California Über Alles ⇥ news.ycombinator.com

Peter Christiansen commenting on Hacker News on my little ditty about diversity:

I wish they would have included demographics for the Bay Area, not just the USA. From Wikipedia – 52.5% White, 6.7% non-Hispanic African American, 23.3% Asian, 10.8% from other races, 5.4% from two or more races, 23.5% Hispanic or Latin. (Incidentally, this almost exactly matches Apple’s numbers, except for Hispanic). Comparing tech worker demographics to Bay Area demographics, It’s kind of a chicken vs egg about whether the demographics precede the jobs or vice versa, but given how geographically concentrated the tech industry is, this seems like a bad oversight.

This was by far the most common critique I received about the piece: why did I compare tech company demographics against the US as a whole, and not just California?

While it’s true that the American West Coast has typically had a much higher Asian population than, say, Cleveland or Mobile, it’s hard to say whether it has grown disproportionate to the rest of the United States, as records have been pretty poorly kept. This is what Christiansen alludes to in his comment: is the tech industry responsible for the demographics of the Bay Area, or are Bay Area demographics fairly represented by most of these companies?