Techno-coolies or brilliant competitors

Joel Kotkin joins the ranks of racist Progressives, labeling Indian back office workers "techno-coolies:"

[T]he big [high-tech] firms have shown a very weak record of hiring minorities and women. And not surprisingly, firms also are notoriously skittish about revealing their diversity data. A San Jose Mercury report found that the numbers of Hispanics and African Americans employees in Silicon Valley tech companies, already far below their percentage in the population, has actually been declining in recent years. ... Another technique is the outsourcing of labor to lower paid foreign workers, the so called “techno-coolies.”

To repeat the famous quote from Shawshank Redemption: How can he be so obtuse? In one paragraph, he complains because not enough blacks and Hispanics are being hired, and in the next paragraph he complains because high-tech firms are hiring too many Asians and Indians.

I grow very tired of people who have no familiarity with Silicon Valley, who likely have never set foot on the floor of a Silicon Valley engineering department, criticizing the hiring of immigrant Indian, Asian, and Eastern European immigrant engineers, many of whom are some of the most gifted technical workers that software companies have.

As I have written before: to many on the Left, Asian diversity is not real diversity. The Left insults Asians and Indians as newcomers and now as techno-coolies. Kotkin needs to ask himself one simple question: Why is hiring immigrant Hispanic workers a good thing, but hiring immigrant Asian and Indian workers not?

Kotkin goes on to criticize high-tech firms for showing preference for younger workers and for not being union shops:

Some of this also reflects a preference for hiring younger employees at the expense of older software and engineering workers, many of whom own homes and have families in the area. ... The good news for the bosses has been that employees are rarely in the way. Unlike the aerospace, autos or oil industries, the Valley has faced little pressure from organized labor, which has freed them to hire and fire at their preference.

Look, Joel, I am a 60 year old white software engineer. If my company can identify a 30 year old Indian geek who can do my job as well or better than I can and who will work for a lot less, well, that's reality, dude. Why should we think that the knees and shoulders of individuals give out more and more as they grow older, but that brains do not? Are you suggesting, Joel, that my company allot a certain number of software jobs for old white guys, not on the basis of their having more talent, but simply because they are old white guys? Preference based on age is just as much economic insanity as preference based on gender or race. As for unions, the absence of unions is one of the great advantages of Silicon Valley, preventing it from becoming sclerotic and failing like the steel and automobile industries.

And if you cannot understand all this, well, that's why you just don't get Silicon Valley. There is incredible opportunity here, but the competition is brutal. And it is the brutal competition that keeps the Valley humming along. We don't want to become Detroit, thank you.

John Ying: Asian American core values align with GOP

In previous blog posts, I have argued that the Republican Party should forget about trying to attract Hispanic voters and instead court the support of Asian, Indian, and Eastern European immigrants, especially here in Silicon Valley. For example, I wrote:

In my opinion, [Asian, Indian, and Eastern European] immigrants are natural constituents of the Republican Party. My experience is that they have conservative family values. They believe that one should get ahead through hard work, not government handouts. They understand the financial mess the US finds itself in and find it repugnant. Their value system is decidedly entrepreneurial and meritocratic. Statements like President Obama's "You didn't build that" are counterintuitive to them. ...

In sum, the Republican Party should forget about pandering to Latinos and blacks and instead promote real, global diversity by advocating for more [Asian, Indian, and Eastern European] immigration into Northern California. Once these new immigrants from Asia and Europe are absorbed into the American melting pot, they will be far more likely to support the many strands of conservative thought that find their natural home in the Republican Party.

Now FoxNews reports:

A group of Asian Americans is starting a grassroots effort to garner support for the Republican Party and its candidates, saying the GOP most closely aligns with their core values including family, education and entrepreneurship.

The group, the Asian Republican Coalition, is co-founded by international investment banker John Ying, who during the 2012 presidential election cycle served on the Republican National Finance Committee. ...

While much of the Republican Party’s focus has recently been to trying to connect with Hispanic voters, ... Asians are the country’s fastest-growing ethnic group, according to a 2012 U.S. Census report. ...

Ying repeatedly says the group is focused on family, education, entrepreneurship, personal freedom and “merit- and work-ethic driven opportunity."

Asian-Americans recently got a wake up call when California Democrats sought to reintroduce affirmative action into the admission process at California public universities through constitutional amendment SCA-5. As I wrote at the time:

Anyone familiar with the demographic makeup of the University of California knows that students of Chinese and Indian descent are vastly overrepresented relative to their numbers in the general population. This overrepresentation is not the result of affirmative action, but of the strong support of parents and the hard work and academic excellence of students who come from the families of these ethnic groups. The amendment being pushed by the Democratic Party threatens to reintroduce other considerations besides meritocratic ones into the admissions process. If Chinese and Indians are overrepresented now, it is guaranteed that their enrollment numbers will fall if race-based considerations are reintroduced into the admissions process.

Because of considerations like these, many Asian Americans wrote their State Senators expressing their disapproval of SCA-5 and the amendment has temporarily been tabled. But, Democratic support for SCA-5 has made it plain to many Asian Americans that their interests are not aligned with those of the Democratic Party, and that they would find a more natural home in the Republican Party.

Thus, I welcome John Ying's efforts to persuade Asian Americans that their core values of family, academic excellence, and entrepreneurship more closely align with the principles of the GOP.

Disparate impact and data science

In several recent blog posts (for example here), I have discussed the doctrine of disparate impact. Wikipedia defines disparate impact as follows:

In United States employment law, the doctrine of disparate impact holds that employment practices may be considered discriminatory and illegal if they have a disproportionate "adverse impact" on members of a minority group. Under the doctrine, a violation of Title VII of the 1964 Civil Rights Act may be proven by showing that an employment practice or policy has a disproportionately adverse effect on members of the protected class as compared with non-members of the protected class.

Of course, the doctrine of disparate impact is often applied in other areas besides employment practices. For example, as reported in Bank News, disparate impact doctrine is often applied to lending practices:

Under the act, it is unlawful for a creditor to discriminate against any protected class on the basis of race, color, religion, national origin, sex or marital status, age or source of income. The disparate impact theory enables enforcement agencies to prove lender discrimination via a regression analysis of statistical variations in loan terms between borrowers as evidence that a lender illegally facially discriminated against a protected class, even without a showing of discriminatory underwriting criteria.

Disparate impact analysis is on a collision course with data science and big data processing.

Suppose, for example, that you have an algorithm that mines data in an attempt to determine the set of features that are best able to predict whether a prospective borrower will default on a loan or commit some kind of fraud. (Such algorithms are a well-known part of machine learning and statistics and are referred to under the general heading of feature selection.) Suppose further that the algorithm, presumably operating quite impartially and without human intervention, discovers that the features that are most predictive of default are gender, race, and marital status. That is, the algorithm may find that if you are a single black mother then the probability of you defaulting or committing fraud is predicted to be high, whereas if you are a married white male, the predicted probability is small. What, then, are you supposed to do with the model?

I have actually heard professional data scientists say that they would suppress consideration of these features in the predictive model. In other words, data scientists are actually being forced to pervert software algorithms so that they produce corrupt results, simply because they are afraid that the uncorrupted results will be politically unacceptable and subject them to attacks from the race and gender Stasi. There are even some misguided data scientists who willingly embrace the corruption of their science as the price that has to be paid in exchange for the advancement of certain "protected groups."

This is the corrupt state of affairs that we have arrived at because of policies like disparate impact, which promote race- and gender-based prejudice over scientific understanding. Imagine what would happen in a field like Physics if scientists distorted their results to achieve such political ends.

Government race- and gender-based quotas will weaken the high-tech industry

Not long ago, in a blog post entitled The coming impact of disparate impact, I wrote:

Wikipedia states:
In United States employment law, the doctrine of disparate impact holds that employment practices may be considered discriminatory and illegal if they have a disproportionate "adverse impact" on members of a minority group. Under the doctrine, a violation of Title VII of the 1964 Civil Rights Act may be proven by showing that an employment practice or policy has a disproportionately adverse effect on members of the protected class as compared with non-members of the protected class.

One of the great advocates of the doctrine of disparate impact is Thomas Perez, who currently serves as the Assistant Attorney General for the Civil Rights Division of the Department of Justice and earlier this year was nominated by President Obama to be Secretary of Labor. Of him, WSJ writes:

Mr. Perez is a champion of disparate-impact theory, which purports to prove racial discrimination by examining statistics rather than intent or specific cases.

Expect disparate impact doctrine to be used by the Justice and Labor Departments and by trial lawyers to … strong arm [Silicon Valley companies] into hiring more blacks, Hispanics, and women. The fact that the distribution of these groups in the high-tech industry is not the same as their distribution in the general population will be used as evidence that these companies engage in discriminatory employment practices.

In a second recent blog post, entitled Jesse has landed, I quoted from a story in the San Jose Mercury News, which described Jesse Jackson's recent attempts to shake down the high-tech industry for more jobs:

Jackson led a delegation to Hewlett-Packard's annual shareholders meeting Wednesday to bring attention to Silicon Valley's poor record of including blacks and Latinos in hiring, board appointments and startup funding. ...

Earl "Butch" Graves Jr., president and CEO of Black Enterprise magazine, said Jackson is shining a light on the fact that technology companies don't come close to hiring or spending what is commensurate with the demographics of their customers.

In still another post, entitled In politics, everything is, well, politicized, I observed that the hopelessly politicized hiring processes used by the government would prevent it from ever achieving the kind of performance one finds in the private sector when it comes to implementing high-tech projects:

[A]sk yourself: What will happen if the federal government changes its hiring practices and it turns out that 70% of new high-tech hires are male and 40% are Asian and Indian? Once again, won't Jesse Jackson and the rest of the affirmative action Stasi spring into action and pressure the government into creating quotas for women, blacks, and Hispanics for those plum, high-paying high-tech jobs? … The problem is that government hiring is often based not on merit, but on politics. And in politics everything is, well, politicized. But, if hiring practices in the federal government continue to be based on politics rather than merit, there is no way that the high-tech workforce in government will ever be as good as it is in the private sector.

Well, now the AP reports:

[On Tuesday, t]he president … will direct the Labor Department to adopt rules requiring federal contractors to provide compensation data based on sex and race. … Federal contractors … worry that additional compensation data could be used to fuel wage related lawsuits, said James Plunkett, director of labor policy at the U.S. Chamber of Commerce.

So, any Silicon Valley company that has a federal contract (gee, how many can that be?) will be forced to submit "compensation data." If these data reveal that not enough members of the preferred victim groups are employed or that their pay deviates statistically from the norm, then, these companies will be made to feel the wrath of the Obama Administration. Namely, they will be forced to create quotas for the hiring of more women, blacks, Hispanics and other victim groups, regardless of their qualifications.

In one final blog post, entitled To Cnn, "Asian diversity" is not real diversity, I sounded the following warning:

One thing is for certain. If high tech companies are ever strongarmed into instituting "diversity programs" to increase the number of Hispanics, blacks, and women in the ranks of the Silicon Valley workforce, it will be the death knell of the area's vibrant economy (the only thing that might be more damaging would be the unionization of the high-tech workforce). Instead of being allocated strictly on merit, jobs will be allocated based on the color of one's skin or gender (or seniority in unions). As I noted above, these are non-essential characteristics that have nothing to do with engineering talent. Any industry that bases its selection of workers on such non-essential characteristics is doomed to failure.

Wake up, Silicon Valley! The politicized hiring practices of the Obama Administration are making their way into high-tech and threaten to destroy the vibrant, meritocratic economy you have worked so hard to create.

How prescient Tom Perkins was. The Progressives do want to exterminate the "swarms."

How prescient Tom Perkins was when he called attention to the parallels between Nazi Germany's war on its "one percent," namely its Jews, and the progressive war on the American one percent, namely the "rich." As reported on SFGate:

Protesters stood with signs and handed out flyers outside of a Google Ventures partner and entrepreneur’s home in San Francisco’s Potrero Hill neighborhood Sunday, calling him a “parasite” and a “leech.” Flyers passed out at the protest said that Kevin Rose, 37, who founded Digg and several other web companies before joining Google Ventures, accelerates the growth of tech wealth in the city by investing in startups.

The flyers state:

As a partner venture capitalist at Google Ventures, Kevin directs the flow of capital from Google into the tech startup bubble that is destroying San Francisco. The start-ups that he funds bring the swarms of young entrepreneurs that have ravaged the landscapes of San Francisco and Oakland.

The protest was sponsored by a group of anarchists (insofar as one can tell) who style themselves Counterforce. In an online post taking responsibility for the protest, they denigrate Mr Rose and his associates as "bros," threaten to "cut off their balls," demand that Google give $3B to an anarchist organization of their choosing," and close with the following threat:

[If you do not give us the $3B,] get ready for a revolution neither you nor we can control, a revolution that will spread to all of the poor, exploited, and degraded members of this new tech-society and be directed towards you for your bad decisions and irresponsible activities. We advise you to take us seriously.

As I noted in a previous blog post, the US Holocaust Memorial Museum describes the boycotting of Jewish businesses under the Nazis in identical terms:

When the Nazis came to power, the lives of German Jews changed drastically. On April 1, 1933, the Nazis carried out the first nationwide, planned action against them: a boycott of Jewish businesses. ... On the day of the boycott, Storm Troopers stood menacingly in front of Jewish-owned shops. The six-pointed "Star of David " was painted in yellow and black across thousands of doors and windows. Signs were posted saying "Don't Buy from Jews" and "The Jews Are Our Misfortune." [emphasis added]

The dehumanizing description of tech workers as "parasites," "leeches," and "swarms" is indicative of the mindset of these so-called Progressives. Tech workers in San Francisco, many of them young Asian or Indian men, are viewed by these nativists as just so many insects to be exterminated.

Endlösung for Prop 8 supporters

Proposition 8 passed in 2008 with a 52% majority. The following are the vote figures for the various counties that can be thought of as making up Silicon Valley:

• Santa Clara County: 44.4% yes, 55.6% no
• San Mateo County: 38.3% yes, 61.7% no
• San Francisco County: 24.9% yes, 75.1% no

You can see these results here. So, even in San Francisco County, 1 in 4 voters voted to define marriage as an act between a man and a woman.

Mozilla has offices in San Francisco and Mountain View. If Mozilla wants to be consistent and purge all individuals whose political views, in their opinion, are not consistent with Mozilla's culture, they should do the following: call a company wide meeting and ask everyone who voted yes on Proposition 8 to stand up; then take them, likely, about 1 in 4, out and shoot them.

My guess is that this is precisely what some gay storm troopers would like to see happen. And the fact that they cannot grasp what a moral abomination such an Endlösung would be is yet another sign of how far gone our society is.

Guy in the Bay Area

The Brendan Eich story has reminded me once again that being guy in the heterophobic Bay Area is hard.

Eich, who opposed gay marriage in 2008, is out at Mozilla, but Obama, who opposed gay marriage in 2008, is still president

As the editors or National Review Online write:

In 2008, Barack Obama and Brendan Eich both were against gay marriage. Senator Obama averred his support for the one-man/one-woman view of marriage, while Mr. Eich, a cofounder of the Mozilla web-browser company, donated $1,000 to support Proposition 8 — a California ballot initiative that had the effect of making Senator Obama’s avowed marriage policy the law in California, at least until a federal court overturned it on the theory that California’s constitution is unconstitutional. Barack Obama inexplicably remains, as of this writing, president of the United States of America, but Mr. Eich has just been forced out as CEO of Mozilla because of his political views. ... All [Mr Eich] did was write a $1,000 check to an organization dedicated to the previously unremarkable proposition that marriage is the union of a man and a woman, a position that was endorsed by the voters of California and is held today by many people of good will, including some who are gay themselves.

Let me only add that the only difference I can see between Eich and Obama is that, from the point of view of relevant experience, Eich was far better qualified to be appointed CEO of Mozilla a couple of weeks ago than Obama was to be elected Chief Executive of the United States in 2008.

Ouster of Eich shows Valley is sick; and, btw, fuck you, OKCupid

In a WSJ ‘Heard on the Street” video, columnist Miriam Gottfried is interviewed about Brendan Eich, who was forced out of his job as CEO of Mozilla because he had donated $1000 in support of Proposition 8, the California initiative to ban gay marriage:

In doing a search for an executive, you should always be looking, it seems to me, for an executive who matches the culture of your company. Maybe it’s too much to look through every single donation that an executive has given to a certain cause. But you should probably see: Does this person’s culture – and that does include political views – align with the image that we are trying to put out there about our company?

What is so unsettling about these statements is Ms Gottfried's apparent view that an individual's political positions should be assessed when considering his fitness for a particular job. Ms Gottfied does not seem to have any understanding whatsoever of the importance of Mr Eich’s contributions to browser technology and to Mozilla. Rather, the only thing that seems important to her is whether Mr Eich toes the politically correct line.

Brendan Eich created Javascript. He was a principal contributor to Netscape, the company that gave us the internet browser. When AOL dumped Netscape, he helped pick up the pieces and transform them into the Mozilla organization, which reincarnated the old Netscape browser as the new Firefox browser. How could it possibly be that Brendan was not a good match for the culture of Mozilla? He was one of the main architects of that organization, ferchrissake, and his vision had guided it for many years. His political views are completely irrelevant to the question of whether he would have made an outstanding CEO for Mozilla. The simple fact is that all the political correctness in the world is not going to help Mozilla one iota in its efforts to increase market share for Firefox and other Mozilla apps. In reality, the management and board of Mozilla are complete idiots for letting Brendan Eich, who was uniquely qualified to lead them, slip away.

We have entered a new era in Silicon Valley, one where what matters are not meritocratic considerations, that is, the actual qualifications of a person for a job, but rather inessential, accidental considerations, namely, a person’s political and moral views, or the color of his skin, or the set of genitalia attached to him or her. This is sick, sick, sick and it augurs poorly for the future of the Valley.

And, btw, fuck you, OKCupid, the online dating site, for promoting a boycott of Firefox browsers because of their "outrage" over Mr Eich's politics. OKCupid's business is little removed from that of an old-time procurer. For them to assume that they are somehow justified in taking on the role of an arbiter morum is yet another sign of how far our society has fallen.

Mozilla's ousting of Brendan Eich shows that, to Progressives, tolerance for diversity is a one way street

As the San Jose Mercury News reports, Brendan Eich, the creator of the JavaScript programming language, has been forced to resign as CEO of the Mozilla Corporation and also from the board of the nonprofit foundation which wholly owns it because it became publicly known that he had contributed $1000 to support Proposition 8, the California ballot initiative which sought to create a constitutional amendment defining marriage as between a man and a woman. Eich's ouster is an outrage and a gross miscarriage of justice.

As summarized in his Wikipedia article, Eich is best known for his work on Netscape and Mozilla. He started work at Netscape Communications Corporation in April 1995, working on JavaScript for the Netscape Navigator web browser. Eich then helped found mozilla.org in early 1998, serving as chief architect. When AOL shut down the Netscape browser unit in July 2003, Eich helped spin out the Mozilla Foundation. In August 2005, after serving as Lead Technologist and as a member of the Board of Directors of the Mozilla Foundation, Eich became CTO of the newly founded Mozilla Corporation. In March 2014, he became the CEO.

For those of you who don't understand the significance of Eich's contribution to the Web, almost every time your browser accesses a page on the Web, it executes JavaScript code to enable it to display the page. So, every time you access a page in your browser, you are unknowingly benefiting from work done by Brendan Eich. Now he has been ousted from the Mozilla Organization that he spent decades building because of private political and moral views that he held.

In a post on the Mozilla Blog, "the official source for Mozilla-related news, opinions, events and more," Mitchell Baker, Executive Chairwoman of the Mozilla Foundation wrote:

Mozilla believes both in equality and freedom of speech. Equality is necessary for meaningful speech. And you need free speech to fight for equality. Figuring out how to stand for both at the same time can be hard. Our organizational culture reflects diversity and inclusiveness. We welcome contributions from everyone regardless of age, culture, ethnicity, gender, gender-identity, language, race, sexual orientation, geographical location and religious views. Mozilla supports equality for all. We have employees with a wide diversity of views. Our culture of openness extends to encouraging staff and community to share their beliefs and opinions in public. This is meant to distinguish Mozilla from most organizations and hold us to a higher standard. But this time we failed to listen, to engage, and to be guided by our community. ... What’s next for Mozilla’s leadership is still being discussed. We want to be open about where we are in deciding the future of the organization and will have more information next week. However, our mission will always be to make the Web more open so that humanity is stronger, more inclusive and more just: that’s what it means to protect the open Web.

Apparently, Mozilla's concern for "freedom of speech," "equality for all," and a "more just Web" does not extend to defending the rights of any individual to express whatever views he holds, no matter how unpopular those views may be in San Francisco's Castro District.

Be on notice, then, citizens of Silicon Valley. If you should ever decide to let it be known that you hold a point of view that is deemed politically incorrect by the so-called Progressive Left, you, too, will run the risk of being forced out of your job. Mitchell Baker claims that she is supporting "diversity and inclusiveness." What a fucking hypocrite! Instead, she has sacrificed on the altar of political correctness one of the most significant contributors to the Web, whose very openness she is claiming to defend.

Addendum: At the end of her blog post, Mitchell Baker writes:

We will emerge from this with a renewed understanding and humility — our large, global, and diverse community is what makes Mozilla special, and what will help us fulfill our mission. We are stronger with you involved. Thank you for sticking with us.

Apparently, "sticking with" Brendan Eich, without whom the entire Mozilla organization would not exist, was not high on Mitchell's list.