Hacker News Reader

Comment by falsestprophet | Hacker News Reader

"tech is very very white"

Sure tech is generally non-black, but there are load of East Asians and South Asians. It's not exactly the Augusta National Golf Club.

There are a lot of places in corporate information technology in the US where tech is "very very" Indian and a white or black or hispanic person may very well be the only non-Indian (or even US citizen or permanent resident) in the room or on the team.

View on HN

You are correct. My current place of employment is very Indian. In many ways, however, there is less tension in those situations. Often times whites tend to treat non whites in a certain manner that is less than... Now, I am not trying to paint all whites in tech with a broad brush (even if I sounds very much like I am). White people are cool with me, and if I'm to be honest, I have more white friends right now than I do black. So please, understand I am not trying to say "All white people...". I'm not angry. I am instead giving an honest assessment of my experience in tech for the last 15 years, and how it may relate to this story.

It does vary quite a bit. I've found that the startup scene in SF is extremely white comparatively to the enterprise software company that I work for in SF.

The point still stands though if you replace the word "white" with "non-black / hispanic". There are vast cultural and systemic barriers that some minorities go through in the United States (black / latino) to get to becoming a software engineer, and not others (Asian).

Agreed. Even in a metro with very low Asian population, we have a lot of Asian workers in my I.T. department and it seems to be the case for other companies nearby. Probably we are about 65% non-Hispanic white (including eastern europeans and foreign workers in that number), 30% Asian (about half Asian and half east Asian, with a few southeast Asians), 5% black and Hispanic.

Very very east Asian is also common.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com