High Tech Minority Representation

[gdr_11]

While watching tv the other day I watched commercial after commercial showing comouter programmers and web developers being represented as black with many being women.

Having been out of the national research environment for about 14 years now, I wondered how much the stats had changed, because as I recall these positions were generally about 80% white and 15% asian with women being a small minority.

Found this 2022 study that seems to confirm things have not changed much with the exception of pretty good gains by women.

Of course, we all know that Madison Ave, like Hollywood always gives us a fantasy image of reality

Minority group computer occupation workers U.S. 2022 | Statista

As of 2022, women accounted for around 26.2 percent of all employees working in computer and mathematical occupations in the United States.

www.statista.com

 

[popper]

From my 45 yrs experience in the field, the more females in the business, the funnier the solution becomes. "why is it like that?' - 'it's cute or neat.' - does that make it better?' - 'No.'.

 

[Tex62]

More Asian now (Indian). It’s been increasing since the mid 90s. Probably 40-50%.

40 years in the industry now.


Sent from my iPhone using Tapatalk

 

[RedArmy]

I'm currently working as a data analyst/main frame operator ( And whatever the hell else they decide to tack onto me, the list keeps growing.) for a large company that deals in the automotive parts industry throughout North and South America, Canada, Europe and parts of Asia. We also deal in oil filed and heavy equipment parts (18 wheelers), I can only speak for the automotive and heavy equipment division.

Our primary main frame programmers on the US side are currently all white with the exception of of the recent new guy who is Indian and working out of Canada. Recently they hired some people from India to help with updating some of the main frame programs, we have so many accounting jobs that we need all the help we can get to keep things updated in a timely manner.

The majority of our server and distribution software side people are Indian. Most of our support for DC systems was farmed out to India several years ago, all of the US based people were laid off. Quite a few of the accounting people also lost their jobs to India about seven years ago. We have quite a few African Americans in manager roles and some Asians as well. Almost all of the Indian people work offshore, so far I haven't had any issues working with them when solving problems. We use Teams mostly to communicate, I've also been on conference calls with them before and had no issues, everyone is friendly and knows their jobs.

I do worry about all the offshoring though, are there really no Americans that can be hired for these positions? I don't think there's much of a pay difference between the US and India anymore. I have nothing against anyone because of their race, it just seems to me we should be employing more Americans in the IT and programming fields.

 

[Aus_Schwaben]

The part of the offshoring being that the companies offer their employees two choices - immediate layoff or 2-6 months of training their replacements before layoff!

 

[Lead Belly]

I think in the future, humans will be the minority workers and AI will handle most tasks. Today the coder-crown goes to Pakis/Indians.

I got involved in computing pre-DOS, I was a Kaypro Luggable dealer: CP/M-80. Most had a single floppy that you'd boot on, then swap disks to use Wordstar, SuperCalc, D-Base,etc. No mouse- all command line.

 

[RedArmy]

I think in the future, humans will be the minority workers and AI will handle most tasks. Today the coder-crown goes to Pakis/Indians.

I got involved in computing pre-DOS, I was a Kaypro Luggable dealer: CP/M-80. Most had a single floppy that you'd boot on, then swap disks to use Wordstar, SuperCalc, D-Base,etc. No mouse- all command line.

View attachment 437607

And it's still like that believe it or not. We run COBOL and still have a master console but now we run emulators instead of the actual hardware so you can have multiple screens up. I'm running an IBM Z Series mainframe with multiple partitions. The actual machine is in a secured bunker miles away from me, I'm now working 100% remote. Our company is currently trying to do away with the mainframe due to all the costs of keeping people around that can work on it. I wish them luck, the last estimate they got said it would take years to switch it over to a cloud based solution if it could even be done.

Lots of talk around the campfire about AI. Currently there is a company-wide ban on using it for writing code due to security concerns. I suspect at some point AI will be doing it all though. I don't currently see it doing my job anytime soon with all the crap that goes wrong during a normal shift, lol. It would probably crash.

 

[dsgrey]

Almost 40 years ago it was around 90% white male, 5% white female, 3% black male/female and the other 2% a mix.

My experience in the past 10+ years at two companies is around 10% white male/female, 3% black male/female, 80% Indian male, 5% Indian female and the remaining 2% is mixed.

 

[dsgrey]

And it's still like that believe it or not. We run COBOL and still have a master console but now we run emulators instead of the actual hardware so you can have multiple screens up. I'm running an IBM Z Series mainframe with multiple partitions. The actual machine is in a secured bunker miles away from me, I'm now working 100% remote. Our company is currently trying to do away with the mainframe due to all the costs of keeping people around that can work on it. I wish them luck, the last estimate they got said it would take years to switch it over to a cloud based solution if it could even be done.

Lots of talk around the campfire about AI. Currently there is a company-wide ban on using it for writing code due to security concerns. I suspect at some point AI will be doing it all though. I don't currently see it doing my job anytime soon with all the crap that goes wrong during a normal shift, lol. It would probably crash.

I was mainframe Cobol from 1986 until 2000 then moved over to the dark side and eventually into management. Most everything now is Java/Python based with a mix of custom apps and 3rd party integrations. My last company did retire their mainframe in 2023. My staff has been mostly Indian since 2006 with the majority offshore (1/6 the pay rate or less). AI is being used but not at the volume that would lower resource count at this point. I work in IT Ops (managing the zoo or chaos as I say) so I don't see AI replacing my position due to the requirement of managing the client relationship and other non-technical aspects. At least I hope so for another 9 years.

 

[Lead Belly]

And it's still like that believe it or not. We run COBOL and still have a master console but now we run emulators instead of the actual hardware so you can have multiple screens up. I'm running an IBM Z Series mainframe with multiple partitions. The actual machine is in a secured bunker miles away from me, I'm now working 100% remote. Our company is currently trying to do away with the mainframe due to all the costs of keeping people around that can work on it. I wish them luck, the last estimate they got said it would take years to switch it over to a cloud based solution if it could even be done.

Lol, I used to advise the Stock Exchange on IT matters. They tried to get away from the dedicated hardware to x386 stuff and just paid HP the $5 million to go away. Mission-critical real-time is a tough nut.

There was one woman who designed and maintained all their stuff. She was a chain-smoking machine. She passed from heart attack, oddly enough. It went about as well as you can imagine after she was gone....

 

[Lead Belly]

Serial Line printers....

 

[RedArmy]

Serial Line printers....

Oh damn I HATE those! Way back in the day I used to sit in a room with two of those damn green bar printers running full steam during our month end operations. I should sue them for hearing loss. So much fun putting on gloves and changing the ink ribbons and then vacuuming up all the paper dust.

Remember the magnetic tape drives anyone, lol. Spend a half hour writing and then the tape gets ruined during high speed rewind because the vacuum pump failed. Then the fun of making a scratch from a new tape. Clip the end and then place the magnetic leader, they were actually fun to me. Although those drives came out way before my time we were still using them in the late 2000's because my company is so cheap. IBM finally told them no parts could be found anymore so we went to a nice new automated tape library. We've also done away with that system too and now write to a solid state drive system which I've never seen but works great.

 

[mroper]

Serial Line printers....

I started out as a printer operator, When the month end reports came down, we had a monster Seimens High speed serial printer about the size of a VW BUG. It would run through a box of 1000 sheet paper in 20 Mins. The reports would start at 11:00 pm and end at aroun 5-6 AM. it was a busy night we would go through 10 boxes of paper and a half gallon of toner.
@Red Army. surprising that your company has not gone to an SAP or other ERP system. I know they have Automotive systems already designed.

 

[Ausländer]

30+ in tech. Started off working on SAC mainframes that used 8" floppies to boot and had 1Meg of memory. As a civilian I worked for global ISPs, content providers and Tier 1 providers....

Lots of tech jobs (software/server, switching, routing, security, etc.) have gone to India and/or H1B visa holders from there. More than a few enter the market with advanced degrees (yes, plural) and accept salaries much lower than anyone else will.

 

[Darkpriest667]

Just reinforcing what's been said here. I've only been in the industry for a short time (5 years) but been doing computers over 30. Almost everyone is outsourced to india at this point and it makes solutions extremely painful to obtain when there is a problem.

 

[Grumps21]

From my 45 yrs experience in the field, the more females in the business, the funnier the solution becomes. "why is it like that?' - 'it's cute or neat.' - does that make it better?' - 'No.'.

I read your reply to my wife just a minute ago, and she didn’t find it very amusing. I on the other hand thought it a masterful reply. Oh and very true. I’m still chuckling

 

[Lead Belly]

I read your reply to my wife just a minute ago, and she didn’t find it very amusing. I on the other hand thought it a masterful reply. Oh and very true. I’m still chuckling

You have balls. They might remain untouched for a long while,... but nonetheless.