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Comment by CyanLite2 | Hacker News Reader

Occam's Razor says that they aren't a lot of black people in STEM positions because companies aren't hiring black people in STEM positions. There are plenty of black candidates applying to FAANG companies only to be rejected because "they don't fit in with the culture" or they "weren't Google-y enough", or "they couldn't write a depth-first-search algorithm in less than 2 seconds in front of a whiteboard ("white board" pun fully intended) so they must not be smart." Over enough time, those parents go on to have kids who then encourage those kids to go elsewhere and invest their study time in other areas where they know they can be successful.

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For context: I am Black.

I think it’s a pipeline problem. How many Blacks are graduating from top schools in STEM? I didn’t graduate from a top school at all. But that was back in the mid 90s and by choice. I just needed a degree. I knew I could get a job and be competitive with anyone being self taught in both C and a variety of assembly languages.

I just got a job at Amazon under AWS Professional Services. I got a customer facing role as a Black guy. If there were going to be discrimination, that would be where it would be. Because of Covid, the interview was completely virtual. I’m coming from a long 25 year career of working for mostly small companies that no one has ever heard of. All of my AWS experience came from a company with less than 50 people.

I can honestly say that I don’t think I have ever been discriminated against in hiring. I have had maybe 3 rejections in 25 years, plenty of interviews and since I only use recruiters, my resume doesn’t go through the ATS black hole.

I'm black too, but I've had the opposite experience. Turned down at Google, Microsoft, and a few other Top N tech companies. Is it because I'm black? Probably not. But throughout all of the interviews, I've never met or seen another black engineer on the teams, let alone interviewed by one. It's hard enough to get through the hackerrank-style "gotcha" questions, but it's even harder to feel connected to an interviewer who wants to talk about their team culture in terms of rollerblading or playing sandlot volleyball.

My virtual interviews with AWS were very structured and very much focused on soft skill questions and “describe your projects”. My only technical interview was the first one before I went through “the loop”.

Anyone who studied for the AWS Architect Associate could pass it.

Of course, I did have a resume that showed a lot of real world experience with AWS in particular and leading technical projects in general -thanks to working at small companies.

I wouldn’t make it past the first 10 minutes of an algorithm style interview for a software dev position at $BigTech at this point in my life. I knew my way in would be through the consulting department.

Do you think you're too old to put the month in grinding leetcode or just don't have the time?

Why would I? I got a job at Amazon (AWS Consulting) paying the same amount as a software engineer and it is a remote position that allows me to live in a relatively low cost of living area.

I did nothing special to prepare to work for Amazon. I just did my job, gained experience, and made sure I could answer soft skill questions based on the “Leadership Principles”.

I wasn’t even thinking about working at Amazon pre-Covid before my company had across the board pay cuts. My company made the announcement, the next day a recruiter from Amazon emailed me and I thought “Why Not?” They asked me to put in an application. I did it and a month and a half later I had an offer.

I definitely didn’t spend months “grinding leetCode” like the fresh college grads over at r/cscareerquestions.

It seems one of the most insidious effects of racism is the nagging feeling when a job interview doesn't work out, or someone was rude to you, in the back of your mind wondering if racial bias had anything to do with it. Even if one could keep a relatively accurate accounting, just having to constantly process this being a real possibility would be exhausting.

I disagree. Most companies are actually trying to INCREASE diversity, be it based on skin colour or gender. So it may actually be much EASIER to get accepted in this companies if you are black.

I know in some STEM fields (not all in STEM is CS), you have MUCH MUCH higher chances to land a good job at a big company if you are female. But being female in medicine or law buys you nothing since there is no imbalance.

Of course everybody says they're TRYING to increase diversity, but none have actually DONE it. But not because there's a lack of qualified diverse candidates applying there. If they wanted to solve the problem, they could, but it's not a priority for them. Facebook grew their overall employee base by nearly 400% over the past 6 years, but their percentage of black employees only grew by 0.8%.

https://www.cnbc.com/2020/06/12/six-years-into-diversity-rep...

Growing from 3% to 3.8% is 26% growth over 5 years or roughly 5% per year. That's incredibly far away from "none have actually DONE it". If you could solve systemic problems in just 5 years then why hasn't anyone done it over the last 200 years?

By the way the facebook data is only from 2014 to 2019. The headline is misleading when you only look at facebook.

Yeh you'd think that but if the interviewer doesn't like you doesn't even matter. When I graduated a few years ago I made a spreadsheet to see why. The strongest predictor wasn't how well I think I did out of 10, or hours of prep I did before hand. There were certain people regardless of what I need gave me 100% rejection. I'm not saying it was prejudice, but it was a very clear pattern.

Dude, nobody is worse in getting a job than me. But let me tell you a few things:

1. Mostly it is how much people like you and how much they share with you.

2. 1st class people hire 1st class people, 2nd class people hire 3rd class people

3. Being rejected tells nothing about you. The guy they hired tells a lot about the company.

Nitpick, FAANG hasn't been around nearly long enough to have enough parents with workforce age children for this to be true. Especially not for them to have gone through recent (last 5-10 years) interview processes that people complain about.

I know some of the first Black software engineers at Facebook and none of them have kids (they're early 30s). The rest of it is true, people are discouraged both by bias in interviews and internal promotion/politics.

Apple and Microsoft have both been around since the early 80s. Yes I realize that Microsoft isn’t included in the FAANG acronym, but it’s much larger than Netflix.

True, this could apply to Apple or Microsoft. Microsoft especially had poor interview practices in the past (lightbulb puzzle style brainteasers). Anecdotally I don't know of any Black parents that discouraged their children from going into tech due to a poor or biased interview experience. I know many Black engineers with a parent that was an engineer and encouraged them to go into th field. Lack of awareness, many people did not know computer programmer was a job growing up, is a bigger issue.

That’s true. I grew up in the 80s with an Apple //e. I was programming in Basic and assembly by the time I hit high school. But, that was only because my mom knew college professors that could find books from other colleges - there was no internet back then.

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