Jim Keller Leaves AMD

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• Reflex - Sunday, September 20, 2015 - link

  Ah yes, I love how you demonstrate your inclusiveness by casting aspersions on others who are not like you. How terrible that others have other priorities! It must be horrible to have to live in a world where others may choose to prioritize things you do not...

• Murloc - Saturday, September 19, 2015 - link

  yeah it's not really discriminating as long as the subsequent hiring process is race-blind, but let's face it: almost no customers go beyond understanding that the hard disk is their space and the computer is the rest, so the CPU companies reflecting the real world is completely useless.
  
  Software companies are another thing.

• Reflex - Saturday, September 19, 2015 - link

  I don't actually agree with this assertion for a couple reasons. First, Intel does not just design integrated circuits, they design platforms, and those platforms are often 50% or more of what goes into the final product. Intel does not just hand Dell a CPU, they hand them a prototype tablet, ultrabook, or other design and Dell takes that and brings it to market, with their own engineering efforts added to it. If you go to IDF or other Dell events you will find a wide range of tablets, ultrabooks, desktops, phones and other designs, all based on their own market research and engineering ideas. It is very important for Intel to understand the market, they have to deliver silicon that matches the products that people will want to buy.
  
  The second reason is competitiveness. Unless one accepts the incorrect notion that white and asian males are inherently superior engineers to all others, then if your workforce is overwhelmingly white and asian males you are likely leaving a lot of the best available talent unconsidered, and another company that recognizes that will grab the top talent first. I see this a lot with female engineers, we do not have enough of them so we started sending recruiters to Grace Hopper events before many other tech companies and we had the pick of the absolute best female engineers in the country. Many of our absolute best engineers and software architects are now women as a result. By not explicitly targeting underrepresented groups, you are leaving that top talent to your competition, and they will use that talent to beat you in the market.
  
  The major area I'd like to still see improvement is in the US education system, where women are still aggressively pushed towards communications, marketing and other non-technical careers. In China, India and the middle east you do not see this kind of bias, and a large percentage of our female hires are foreign as a result. This is nationally a missed opportunity in my opinion since I have no reason to believe that American women are less capable than foreign women.

• Alexvrb - Saturday, September 19, 2015 - link

  Here's an idea: Hire whoever is best for the job and go truly race blind. We should make it illegal to offer different treatment to anyone based on race or gender. Taken mention of race and gender out of everything. Across the board, nationwide. True equality, under the law, no special treatment. Ah, but that doesn't promote the agenda.
  
  Oh and FYI most females tend to avoid technical classes like the plague. They're not being "aggresively pushed towards non-technical careers" when they (of their own volition) avoid technical education. If you want more women in those fields you'd have to push them towards it. Good luck.

• MisterAnon - Sunday, September 20, 2015 - link

  @Alexvrb
  
  Truly race blind is a great goal, but we have to get there first. Institutional racism and sexism are things that still exist in our society, and these problems must be addressed. Calling for "colorblindness" while courts disproportionately give longer sentences to black men for the same crimes as others isn't colorblindness. It's ignorance and denial.
  
  >Oh and FYI most females tend to avoid technical classes like the plague.
  
  [citation needed]
  
  >They're not being "aggresively pushed towards non-technical careers"
  
  They definitely are. It's said that adults tend to live up to their role, and not their potential. In our society girls are often shamed away from things like math because it's not "womanly".

• pklop - Sunday, September 20, 2015 - link

  "Calling for "colorblindness" while courts disproportionately give longer sentences to black men for the same crimes as others isn't colorblindness."
  That's certainly a problem that needs to get fixed. Men in general btw, get a lot more and longer sentences than women. I hope you don't agree that's because men are more aggressive or bad in general....
  
  Besides that, compensating a wrong by discriminating another group in another domain is not what an evolved country should do.
  
  I have no problem with people who love their work, no matter their looks. What does matter is personality, though. And this kind of targeted minority hiring gets a lot of self-entitled personalities come to companies, with overinflated egos, because they are made to believe they are special and deserve it so much.
  
  That indeed is hurting the whole atmosphere and devaluing other groups or people that are more sensible.
  
  Also in general, more and more fluff kind of people come to IT, because it's the big business right now. That's also where all those "equality" propaganda comes from. They don't care about equality, they want to see more of their own type amongst their co-workers.
  
  If this was about equality the ads would truly be varied, and not have those licked and slick and always fake-happy people. Because the company would care about a real representation of all kinds and personality of people.
  
  This is just marketing. This isn't about the minorities. Actually they are just a tool and it's a good way to distract from the real change that needs to happen. It's clever because if they don't get hired they hate white males as a group, instead of those people who really make the decisions, which are not the "white males" group.
  
  White males are individuals, and it's actually insulting to lump them together and fovor or disfavor them based on skin color, or assign them properties.
  
  This is harmful.

• pklop - Sunday, September 20, 2015 - link

  "They definitely are. It's said that adults tend to live up to their role, and not their potential. In our society girls are often shamed away from things like math because it's not "womanly"."
  
  Yeah, since it's so cool to be a guy that is into technology. The normal population certainly has limited interest for those topic, as is obvious again and again.
  
  It's not like you are a hero because you are a man and into tech. It's more like a looser.
  
  If you have a successful internet startup it may be different. But it's about the business you created, not because of the subject or technology itself.
  
  Let's not fool ourselves. Boys and men in tech are seen as looser nerds who can be lucky if they get a girl.
  
  The wrong ideals are certainly not made by male nerds, most would love to share their interests if people would listen (who are not already into it by their own interest).

• HollyDOL - Monday, September 21, 2015 - link

  I cannot speak in general, but in my uni (and class), first year there were only about 6 or 7 women(out of ~100ish pple). Out of those, only one finished the degree (but most gave up during first few months). Don't ask me why, they definitely were not bullied by anyone or anything like that, university itself was even actively trying to promote IT among potential women students, but at least on my university they were extremely rare back when I was there. From what I have heard the situation hasn't changed so far. So I guess majority of women are simply not interested in 1s and 0s and honestly you can't force them to like computer sciences if it is not interesting for them.
  
  It's imho better if they focus on something they like. Same like you won't see 50% of miners being women or 50% of kindergarten teachers being men (I for one am sure I would epically fail being one). I am by no means a specialist to tell, but I guess certain roles prefer some dispositions (like physical body build for miners) that's more suitable for one gender. Maybe IT has something like that too, dunno.

• Reflex - Sunday, September 20, 2015 - link

  Alexvrb -
  
  I often see this claim that women aren't pushed out of technical careers, but I witnessed the exact opposite myself. My ex partner was herself a scientist, at the top of her class in an elite program. At every level from high school through her PhD the pressure was on her, and her female friends to drop out of her major and move into something 'easier'. She was asked repeatedly why she wanted to pursue a major with so much advanced math and chemistry, and didn't she know she could move towards an easier major? Her friends faced similar challenges.
  
  Working in a top 5 tech company, I often mentor our interns. The female interns we get almost always talk about the pressure they face, how often they are pushed towards project management, marketing, design and other 'light' majors and away from computer science. I have been told over and over about how difficult it is to know that in order to succeed in tech as a female they have to be the best of the best, while a guy just has to be 'good enough'.
  
  The more astounding part to me is how that situation does NOT exist among foreign hires. I have never met a woman from India or China who was pressured to change her major away from engineering. Their culture does not treat women from a young age as though they are less than feminine or strange if they are interested in science or technology. Our international hires are far more gender balanced than our domestic hires.
  
  Given that, there are only two conclusions that I can come up with. Either US born women are mentally and intellectually inferior to foreign born women, or the experience I witnessed with my ex is indicative of our culture in general pushing women away from technical roles.
  
  I'll go with the latter since I'm not a believer in american inferiority.

• Alexvrb - Thursday, September 24, 2015 - link

  They push THEMSELVES away from technical educations before they even consider higher education at all. In droves. I've seen it all my life. They want nothing to do with highly technical classes. I know you believe you can't be wrong, but look at it this way: If 90% of students attending programming courses (starting in high school, for argument's sake) are male, why in hell would you be shocked to hear that 90% of programmers are male? I've discussed it with a lot of people who have also taken male-dominated technical classes and the typical consensus is DUH they don't want to be involved in that world. Less taking those classes = less in those careers.
  
  That doesn't make the ones who decide to take an interest to be any worse than men, in the slightest. They're absolutely our equals, when they choose to take on the same role. The key is "when". There's a societal problem alright... and it's mostly an image problem. If you can get more girls to feel it is socially acceptable and indeed desirable to take these classes, the problem will fix itself.
  
  If you are using so-called "positive" discrimination whether racially or gender based, you're still a biggot and you're discriminating both for and against humans based on a genetic characteristic rather than their merit as an individual. But naturally you'll reject this notion, being a faultless, selfless champion of the people.