This is a misrepresentation of the article's position. The article's actual, more ambiguous, position is better summarized in another paragraph:
> People tend to discuss Silicon Valley’s diversity problem in binary terms. One camp says companies are biased against underrepresented minorities, or at least aren’t trying hard enough to attract them. The other says there aren’t enough people from these backgrounds who are qualified for positions—or at least who are good enough to beat those Stanford grads with all the programming trophies and internship experience and Mozart-like childhoods. The reality is, both are true.
This sort of assumes that it is everyone's job to try hard to attract underrepresented minorities. That's expecting way too much noble-mindedness of people. What employment tends to optimize for is good capable employees in general. If the pool does include qualified and capable minorities, they will get employed in most cases (and racial bias will likely be there only in a minority of cases -- atleast in Silicon Valley). Just employing token representatives from under-represented minorities will only perpetuate the problem (special if the token representatives end up performing poorly if they were employed not for their ability but just to represent a minority). What will help is to have a large pool of minority group grads to select from.
Perceived merit, not necessarily actual merit. I think in every interview, how much ever you sneer at it, the people employing will prefer someone who can do their job than someone who will end up needing support to do their job. They may include their bias later, but they still will look for people they perceive to be capable of doing the job they are hiring for.
> People tend to discuss Silicon Valley’s diversity problem in binary terms. One camp says companies are biased against underrepresented minorities, or at least aren’t trying hard enough to attract them. The other says there aren’t enough people from these backgrounds who are qualified for positions—or at least who are good enough to beat those Stanford grads with all the programming trophies and internship experience and Mozart-like childhoods. The reality is, both are true.