These days I think getting into open source is great advice for minorities, and I think they will find it to be as close a meritocracy and "color-blind" environment as they will find in America today. That said, it is an inherently harsh environment to learn where there is a pretty low tolerance for beginners, and it could be quite discouraging for someone just getting their feet wet in programming. Also, if it's pitched heavily as a gateway to a lucrative career by parents and authorities a lot of people are going to be pushed into it who might not have the intrinsic interest to succeed in the pedantic world of telling a computer exactly what to do.
That said, one has to imagine that the number of blacks and latinos with a very strong potential to be good programmers is probably severely under-represented in industry as well as open source simply due to lack of early opportunity and privilege.
In this thread: Lies open source developers tell themselves.
It's a sad joke Rubyconf attendees yearly confuse @bryanl and @daksis with each other, but it's happened at every Rubyconf i've been too (which is granted 3 but it's there).
Open Source is a community, and communities are about who you know, and how you interact with them. Open Source communities do nothing to fix or address the structural or cultural elements of racism.
Success in open source is like success in anything else. It's about building something that other people care about, and promoting yourself and your work to others (or having someone else promote it for you). That last component is entirely socio-cultural. There is no meritocratic component to it.
It's again worth noting that the modern etymology of the term 'meritocracy' was satire against the concept we identify it with: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Meritocracy#Etymology
Being good at what you do and working hard is necessary but not sufficient to being recognized and successful.
Did I saw open-source was a panacea? No, I did not. I just said it was better than most other power structures in America. Why? Because code talks. Just because most engineers dislike political correctness and aren't doing anything to right structural inequities permeating our society doesn't mean they are racist. If they are passively supporting racist structures just by being white and operating within them, okay, that's a minor strike against them and feel free to slather on the white guilt, but it pales in comparison to the typical old boys club operations of most power structures in America.
Obviously open source has cliques and insiders as well, but that's based on a history of actual work and participation. I think the idea that a black man coming and jumping into open source is going to be at a disadvantage because of his race is not credible.
I have four kids, a career in software (after almost 20 years that included hardware design), a couple of outside activities but the reality is that software is (and has been) my hobby. And I pursue my hobby instead of watching television, I read software books more frequently than fiction.
You could probably say my life isn't very balanced, but my kids and wife haven't complained that I don't make time for them. It's a matter of sleeping less and not filling my time with other hobbies. I'd hate to call this racism (not that racism doesn't exist) when it might just be cultural differences?
I realize that there are definite economic barriers to even having time for a hobby, and that put having a suitable computer out-of-reach, so I think I'd rather see this particular issue framed as one of SES. Racism, as well as a variety of other factors can definitely affect SES ... and there's often continuity within a family.
So what can we do? Since it's the season of giving, I'll start with an offer. If you believe you're being kept out of the software field, you're truly passionate about software as a career (not just because the pay tends to be good) and if you're in the Central Pennsylvania area, please contact me via the e-mail in my profile. I'll do what I can to get you connected into a community and set up with a used computer that should get you started.
You have been watching too much MSNBC. Young Blacks and Latinos watch 3-4 hours of television per day and play 2+ hours of video games. There goes your free time belief.
Access to computers and internet? Poor blacks compared to poor whites have the same resources to computers yet the poor whites become coders in the same percentages as the general population.
You are 0 for 2.
If you don't think poor people (not ones still living under their parents roofs) have less time than middle class people then you have never been poor.
About myself: I didn't go to a great school; Didn't have friends or classmates who were interested in computers or programming; Didn't have a role model to inspire or guide me; Never went to a workshop or joined a user group; Never attended a computer science class until I was in college.
I got fascinated by computers by reading about them in a newspaper when I was a kid, and had to go on a hunger strike every night until my father caved in and bought one for the house. By the time I was 15 I worked together with 4 guys to build a popular website and we developed a file editor together. We collaborated over IRC and what's interesting is that we knew nothing about each other except our nicknames and where we lived (This was before social networks became popular). Nothing else mattered except our mutual interest and skill.
Oh, and I'm not white.
Because 'white guilt', and people need _something_ to post about in their tumblr blogs. ;)
I'd like to see some specific cases of racism in open source. I've been working professionally for 7 years, and I haven't seen a single case of racism anywhere in open source. I just can't imagine it; who would put themselves out there like that doing something terrible, and what community would allow that?
So if not overt, the racism must be passive and environmental. But the relative abundance of Asian (Indo/Pakistani and/or Oriental) members in IT and FOSS software suggest that there's not an obvious or passive "White Power" conspiracy going on there.
Economic issues, education, and free time make some sense as barriers, and these are disproportionately shared among the different races (in the USA at least).
I'm all for increasing opportunities for underrepresented groups, but don't discount all the passionate, unpaid work people provide to the open source community!
When using OSS libraries on commercial products I've found the need to fix bugs or other problems and have sent pull requests with those changes afterwards. Granted not all clients approve this, but I wouldn't describe it as "few-to-no other companies" that allow it.
When it comes to teaching yourself to code, two to three hours per week is lame, what you learnt in one week is likely to have been forgotten by the next.
And there are those with more time obligations than what you've listed on top of struggling to make ends meet. Not everyone, granted -- and for some, lack of time will indeed be a lame excuse -- but it sounds like you're generalizing to everyone.
Allegedly 1.5% of open source software contributors are female. So you are more likely to win the lottery than finding yourself working with a black woman on an open source project.
...but if you're building something on a company's API to specifically get hired by them, it's effectively an unpaid internship, regardless of the license and the copyright.
>[Open source software] contribution takes time; I don't think anyone would contest that. Getting familiar with a project, finding out where you can fit into it, reading and responding to issues, testing and submitting patches, writing documentation. All of that requires a good deal of time.
>Marginalized people in tech — women, people of color, people with disabilities, LGBTQ people, and others — have less free time for a few major reasons: dependent care, domestic work and errands, and pay inequity.
Will it be deployed? I don't imagine the pay-off to be immediate, or self-correcting (teaching/mentoring). I can't imagine how open source is somehow a teaching/development code base for beginners.
Why do LGTBQ people spend more time on domestic work and errands?
This sounds like the author is resigned to the fact that colored people don't go to college. Is that the premise of this article? What about the tiny percentage of colored college students why have any interest in software development?
>But in Haibel's experience, the open-source world is even whiter and more male than the world of proprietary software. "It's very clear that the open source community is whiter than the software community as a whole," she says.
Wait, this seems to imply that the fact that there aren't many women or colored coders is because the white men in charge refuse to hire them on this basis. This is in stark contrast to reality where the fact that is not mentioned here is that there is little or no interest to code from these groups.
>There are larger societal factors that contribute to the whiteness of the tech world, more broadly. Blacks and Latinos are more likely to attend under-resourced schools, they're underrepresented in math and science fields at every level of higher education and increasingly so the higher they go, and are less likely than whites to
This is such garbage. Blacks and Latinos in the same schools and in the same socioeconomic status as their White, Asian and Indian counter parts become coders at the same rates. Why do journalists always try to make everything about race unfairness?
There is no story here. Blacks and Hispanics aren't coders very often because they don't have ambition to do that. Wither it be cultural or genetic is not exactly known but it is not because they are disadvantaged. what is all this crap about them contributing to open source?
Would we ever see an article about how Indians and Persians are overrepresented in gas station and liquor store ownership (a very lucrative career) and how white people should do x to catch up? White people don't aspire to do that, end of (non) story.
According to Wikipedia 72% of the population of the USA are white, so maybe 8 in 10 is not really that much of an indication of discrimination or disadvantage. (72% boils down to "more than 7 in 10").
I would imagine that the region with next highest contribution is Europe, which comprehensive English teaching. (also: mostly white)
Edit: why did you delete the links to the searches? It looked like literally 99% bad word lists, and a couple of random repos that probably only the comiter cared about. One of them was a dump of metadata from pirated files off The Pirate Bay.
I'm certainly not saying that there are no individual bigots in the OSS world. With thousands (millions?) of people you'll get all points of view, beneficial and toxic.
A simple 'grep' of GitHub reveals a lot of crap, but are these influential projects? Do these projects have multiple committers who have signed off with pride that "my project contains 'n-----' in the code comments"? Do these projects have lots of users?
It would be interesting to plot the occurrence of racial slurs against the number of participants in a project (controlling for offensive term filters or corpuses of 'real' language). My hunch is that the vast majority of these terms occur in one-time undergraduate projects or forgotten hobbyist repos.
This is a common argument but I think it's kind of irrelevant. It's not untrue, but it doesn't suggest that there is no bias against other groups (women, blacks, hispanics, etc.). I think it's fair to say Americans by and large are extremely comfortable around Asian people and not so comfortable around blacks or Mexicans. Programmers are no different.
Just for your own sake, in case you're not a native speaker: you shouldn't ever, ever say this. The words you use send social signals to others, and 'colored people' sounds really, really, really racist.
This is distinct from 'person of color,' which is not. Use it instead.
See http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Colored vs http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Person_of_color
So "only" one full time job with no overtime... but you've already said yourself you have more than that, with school and the startup?
> Even if you waste 3 hours on stuff like eating, commuting
I've had commutes which eat up more time than that on their own on a good day! And heck, I have a coworker who has a longer commute now than mine was!
Lets try the math again: Two full time jobs trying to make ends meet. I hear this is a thing that happens sometimes. Even the stereotypical easy mode "well off white man" runs into this sometimes with mandatory 80+ hour work week crunches at his programming job and is foolish enough to go along with it.
8 hours of sleep + 8 hours of job 1 + 8 hours of job 2 (or mandatory overtime.) We've already used up all 24 hours of every weekday before getting into commutes, eating, or grocery shopping! There's only the 32 hours of the weekend left (2x(24-8))
Let's give this unfortunate person a commute only as long as that coworker of mine... this seems generous considering my coworker only commutes to one job. ~20 hours / week. 12 hours remaining (32-20.)
They prepare and scarf down all three meals a day in 20 minutes each (I would choke on my food frequently at those speeds.) 5 hours remaining (12 - 7x3/3.) Grocery shopping takes me about an hour a week without clipping coupons or looking for deals: 4 hours. 9 minutes to shower, brush teeth, and use the restroom a day: 3 hours left.
Lets be generous and assume they don't have to fill up the tank (they take the bus?), pay the bills (they're all autopaid?), take out the trash, do the laundry, or take care of a single other chore. Their business is finally out of the way!
They have 3 hours left out of their entire week, including weekends, to spend with their friends, family, or FOSS before they need to start sacrificing sleep. If this person says they lack the time to work on FOSS, is that a lame excuse?
I certainly think it's possible that blacks and Asians face distinct challenges and biases in this community; one would have to be very naive or ignorant of minority treatment in the US to not consider that a possibility.
I don't consider a Freshman anonymously posting some obnoxious text on GitHub to be a part of the "Official Open Source Community (tm)" any more than a two year old finger painting is a professional artist.
If such a person turned up at PyCon or RubyConf and starting dropping n-bombs in public conversations, they would get a very fast education in what is acceptable public discourse in an open source community.
One caveat though ... I'm horrible with names and faces. This includes plenty of white people who happen to look alike. Fortunately I'm to the point where I can pick my wife and kids out of a crowd. Is this a common affliction among people who pursue software?
But on a more serious note, I can see where being "the black guy" would get tiresome fast. Or being mistaken for "the other black guy". Don't know if that would cause a person to quit the OSS world, but it's probably not a highlight.
Hmm, no... let's not do anything until we can rationalise the problem. On average I spend around four to five hours a day teaching myself programming, that amount of time is the main reason I can learn it effectively. Along with the commitment of two part time jobs (one of them being voluntary), an accountancy course, searching for new jobs and the fact that I can't afford a car, I get about 4 - 5 hours sleep per day. No, that ain't no balance. If I had children to look after, I doubt I would be able to do it.
We all have a limited amount of time to spend on our hobbies, work and the family. We will never have enough time to do all that we would like to do - that is obvious.. B
While you may not have enough time to contribute to os projects at this moment, it's simply because you have different priorities,and prefer to spend that time doing other activities. It's not the time I lack, it is the expertise, which should improve with more practise. Preferences are different from priorities, my preference would be to write C code (and other languages) for most of the day. My priorities are to get a full time minimum wage job, since that is basically a realistic goal for me. One of the reasons I am doing an accountancy course is that I couldn't get sufficient funding for a course in computing, and this is because I cannot get a full time minimum wage job to pay for said computing course. Sound familiar? In CS this is related to bootstrapping.
Also, my paid job is working as a tree surgeon. One of the most dangerous jobs in the UK, as well as back breaking. I'm amazed I have enough energy to code when I get home.
I don't think there's anything racist about that if it's an honest mistake the audience makes. Or did you mean to say the actual presenters announce them by the wrong name?
And yes, he means that people walk up to Randall and say "oh hey, Brian!" and vice versa. Really, really often. Sometimes repeatedly. They're different heights, they don't even look like each other at all. They're just usually the only two black guys there. It happens at more than just Ruby conferences...
a) They have never met the speaker personally.
b) http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Face_perception
It has --nothing-- to do with being racist.
You'll also note that the South Africa bit is specifically mentioned in the "people of color" link.
You're sure you didn't do exactly that to an audience of about 12K followers on Twitter? https://twitter.com/steveklabnik/status/409697629321195520
Yes, this is "We met earlier in the day, I'm saying hello again." Or, like I said, a waiter that over the course of a multi-hour dinner and drinks, continually confuses the two. (EDIT: Whoops, when revising, I apparently deleted that story. I've seen this too.)
Furthermore, it doesn't happen with other people, at least not to the same degree. People even say "whoops, I confused you with the other black guy."
Who knows, perhaps they even have an advantage because people actually remember them. They only get their names mixed up sometimes - other people are simply forgotten completely. How often do you forget the name of people you have just been introduced to?