5 ms·

In my entire career working for US companies, I have yet to work with a black software engineer. Not a auxiliary role like PM, DevOps, IT but a straight SDE rol

by typon 2y ago

In my entire career working for US companies, I have yet to work with a black software engineer. Not a auxiliary role like PM, DevOps, IT but a straight SDE role. I have worked with literally hundreds of software engineers in my life.

HeyLaughingBoy 2y ago
As a black software engineer, in my entire career working for US companies, I have yet to work with another black software engineer.
- kragen 2y ago
  As a white software engineer, in my entire career working for US companies, I only ever worked with one black software engineer. He was Nigerian. I believe that this is because the US has a profoundly racist culture; usually this was implicit racism (I only recall ever hearing one overtly racist remark against black people). I also worked with very few Hispanic people. But I worked with lots of Indian and Chinese people, plus Arabs, Pakistanis, etc. Perhaps the US system of racism is less effective against people who had first-class opportunities at education and mentorship before entering the work force? It's still pretty effective — there were lots of times I had Indian and Chinese coworkers and a white boss.
  - RestlessMind 2y ago
    > I believe that this is because the US has a profoundly racist culture I wonder why US is not racist against Indians and Chinese. > Perhaps the US system of racism is less effective against people who had first-class opportunities at education and mentorship Are we supposed to believe that only certain societies (like India and China) have these kind of opportunities? Why doesn't Latin America, with 600-700M population, have this kind of opportunity then? > lots of times I had Indian and Chinese coworkers and a white boss. Anecdote - at the last FAANG I worked at, 6 out of 7 people in my management chain were Indian dudes, including the CEO. Also as a matter of statistics, Asians are over-represented in S&P500 leadership positions compared to their share of the US population.
    - kragen 2y ago
      If you've ever been Indian or Chinese in the US, you know the US is racist against you, just not in a way that excludes you from programming work. And, yeah, there's quite a bit of Indian-American senior leadership in Silicon Valley. I live in Latin America now, and the universities almost all suck. Latin America culturally has the idea that universities are for job training and are basically all equivalent. China and, generally speaking, India instead place very high value on education and on good universities, and China also has a massive research budget. Latin America, broadly speaking, has zilch. The result is that in lists like https://www.timeshighereducation.com/world-university-rankings/2024/world-ranking https://www.timeshighereducation.com/world-university-rankin... the top 100 universities include 11 in China, 4 in Singapore (which is largely Chinese), and 0 in Latin America. Most of India's IITs don't appear on that list for some reason, but they should — and the ones that do appear are the wrong ones. Here in Buenos Aires, the University of Buenos Aires was badly damaged by Perón demanding loyalty oaths from the professors, driving those who valued their intellectual freedom out of the university and often out of Argentina entirely. A few years later, it was damaged further by an anti-Peronist military dictatorship attempting to purge it of Peronists https://es.wikipedia.org/wiki/Noche_de_los_Bastones_Largos https://es.wikipedia.org/wiki/Noche_de_los_Bastones_Largos. The first computer in Latin America was lost in the shuffle. Decades of such intermittent political violence disproportionately affected the intellectual classes; the last dictatorship, backed by the US in its secret mass murders of political dissidents, notoriously blamed society's drug problems on "an excess of thinking" among students: https://es.wikipedia.org/wiki/Julio_Bardi#Ministro https://es.wikipedia.org/wiki/Julio_Bardi#Ministro Those intellectuals who could move abroad often did so, including Favaloro, who invented heart bypass surgery after refusing to swear loyalty to Perón, and Chaitin, the discoverer of the random number omega at the heart of computability and the graph-coloring formulation of the compiler register allocation problem. Despite all that, the University of Buenos Aires is still one of the best five or so universities in Latin America. That may give you a clue as to how bad the situation is in places like Ecuador, Venezuela, and Honduras, or even the poorer provinces of Argentina.
    - freejazz 2y ago
      >I wonder why US is not racist against Indians and Chinese. You really can't imagine why American culture treats blacks differently from how it does Indians and Chinese? That says more about your imagination than it does America.
  - naijaboiler 2y ago
    As a person who has been black elsewhere and black in America, the biggest advantage of being foreign born black person is having grown up in an environment where black excellence is not exceptional, it just expected. In the US, inferiority of blackness is so deeply ingrained and entrenched. it's like air, we (blacks, white and everything in between) have all breathed in and fully internalized that we don't even realize its there.
    - kragen 2y ago
      That rings true to me. I couldn't see it until I'd moved to Argentina for a few years, which is also very racist but in a way sufficiently different that I could see the absurdity of the US system of racism from the outside. Dangerous as this is, recognizing my own blindness to my own subconscious racism makes me totally disregard the opinions of people who have lived in the US all their lives on this matter, because I know that 95% of them are looking at the world through the same lens of subconscious prejudice I was, because they've never seen anything different. Reading things like The Color Purple, Black Like Me, and The Autobiography of Malcolm X in my childhood didn't remove that blind spot; if anything, the contrast tempted me to think that racism was pretty much a solved problem in the US, except for a few reactionaries. It wasn't until years of living something fundamentally different that I could start to notice how absurd and pervasive it was.
- pixxel 2y ago
  Did the software suffer? Did you suffer?
  - freejazz 2y ago
    Hmm, what's missing from this list?
- deleted 2y ago
  [deleted]
- golly_ned 2y ago
  I had a chance to see Amazon Hr's organizational dashboard which listed, among other things, the racial breakdown for each VP in the company. BLACK_NA (which I figured means american-born black employees?) in engineering organizations were generally at about 1%. I knew of one black American engineer in my org of about ~150. There was one notable exception: an org based in Virginia with something like 10% or 15%. I figured it was due to black former military and defense workers who had to be on-site in Virginia to work on a specific GovCloud project, part of the JEDI contract effort. I knew of one black engineer who worked on that compared to about ~5 others I knew who worked on that.
nomel 2y ago
I'm software, but towards the hardware side of things, for decades, in silicon valley and elsewhere. I've worked with (as in, in the whole org) exactly zero software/firmware, and only one black hardware engineer (born and raised in Nigeria). I've interviewed a couple hundred people at this point, with only one being black. Where I've been, trying to get some DEI policy to influence who's hired would be impossible, since the panel has to agree, and there's no way they would agree to someone not qualified. Even with pressure like "we really need to hire someone before end of month or we'll lose the req", the response has always been "find better people then".
SirMaster 2y ago
But this discussion is about it being a problem with hiring? There was not a single black student in my graduating class of Software Engineering from college. So is the problem truly with hiring, or is it earlier on. It could also be both. But if none are graduating with a SE degree...
- typon 2y ago
  Just replying to the above comment that seems to suggest that all these DEI jobs are being taken over by "black or Hispanic" people.
deleted 2y ago
[deleted]
svieira 2y ago
While I can think of at least five people I have worked with who were SDEs and black (two from Africa, three from I-don't-know-where-but-I-presume-American-born).
golly_ned 2y ago
I've worked directly (that is, either on the same team or with an immediately neighboring team) with two black engineers. My company historically has had leveling issues and, sadly, they were definitely not meeting expectations for their level, or maybe even for the one below their level. One was nudged out to another team. One currently on my direct team is being nudged out. One or two people want him to be fired (very curmudgeonly engineers who had worked with him), but me and the manager would rather find him new work within the company suited to his background in data science rather than software engineering. He's been dragging his feet; it's getting more and more difficult. The company has a strong and vocal DEIB/social justice culture within certain parts of the company (though I suspect much less so among executives). It sometimes comes into play pretty directly in hiring. I've been in panels where someone calls out that the candidate is part of a disadvantaged population who've historically been under-leveled, though I haven't been in a panel where that made a difference in hiring or leveling. The standard line is that the company doesn't compromise its hiring standards for diversity. I clearly have my doubts about whether that ends up happening in practice.
bigmutant 2y ago
Northrop Grumman had a lot of folks from Crenshaw/Hawthorne/Carson when I was there, due to a partnership program with the local Cal State (Long Beach). All of the security staff was from that area too. Good folks, would 100% work with them again. On the other hand, I've seen exactly 1 guy at the FANG I work at. What's the difference? I think it's companies like Northrop realizing that folks from under-represented communities have great value and prioritize that instead of whatever the current HackerRank-based interview process selects for
DontchaKnowit 2y ago
Idk wtf companies you're working at but in my short career in a small city in the middle of the country where most people are white by a good percentage Ive worked wkth a ton of black developers.

by typon 2y ago

HeyLaughingBoy 2y ago

As a black software engineer, in my entire career working for US companies, I have yet to work with another black software engineer.

kragen 2y ago
As a white software engineer, in my entire career working for US companies, I only ever worked with one black software engineer. He was Nigerian. I believe that this is because the US has a profoundly racist culture; usually this was implicit racism (I only recall ever hearing one overtly racist remark against black people). I also worked with very few Hispanic people. But I worked with lots of Indian and Chinese people, plus Arabs, Pakistanis, etc. Perhaps the US system of racism is less effective against people who had first-class opportunities at education and mentorship before entering the work force? It's still pretty effective — there were lots of times I had Indian and Chinese coworkers and a white boss.
- RestlessMind 2y ago
  > I believe that this is because the US has a profoundly racist culture I wonder why US is not racist against Indians and Chinese. > Perhaps the US system of racism is less effective against people who had first-class opportunities at education and mentorship Are we supposed to believe that only certain societies (like India and China) have these kind of opportunities? Why doesn't Latin America, with 600-700M population, have this kind of opportunity then? > lots of times I had Indian and Chinese coworkers and a white boss. Anecdote - at the last FAANG I worked at, 6 out of 7 people in my management chain were Indian dudes, including the CEO. Also as a matter of statistics, Asians are over-represented in S&P500 leadership positions compared to their share of the US population.
  - kragen 2y ago
    If you've ever been Indian or Chinese in the US, you know the US is racist against you, just not in a way that excludes you from programming work. And, yeah, there's quite a bit of Indian-American senior leadership in Silicon Valley. I live in Latin America now, and the universities almost all suck. Latin America culturally has the idea that universities are for job training and are basically all equivalent. China and, generally speaking, India instead place very high value on education and on good universities, and China also has a massive research budget. Latin America, broadly speaking, has zilch. The result is that in lists like https://www.timeshighereducation.com/world-university-rankings/2024/world-ranking https://www.timeshighereducation.com/world-university-rankin... the top 100 universities include 11 in China, 4 in Singapore (which is largely Chinese), and 0 in Latin America. Most of India's IITs don't appear on that list for some reason, but they should — and the ones that do appear are the wrong ones. Here in Buenos Aires, the University of Buenos Aires was badly damaged by Perón demanding loyalty oaths from the professors, driving those who valued their intellectual freedom out of the university and often out of Argentina entirely. A few years later, it was damaged further by an anti-Peronist military dictatorship attempting to purge it of Peronists https://es.wikipedia.org/wiki/Noche_de_los_Bastones_Largos https://es.wikipedia.org/wiki/Noche_de_los_Bastones_Largos. The first computer in Latin America was lost in the shuffle. Decades of such intermittent political violence disproportionately affected the intellectual classes; the last dictatorship, backed by the US in its secret mass murders of political dissidents, notoriously blamed society's drug problems on "an excess of thinking" among students: https://es.wikipedia.org/wiki/Julio_Bardi#Ministro https://es.wikipedia.org/wiki/Julio_Bardi#Ministro Those intellectuals who could move abroad often did so, including Favaloro, who invented heart bypass surgery after refusing to swear loyalty to Perón, and Chaitin, the discoverer of the random number omega at the heart of computability and the graph-coloring formulation of the compiler register allocation problem. Despite all that, the University of Buenos Aires is still one of the best five or so universities in Latin America. That may give you a clue as to how bad the situation is in places like Ecuador, Venezuela, and Honduras, or even the poorer provinces of Argentina.
  - freejazz 2y ago
    >I wonder why US is not racist against Indians and Chinese. You really can't imagine why American culture treats blacks differently from how it does Indians and Chinese? That says more about your imagination than it does America.
- naijaboiler 2y ago
  As a person who has been black elsewhere and black in America, the biggest advantage of being foreign born black person is having grown up in an environment where black excellence is not exceptional, it just expected. In the US, inferiority of blackness is so deeply ingrained and entrenched. it's like air, we (blacks, white and everything in between) have all breathed in and fully internalized that we don't even realize its there.
  - kragen 2y ago
    That rings true to me. I couldn't see it until I'd moved to Argentina for a few years, which is also very racist but in a way sufficiently different that I could see the absurdity of the US system of racism from the outside. Dangerous as this is, recognizing my own blindness to my own subconscious racism makes me totally disregard the opinions of people who have lived in the US all their lives on this matter, because I know that 95% of them are looking at the world through the same lens of subconscious prejudice I was, because they've never seen anything different. Reading things like The Color Purple, Black Like Me, and The Autobiography of Malcolm X in my childhood didn't remove that blind spot; if anything, the contrast tempted me to think that racism was pretty much a solved problem in the US, except for a few reactionaries. It wasn't until years of living something fundamentally different that I could start to notice how absurd and pervasive it was.
pixxel 2y ago
Did the software suffer? Did you suffer?
- freejazz 2y ago
  Hmm, what's missing from this list?
deleted 2y ago
[deleted]
golly_ned 2y ago
I had a chance to see Amazon Hr's organizational dashboard which listed, among other things, the racial breakdown for each VP in the company. BLACK_NA (which I figured means american-born black employees?) in engineering organizations were generally at about 1%. I knew of one black American engineer in my org of about ~150. There was one notable exception: an org based in Virginia with something like 10% or 15%. I figured it was due to black former military and defense workers who had to be on-site in Virginia to work on a specific GovCloud project, part of the JEDI contract effort. I knew of one black engineer who worked on that compared to about ~5 others I knew who worked on that.

nomel 2y ago

I'm software, but towards the hardware side of things, for decades, in silicon valley and elsewhere. I've worked with (as in, in the whole org) exactly zero software/firmware, and only one black hardware engineer (born and raised in Nigeria). I've interviewed a couple hundred people at this point, with only one being black. Where I've been, trying to get some DEI policy to influence who's hired would be impossible, since the panel has to agree, and there's no way they would agree to someone not qualified. Even with pressure like "we really need to hire someone before end of month or we'll lose the req", the response has always been "find better people then".

SirMaster 2y ago

But this discussion is about it being a problem with hiring? There was not a single black student in my graduating class of Software Engineering from college. So is the problem truly with hiring, or is it earlier on. It could also be both. But if none are graduating with a SE degree...

typon 2y ago
Just replying to the above comment that seems to suggest that all these DEI jobs are being taken over by "black or Hispanic" people.

deleted 2y ago

[deleted]

svieira 2y ago

While I can think of at least five people I have worked with who were SDEs and black (two from Africa, three from I-don't-know-where-but-I-presume-American-born).

golly_ned 2y ago

I've worked directly (that is, either on the same team or with an immediately neighboring team) with two black engineers. My company historically has had leveling issues and, sadly, they were definitely not meeting expectations for their level, or maybe even for the one below their level. One was nudged out to another team. One currently on my direct team is being nudged out. One or two people want him to be fired (very curmudgeonly engineers who had worked with him), but me and the manager would rather find him new work within the company suited to his background in data science rather than software engineering. He's been dragging his feet; it's getting more and more difficult. The company has a strong and vocal DEIB/social justice culture within certain parts of the company (though I suspect much less so among executives). It sometimes comes into play pretty directly in hiring. I've been in panels where someone calls out that the candidate is part of a disadvantaged population who've historically been under-leveled, though I haven't been in a panel where that made a difference in hiring or leveling. The standard line is that the company doesn't compromise its hiring standards for diversity. I clearly have my doubts about whether that ends up happening in practice.

bigmutant 2y ago

Northrop Grumman had a lot of folks from Crenshaw/Hawthorne/Carson when I was there, due to a partnership program with the local Cal State (Long Beach). All of the security staff was from that area too. Good folks, would 100% work with them again. On the other hand, I've seen exactly 1 guy at the FANG I work at. What's the difference? I think it's companies like Northrop realizing that folks from under-represented communities have great value and prioritize that instead of whatever the current HackerRank-based interview process selects for

DontchaKnowit 2y ago

Idk wtf companies you're working at but in my short career in a small city in the middle of the country where most people are white by a good percentage Ive worked wkth a ton of black developers.