I’m Black. I’m 46 years old. I won’t discount your experience, but let me tell you mine.

I started programming in assembly in middle school in the mid 80s. I graduated from an unknown state school - an HBCU with a degree in CS in the mid 90s.

I muddled my way between two jobs until 2008 when I started taking my career seriously.

Over the last 12 years, I’ve had plenty of interviews and I am on my 6th job since 2008. I have had very few rejections. I think maybe three. I always use local recruiters so my resume has never disappeared down a black hole.

I have had the Dev lead position at $1 Billion revenue (non software) company, then a back end “cloud architect”, and now I work as a consultant at AWS. I have never once gone into a job interview with a doubt that I was qualified or that I would get the job.

I don’t hide my color on the Internet. In the appropriate threads, I always say that I am Black.

I haven't read the comments but...

I'm black and a developer (not just a dev, I'm a full stack, audiovisual generalist, animation, motion graphics, ui/ux, illustrator), started in the end 90s and professionally since 2008?!

Got no idea if I ever been put aside because of my skin colour, but my photo and stuff is public for anybody prior to any interview and stuff - so if that happened, great, fuck them, I don't want to have to deal with them.

I also don't wear suits and stuff like that, and for a lot of years I used to take my skateboard to interviews and always spoke my mind.

My afro is also huge, I also wear whatever I want, but managed to work in a fintech where people wear suits and stuff.

I do know that may pay is usually lower then other people but don't think that's related to my skin colour but because I don't do any ass licking! Or maybe because I'm shit :)

My biggest problem nowadays is that there are a lot of people in the scene for money and this obsession for long recruitment processes, literally putting people in risk of being homeless. I also find that this same people expect you to behave in a certain way and have a "certain culture" - there are countless youtube videos of people offering what seems to be tutorials on what to say in interviews, etc - I find that absolutely ridiculous and inhuman! Sick and sad people!

So that's who I relate with, good people, people who work hard and still struggle even though! But yes, of course I'd like to see other people like me once in awhile too.

Friend, I truly appreciate your candor.

About the whole "culture" thing, it's b.s. you find anywhere from a small time stret gang to the board room of a multinational. It's easier if you b.s. and act fake like everyone else,but also if you don't and you are original and strategically "real" enough,it can play to your advantage. Worker bees that don't behave like other worker bees either don't get the big picture or get the big picture better than everyone else.

> I’ve been passed up for promotions, fired, and hired based solely on my color.

But... But how do you know that's the color thing? It could be nepotism, management incompetence or any other reason.

Many of the things you mention to have experienced, I too have experienced. Only I am white, working in a largely caucasian environment.

Thanks for your comment. I'm not blakc, but I agree that reading some of these comments is quite depressing and proves that we have a long way to go on race issues in tech.

It might simply be that "comments promoting allyship" are off-putting. They very easily become preachy, and if it feels like a third party inserting themselves and telling me what to think, I get irritated. The comments by the black programmers in this thread are a million times more interesting. Sometimes I feel like all the loudest voices in this debate are white and that just has to be wrong.

I don't mean this to make an argument, I just heard you about feeling frustrated and wanted to offer a possible explanation.

Accusations of virtue signalling (becoming preachy) are a pretty common way to dismiss people arguing that systemic racism is a problem. What's further frustrating is that last I checked, the debates are raging far more in threads like this one, while the black programmers telling their experiences were comparatively empty of comments.

It's a manifestation of cognitive dissonance. High intelligence leads to the ability to rationalize almost anything. Ideas posited in this thread threaten some people's conception of themselves and the world ("I am not racist, I treat everyone fairly, the world is a just place"). When people's identity and worldview is threatened, they try to annihilate that threat (usually not violently, but that occurs also e.g. violence against trans people). That's what is happening in the comments here - arguments about semantics without addressing the whole point of the testimony.

Did you always work in large corporates or have you experienced the same biases in smaller companies too?

> I’ve been passed up for promotions, fired, and hired based solely on my color

"solely". It's easy to pin point a problem on others.

This might come in handy - https://twitter.com/shreyas/status/1276956836856393728?s=20

I would like to respond to you directly. Another comment that was downvoted said something very similar.

I do not blame race on everything. Numerous jobs I have been hired solely because of my skills. I have been fired because I slacked off too hard. I have missed promotions because I could only see my positives and not my negatives. I have the experience I do from working at many different IT shops.

Part of what happened recently has to do with the fact that the company makes diversity a key deciding factor. My previous roles show a clear footpath in the direction they desired. To have someone of lesser skill promoted in front of me and then not spend any time to groom me to move up as well is a huge slap to my face. I gave up my revenue generating business to take this opportunity, so please forgive me if I’m a bit jaded at this point.

I know what I can do, and I never look a gift horse in the mouth. I am blessed to be employed right now.. but bet your ass as soon as this virus passes I’m out and will be back to schmoozing investors. Probably with better results than my last 3 years combined (EDIT: and very likely because of company XYZ being on my resume. But change needs to start from the top and I’m not gonna hang around forever to wait. I’m rambling now so it’s probably time to get off the internet)

It's also easy to be dismissive on the internet. Please don't do that here.

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

Disclaimer - english is not my first language

Hey dang,

I am curious. what could I have done better?

if OP said he is suffering "solely" because of his colour and I think, its borderline impossible to pin point a result of large complex system on any one thing?

P.S. - do people flag my comments or did you just see it on your own.

People in the GP's situation often encounter responses like "it's easy to pin point a problem on others" or other logical-sounding objections that come across as dismissive of the specific experiences that they're reporting. If you do that in the way you did it, complete with a Twitter link about how to become a 'high-agency' person, other people will interpret you as saying 'that's not happening' and 'you should just try harder', i.e. as telling them that they're wrong in the description of their own experience and ultimately as denying that race has been a factor in it. Do you see how that could come across as dismissive?

It's possible that you were misled by the word 'solely', since your objection seemed to be sort of a technical one based on the literal meaning of that word. Since you say you're a non-native English speaker, I can see how that could happen. It's clear from the GP's reply to you that they didn't mean that word literally. When it comes to an issue as complex and as emotional as this, it's usually best not to react to just one word, but rather to suss out the comment as a whole. That goes for native speakers too.

One thing that might have been better is to ask clarifying questions rather than making objections. If you ask an open-ended question in a heartfelt way, it might invite the other person to expand on his or her experience more, in a way that both helps you understand and makes them feel like someone is listening. It's tricky, though. This topic is so fraught that it's easy for a question to sound like a counterargument, and the discourse has unfortunately been polluted by a lot of questions which are not questions at all, but attempts to undermine. So if you do ask such a question, make it clear (as best you can) that you mean it sincerely.

It makes me wonder if we could build tools to help craft the conversation differently, but that's another topic.

(No one flagged your comment above; I just happened to see it in the thread.)

Hey Dang, that was really helpful! Thanks!

> It's possible that you were misled by the word 'solely'

Yeah, I don't think I fully understand the premise.

> Do you see how that could come across as dismissive?

I can see that but it's really hard to convey something contrary to popular belief.

Let's say I want to say something like "it's easy to be a victim rather than to take action and make change" I truly believe that and I really think it will help people to take actions rather than just being stagnant. I don't want to be dismissive. How can I say it?

> better is to ask clarifying questions rather than making objections

I somewhat agree. But, it's hard to discuss without counter arguments.

dang: you are insufferable--and don't misconstrue what I mean by that. https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html

> In my current Fortune 500 job, I was hired for my expertise then was moved to a new team where my expertise didn’t even matter. Every issue that came up that I had qualifications for I was passed over for a lesser skilled White man

How many times do you think this happens to white people? It’s incredibly common.

I keep a “to poach” list of developers who aren’t being given the respect, challenge, title, pay etc that they deserve and at this point it’s close to 20% of the developers Ive worked with.

Ok, but what's your point in bringing that up here? Both statements can easily be true.

> Ok, but what's your point in bringing that up here?

To foster solidarity amongst the working class.

Here's Google's latest diversity report: https://kstatic.googleusercontent.com/files/25badfc6b6d1b33f...

Whites are underrepresented at similar rates as blacks. Asians are overrepresented by 900%.

It would be helpful to understand what numbers you're using to make these claims.

For e.g., White non-hispanics make up ~62% of the US population. At Google they make up 65.9% of leadership representation.

Black non-hispanics make up ~12% of US population and only 2.6% of Google leadership representation.

To clarify, this is hires (as per the thread "Viewpoint: 'I feel like I was accidentally hired'").