas. Better, they have discussed, researched, and critiqued those ideas. As a white guy, I'm unlikely to have any particularly good ideas, because I have little direct experience of the problem I'm trying to solve. I also try not to have ideas on products to create for the Chinese market, better approaches to goat herding, or the particle makeup of dark matter. I know I'm not an expert, so I'm not going to clutter the discussion talking like I am.
And what am I actually doing? A fair number of things, but the most important of them is to listen. I talk with actual people about their actual experiences. Via RSS and Twitter, I follow a lot of people who think and write about this stuff. I read studies on the topic. I read about America's incredibly fucked-up racial history, and about how we're still dealing with the effects of that today. I listen to actual minorities in tech about their actual experiences. And ones outside of tech, too.
I encourage you to try it. Because then you'd know that racial bias is widespread in the US despite "good intentions" [1]. You'd know that outbursts like this are a symptom of white fragility [2]. You'd know about the white savior complex, where a white person decides the only solution to racism is for them to go share their time and wisdom with those poor unfortunates, ignoring the structural issues that created the situation.
And then, once you get past the Racism 101 stuff, maybe you could help me and others who would like HN and the tech industry to have discussions on this that aren't somewhere on the horrific/remedial end of the spectrum. But take your time with the listening. It took me maybe 3 or 4 years of work. The hard part wasn't the learning, it was the unlearning of what I thought I knew. [3]
Hey wpietri, thanks for writing this comment. Sometimes, I read through threads like these, and see a lot of vocal white people saying shit that makes me lose hope for the future. White people are in charge in this country, and any change will require them to back it. Reading this helps undo some of that despair, and gives me some hope for the future.
Thank you, and keep being exactly what minorities need right now.
Thanks. I was an ignorant fool on these issues for a long time. Now that I have slightly more clue, I figure one of the best things I can do with my privilege is just to visibly object, to get white dudes to listen to, well, anybody else. So much of what I got wrong happened not because I heard both sides and picked the wrong one, but because I didn't even know there was a choice.
And for what it's worth, I'm as impressed as hell by people in their 20s today. As an old, I think I'm supposed to grumble about kids these days. But I see so many young-ish voices that are so much smarter about these topics than my cohort was. I have enormous hope for the future.
Are typed arrays stored outside of the JS heap? For example, in node.js you can use Buffers to get around V8's 1.8GB JS heap limit -- are typed arrays similar? Does the ES6 spec specify whether typed arrays should be stored separately from the JS heap, or is that an implementation detail?
Fluid, Inc. | http://fluid.com | San Francisco, CA (but remote friendly)
Senior Full Stack Engineer
Fluid's main product offering is Fluid Configure, a flexible and powerful platform for mass customization and configuration of consumer products. Fluid Configure is being successfully used by The North Face, Reebok, Oakley, and Vans, among many others. We are looking for engineers with well-rounded experience to help us build out the next generation of Fluid Configure, and help us solve problems in building flexible and performant web UIs, 3D rendering, image processing, scalability, server APIs, and administration tools.
Senior Software Engineer - AI / Machine Learning
Fluid's next product (currently in the alpha phase) is Expert Personal Shopper (XPS) - an AI / ML-driven product recommendation engine. XPS uses a variety of AI technologies such as IBM's Watson, Named Entity Recognition, Natural Language Classifiers, and Sentiment Analysis to produce its results. We are looking for smart, creative, skilled engineers to advance our intelligent XPS platform. Experience with AI or machine learning technologies is a huge plus (but not required).
Fluid is a company of about 100 people, with offices in SF and NY, as well as many remote employees spread across the globe. Fluid started as a digital agency, but within the last 5 years has seen strong growth in its SaaS business. On the Software R&D team, we value technical skills as well as creative and intrapersonal skills. We have flexible working schedules, great benefits, and consider our 40-hour work weeks sacred.
If any of these positions interest you, send me your resume or something that showcases your skills at aearly+hn@fluid.com (I am Alex Early). You can also apply online[1]. We also have a variety of other non-engineering positions open.
Fluid, Inc. | http://fluid.com | San Francisco, CA (but remote friendly)
☛ Full Stack Engineer
Fluid's main product offering is Fluid Configure, a flexible and powerful platform for mass customization and configuration of consumer products. Fluid Configure is being successfully used by The North Face, Reebok, Oakley, and Vans, among many others. We are looking for engineers with well-rounded experience to help us build out the next generation of Fluid Configure, and help us solve problems in building flexible and performant web UIs, 3D rendering, image processing, scalability, server APIs, and administration tools.
☛ Full Stack Engineer - AI / Machine Learning
Fluid's next product (currently in the alpha phase) is Expert Personal Shopper (XPS) - an AI / ML-driven product recommendation engine. XPS uses a variety of AI technologies such as IBM's Watson, Named Entity Recognition, Natural Language Classifiers, and Sentiment Analysis to produce its results. We are looking for smart, creative, skilled engineers to advance our intelligent XPS platform. Experience with AI or machine learning technologies is a huge plus (but not required).
Fluid is a company of about 100 people, with offices in SF and NY, as well as many remote employees spread across the globe. Fluid started as a digital agency, but within the last 5 years has seen strong growth in its SaaS business. On the Software R&D team, we value technical skills as well as creative and intrapersonal skills. We have flexible working schedules, great benefits, and consider our 40-hour work weeks sacred.
If any of these positions interest you, send me your resume or something that showcases your skills at aearly+hn@fluid.com (I am Alex Early). You can also apply online[1]. We also have a variety of other non-engineering positions open.
I think this is a great idea. While I think the execution could be improved (maybe a person wants to see an different therapist, or one outside the office), but attempting to remove the stigma surrounding mental health, and giving low friction access is huge. There is also the acknowledgement of the fact that most people aren't perfect, and nearly everyone could benefit from some sort of counseling. If everyone at your company is in perfect mental health you're either incredibly lucky, or kidding yourself.
I think Shanley Kane put it best[1]: "People are broken, and people work at companies."
I think the author makes a couple flawed assumptions. First: that all people are motivated primarily by money, and second: things that have no direct monetary value have no value.
Some people value the work they do, or the work their company does. Some people value their teams and the people they work with on a daily basis. Some people value working in a nice space, or their own spaces. Some people would like to look back at 65 at what they have built, rather than what they have earned, not really caring that they may have earned 20% less.
I do agree that chasing seniority for title only can be a fools errand. A higher title can be a substitute for self-esteem issues, but on the other hand, it can also lead to higher pay scales.
Also, I've known companies to reward those "corporate idealists" with more than just carnival tickets.... If your company doesn't reward putting in the occasional extra hour and seeing things through to completion, it's a bad company to work for.
Who says social comparison (discarded by this article as "carnival tickets") plays no role in satisfaction? Research shows that making more than peers is a better predictor of happiness than absolute income (http://e-archivo.uc3m.es/bitstream/handle/10016/15313/happin...)
That's only true if you're following the canonical Flux architecture to the letter. There's little difference between having your store trigger setState() on a root component and having your store trigger React.render(<RootComponent/>) with new props.
My point was that the state of the dropdown is something that perfectly fine to manage directly in the component (nothing else needs to know about it). Things like the selected value would not be something to manage using component state.
All it takes is one hiring manager to read this thread, realize their unconscious bias, and then realize that focusing on diversity does not compromise employee standards. Then a black person gets hired.