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> A narrative that (white) men are uniformly privileged and life is just easy for them. This is very perspective dependent. I’m a black college student now and

> A narrative that (white) men are uniformly privileged and life is just easy for them. This is very perspective dependent. I’m a black college student now and every conversation with friends back home includes some mention of dropping out because it’s not for us as well. When you see people with equivalent resumes already coasting by in the job market because they could get their last names and LinkedIn photos past the screening and into an interview it’s hard to believe that’ll change post-graduation. And most of us are already in planning on entrepreneurship because we know we’re not what companies are looking for even with fancy CS degrees. It’s like if I’ll have to sell sneakers to make ends meet after college anyways I might as well drop out and use that money bootstrapping this inventory SaaS. Innovation out of desperation, I guess. It’s no way to live. But I think we’re approaching an inflection point.

spoonjim 5y ago
You must have bad information because FAANG companies compete over hiring black software engineers. They want to get their numbers up and there aren’t many to hire.
- tchaffee 5y ago
  How many FAANG companies are there? I guess five from the name. Does every black applicant with a CS degree get a job if they apply? It's a free pass? Your sample size of five elite companies can't be taken as a serious attempt to describe the actual experience of black CS grads applying for jobs.
  - throwaway556677 5y ago
    A charitable (and, I think, reasonable) reading would be that the poster used FAANG as a representation of the overall trend in tech. FAANG are what the rest of the industry aspires to be, after all.
    - tchaffee 5y ago
      How many CS jobs are even in the "the industry" though? Home Depot, Walmart, and Nestle are examples of massive companies that do not aspire to be Facebook or anything like it, but who hire lots of software engineers. Most companies are not tech companies, although a handful of tech giants have done very well.
    - astura 5y ago
      What's "tech?" Large VC funded B2C companies get a lot of press and are most well known but I'd imagine most software engineering jobs are either at "non-tech" companies or companies that provide B2B services.
  - simonh 5y ago
    The top 5 have recruited over a million people between 2000 and 2018. That's an average of about 50,000 new recruits per year. Not all of those are in engineering of course, and those are global numbers, but still they hire tens of thousands of engineers every year. Here in the UK local software companies constantly complain that the cream of every year's CS grads emigrate to the US.
    - tchaffee 5y ago
      Doing the rough math, Google employs about 80,000 engineers today. Generously assuming the other FAANGs employ as many engineers, you get about 400,000 engineers. There are about 26 million software engineers in the world. So that's 1.5% of all engineers. And that's being very generous. The real number is surely below 1%. No surprise that the most desirable companies hire the top 1%. (Happy for someone to correct my numbers and the resulting percentage - it's based on a few Google searches). Unless my numbers are way off, it's safe to say that over 99% of engineers in the world are not working at a FAANG. I stand by my claim that we should not be using what happens at FAANGs as reliable anecdotal evidence of the interview experience for most candidates.
- dkdk8283 5y ago
  My company is only hiring black engineers or women. You have no chance if you are a white man and don’t have an in.
  - exporectomy 5y ago
    How is that legal?
    - jpxw 5y ago
      It isn’t. But nobody cares about that. Employment law appears to only work in one direction.
      - exporectomy 5y ago
        Yep. I've converted myself to a member of the native ethnicity because my government has a policy of preferentially buying from native-owned businesses but failed to define nativeness using any immutable or objective characteristics. I just have to remember my new ethnicity on any future forms that ask for it. It may also entitle me to enhanced healthcare services.
        xphilter 5y ago
        I hope you’re kidding. What a terrible thing to do.
        aleister_777 5y ago
        It's also terrible to consider that "enhanced health services" are only reserved for certain shades on the color wheel.
        alvah 5y ago
        You're absolutely correct. The government giving preference to suppliers on the basis of ethnicity is a huge step backwards.
    - 5y ago
jmeister 5y ago
I’m sorry, in 2021, companies and universities are bending over backwards to hire black candidates. This falls in the “earth is not flat” category in 2021, I will not bother posting evidence, as a litmus test of the HN crowd.
- tchaffee 5y ago
  Both can be true. The number you really need is what percentage of black people with a CS degree end up actually getting a job offer. And highly publicized diversity efforts by tech giants does not necessarily reflect what the average company in Ohio is doing. The news is not the data, so yeah, you really do need more evidence than "it's what I heard".
  - icare_1er 5y ago
    >what percentage of black people with a CS degree end up actually getting a job offer. So, the next step after forcing universities to give out degrees, is to force companies to hire minorities just to produce statistics that would please liberals ? Really starts to sound like Communist countries declaring what the unemployment figures should be, by law.
- LightG 5y ago
  Do you hear that? It's the sound of your mind closing ...
- Cipater 5y ago
  This is the funniest thing I've read on Hackernews in a while.
- pessimizer 5y ago
  I'm sorry, I'm black and this is not my experience. I will not bother posting evidence either, because why does evidence matter when you already know something to be true, right?
_Nat_ 5y ago
Dropping out of a fancy Computer Science program that you're already in would seem like an extraordinarily bad idea. If someone's trying to talk you into quitting and giving up because no one wants you because you're black, well.. that doesn't sound like a good friend to me. Don't get me wrong -- a few tech-billionaires dropped out of college, and apparently it worked out for some. So if you want to try that out, then that'd seem like a different issue. But dropping out because you're black sounds crazy. All that said, if you want to feel out the waters, why not apply for an internship? Internships can be awesome! -- you can get experience and money while still being a student, plus it can be fun!
- throwtheworld 5y ago
  > Dropping out of a fancy Computer Science program that you're already in would seem like an extraordinarily bad idea Of course haha the name brand and few cool professors are keeping me at this point. But I never expected to go from the highest ranking/gpa/scores to having leaving academia even at the edge of the table. > But dropping out because you're black sounds crazy. It’s more like “if I can make X amount anyways today, why do it Y way when I’ll be behind anyways? Might as well gain the experience and be in the same position 4-5 years from now?” if that makes sense but I understand it sounding rash through text. > why not apply for an internship? It seems we all have the same issue of never getting responses online. It’s very odd considering we’ve done incredibly well when the interview is direct with the person hiring (as in this is the person that makes the final decision), but situations like that are limited.
  - notJim 5y ago
    Apologies if this is obvious, but if you're not getting callbacks, usually the issue is with your resume or application. If you haven't already, I would look for groups that review resumes and applications (especially groups that involve people who are already working or have experience hiring.) You could also try posting on the /r/cscareerquestions subreddit to have people critique your resume.
    - spopejoy 5y ago
nickd2001 5y ago
Do you mean by "we know we’re not what companies are looking for even with fancy CS degrees", simply that they're looking for identically qualified people that aren't black? If so, I'm extremely sorry to hear this, and disgusted that its happening. I can't actually think of anyone I worked with who'd knowingly treat or value a black colleague or interview candidate any differently, but maybe that's white blindness on my part, maybe its been going on and I didn't notice. In case this is helpful info, I know that Capital One tech has robust D&I policies and seeks to redress the balance. They sponsor an organisation called "Blacks in Tech". Their senior management seem to say it makes good business sense and provides competitive edge, to reward talented people who happen to be black, whom other employers are too stupid/racist to consider hiring and/or promoting quick enough once hired. so, if I were a black American looking for a job in tech I'd look at Capital One if struggling to get anywhere with other employers.
- astura 5y ago
  >that they're looking for identically qualified people that aren't black? You see this here on HN all the time, articles about "how we do hiring" that start out with "I would only hire someone who I'd want to get coffee with." Which, to me at least, makes it sound like the person is looking to hire friends/drinking buddies that also have technical skills, not employees. It's a signal that the person is looking for "their type of people." It's so acceptable to hire this way that people feel comfortable opening publishing that, under their own name, as something they are proud of. I'm not even black (but I am a woman, I grew up poor, and I'm on the older side) and constantly reading about hiring procedures like that makes me feel like I'm very much not welcome.
  - arglebarglegar 5y ago
    this is also what people mean when they don’t hire someone because they’re not a good “culture fit” the facade on this discrimination is razor thin
  - nickd2001 5y ago
    Seems to me 100% their loss, if they don't want you! I'm white and male, but the wrong side of 40. Occasionally I've faced ageist "humour". But anywhere that's unfriendly to older people, women, non-white people, would IMHO suck to work even if you were young, white, male etc. Wouldn't wanna work with prejudiced people even if they think I'm "like them". Working in a diverse inclusive team is far more joyful, as well as more productive. BTW in my current workplace, there's a lady who's both older and black. She's awesome at her job, has a unique set of skills built up over many years. IMHO she's irreplaceable as well as a fun nice person to work with. So thank goodness we don't have something that'd have made her feel unwelcome....
AussieWog93 5y ago
>It’s like if I’ll have to sell sneakers to make ends meet after college anyways Just for what it's worth, I (not black, but from a different group that is not looked upon kindly by HR types) took the route of EEE Degree -> PhD (dropped out) -> Software Engineer at Relatively Elite company (not FAANG, but about as good as we have in Melbourne, AU) -> running eCommerce businesses from home (selling used video games on eBay as well as a USB oscilloscope I designed as a student, mostly through Amazon). If you're smart and skilled, you can make an absolute killing doing something that stoners or less intelligent people do to "get by", and at the same time spend massive amounts of quality time with your (probably at this stage future) wife and kids. If you want to have a chat about it, feel free to shoot us an email (see profile). But long story short, even if you're locked out of the traditional job market it doesn't mean you should give up on developing your skills or give up hope. Capitalism provides, man.
10x-dev 5y ago
This doesn't match up with my experience as an interviewer at several FAANGs. HR typically wants their diversity numbers up badly so if you're gay, a woman, and/or black they are already incredibly inclined to hire you, as long as you pass the interviews. It's not a walk in the park, but you have this going for you and it's a big advantage imo.
- tchaffee 5y ago
  > as long as you pass the interviews. Aren't these are known to be extremely difficult interviews compared to most tech interviews? What percentage of candidates who apply get hired? I would imagine the numbers are quite low?
  - 10x-dev 5y ago
    My opinion is that generalist interviews are difficult but not 'extremely'. For example, here is a problem I came up with at one company: Given a list of chapters in a video course, and a list of user bookmarks, write a function that groups the bookmarks by chapter. Chapters and bookmarks are defined as millisecond offsets from 0 (the start of the video file). I'd specify the data structures for junior devs and let the more senior people work those out. Your average developer that gets hired can solve and unit test the solution in less than 35 minutes. Those who don't might be having an off day, or I didn't do a good job at explaining the problem and details, or they didn't ask the right questions or who knows. The point is, a thousand things can go wrong, but the problem itself isn't that difficult. A few loops and a hashmap gets you an acceptable solution. This and the other problems in the interview question databases at FAANGs are typical of what's in the Cracking the Coding Interview book. Whether someone's ability to solve these types of problems quickly is indicative of their skill level is a hot topic of debate, but if one wants to join these companies, then hacking the process by learning to solve algorithm and data structure problems is acceptable and not a particularly complex process. It's high overhead for the candidate, but at the very least it proves that they can learn, and learning the custom tools and code quickly is about half the skillet required to be successful at a FAANG.
    - 5y ago
ClumsyPilot 5y ago
"I’m a black college student now and every conversation with friends back home includes some mention of dropping out because it’s not for us as well." I can only recommend that you have to base life decisions on your own experience, because it can differ dramatically. I have an experience from which I have drawn some conclusions - I am an immigrant and many of my co-immigrants are convinced that the locals dislike them, they feel they are being treated unfairly, etc. I was unable to square my experience with their's: surely they can't be imagining things, but at the same time I cannot be just magically lucky. Some of them are older generation, maybe things were different back then. Maybe, when they face difficulties they are more likely to attribute it to discrimination. Maybe some behavioural stereotyoes play a role - I don't know. For a while I wanted to try a 'secret shopper' experiment, create two fake Linkedin profiles, identical except background- try applying for jobs with them. Never got round to it.
- sudosysgen 5y ago
  A study has been made with your experiment here in Canada. The result was that the white-sounding profiles got more interviews based solely on last name, no picture needed. [PDF, French]: https://www.cdpdj.qc.ca/Publications/etude_testing_discrimination_emploi.pdf https://www.cdpdj.qc.ca/Publications/etude_testing_discrimin...
- throwtheworld 5y ago
  > For a while I wanted to try a 'secret shopper' experiment We did something like this! But we swapped slightly reworded resumes and the response ratio leaned even further in the white classmate’s favor. We just laughed, as if we couldn’t believe that what we half-joked about actually happened. I’m long past the point of being sad. I guess that’s life.
RickJWagner 5y ago
Please reconsider. As far as I can tell, Big Tech has terrible numbers for diversity and they are tripping over themselves trying to bring the numbers up. I really, truly believe that non-white, non-male candidates are not going to suffer if they can get the resume on the table. Stay the course. Good things await.
dotancohen 5y ago
> I’m a black college student now and every conversation > with friends back home includes some mention of > dropping out because it’s not for us as well. Naive question, I don't live where you live. But who is the "us" that your friends speak of? Black people? Black Americans? Black people from a specific subculture? And finally, what determines that college is not for the "us" your friend refers to? Culture? Post-graduation job prospects? At least from his perspective.
listless 5y ago
> “We know we’re not what companies are looking for” Why do you say that? Because I can tell you as an employee of a FAANG company that you are exactly what these companies are looking for. They’ve got serious diversity issues - especially among Black men (not assuming a gender here just facts) - and they are desperate to balance themselves out. I mean that as an encouraging statement. You ARE who is being looked for. Be confident in that and use it to your advantage.
arthur_sav 5y ago
> Innovation out of desperation, I guess. It's the only way to innovate imo.
damagednoob 5y ago
Where are you and your friends getting your information from? If you're in the US or Europe, IMO the market for programmers has never been better. It may be a struggle to get the first job but if you persevere, it will get easier.
b7a9a9a 5y ago
complete your degree and then do federal contracting; for entrepreneurship: https://www.sba.gov/business-guide/grow-your-business/minority-owned-businesses https://www.sba.gov/business-guide/grow-your-business/minori... > we’re not what companies are looking for even with fancy CS degrees. You are exactly what the federal government is looking for. US contract procurement has a significant racial spoils system within it.
- throwtheworld 5y ago
  This is one of the things I was looking into, thank you!
Aunche 5y ago
I can't speak for your personal experience, but at least on paper, companies are begging for more diverse hires, even blatantly admitting to breaking the Civil Rights act to do so. https://careers.google.com/jobs/results/132267679726609094-student-training-in-engineering-program-2021-people-with-disabilities/?%2F=&page=6 https://careers.google.com/jobs/results/132267679726609094-s... >students who are a member of a group that is historically underrepresented in the technology industry will receive priority in the selection process. This group includes women, ethnic minorities and students with disabilities.
- throwtheworld 5y ago
  Unfortunately, once you’re giving “priority” to such a broad group of people (e.g. every permutation of gender, whatever you consider ethnic, and ability minorities) it becomes easy to say one thing and continue doing another. The companies that have to virtue-signal do so because you wouldn’t notice if they didn’t tell you. I’d prefer they skip that and hire who they want without the pretense, and if that’s not me, fine, but please be honest.
treis 5y ago
Send me your resume to and I'll pass it along: taway1343@gmail.com
baron816 5y ago
I think your comment, and the responses to it help advance my point: there are a bunch of narratives out there that are not wholly rooted in reality (or out of date in your case). These can have detrimental effects. There are certainly black individuals who would pursue a career in tech, if not for the (perhaps earned) perception that tech is hostile towards black people. Things have changed, but the narrative hasn’t, and that is doing real damage. I’m trying to say the same sort of thing applies to white men and college—just there being a perception of college campuses being hostile to them is going to prevent many of them from going. And people will be hurt by that, in one way or another.
rkk3 5y ago
> some mention of dropping out because it’s not for us as well That is cultural transition & stereotype threat first-generation college attendees face, regardless of race. > When you see people with equivalent resumes already coasting by in the job market because they could get their last names and LinkedIn photos past the screening and into an interview it’s hard to believe that’ll change post-graduation If anything, they are probably getting introductions/doors opened for them by friends & family. It sounds like you are probably applying for some of the most competitive positions in the world, Google and many other places have less than 1% acceptance rate for interns. Harvard is an order of magnitude less selective. It sucks, but don't let struggling to get an internship get you down.
etempleton 5y ago
One of the things everyone hears from some cousin, uncle, aunt, brother, sister, parent, or friend when they don’t get selected for something these days is some form of, “oh you didn’t get it because you are insert [black, white, latinx, male, female, young, old, etc].” This comment is about them not you. Avoid this line of thinking. It may be true, or it may not be. You will probably never know. What I do know is this is an unhelpful and defeatist line of thinking. Instead prove the haters wrong.
MonaroVXR 5y ago
As a black person, living in Europe (Netherlands) I feel this too. But there's more because I just started college and going to finish it.
dorkwood 5y ago
I can't speak to hiring practices at larger companies, but if my experience working at smaller companies is any indication I think things might be shifting. At my last job, they were focused on hiring for diversity to create a more desireable workplace and improve retention. I think this mindset is starting to become more commonplace, so you may find that you're no longer in such a bad position once you graduate.

spoonjim 5y ago

You must have bad information because FAANG companies compete over hiring black software engineers. They want to get their numbers up and there aren’t many to hire.

tchaffee 5y ago
How many FAANG companies are there? I guess five from the name. Does every black applicant with a CS degree get a job if they apply? It's a free pass? Your sample size of five elite companies can't be taken as a serious attempt to describe the actual experience of black CS grads applying for jobs.
- throwaway556677 5y ago
  A charitable (and, I think, reasonable) reading would be that the poster used FAANG as a representation of the overall trend in tech. FAANG are what the rest of the industry aspires to be, after all.
  - tchaffee 5y ago
    How many CS jobs are even in the "the industry" though? Home Depot, Walmart, and Nestle are examples of massive companies that do not aspire to be Facebook or anything like it, but who hire lots of software engineers. Most companies are not tech companies, although a handful of tech giants have done very well.
  - astura 5y ago
    What's "tech?" Large VC funded B2C companies get a lot of press and are most well known but I'd imagine most software engineering jobs are either at "non-tech" companies or companies that provide B2B services.
- simonh 5y ago
  The top 5 have recruited over a million people between 2000 and 2018. That's an average of about 50,000 new recruits per year. Not all of those are in engineering of course, and those are global numbers, but still they hire tens of thousands of engineers every year. Here in the UK local software companies constantly complain that the cream of every year's CS grads emigrate to the US.
  - tchaffee 5y ago
    Doing the rough math, Google employs about 80,000 engineers today. Generously assuming the other FAANGs employ as many engineers, you get about 400,000 engineers. There are about 26 million software engineers in the world. So that's 1.5% of all engineers. And that's being very generous. The real number is surely below 1%. No surprise that the most desirable companies hire the top 1%. (Happy for someone to correct my numbers and the resulting percentage - it's based on a few Google searches). Unless my numbers are way off, it's safe to say that over 99% of engineers in the world are not working at a FAANG. I stand by my claim that we should not be using what happens at FAANGs as reliable anecdotal evidence of the interview experience for most candidates.
dkdk8283 5y ago
My company is only hiring black engineers or women. You have no chance if you are a white man and don’t have an in.
- exporectomy 5y ago
  How is that legal?
  - jpxw 5y ago
    It isn’t. But nobody cares about that. Employment law appears to only work in one direction.
    - exporectomy 5y ago
      Yep. I've converted myself to a member of the native ethnicity because my government has a policy of preferentially buying from native-owned businesses but failed to define nativeness using any immutable or objective characteristics. I just have to remember my new ethnicity on any future forms that ask for it. It may also entitle me to enhanced healthcare services.
      - xphilter 5y ago
        I hope you’re kidding. What a terrible thing to do.
        aleister_777 5y ago
        It's also terrible to consider that "enhanced health services" are only reserved for certain shades on the color wheel.
        alvah 5y ago
        You're absolutely correct. The government giving preference to suppliers on the basis of ethnicity is a huge step backwards.
  - 5y ago

jmeister 5y ago

I’m sorry, in 2021, companies and universities are bending over backwards to hire black candidates. This falls in the “earth is not flat” category in 2021, I will not bother posting evidence, as a litmus test of the HN crowd.

tchaffee 5y ago
Both can be true. The number you really need is what percentage of black people with a CS degree end up actually getting a job offer. And highly publicized diversity efforts by tech giants does not necessarily reflect what the average company in Ohio is doing. The news is not the data, so yeah, you really do need more evidence than "it's what I heard".
- icare_1er 5y ago
  >what percentage of black people with a CS degree end up actually getting a job offer. So, the next step after forcing universities to give out degrees, is to force companies to hire minorities just to produce statistics that would please liberals ? Really starts to sound like Communist countries declaring what the unemployment figures should be, by law.
LightG 5y ago
Do you hear that? It's the sound of your mind closing ...
Cipater 5y ago
This is the funniest thing I've read on Hackernews in a while.
pessimizer 5y ago
I'm sorry, I'm black and this is not my experience. I will not bother posting evidence either, because why does evidence matter when you already know something to be true, right?

_Nat_ 5y ago

Dropping out of a fancy Computer Science program that you're already in would seem like an extraordinarily bad idea. If someone's trying to talk you into quitting and giving up because no one wants you because you're black, well.. that doesn't sound like a good friend to me. Don't get me wrong -- a few tech-billionaires dropped out of college, and apparently it worked out for some. So if you want to try that out, then that'd seem like a different issue. But dropping out because you're black sounds crazy. All that said, if you want to feel out the waters, why not apply for an internship? Internships can be awesome! -- you can get experience and money while still being a student, plus it can be fun!

throwtheworld 5y ago
> Dropping out of a fancy Computer Science program that you're already in would seem like an extraordinarily bad idea Of course haha the name brand and few cool professors are keeping me at this point. But I never expected to go from the highest ranking/gpa/scores to having leaving academia even at the edge of the table. > But dropping out because you're black sounds crazy. It’s more like “if I can make X amount anyways today, why do it Y way when I’ll be behind anyways? Might as well gain the experience and be in the same position 4-5 years from now?” if that makes sense but I understand it sounding rash through text. > why not apply for an internship? It seems we all have the same issue of never getting responses online. It’s very odd considering we’ve done incredibly well when the interview is direct with the person hiring (as in this is the person that makes the final decision), but situations like that are limited.
- notJim 5y ago
  Apologies if this is obvious, but if you're not getting callbacks, usually the issue is with your resume or application. If you haven't already, I would look for groups that review resumes and applications (especially groups that involve people who are already working or have experience hiring.) You could also try posting on the /r/cscareerquestions subreddit to have people critique your resume.
  - spopejoy 5y ago

nickd2001 5y ago

Do you mean by "we know we’re not what companies are looking for even with fancy CS degrees", simply that they're looking for identically qualified people that aren't black? If so, I'm extremely sorry to hear this, and disgusted that its happening. I can't actually think of anyone I worked with who'd knowingly treat or value a black colleague or interview candidate any differently, but maybe that's white blindness on my part, maybe its been going on and I didn't notice. In case this is helpful info, I know that Capital One tech has robust D&I policies and seeks to redress the balance. They sponsor an organisation called "Blacks in Tech". Their senior management seem to say it makes good business sense and provides competitive edge, to reward talented people who happen to be black, whom other employers are too stupid/racist to consider hiring and/or promoting quick enough once hired. so, if I were a black American looking for a job in tech I'd look at Capital One if struggling to get anywhere with other employers.

astura 5y ago
>that they're looking for identically qualified people that aren't black? You see this here on HN all the time, articles about "how we do hiring" that start out with "I would only hire someone who I'd want to get coffee with." Which, to me at least, makes it sound like the person is looking to hire friends/drinking buddies that also have technical skills, not employees. It's a signal that the person is looking for "their type of people." It's so acceptable to hire this way that people feel comfortable opening publishing that, under their own name, as something they are proud of. I'm not even black (but I am a woman, I grew up poor, and I'm on the older side) and constantly reading about hiring procedures like that makes me feel like I'm very much not welcome.
- arglebarglegar 5y ago
  this is also what people mean when they don’t hire someone because they’re not a good “culture fit” the facade on this discrimination is razor thin
- nickd2001 5y ago
  Seems to me 100% their loss, if they don't want you! I'm white and male, but the wrong side of 40. Occasionally I've faced ageist "humour". But anywhere that's unfriendly to older people, women, non-white people, would IMHO suck to work even if you were young, white, male etc. Wouldn't wanna work with prejudiced people even if they think I'm "like them". Working in a diverse inclusive team is far more joyful, as well as more productive. BTW in my current workplace, there's a lady who's both older and black. She's awesome at her job, has a unique set of skills built up over many years. IMHO she's irreplaceable as well as a fun nice person to work with. So thank goodness we don't have something that'd have made her feel unwelcome....

AussieWog93 5y ago

>It’s like if I’ll have to sell sneakers to make ends meet after college anyways Just for what it's worth, I (not black, but from a different group that is not looked upon kindly by HR types) took the route of EEE Degree -> PhD (dropped out) -> Software Engineer at Relatively Elite company (not FAANG, but about as good as we have in Melbourne, AU) -> running eCommerce businesses from home (selling used video games on eBay as well as a USB oscilloscope I designed as a student, mostly through Amazon). If you're smart and skilled, you can make an absolute killing doing something that stoners or less intelligent people do to "get by", and at the same time spend massive amounts of quality time with your (probably at this stage future) wife and kids. If you want to have a chat about it, feel free to shoot us an email (see profile). But long story short, even if you're locked out of the traditional job market it doesn't mean you should give up on developing your skills or give up hope. Capitalism provides, man.

10x-dev 5y ago

This doesn't match up with my experience as an interviewer at several FAANGs. HR typically wants their diversity numbers up badly so if you're gay, a woman, and/or black they are already incredibly inclined to hire you, as long as you pass the interviews. It's not a walk in the park, but you have this going for you and it's a big advantage imo.

tchaffee 5y ago
> as long as you pass the interviews. Aren't these are known to be extremely difficult interviews compared to most tech interviews? What percentage of candidates who apply get hired? I would imagine the numbers are quite low?
- 10x-dev 5y ago
  My opinion is that generalist interviews are difficult but not 'extremely'. For example, here is a problem I came up with at one company: Given a list of chapters in a video course, and a list of user bookmarks, write a function that groups the bookmarks by chapter. Chapters and bookmarks are defined as millisecond offsets from 0 (the start of the video file). I'd specify the data structures for junior devs and let the more senior people work those out. Your average developer that gets hired can solve and unit test the solution in less than 35 minutes. Those who don't might be having an off day, or I didn't do a good job at explaining the problem and details, or they didn't ask the right questions or who knows. The point is, a thousand things can go wrong, but the problem itself isn't that difficult. A few loops and a hashmap gets you an acceptable solution. This and the other problems in the interview question databases at FAANGs are typical of what's in the Cracking the Coding Interview book. Whether someone's ability to solve these types of problems quickly is indicative of their skill level is a hot topic of debate, but if one wants to join these companies, then hacking the process by learning to solve algorithm and data structure problems is acceptable and not a particularly complex process. It's high overhead for the candidate, but at the very least it proves that they can learn, and learning the custom tools and code quickly is about half the skillet required to be successful at a FAANG.
  - 5y ago

ClumsyPilot 5y ago

"I’m a black college student now and every conversation with friends back home includes some mention of dropping out because it’s not for us as well." I can only recommend that you have to base life decisions on your own experience, because it can differ dramatically. I have an experience from which I have drawn some conclusions - I am an immigrant and many of my co-immigrants are convinced that the locals dislike them, they feel they are being treated unfairly, etc. I was unable to square my experience with their's: surely they can't be imagining things, but at the same time I cannot be just magically lucky. Some of them are older generation, maybe things were different back then. Maybe, when they face difficulties they are more likely to attribute it to discrimination. Maybe some behavioural stereotyoes play a role - I don't know. For a while I wanted to try a 'secret shopper' experiment, create two fake Linkedin profiles, identical except background- try applying for jobs with them. Never got round to it.

sudosysgen 5y ago
A study has been made with your experiment here in Canada. The result was that the white-sounding profiles got more interviews based solely on last name, no picture needed. [PDF, French]: https://www.cdpdj.qc.ca/Publications/etude_testing_discrimination_emploi.pdf https://www.cdpdj.qc.ca/Publications/etude_testing_discrimin...
throwtheworld 5y ago
> For a while I wanted to try a 'secret shopper' experiment We did something like this! But we swapped slightly reworded resumes and the response ratio leaned even further in the white classmate’s favor. We just laughed, as if we couldn’t believe that what we half-joked about actually happened. I’m long past the point of being sad. I guess that’s life.

RickJWagner 5y ago

Please reconsider. As far as I can tell, Big Tech has terrible numbers for diversity and they are tripping over themselves trying to bring the numbers up. I really, truly believe that non-white, non-male candidates are not going to suffer if they can get the resume on the table. Stay the course. Good things await.

dotancohen 5y ago

> I’m a black college student now and every conversation > with friends back home includes some mention of > dropping out because it’s not for us as well. Naive question, I don't live where you live. But who is the "us" that your friends speak of? Black people? Black Americans? Black people from a specific subculture? And finally, what determines that college is not for the "us" your friend refers to? Culture? Post-graduation job prospects? At least from his perspective.

listless 5y ago

> “We know we’re not what companies are looking for” Why do you say that? Because I can tell you as an employee of a FAANG company that you are exactly what these companies are looking for. They’ve got serious diversity issues - especially among Black men (not assuming a gender here just facts) - and they are desperate to balance themselves out. I mean that as an encouraging statement. You ARE who is being looked for. Be confident in that and use it to your advantage.

arthur_sav 5y ago

> Innovation out of desperation, I guess. It's the only way to innovate imo.

damagednoob 5y ago

Where are you and your friends getting your information from? If you're in the US or Europe, IMO the market for programmers has never been better. It may be a struggle to get the first job but if you persevere, it will get easier.

b7a9a9a 5y ago

complete your degree and then do federal contracting; for entrepreneurship: https://www.sba.gov/business-guide/grow-your-business/minority-owned-businesses https://www.sba.gov/business-guide/grow-your-business/minori... > we’re not what companies are looking for even with fancy CS degrees. You are exactly what the federal government is looking for. US contract procurement has a significant racial spoils system within it.

throwtheworld 5y ago
This is one of the things I was looking into, thank you!

Aunche 5y ago

I can't speak for your personal experience, but at least on paper, companies are begging for more diverse hires, even blatantly admitting to breaking the Civil Rights act to do so. https://careers.google.com/jobs/results/132267679726609094-student-training-in-engineering-program-2021-people-with-disabilities/?%2F=&page=6 https://careers.google.com/jobs/results/132267679726609094-s... >students who are a member of a group that is historically underrepresented in the technology industry will receive priority in the selection process. This group includes women, ethnic minorities and students with disabilities.

throwtheworld 5y ago
Unfortunately, once you’re giving “priority” to such a broad group of people (e.g. every permutation of gender, whatever you consider ethnic, and ability minorities) it becomes easy to say one thing and continue doing another. The companies that have to virtue-signal do so because you wouldn’t notice if they didn’t tell you. I’d prefer they skip that and hire who they want without the pretense, and if that’s not me, fine, but please be honest.

treis 5y ago

Send me your resume to and I'll pass it along: taway1343@gmail.com

baron816 5y ago

I think your comment, and the responses to it help advance my point: there are a bunch of narratives out there that are not wholly rooted in reality (or out of date in your case). These can have detrimental effects. There are certainly black individuals who would pursue a career in tech, if not for the (perhaps earned) perception that tech is hostile towards black people. Things have changed, but the narrative hasn’t, and that is doing real damage. I’m trying to say the same sort of thing applies to white men and college—just there being a perception of college campuses being hostile to them is going to prevent many of them from going. And people will be hurt by that, in one way or another.

rkk3 5y ago

> some mention of dropping out because it’s not for us as well That is cultural transition & stereotype threat first-generation college attendees face, regardless of race. > When you see people with equivalent resumes already coasting by in the job market because they could get their last names and LinkedIn photos past the screening and into an interview it’s hard to believe that’ll change post-graduation If anything, they are probably getting introductions/doors opened for them by friends & family. It sounds like you are probably applying for some of the most competitive positions in the world, Google and many other places have less than 1% acceptance rate for interns. Harvard is an order of magnitude less selective. It sucks, but don't let struggling to get an internship get you down.

etempleton 5y ago

One of the things everyone hears from some cousin, uncle, aunt, brother, sister, parent, or friend when they don’t get selected for something these days is some form of, “oh you didn’t get it because you are insert [black, white, latinx, male, female, young, old, etc].” This comment is about them not you. Avoid this line of thinking. It may be true, or it may not be. You will probably never know. What I do know is this is an unhelpful and defeatist line of thinking. Instead prove the haters wrong.

MonaroVXR 5y ago

As a black person, living in Europe (Netherlands) I feel this too. But there's more because I just started college and going to finish it.

dorkwood 5y ago

I can't speak to hiring practices at larger companies, but if my experience working at smaller companies is any indication I think things might be shifting. At my last job, they were focused on hiring for diversity to create a more desireable workplace and improve retention. I think this mindset is starting to become more commonplace, so you may find that you're no longer in such a bad position once you graduate.