Ruben Harris: Big Tech pays 'a lot of lip service' to diversity

Ruben Harris is CEO and cofounder of Career Karma, a platform for connecting people to coding bootcamps, peers and tech industry professionals so they can find a full-time career in tech.

Harris is an African-American former professional cellist who developed an interest in tech and the future of work while working as an investment banker.

Speaking to Business Insider, Harris said the big tech companies often pay 'lip service' to the issue of diversity within their workforces.

He said the majority of people currently enrolled on Career Karma programmes are “women, black and brown.”

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Career Karma CEO and founder Ruben Harris has said the major US tech firms and Silicon Valley as a whole pays “a lot of lip service” to the issue of diversity within their workforces.

Harris, who is African-American, was speaking to Business Insider about diversity in tech and his hopes for Career Karma, the coding and networking platform he cofounded in 2018. It raised $1.5 million in a seed funding round last July.

Career Karma's bread and butter is connecting people to coding bootcamps – and to peers from similar demographics – to help them train as software developers and ultimately break into the tech industry. There are no formal requirements to joining beyond downloading the app, and people can attend bootcamps in their spare time.

'You are not going to make change with top-down efforts'

Asked if big tech truly cares about diversifying its employee base, Harris said: I don't think so. What I believe is that you are not going to make change with top-down efforts. We're only going to make change through bottom-up efforts, because most jobs are offline anyway.

“If you want to recruit people from non-traditional backgrounds, you have to connect the people that have the skills to the people inside that will give them the chance to prove they have the skills. I would say there are people who want to help, but if you look at the billions of dollars that's been spent to reach people outside tech, the numbers have barely changed.”

Silicon Valley's diversity numbers have generally stayed pretty static, with the bulk of senior technology roles occupied by white men.

For example, looking at the number of black people working at the major tech firms, Facebook and Google both report that less than 5% of their overall employees identify as black. The percentage is even lower when filtering just for tech roles.

Apple is edging closer to double-digits with 9% of its US workforce identifying as black. But part of the reason Apple does better overall on diversity is because a bunch of its employees work in lower paid jobs at its high-street stores.

Almost a quarter of Amazon's workforce identifies as black, but with the same caveats as Apple.

Harris secured a coding job in Silicon Valley within 3 weeks, and with no coding background

Harris is an outsider to tech, but developed his own software skills and industry contacts.

Once a professional cello player, Harris' interest in tech grew while he worked as an investment banker in Chicago in the early 2010s. It was the finance industry's increasingly close relationship with tech that piqued his curiosity.

Read more: Facebook says it wants to 'double our number of women globally and Black and Hispanic employees in the US' as it reports its annual workforce diversity stats

“This was a time when all the people I knew were trying to do finance. But then, right across the street, people were talking about tech. I was like 'What is this tech thing？'”

“I ended up being recruited by another bank in Atlanta. Again, right across the street, there was something called 'Atlanta Tech Village'. Me and my future cofounder, Artur [Meyster], would go there every week to grab lunch with people who worked in tech. This was in bitcoin's early days, so we started organising 'bitcoin 101' sessions for people.”

It was this bitcoin initiative that prompted Balaji Srinivasan, a VC at Andreessen Horowitz, to message Harris on Twitter and suggest he move into tech. Having developed a number of contacts within the tech and VC worlds, Harris said the exchange “added fuel to my fire” and led him to move to Silicon Valley for good. Within 3 weeks, Harris was able to secure a coding job at edtech firm AltSchool, despite no prior coding experience.

Harris founded Career Karma after a Medium post he wrote about successfully breaking into tech went viral

Harris wrote about this experience in a blog post on Medium, which went viral and inspired him to create a successful podcast called 'Breaking Into Startups'. Not long afterwards, Career Karma was born. Harris said around 30,000 people are currently enrolled on Career Karma programmes, attending coding bootcamps such as Lambda School, App Academy, Hack Reactor, Kenzie Academy, Flatiron School, and Thinkful.

He added that these programs have helped several people secure jobs as software engineers at companies like Twitter, Tesla, Instacart, Walmart, and Mailchimp.

Ultimately, Harris said, Career Karma offers a window onto a far more diverse future for tech.

If you look at the 30,000 people who are on Career Karma [programmes] right now, if all those people become software engineers, we'll have more black people in tech than anybody else in the entire industry. The majority of people we have are actually women, black and brown. A lot of them are parents, and a lot are older people. It defies everything you see in the media.

“I'm not stressed about people who pay lip service to diversity, or don't talk about it,” he continued. “The fact of the matter is most staffing efforts are targeting people who are going to get jobs already. It's actually not that hard to bring about diversity. We're doing it.”