I am Brazillian, mixed race, my dad family is from europe, my dad has green eyes, and I can apply for EU citizenship.

My mother family is mixed of black and native american.

Almost every single time I faced discrimination, was because I was "white", for example open hostility by 100% black people assuming that I was "white" and evil or something, or when I was informed I should not apply for affirmative action because I was too white looking, or many, many times I was called racist as soon people saw a picture of me during some argument or another.

To me it is obvious that further segregation and racism, is not the answer to segregation and racism.

I've faced all these things too; I pass for white and have similarly been told I'm not hispanic enough. It's not a simple yes or no kind of situation. It simply can suck in some ways to be all mixed up.

I can't even pass as white, and I'm still excluded from most diversity programs because my race (South Asian) is overrepresented in tech.

However, overrepresentation in tech in Silicon Valley does not necessary translate into societal privilege, or even extend to all places in the US. Like sure, Google's CEO is Indian, but the entire upper layer of management at the company I work at (and a lot of other companies in Middle America) is 100% golf-playing white males with no way to break in. So I'm kinda SOL both in the diversity programs in Silicon Valley / more progressive tech places as well as the golf-and-whisky club at work.

Would like to hear solutions or experiences from other brown South Asians working outside Silicon Valley.

I am in a similar situation, where I have a last name that is clearly "not local", mixed origins, but I'm very white by most standards.

Any sort of intervention will have some negative effects. I'm sorry you are being disadvantaged. Seeing how hostile people can be to others, especially in cases where they are wrong (like yours), shows how bad things have become, imho.

That said, we have to do something. If helping get parity in CS means a few guys get disadvantaged, or some people get otherwise mislabelled, it still helps a ton of people, helps break the systemic issues. In many situations, it's dammed if you do, dammed if you don't. You and I are still very privileged in the end (ex: dual citizenship).

So I'm ready for the downvotes, but its worth it. I don't think it is generally good to look for divisions and more ways to separate from the whole. I don't know if that is because you're out somewhere in super woke SF or similar but you've already used terms like "LatinX" and "person of color" like someone who is already woke but maybe stop for a sec?

Why don't you see yourself as a person who likes CS/tech and likes doing XYZ things with ABC tools? Or maybe believe for a brief second that the "caucasian American", is probably thinking about what show to watch on Netflix rather than some shitty thoughts about how you don't fit in.

I also would be willing to be my bottom dollar that Google of all places doesn't feel like a small town in Sweden. I'm willing to bet there are way too many Asians (yellow and brown) for that to be true.

Also, seriously wtf is LatinX? Seriously.

<--- this author is also an immigrant from that small country north of Peru.

I think you might be reading into what I wrote a bit. This is just how I feel...not how I WANT to feel. Obviously, these are biases and anxieties that exist in my own mixed-race low-income immigrant brain that i wish weren't there. As another latino founder told me..."walk into a VC pitch meeting with the confidence of a tall white man."

Like I don't hate caucasians but sometimes can't help but notice these differences. I also can't just focus on fucking Netflix during an interview! These anxieties and nervousness creep into our heads whether we like it or not!

This sounds like your problem is not so much any actual discrimination as it is the expectation of it, and you are suffering real disadvantages due to that expectation. It might be better to try to reduce your consumption of US culture war content (including this article and discussion thread) and maybe even seek the company of more people who are not constantly preoccupied with it.

People of color don’t have a switch that allows them to turn off the experience of being a person of color. Your comment amounts to a claim that sbilstein is inventing all of the issues he’s faced in life.

If you’re seriously claiming that people of color aren’t treated differently, look at the implicit bias test: https://implicit.harvard.edu/implicit/

It’s a very easily reproducible experiment (you can conduct it on yourself by following the link) that shows that most people respond differently to disadvantaged groups, even if those people are not consciously aware of having bigoted attitudes.

I think that if somebody is telling you they’ve faced discrimination, it shows respect to at least acknowledge the possibility that they are telling the truth and not hallucinating it.

I agree with you, but the implicit bias test has been crumbling under the replication crisis.

https://qz.com/1144504/the-world-is-relying-on-a-flawed-psyc...

https://www.thecut.com/2017/01/psychologys-racism-measuring-...

From that last link: "Both critics and proponents of the IAT now agree that the statistical evidence is simply too lacking for the test to be used to predict individual behavior."

I don't understand how you get that out of my comment. Regardless of what problems the parent poster actually faced, it's clear from their descriptions that (1) at this point they are genuinely experiencing problems from their expectation of discrimination (it's not like the "anxieties and nervousness" creeping into their heads would have any benefit even if the interviewers are in fact biased against them!), and (2) their usage of terms like "LatinX" indicates that they had a lot of exposure to the sort of writings that tell them to expect concealed discriminatory attitudes in everyone - which, even if true, is very unlikely to be a healthy or useful mindset for the putative target of those discriminatory attitudes to have.

I would argue it is comparable to (an outward-oriented version of) body dysmorphic disorder: instead of social anxiety due to the perception that people are disgusted by your appearance, you get social anxiety due to the perception that people hold a negative view of your ethnicity.

I don't know if this will be of any use to you. If you're pitching to VCs, you're already operating way above my level. I also don't know if it's different over here. I live and work in the UK and I'm white. I genuinely don't think I've worked with anyone in the tech industry who cares what race or background their co-workers have.

There's definitely an underrepresentation problem (most grievously with female engineers), but I sincerely believe the problem is mostly systemic, rather than driven by personal prejudice.

From my (limited) perspective, the only thing anyone gives a damn about is whether you're a good developer. If you can code, if you can ship, if you can work well with your other colleagues. Please don't feel like you have you walk into meetings pretending you're somebody else. Walk into meetings with the confidence of a great engineer and founder - because anybody who gives a crap about anything else isn't worth impressing.

With love, from one engineer to another ️

The best athletes in the world still get nervous before games. Same with musicians. I don’t feel meta bad about getting nervous. It just sucks to feel nervous!

As long as the nervousness doesn’t seriously affect the presentation it is ok or even good. I find a bit of adrenaline helps me put my best effort in.

Having lived and worked in the UK for five years, the class system overrides race. You would have to go far down the chain of accent, education, area you live in, people you hang out with and more before you hit race.

There are immigrants at the bottom that feel discriminated against because of race but they miss the basics of the culture and the ones that learn the system excel.

Not being a straight cis white male etc is now a MASSIVE superpower for fundraising and company building. I am happy to help anyone in this bucket for their pitching process if they do not already see that.

Lesson on HN: This comment got a whole bunch of upvotes, and a few hours later, super downvoted. I think we've learned something unfortunate about what the global community here wants to see happen :(

> "walk into a VC pitch meeting with the confidence of a tall white man."

As a tall white man, I find it hilarious you think we are all confident.

As a tall while Caucasian I think you need you have a problem with the environment, not a racial one. I live in Eastern Europe and we don't really know what racism is because we have no history of problems in the past; I had direct reports that were Latino and Latina, Europeans (Caucasians), black (African): they were friends more than subordinates. In Bucharest my South African colleague, the Brazilian one and the Chinese lady are cool and they attract attention in a positive way, they have absolutely no issues living here. I think the problem is the US with the long history of treating poorly other races, not with your race.

Unfortunately, Wikipedia finds your experience to not be universal: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Racism_in_Europe . I hope this continues to change, however!

More relevantly, it is useful to understand the VC process as selling to a mix of individuals. The horrible ones stink and need to be written off. It sucks, but that's life. (You probably don't want to work with them anyway: should you really trust them with your life's work through all the closed door activities that happen?) At the same time, there is a strong wave of individuals and firms that view non-traditional backgrounds as a valuable leading indicator for key difficult aspects of company building. Fundraising is a form of sales. You only really need one yes, so having access to otherwise closed off sources of capital is an amazing advantage.

It's a weird world and something I care about, so I'm genuine in my offer to folks here.

I'm from Eastern Europe, and we absolutely know what racism is.

Just look at Roma.

> I live in Eastern Europe and we don't really know what racism is because we have no history of problems in the past;

Then why do I read stories like this about black soccer players being racially abused?

https://www.euronews.com/2019/11/01/racism-at-the-heart-of-b...

> I also would be willing to be my bottom dollar that Google of all places doesn't feel like a small town in Sweden.

You would win that bet - Google is 54.4% white, 39.8% asian, according to https://diversity.google/annual-report/#!#_this-years-data

The US is 61.5% white, so whites are underrepresented at Google.

I don't think it's reasonable to expect anyone to match the demographics of the entire US unless they have a uniform presence across the entire US, such as one might find with Wal-Mart. It's a big country, and the people tend to aggregate into clumps.

Alphabet keeps about 1/4 of its people in Mountain View. In terms of the demographics of San Francisco metropolitan area, those diversity report numbers likely only slightly overrepresent whites and Asians. Statistically, it is unlikely that Alphabet/Google has a racial bias in hiring, but it certainly has a geographical bias for California.

I might bet a dollar--other than my bottom one--that the offices outside of California all feel like a small town in Silicon Valley.

But what demographics were used to target 50% females?

>Google is 54.4% white, 39.8% asian

it correlates well with what population looks like if you look at the percentiles of 750 Math SAT - 3% of whites, 20% of asian and 1% of the rest of race/ethnicity categories (like African American and Hispanic) make it there:

https://collegereadiness.collegeboard.org/pdf/sat-percentile...

Multiplying by their representation in the overall population, 61% white, 6% asian and 33% for the rest , we can see that the representation at Google is a very close correlate : (3 x 61) / (20 x 6) / (1 x 33) = 183 / 120 / 33 vs. (54.4 / 39.8 / the rest about 6%)

The problem with your stats is that not very long ago, the term "white" essentially referred to a Protestant European. Didn't actually apply to Italians, Greeks, Jews, etc. So if history tells us something is that this will also change.

Also Google's CEO is noticeably anything but white.

Latinx is a term that USA whites prefer to use when referring to hispanic people or people from a country south of the USA.

It eliminates the misogyny that english-language-only whites read into romance languages.

Surveys show that only 2% of the people referred to as "Latinx" prefer that term. So the whole phenomenon is crazy to think about.

https://medium.com/@ThinkNowTweets/progressive-latino-pollst...

>>>Also, seriously wtf is LatinX? Seriously.

As another minority I also looked at the poster's usage of LatinX unironically with surprise, and drew similar conclusions about their "wokeness".

https://www.washingtonexaminer.com/news/98-of-hispanics-and-...

Basic Principles of Respectful Discussion:

1) Assume good faith until you have reason to assume otherwise. Try your best to NOT make assumptions about people's experiences or situations.

2) If someone, particularly a marginalized person, brings up an experience they have had but you have not had, your first impulse should be to hear them out, NOT to invalidate them.

3) Likewise, just because you personally may not have seen or experienced something in this group/in real life, it does not mean that said thing does not happen.

4) Above all, just be good to each other. It can often be difficult to discern tone and intent over the internet, but try not to pounce on each other too quickly.

>If someone, particularly a marginalized person, brings up an experience they have had but you have not had, your first impulse should be to hear them out, NOT to invalidate them.

The fact that the recounter of a first hand experience is a monirity does not mean that their perspective is automatically valid. And it isn't some mortal sin to question or invalidate the conclusions they draw from experience. It drowns out unpopular (but not necessarily untrue) perspectives and stymies productive conversation.

No one deserves special privileges for having a particular skin color or sexuality. This is exactly the kind of unnecessary segregation that the gp is talking about. It's the first steps along the path that leads to some of us being more equal than others and these pedestals we place minorities on are doing far more harm than good.

> I absolutely observe bias in hiring processes and recruiting

Ok, see, this assertion bugs me. The linked post SPECIFICALLY talks about biasing hiring and recruiting in favor of women. Diversity efforts, by definition, are hiring and recruiting bias, but for supposedly benevolent reasons. But you’re dismissing that and implying that there are subtle, hidden, unremovable biases that only certain people are capable of even seeing. If somebody were to suggest that you’re imagining things, there’s no way to test your theory against theirs, since you’re begging the question (in the original philosophical sense).

Even if it is in the imagination of the interviewee, it's still evidence that the interview is failing at its job of assessing who could be successful in the job.

> it's really hard for non-POC to understand the more subtle parts of what sucks about interviewing.

I get it. Interviewers still think they should evaluate how a candidate will "fit into our culture" without any examination of what that means. For a lot of teams that still translates to "same shows, same games, same fondness for happy hours, same comfort for vaguely inappropriate jokes". If a candidate doesn't seem to fit into that sort of "culture", it's easy to pass them over for the next one.

There are many stories of people who had horrible experiences with Google interviews. White people get anxious, too. You acknowledge yourself that those feelings may be irrational, but nevertheless I wanted to point out that you don't really know what it is like for white people going through those interviews. White people are not automatically being hired, either.

I'm relatively new to the US, can anyone explain why Asians or LatinX people born in the US in middle-class families should get better treatment than "white" immigrants who recently came from poor Eastern European countries?

Don't you think it is racist to actually care about the race of the interviewer? Would you even think about that if there wasn't a non-stop conversation about racial differences? Maybe the nonsense diversity discussion is only making it worse by creating anxieties that wouldn't even be there?

> I absolutely observe bias in hiring processes

It's interesting that you went on to describe your bias against white interviewers. It's going to be quite difficult for white people to hire non-white people into their organization if non-white people are biased against performing well for white interviewers.

Since you can find bias everywhere, that means there is lots of room for improvement everywhere. But when you talk about bias at the university level, isn't that evidence in favor of there being a pipeline problem? From a hiring company's point of view, that is. For a university, high schools are their pipeline.

Sorry if it wasn't clear in my comment. Yes, absolutely there is a pipeline problem. There is also a bias problem. Both those things are true.

I wish I knew what to do to help ameliorate the anxieties you've experienced, because as the white guy giving the interviews, I'm terrified that something about my approach or demeanor is enhancing those anxieties in my candidates (and I've seen entirely too many promising candidates wash out where I had to put as my feedback "I think they can do this, but they couldn't do it during the interview, and I suspect they got too nervous").

What can I do to do better?

Hispanic here. I interviewed with Google and I did terribly bad. I was surprised how nice and patient my interviewer was. There is a lot of self imposed pressure as this is Google. I felt the interview went from 0 to 60MPh really fast. My mind was blocked instantly. I also needed to study specifically for this. It seems that on the job experience is not enough. You really need to train for it.

This is the same for almost all candidates of all races and genders.

https://careers.google.com/how-we-hire/interview/#interviews...

> Even tho I grew up in the states and have been around white people my entire life...there is something about the way most caucasian Americans telegraph (or don't) feelings and communicate during a technical interview that put me totally on edge.

Anything specific that white interviewers could do differently to make you feel more at ease?

> It felt like the 'whitest' place ever and that everyone I spoke to was Linus Torvalds or James Damore or someone like that.

Well yeah, it's Google, so that's possible. Or maybe the company is large enough now that those kinds of high level individuals are diluted in their engineering pool? But it certainly had that reputation early on, that any random person interviewing you could be top in their field of expertise.

> The fact they didn't seem coached to be friendly added dramatically to that effect.

Hah, yeah, that's very much part of the culture. Having the best argument or data or working code matters. Not how politely you talk about it.

Which can certainly have its advantages, as long as everyone can let go of personally identifying with their idea once they are convinced of a better one. Then it can be a real positive.

Working on anxiety can be life changing. I highly recommend the book "When Panic Attacks" by Dr. David Burns. In fact just the other day Dr. Burns had as a guest on his "Feel Good" podcast a tech guy who was rebuilding his web site (https://feelinggood.com/) in exchange for help with his anxieties. In a nutshell, the guy was a "handsome, successful, Yale educated, British" guy who was suffering from anxieties in social situations. Dr. Burns also has a book called "Feeling Good" which is geared more towards depression. Burns is one of the pioneers in cognitive behavior theory. If you're suffering from anxiety and/or depression I highly recommend his books/website/podcast - I will also note that Dr. Burns promotes drug free and rapid recovery that can be accomplished in many cases through "bibliotherapy" - e.g. just by reading a book and , most importantly, doing the exercises/work he recommends.

I'm asking to better understand - can you think of ways to make an interview process more comfortable? What about 'blind' remote interviews (ie, no video, but audio)?

The company that wrote this blogpost, which I work for part-time, does exactly that. I think it's a massive improvement.

I like this idea, but what makes it different from a phone call? I avoid video chat whenever I can. I don't want to see myself in the screen. When I can just speak to an interviewer on the phone, I do better.

We do a shared code editor and VoIP. It really helps to not be able to see any facial expressions IMO. I've done like a hundred or so of these interviews.

Awesome! I hope more companies begin to do the same!

Voice interviews are biased against non-native speakers of the company's language.

That could be true, but communication has to be a point of evaluation for most jobs.

>As for bias in interviewing, I think it's really hard for non-POC to understand the more subtle parts of what sucks about interviewing. Even tho I grew up in the states and have been around white people my entire life...there is something about the way most caucasian Americans telegraph (or don't) feelings and communicate during a technical interview that put me totally on edge. I get anxious with the 'Zuck' white guy personality type and somehow these feelings of being poor, being bilingual, going to a shit public school, etc bubble up in my head while I'm trying to rotate a binary tree. The two times I interviewed onsite at Google I couldn't escape the feeling. It felt like the 'whitest' place ever and that everyone I spoke to was Linus Torvalds or James Damore or someone like that. The fact they didn't seem coached to be friendly added dramatically to that effect.

You've described me perfectly. Except that I'm an anxious, pale-skinned, Jewish guy from rural Oregon who was bullied throughout high school for being, I dunno, skinny, pale, and awkward. This has resulted in a lot of self-worth issues, social anxiety, and major depression, which I struggle with to this day, nearly 15 years after high school. I have been interviewing for high-level companies for the past year and...have not secured a single offer, probably because I suck at interviewing, but who the hell knows?

Anyway, I get what you're saying about the "Zuck" personality type, and that's refreshing for you to mention. I, too, am pretty intimidated by some of the people you describe. I am sorry that they make you feel that way. They probably don't intend to. Anyway, the point I'm trying to make is that there are a LOT of "non-POC" people, AKA Zuckerberg-looking folks, who are incredibly anxious and just want you to smile at them and try to get to know them as a _human being_. I don't want to be grouped together with all the people in this country that have light skin. It's not fair to me.

I suspect that some of the "non-POC" people (why don't you just say white people?) COULD wrongfully see you as an intended "diversity hire", and need to "prove your worth" accordingly, which is racist and wrong. But the problem is that the narrative you're putting forth is encouraging companies to take measures to make the workplace more diverse. If you follow this idea down the rabbit hole, I think it will hurt people that look like me, who have no acceptable "race card" to play. And that's OK. But down the road, it's going to lead to more racial friction. I don't want to be put into a racial box based on my phenotypes. What if there was a form of affirmative action that led to more anxious and depressed people getting better jobs? For a few minutes it sounds awesome, but it's probably the wrong way to go about things, because I think it would lead to animosity between neurotypical people and, to use a woke term, the "neurodiverse".

In my experience, making an interview less biased is not about color of skin. It's about comfort and acknowledging how these anxieties creep up. At big companies I've worked at, we coached interviewers to do at least 5 minutes of small talk and resume review, to smile, to always leave time for questions at the end, to show some amount of enthusiasm for the work the interviewee is doing.

It's not about an interview format for a different race but interviews that take into account how being the odd person out may make it harder than it needs to be. In my ideal process, that helps everyone have a better interview.

When I was at Google, interviewing was considered everybody's job, but without any particular benefit from doing them. They'd just try to guilt you into doing them. (I think they'd try to guilt some people harder than others, though.)

I think this is a mistake. Interviewing is a teaching/sales role and many people need coaching to come across as friendly. They aren't going to get that coaching if they see it primarily as an obligation.

I did them for many years out of a feeling of obligation, but if I got better at it, it was slowly, and with diminishing returns. It was just more of the same experience.

So much this. I don’t mind running interviews, but I don’t think I’m particularly good at running them, especially in the “making the candidate feel comfortable” angle. With engineering having such an outsized proportion of introverts and, for the lack of a better term, oddballs, we could take a better look at who _should_ be interviewing.

Yea, I’m white and I feel I have less in common with the Ivy League Zuckerbro personality than I have with poor and working class folks like who I grew up with. When I see my interviewer has two popped collars under his Stanford sweater I can instantly feel the anxiety growing. I think to myself “the minute I open my mouth he’s going to hear the mining town and farm work coming out.” It’s more about cultural background and not about race.

Thank you for understanding where I'm coming from and sharing this point. I've def had friends who corroborate this experience as well.

> At big companies I've worked at, we coached interviewers to do at least 5 minutes of small talk

For some people that causes anxiety, the exact opposite of comfort.

What is the "Zuck" personality type? Zuck is famous for being a supposed Aspie robot in front of Congress, quite an "anxious, pale-skinned, Jewish guy" as you write

Or are we talking about the personality type of a movie character pretending to be Zuck?

Torvalds is Finnish

Although his family was part of the Swedish speaking minority.

As a fellow Latin American, I find "LatinX" offensive.

English already has a gender neutral adjective to refer to us, Latin, and therefore Latin American.

LatinX means you've internalized the colonialization of white "liberals" [0] who would refer to us as Latinos or Latinas while speaking English to show off their poor Spanish and therefore pretend to be sophisticated and woke.

[0] I don't consider liberal bad or good, just that the people who use latino/a/X seem to self-identify as liberals.

I too hate the term LatinX but it's become the preferred term around so many I know that I'd rather just conform than argue about it. Just cause I used it doesn't mean I endorse it.

I upvoted your reply to my "Impose yourself" comment. Specifically the "Choose my battles".

I get it. I live in the mid-West. Most people haven't heard the neologism. My parents (well educated, sophisticated people) certainly hadn't.

SV is different.

But culturally where I live doesn't matter. We accept the culture. If SV adopts LatinX, then all Latin Americans will have to adopt it.

Imagine being referred to be a noun that you hate! (well you're a visible minority, so I guess you're more aware of this than I).

We despise -nX. I'm willing to adopt your "Latines" as a compromise. But I'll die refusing to use that X ("X" is dehumanizing, as if we're a mere unknown in an eq.)

lol I just moved to NYC and you bet I’m not gonna say LatinX in a fucking bodega. When in Rome.

You're Latin American! Impose the right terminology!

This is cultural colonialism from the, typically WASP, urban elite. Who possibly finds Spanish's gendered pronouns annoying? How many are them are native Spanish speakers? And yet they feel slighted and therefore try to impose their (typically poor) Spanish on us!

They ignore that, technically, Spanish has three genders (the neutral which is almost, but not completely, withered away; see "esto/este/esta"). So, even in Spanish, "Latin" would be a far more correct gender neutral form.

They ignore that objects can have multiple genders according to the synonyms used to refer to them.

They ignore that linguistic "gender" has little to do with gender, the term appears to have been coined by Aristotle to refer to sets of nouns, which largely follow gender when applied to people.

Why are on Earth are we accepting of unpronounceable adjectives and nouns (the -nX soup of constants being especially unpronounceable for us native Spanish speakers!)

For real, I've looked into this and in LatAm some people prefer Latines as the neutral collective noun. I like that myself cause I'm down with gender neutrality but everyone thinks it's a fucking typo so I give up.

Outside of the Bay Area tech scene, I can't imagine I would ever use LatinX in Spanish conversation. I choose my battles.

I don't understand what's wrong with the terms "Latino", "Latina", and "Hispanic". These are _Spanish_ words, and we're speaking English, so it doesn't make much sense to invent new words just to appease the tiny activist trans community on Twitter.

That only just occurred to me as I was reading OP's comment. The construction of "LatinX" has always bothered me for how contrived and nonstandard it is, but I think what's really been getting under my skin is that it's entirely superfluous. The meaning is entirely legitimate but since the word for it already exists I can't see any purpose for such a weird new one other than signaling woke group affiliation.

I read a recent poll that 90% of Latin Americans don't like the term.

The poll is here [0]. It was discussed recently in an NYT oped here [1]. It was an interesting result that definitely altered my opinion.

[0] https://medium.com/@ThinkNowTweets/progressive-latino-pollst...

[1] https://www.nytimes.com/2019/11/05/opinion/latinix-warren-de...

Wait, that question is awful. As a Hispanic person, I would also put "Hispanic" but that doesn't put into context why. If someone sees me, reads my name, and uses that to refer to me as Latinx, I wouldn't be offended at all, and would prefer Latinx over something like Hispanic.

Oh yes. Hispanic is the correct term when speaking English.

Latinx is a sign of wanting to show off Spanish (to virtue signal) but actually being intolerant of the way the language works. Values collided, and thus Latinx was born. Using the correct term, Hispanic, just wasn't an option.

As a Brazilian Latin American, there's nothing Hispanic about me or my people. Most of us are some mixture of European (primarily Italian or Portuguese), African, indian (as in the native people of South America) descendents. Our official language is Portuguese.

So you're Brazilian.

Latinx, Latino, Latina are not normally used for all Latin-based languages. Italians and French don't qualify either, despite being Latin-based. (Quebec???) It's also not race; the Cherokee do not qualify even if of mixed ancestry. Really it is just a synonym for Hispanic.

Please keep internet psychiatric diagnosis off HN.

https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=all&page=0&prefix=true&que...

https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html

It's not psychiatry, it's psychology. Not even remotely I'm making an attempt to diagnose a psychiatric pathology as in no way I'm qualified to do that. You are giving me more credit than I actually deserve.

I mean "psychiatric" ironically rather than literally—adding "internet" to a word is sort of an instant ironizer. You can read it as "psychological diagnosis" if you like. The point is that making remarks about someone's psychological issues as you perceive them, suggesting that they need therapy and so on, is unduly personal. It crosses a line that is better not to cross, even if you're right, because it frequently lands with the other person as a kind of violation or attack.

We don't know nearly enough about each other from an online text forum to be able to make personal statements, so making them is presumptuous. If there's a substantive point beyond that, it should be easy to express in an impersonal way, and if there isn't, not posting anything is a better option.

If you read the comments at https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=all&page=0&prefix=true&que... you'll see a history of explanations about this.

Ah that's a well written and thoughtful response to my comment. Thank you for that! However I can’t say I agree with the trigger premise though, even if suggestion perceived as personal. Psychological problem suggestions, gentle nudges if you will, are inherently beneficial even if those generate a defensive response. Defensive response is a response! That response is a deliberate thought in itself, an analysis. In modern, developed societies, it seems that the only appropriate time to suggest therapy is when the following sentence includes a suicide hotline phone number, how crazy is that? Therapy or any psychological self-care should be normal, and not in any way different from a regular, scheduled visit to the dentist.

From my perspective this line of thinking makes more sense for in-person contact, where it's possible to read the other person's state more accurately and get a feel for whether or not one's helpful suggestions are actually helpful or not. What matters is not the message you send, but the message the other person receives, and a lot can change from one to the other.

Here on an internet forum, we have almost no information about each other. The risk of such comments doing more harm than good is much higher, partly because the potential for misunderstanding is so high, and also because people have often used this language in snarky ways, for personal attacks, and so on.

That doesn't mean you can't reach out to someone you're genuinely concerned for, but the burden in that case is on you to disambiguate your intention from anything presumptuous or malicious, and that requires a different communication style—much less generic and casual.

I agree with the sentiment that maybe therapy would be helpful for the OC, but speaking as a woman, I have a similar problem. Growing up my dad used my thoughts and emotions as weapons against me so "showing my thought process" to strangers that are men in a high stakes environment like an interview is incredibly crippling. I tend to disassociate once I'm uncomfortable and I'm not able to recover in the span of an interview session. I do attend therapy myself, but it's a very slow process to heal from years of emotional abuse.

I recognize my own experience is more on the extreme end, but SWE and related interviews could be more mindful of different life experiences in general.

You deserve better and I wish you as speedy a recovery as possible. It's going to be quite difficult for interviewers and coworkers to work around an injury that you and the professionals you work with have been yet unable to heal.

Your cultural beliefs and intuitions ARE personal issues and biases. They are challenging to overcome. Racist people don't get to being racist by reading a blog post or two; they develop and internalize it over time like any cultural trait. Same goes for these anxieties people of color feel.

It's ignorant to not realize that all of these things are mental. Duh, therapy helps. Trust me, every single person of color who works in tech and sees a therapist talks through all this stuff with their practitioner.

Also, people of color are often racist, and white people often have anxieties.

I’m not sure I follow, I don’t think that if a white guy is present during your interview, he is automatically racist? What I got from your post is that you are having problems during interviews because you are not comfortable with white people conducting your interviews. It’s sounds like you are automatically assume that white interviewers are racist? You are broadly generalizing people who happened to be white which does not sound good any way you look at it.

"Please respond to the strongest plausible interpretation of what someone says, not a weaker one that's easier to criticize. Assume good faith."

Everyone on HN deserves that, but considering how even-keeled and respectful sbilstein's posts have been in this thread, on so sensitive a topic, I'd suggest 10x.

https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html

Huh? I'm not sure where you are reading that.

I'm saying that any internalized biases, anxieties, etc are deeply personal whether you are of an in group or an out group. It's totally a mental thing for me to get psyched out in an interview so of course therapy helps.

It's deeply personal but it's also something I know anecdotally is common amongst my peers of similar background. I'm pointing it out as one of the ways an interview can be unintentionally biased.

'Stereotype threat' anxiety is a well-known and well-documented phenomenon at this point. https://www.apa.org/research/action/stereotype

It is very well documented. In fact, it is the shining example of the replication crisis in psychology.

Here's from Michael Inzlicht, one of the people who started stereotype threat research in the first place:

> I edited an entire book on stereotype threat, I have signed my name to an amicus brief to the Supreme Court of the United States citing stereotype threat, yet now I am not as certain as I once was about the robustness of the effect. I feel like a traitor for having just written that; like, I’ve disrespected my parents, a no no according to Commandment number 5. But, a meta-analysis published just last year suggests that stereotype threat, at least for some populations and under some conditions, might not be so robust after all. P-curving some of the original papers is also not comforting. Now, stereotype threat is a politically charged topic and I really really want it to be real. I think a lot more pain-staking work needs to be done before I stop believing (and rumor has it that another RRR of stereotype threat is in the works), but I would be lying if I said that doubts have not crept in. ...

http://michaelinzlicht.com/getting-better/2016/2/29/reckonin...

It only got worse since 2016.

I can't believe you are openly racist enough to claim that interviews are unfair because you have to be interviewed by white people (who you would have to work with every day if you were hired). If I said that I was uncomfortable being interviewed by latinos what do you think the reaction would be?

You've broken the site guidelines badly here. Would you please review them and stick to the spirit of this site when posting to HN? Note this in particular:

"Please respond to the strongest plausible interpretation of what someone says, not a weaker one that's easier to criticize. Assume good faith."

https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html

In this case what is the stronger interpretation? He cites and example of "bias in interviewing" but does not point to any biased action of the interviewers, but rather the fact that they are of a different race, which makes him uncomfortable. The obvious interpretation, that an interview conducted by people of a certain race is inherently biased against him. Calling this "bias in interviewing" also carries the connotation that this is the company's fault and their responsibility to fix. In this case, that they should exclude people from the interview team based on race to reduce interviewee anxiety. If the poster I replied to had only mentioned that he got anxiety around white interviewers without the accusation that this constitutes bias against him I would not have responded that way.

That's not at all what I said. I related a very personal set of anxieties (largely irrational) that I feel as a minority.

Plenty of white people are uncomfortable around minorities. Do they all love that feeling? I'm confident most feel intense guilt about it and never act on those impulses in any way. Just having a 'racist' feeling doesn't make someone racist.

> Just having a 'racist' feeling doesn't make someone racist.

I would argue that that is exactly what racism is. It's having an irrational feeling towards someone and assuming they have characteristics based solely on their race. Why is it so hard to judge people on a case-by-case basis? By your own admission you say that these personal anxieties are irrational and then you go on to attribute it to being a minority. If instead you attribute it to yourself personally, it becomes a problem that you can solve for yourself rather than an affliction of which you are victim to. There are plenty of minorities (myself included) who don't feel this way.

False dichotomy. Some people may feel the weight of group membership more than others. Just cause group membership is the cause does not imply there is no personal solution. It’s both. I’m not gonna solve this for everyone but I can solve it for myself. It’s stupid to ignore my upbringing and blame it instead on just personal failure.

Group membership is not the cause.. that's exactly the kind of reasoning that leads to racism. The cause is you believing your identity comes first from being a member of a group rather than being an individual first.

No group dictates the characteristics of the individuals in that group. Instead, the emergent quality of individuals that belong to a group can give that group a stereotype. However, being the unique individual that you know you are, you're capable of shattering any and all of those stereotypes! You're right that you can solve it for yourself; focus on that opportunity/growth mindset! Don't let anyone tell you how you should think/act because of your group "membership"

I don't really care whether or not your feelings constitute "racism," but I don't hold it against you. What I call racist is that you suggest an interview by people of a different race is biased against you.

No he didn't.

But it very well might be (biased against him).

Racism exists. Racism is widespread. People in populations that are targeted by racism are much more familiar with what racism is present than those of us in untargeted populations. Much racism is subtle and implicit.

If you can logically accept those statements, then I don't see how you can claim to know how likely the presence of bias might be. And worrying about something that could actually be true is not racism. Even if the reasons involve race. Assuming that the interviewers are thinking X or will do Y because they are white is racist. Worrying that they might is probably just being realistic.

Again, though, I am the one making this argument that you are declaring to be racist. The person you replied to wasn't. He was just expressing an anxiety he experiences, and wasn't even speculating on how likely that anxiety might be based on reality.

Your statements are irrelevant because he didn't claim that there was any racism against him in the interviews. Only that the interviewers were a different race and that made h

That would be the "no he didn't" that I started with.

>Plenty of white people are uncomfortable around minorities.

Pretty glaring assumption there.

> however as someone who majored in CS it's undeniable that we have far less women and minorities going through these programs.

Why should there be predetermined amount of women or "minorities" in these programs? Who says that's how it should be?

Is this true for all jobs in the world, or just in "these" programs? If so, who chose these particular programs to be "special"?

If not, where is the "fight" for all the other jobs like plumbing, oil drilling, special forces in combat, working on top of 35+ story buildings? Why is nobody counting in those fields?

Those are the things I like to think about whenever I hear something that makes no sense.

Some of these are lower status, and often lower paying, jobs. Others, such as special forces, DO have people pushing for women to be included.

Those fighting for equality are focused on getting equality in great careers, and that's why they're focused on SWE jobs over oil drilling.

You might disagree with them because you think being a plumber really is a good career. You'd probably be right, but that's not how society sees it. Society sees SWE jobs as being much much better, and so that's what's being fought for first.