Silicon Valley and Black Coders: Howard University fights to join the tech boom
What a big steaming pile of political correctness.  The author interviews a tiny handful of mediocre college students who blame their &quot;color&quot; for not getting hired right out of school by big, glamorous tech companies.  Are we supposed to be sympathetic?<p>I remember my own struggles to break into the tech business, many years ago now.  Although white and &quot;privileged&quot;, i.e. no cultural barriers to entry, I found it very tough and had to jump through hoops, work my way up from semi-tech to actual development positions.  I took night school courses on a credit card and got into debt. I bought whatever gear I could afford and stayed up until 3am writing code, then got up and went to my menial job.<p>The opportunities didn&#x27;t just fall in my lap; I had to earn them.  No glamorous technology titans came knocking on my door, begging me to come interview.  I had to work for everything I got, and God, it was hard.  It still is.<p>This same work ethic applied to everyone; I was on the chatboards in the late 80s, all through the 90s, and the 2000s, and the story is always the same.  You have to have the right stuff if you want to build a career in technology -- be smart, creative, have some initiative, humility, humor, etc.<p>So maybe Black Americans don&#x27;t get that in their upbringing.  Maybe they&#x27;re not taught to be smart, competitive, hard charging over achievers.  Maybe they&#x27;re not encouraged to be creative, to think outside the box, etc.  I don&#x27;t know.  What I do know is, you can&#x27;t compensate for that by handing people undeserved opportunities.<p>Affirmative action is a failure; it&#x27;s nothing but a form of welfare.  If Google reaches out and hires under qualified people from Howard or wherever, just to say it&#x27;s trying to overcome &quot;barriers&quot; and achieve &quot;diversity&quot;, that&#x27;s all doublespeak that in the end means &quot;We will hire a few token blacks because we have extra money.  It will make us feel good, and it will fool them into thinking they made it.  Whatever. We have to do it.&quot;