Yet the majority of jobsat most Internet companies don't require any advanced technical knowledge. "A point you never hear in this debate is that most tech companies - and this is especially true with the Internet companies - have a broad range of employment categories," says Butch Wing, who heads the Silicon Valley Project, the West Coast beachhead of the Rainbow/PUSH Coalition that Jesse Jackson created last year. "There's all sorts of good jobs at these companies that don't require software programming skills: public affairs, sales, marketing, finance and administration. You have the legal staff and secretaries and maintenance and technical support, which are typically entry-level or secondary-level jobs. At a lot of these Net companies, maybe 20 percent of the workforce is technically oriented."
Moreover, there's every indication that there are far more qualified, nonwhite, non-Asian engineers out there than the general scarcity of blacks and Latinos inside Internet companies would indicate. "A lack of qualified black and Latino engineers is enough of an excuse - if it's true," says the EEOC's Igasaki. "We don't take that as a given." NACME's Campbell bemoans the "alarmingly" high attrition rate among minority students studying engineering, but more than 10 percent graduate - a much higher rate of success than a casual stroll through most Internet startups would suggest.
"On the East Coast you see plenty of black engineers. It's nowhere near as rare as here," says Kevin Hinkston, an African-American engineer who worked at Hewlett-Packard (HWP) and IBM (IBM) before taking an executive position at NetNoir last December. "The Bay Area is a different place than back East. Maybe because people are more aware of race generally back East. Maybe it's because you see more African Americans in your everyday life [in the East], so the issue is right there in front of you. Here, it's like, 'If one walks in the door and is qualified, great, we'll hire. If one doesn't, well, I guess that means I don't have to deal with this issue.'"
The suggestion is that people in Silicon Valley are so proud that race isn't an issue in their lives that they pay it no mind - and, as a result, Silicon Valley becomes what one person called (ignoring, for the benefit of his punch line, the strong presence of Asians working the field) "the whitest place on earth."
Even the Valley's largest Internet firms are guilty of not trying very hard, if nothing else. Hinkston, who heads the Bay Area chapter of the Black Data Processors Association, makes it his business to attend the National Society of Black Engineers Conference held in Baltimore each year. "There's always between 20,000 and 30,000 college kids there," Hinkston says of the annual job fair. "I talk with a lot of them and always walk away impressed. It's like every resume I see, it's 3.5 or higher. These kids are all studying for an [electrical engineering degree], computer science, that kind of thing. It's a mix of kids from the historically black colleges and the usual East Coast colleges. All the big companies come: Hewlett-Packard, IBM, the telecoms, companies like Mobil (FORU), the top 100 companies. But I've never seen a single Internet company there. These kids would love to work at a Yahoo (YHOO) or an ExciteAtHome, but those companies don't go to conferences like this.
"I don't doubt that many companies care about diversity, but I also recognize that it's just not a priority. To me the general attitude is, 'I've got the VCs on my case. I've got to build a company; I've got my competition breathing down my neck. Who has time for this?'" Hinkston says. "I also recognize that at a lot of companies, they just don't care. Their attitude is, 'If a talented African American pops up, I'll hire, but it's not my job to pursue anybody.'"
The Clinton administration recently embraced a Bay Area-born initiative, dubbed ClickStart, which, if funded, would make kids growing up in low-income homes eligible for a computer and Internet access at a greatly subsidized rate. A prime mover behind ClickStart is Wade Randlett, VP of business development at San Francisco-based Red Gorilla. Randlett, who is white, is quite a comer on the technology policy front. Last summer he helped organize a breakfast meeting for Jesse Jackson at the Hotel Sofitel in Santa Clara, Calif., drawing together more than a dozen CEOs to discuss potential solutions to the digital divide.
"The question is, how do you make tech more attractive as a career path, which mainly means asking how you get more kids interested in math and science," Randlett says. "The Chinese American community and the Indian American community, for a variety of reasons that are very complex and probably date back 1,000 years, put a lot of emphasis on math and science. Those groups consequently are well represented in Silicon Valley - in fact, you look around and say they're overrepresented, at least in terms of their proportion of the population. We want to get to the point where that same ethos is as strong in the black and Latino communities."
Yet even the 35-year-old Randlett, who has sat around and pulled apart the diversity question with the likes of Jesse Jackson and VP Al Gore, has to admit his own company has a long way to go. How many blacks and Latinos does Red Gorilla currently employ? "One of our most valuable people is this immensely talented Asian programmer," Randlett says. OK, but how many blacks and Latinos? "We had this one Hispanic programmer, on contract, who did all this absolutely great work for us. We begged him to take a permanent job." OK, but how many blacks and Latinos are actually on staff? Eventually he produces an answer: zero.
Red Gorilla is a small company, with only 25 employees. A company that small is unlikely to have a full-time personnel director, let alone a recruitment strategy or the resources to troll job fairs and conferences. Randlett, despite a life inside the crucible of an Internet startup, is taking the time to champion change in the wider world. And - it must be said - at least he was brave enough to return a phone call inquiring about his diversity policy.
