Discounting the value of culture is a huge mistake. Humans work best when they are not treated as replaceable units of quantified productivity.
Diverse cultures can attack problems with a broader perspective than homogenous cultures.
I have talented co-workers of many different races (specifically including black), but even without visiting our office, you could guess the percentage breakdown and you wouldn't be far off.
I can't hire applicants that don't exist and I can't hire applicants that aren't qualified.
You can hire junior engineers and mentor and train them to be successful.
Then you can proactively advertise your positions to programs and organizations that have more minority participation.
Of course this takes more work for you, the hiring manager, in sourcing and on boarding. But there should be a burden on every hiring manager to correct the systemic diversity problems.
A success will be extremely impactful for the individuals you hire and for the overall health of the team.
- It's hard to get hired by white companies, so a lot of black people stay within black-owned companies and communities.
- There are a lot of ways to search for and hire applicants; waiting for people to come to you will not necessarily result in the best candidate.
- Transportation is not as easy or available for poor or rural communities. It may be necessary to hire remote, or pay for relocation, or in the extreme cases open remote offices.
- The 'qualifications' may need to be revisited. What are you requiring as a qualification? Is it something a poor black person would have significantly more difficulty in achieving compared to a white person, due to socioeconomic disparities? Is it possible you could find other qualities that work as similar qualifications that black people might be more likely to have?
In order for there to be more black applicants, we need to help there to be more black applicants. This can mean many things, such as contacting local black communities and asking them what your company can do to help adults achieve a job at your company, or helping to improve the roadblocks for young kids to get a good education.
I know, I know; actually trying to help people can be a burden. But it will help people who continue to be oppressed by a society that does not care about them. You could continue to just wait for black people to work around the huge pitfalls society has set up for them, or you could help work to remove those pitfalls. It's up to you. Unfortunately.
The problem exists in parts of the society that technology can't fix, but law and education might. It doesn't help that the criminal justice system is statistically racist and that lack of cohesive families due to the consequences of povertous conditions causes children from those families to perform less well in school.
If you want better diversity in better-paying fields, the most impactful change would be to end the war on drugs, which contributes the most to poverty and incarceration. I don't see how the tech community can do that by themselves and the full effect won't even be measurable in the tech community until a generation later.
First, we have to get people like you to understand what the problem is, which apparently is difficult to do. Then, we have to build empathy for the problems facing black people so you want to actually help them. Then we have to invest in developing social and economic equality within disadvantaged communities.
And hiring more diversely will not lower hiring standards. Please try to understand that.
The explanation tech companies have for not having a more diverse workforce is that the applicants are just not out there to hire. Of course, any good tech worker could take an additional five minutes to think about the problem and discover that there are ways to create the applicants, by improving the communities that will grow the applicants.
But that takes time, and money, it's hands-on and it's not easy. And overseas workers are cheap.
