<<<<< JOB DESTRUCTION NEWSLETTER No. 2086 -- 2/18/2010 >>>>>
web version:
http://blog.vdare.com/archives/2010/02/18/blacks-latinos-women-and-whites-lo
se-ground-at-silicon-valley-tech-companies/
According to the headline on a Mercury News article by Mike Swift, Blacks,
Latinos and women are falling behind the employment curve at Silicon Valley
tech companies.[Blacks, Latinos and women lose ground at Silicon Valley
tech companies,By Mike Swift, San Jose Mercury News, February 13, 2010].
Oh, and buried deep into the article you will discover that whites are
losing also. It was almost mentioned as an afterthought. tsk! tsk!
According to Swift, the Mercury News did a Freedom of Information Act
request (FOIA) to get the data for the article. The Mercury shares only a
portion of the data, so readers are left to assume Swift is competent
enough to analyze the data correctly. Bad assumption!
Upon close reading it’s not very obvious what kind of data the government
gave the Mercury because high-tech employers refused to divulge their
demographic data. These excerpts should raise a big red flag about the
credibility of the data:
Cisco declined to released its most recent race data in detail
"Most recent" is a major understatement, but it gets worse:
Following an appeals process that stretched over nearly two years,
five of those companies -- Google, Apple, Yahoo, Oracle and
Applied Materials -- convinced federal officials to block public
disclosure.
The data included on the sidebar of the article is mostly meaningless
because it covers the boom in high-tech from 1999-2005 while ignoring the
popping of the bubble after 2005. Nothing was provided about the rate of
job loss versus race but the one thing that becomes obvious is that whites
are not necessarily a majority at Silicon Valley companies. Companies such
as Intel and Solectron actually have more Asians than whites. Most of the
data seems to support a conclusion that minorities are over-represented in
Silicon Valley. You have to wonder if Swift and his pals at the Mercury
would complain about diversity problems if the companies were 100% Asian!
Actually Swift never explains what Asian is -- a major blooper that could
be considered racist by Asians. Since Swift didn’t bother to speculate on
what Asian means, let me take a stab: most "Asians" in Silicon Valley are
Indian followed a distant second by Chinese. I base that on the theory that
the H-1B nonimmigrant guest worker program is largely responsible for the
dramatic demographic changes taking place in Silicon Valley (not counting
illegal immigration of Hispanics). Approximately 45% of all H-1B visa
holders are from India followed by 10% from China (among computer/IT
related H-1Bs the Chinese are losing ground to those from India). For more
info read: "On the Need For Reform of the H-1B Visa" by Dr. Norman Matloff.
Swift begins by writing that Silicon Valley is not diverse enough -- which
is the only accurate statement in the article, but not for the reason he
thinks. The truth about Silicon Valley is that the area has been flooded
with H-1Bs for such a long time there has been an ethnic cleansing of
anyone that isn’t Indian or Chinese. Most people who live there tell me
that their neighborhoods look like New Delhi and Hong Kong, or even
Tijuana.
Hispanics and blacks made up a smaller share of the valley’s computer
workers
in 2008 than they did in 2000, a Mercury News review of federal data
shows,
even as their share grew across the nation. Women in computer-related
occupations saw declines around the country, but they are an even
smaller
proportion of the work force here.
Oh, and I almost forgot to mention what Swift wrote about white folks --
because it’s so easy to miss.
With the number of white computer workers also dropping after 2000,
Asians were the exception. They now make up a majority of workers in
computer-related occupations who live in Silicon Valley, although they
hold only about one in six of the nation’s computer-related jobs.
Swift managed to produce numerical statistics for all the racial groups in
question except for whites. That omission is probably to hide the
inconvenient truth that whites are doing as bad or worse than non-Asian
minority groups. Of course it’s anybody’s guess what is happening in
relative terms since Swift never shows whether whites are gaining or losing
ground compared to the other racial groups.
One thing for sure, Swift ignored his own data! The sidebar data shows that
in 2005 whites were 44% of the employees in the ten high-tech companies
surveyed, but combined Asian, Hispanic, and blacks were 56% of the
workforce. There must be truth to the rumors that the education system in
California is broken if writers and editors in one of the state’s major
newspapers thinks that 44% is more than 56%!
One more thing about that data -- between 1999-2005 whites lost 1% of their
share of the techie population since 1999 and so did blacks, but blacks
went from only 3% to 2% of the techie population in 1995 so they lost
proportionally more. Hispanics didn’t fare much better as they went from
7% to 5%. Listed in order below is the groups that are getting clobbered
the worst by the importation of Asian H-1Bs:
1. Blacks -33%
2. Hispanics -28%
3. Whites -2%
4. Asians +8%
Of course my calculations are based on the flawed and limited data provided
by the Mercury, and it only includes the boom times. I decided not to
consider females because their racial breakdown wasn’t provided, which
probably skews the data. My guess is that since 2005 the percentage of
Asians has gone up even as total employment goes down. One thing for sure
is that things have only gotten worse since 2005, and as companies struggle
to cut costs they tend to favor the importation of cheaper foreign labor.
Swift makes a lame attempt to explain why Silicon Valley lacks diversity.
He quoted a Cisco diversity expert as follows:
Silicon Valley lags the nation in hiring -- and perhaps in
retention -- of African-Americans and Latinos are varied
and complex, researchers and observers say.
So, just what is so complex about African-Americans and Latinos compared to
whites, and why are Hispanics and Latinos lumped into the same category?
From the slant of the article it would be easy to conclude that whites are
easy to figure out because they are merely racists and sexists who won’t
hire women, African-Americans, and Latinos. Whites, which the data
illustrates, are the majority race when it comes to corporate management,
don’t seem to hesitate when hiring Indians or Chinese so it seems that
the behavior of whites is far more complicated than Swift realizes.
Theories are fabricated to explain why whites are being pushed out of
Silicon Valley. The education button is pushed in order to explain that
there aren’t enough Americans that are educated in high-tech, and notice
the subtle implication that Americans just don’t cut-the-mustard compared
to hard working foreigners. One of my favorites is used -- Americans
aren’t able to hit-the-road-running fast enough for fast-paced global
corporations. The one thing Swift is good at is the way he can hurl so many
insults at Americans in so few words.
Other reasons, experts say, include a history of valley companies
hiring well-trained tech workers from the Pacific Rim, a weak
pipeline of homegrown candidates, and a hypercompetitive business
environment that leaves little time to develop workers.
The next paragraph answers why the demographics are changing, but it
doesn’t seem like Swift understood his own message. This next one might
be the best blooper of them all:
Aristotle Saunders, a 32-year-old Marvell engineer, volunteers with
school kids in Oakland, dissecting iPods to interest them in a tech
career. He thinks the lack of visible middle-class minority
neighborhoods in Silicon Valley makes it even tougher to recruit
minorities to tech jobs here.
Since women are considered minorities does that mean that Silicon Valley
neighborhoods don’t have enough women? Could it be that Swift is
confusing Silicon Valley and San Francisco when it comes to the percentage
of males?
When I was a kid all of us boys replaced vacuum tubes on TVs. Dissecting
iPods is sissy stuff in comparison because tubes were powered with hundreds
of volts of electricity. We even had to walk ten or twenty miles in the
snow to test the tubes at the local 7-11 or Circle K store, and we had to
be able to read those big cross reference manuals. It was a high risk
activity because putting one of those multi-pinned tubes in the wrong
socket could cause a fireball with smoke clouds. We even got training on
time management because every minute the TV didn’t work was another
minute we couldn’t watch Superman or the Twilight Zone. My theory is that
girls didn’t get into engineering because the boys are the ones that did
the TV tubes. One thing for sure is that we learned a lot more than the
kids nowadays that educate themselves by unscrewing something from a cell
phone and sending brainless text messages.
Meg Whitman gets the top shill honors for this shameful historical breach
of truth. One of the few female high-tech CEOs should know better than to
try something like this! How much you want to bet that Meg never changed a
vacuum tube when she was a girl?
At a time when eBay was headed by one of the few high-profile
female CEOs in Silicon Valley, Meg Whitman, the share of the
company’s managers and top officials who were female declined
to 30 percent in 2005, from 36 percent five years earlier,
according to federal employment data.
"No global company today can stay competitive without persistently
recruiting, retaining and developing a diverse work force "...
eBay believes workforce diversity is critical to achieving our
growth objectives and serving our millions of customers globally,"
the company said in a statement.
The evidence shows just the opposite: as high-tech companies in Silicon
Valley became more diverse the high-tech industries that once dominated the
area have been in a steady downward spiral. That entire area has been
transformed from a shining star on the planet Earth, admired by diverse
populations around the world who wanted to emulate its success, to a sad
example of economic distress, blight, and Balkanization. Silicon Valley was
built by the blood and sweat of hard working Americans who were mostly
Caucasians with the brains and intellect to invent an entirely new economy.
Ironically the Silicon Valley dream is being destroyed by stupid white
people that want more diversity and by smart Asians that want to rule the
world.
Is it possible that Swift couldn’t connect the obvious dots together when
he was writing the article, or was he blinded by shills? The answer to that
question becomes obvious towards the end of the article when the Indian
supremacist Vivek Wadhwa was quoted. Many people nickname him "Professor
Fraudhwa" for a good reason and it looks like he got another notch on his
belt by fooling a major newspaper! Actually Swift got double teamed because
he also talked one of the queens of shortage shouting: AnnaLee Saxenian,
dean of the school of [mis]-information at UC-Berkeley.
LINKS:
Blacks, Latinos and women lose ground at Silicon Valley tech companies
http://www.mercurynews.com/breaking-news/ci_14383730
"On the Need For Reform of the H-1B Visa", by Dr. Norman Matloff
http://heather.cs.ucdavis.edu/MichJLawReform.pdf
Vivek Wadhwa
http://www.wadhwa.com/index.html
Professor Fraudwha's Bogus Brain Drain
http://www.techinsurgent.com/post/Professor-Fraudwhas-Bogus-Brain-Drain.aspx
AnnaLee Saxenian
http://www.ischool.berkeley.edu/people/faculty/annaleesaxenian
Self Service Tube Tester
http://www.tuberadios.com/eico660/Eico2.jpg
multi-pinned Vacuum tube
http://artdc.com/wp-content/uploads/2008/12/tube-3.jpg
Vacuum Tube cross reference manuals
http://home1.gte.net/res0fab4/files/nixdat.htm
+++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++
http://www.mercurynews.com/breaking-news/ci_14383730?nclick_check=1
Blacks, Latinos and women lose ground at Silicon Valley tech companies
By Mike Swift
mswift@mercurynews.com
Posted: 02/13/2010 04:00:00 PM PST
Updated: 02/13/2010 07:15:45 PM PST
The unique diversity of Silicon Valley is not reflected in the region's
tech workplaces -- and the disparity is only growing worse.
Hispanics and blacks made up a smaller share of the valley's computer
workers in 2008 than they did in 2000, a Mercury News review of federal
data shows, even as their share grew across the nation. Women in
computer-related occupations saw declines around the country, but they are
an even smaller proportion of the work force here.
The trend is striking in a region where Hispanics are nearly one-quarter of
the working-age population -- five times their percentage of the computer
work force -- and when dual-career couples and female MBAs are increasingly
the norm.
It is also evident in the work forces of the region's major companies. An
analysis by the Mercury News of the combined work force of 10 of the
valley's largest companies -- including Hewlett-Packard, Intel, Cisco
Systems, eBay and AMD -- shows that while the collective work force of
those 10 companies grew by 16 percent between 1999 and 2005, an already
small population of black workers dropped by 16 percent, while the number
of Hispanic workers declined by 11 percent. By 2005, only about 2,200 of
the 30,000 Silicon Valley-based workers at those 10 companies were black or
Hispanic.
The share of women at those 10 companies declined to 33 percent in 2005,
from 37 percent in 1999. There was also a decline in the share of
management-level
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jobs held by women.
"It's just disappointing," said Shellye Archambeau, the African-American
CEO of MetricStream, a Palo Alto-based company that provides governance,
risk and compliance support to global corporations such as BP and Pfizer.
"The valley is a very strong place, but the fact that we are so lacking in
female leadership, in African-American leadership, and frankly in Latino
leadership in tech, you just sit there and say, 'Imagine what it could be.'
"
With the number of white computer workers also dropping after 2000, Asians
were the exception. They now make up a majority of workers in
computer-related occupations who live in Silicon Valley, although they hold
only about one in six of the nation's computer-related jobs.
Among the findings:
# Of the 5,907 top managers and officials in the Silicon Valley offices of
the 10 large companies in 2005, 296 were black or Hispanic, a 20 percent
decline from 2000, according to U.S. Department of Labor work-force data
obtained by the Mercury News through a Freedom of Information request.
# In 2008, the share of computer workers living in Silicon Valley who are
black or Latino was 1.5 percent and 4.7 percent, respectively -- shares
that had declined since 2000. Nationally, blacks and Latinos were 7.1
percent and 5.3 percent of computer workers, respectively, shares that were
up since 2000, according to the U.S. Census Bureau.
# The share of managers and top officials who are female at those 10 big
Silicon Valley firms slipped to 26 percent in 2005, from 28 percent in
2000.
Cisco Systems is among companies that say they are taking steps to improve
diversity by forming diversity councils and employee resource groups and by
tapping organizations such as the National Society of Black Engineers for
job candidates. Cisco declined to released its most recent race data in
detail, but said the number of black and Hispanic workers had "remained
stable" since 2005, when about 6 percent of its local work force was either
black or Hispanic.
"Cisco believes an inclusive culture promotes creativity, innovation and
drives collaboration," said Ken Lotich, a company spokesman.
The reasons Silicon Valley lags the nation in hiring -- and perhaps in
retention -- of African-Americans and Latinos are varied and complex,