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PaperclipPerfector  7mo ago (text post)   4190 thread views

Small-Scale Question Sunday for April 21, 2024

Do you have a dumb question that you're kind of embarrassed to ask in the main thread? Is there something you're just not sure about?

This is your opportunity to ask questions. No question too simple or too silly.

Culture war topics are accepted, and proposals for a better intro post are appreciated.

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the profession they are getting a degree for

Well that's the whole damn problem, isn't it? You want someone who went to school for Computer Science, which tends to be mostly theoretical, to have training in the most practical and tangentially related sub-field. Why should they?

I'd argue job training is a role universities are uniquely not well-suited to fill, given the glacial pace of curriculum change, and other structural handicaps, like tenured hedgehog dens.

This seems to come up as an explanation a lot, but I don't think it really holds water. We don't have a huge number of people who are experts in pushdown automata or computational complexity or type theory, but can't code. For the most part, the people who didn't learn to code in school also didn't learn any of the theory either.

Why throw up our Pepe hands and pretend this is an unsolvable problem?

You are telling me no college out there knows that students are enrolling into their CS programs for cushy tech jobs and not to learn about automata theory..... Hell, you are telling me no student or worse, no employer knows this?

The problem goes back to Griggs vs Duke Power and related employment law cases.

Universities are the only ones who can do respected credentialization because any system will inevitably have a racially disparate result and universities are the only institution that judges respect too much to destroy for producing a "racist" result.

Any other system you try to set up is living on borrowed time until the judiciary decides to whack it.

If what you say is true, why hasn’t the judiciary destroyed Google for the fact that fewer than 15% of software engineers there are black?

I was going to say "borrowed time", but looks like the majority of the answer may be "Universities"? The first stats I found showed black people making up 4.1% of Google tech employees vs 7% of Computer field employment. That's barely more than the ratio of underrepresentation that white people have among Google tech employees. (which might also be a factor? "you picked too many whites" can become a lawsuit even without allegations of racial animus, but I'd expect "you picked too many Asians" to raise eyebrows in any crowd less racist than a Harvard admissions committee)

Edit: I initially misread that 7% as being "CS degrees", rather than employment in the field as a whole. It sounds like the gap among new graduates has narrowed, if "In computer science fields, Black students earned 9% of bachelor’s degrees, 13% of master’s degrees and 7% of all research doctorates over the 2017-2018 school year." Comparing Google's cumulative hiring stats over decades to new graduate stats a few years old is a bit apples-to-oranges, but if I were one of Google's legal compliance people I'd now definitely be looking for some apples-to-apples and oranges-to-oranges numbers before I felt safe.

This isn’t true; the military, certain unions, and even many private companies get away with racist results all the time.

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