Dropping out of a fancy Computer Science program that you're already in would seem like an extraordinarily bad idea.

If someone's trying to talk you into quitting and giving up because no one wants you because you're black, well.. that doesn't sound like a good friend to me.

Don't get me wrong -- a few tech-billionaires dropped out of college, and apparently it worked out for some. So if you want to try that out, then that'd seem like a different issue. But dropping out because you're black sounds crazy.

All that said, if you want to feel out the waters, why not apply for an internship? Internships can be awesome! -- you can get experience and money while still being a student, plus it can be fun!

> Dropping out of a fancy Computer Science program that you're already in would seem like an extraordinarily bad idea

Of course haha the name brand and few cool professors are keeping me at this point. But I never expected to go from the highest ranking/gpa/scores to having leaving academia even at the edge of the table.

> But dropping out because you're black sounds crazy.

It’s more like “if I can make X amount anyways today, why do it Y way when I’ll be behind anyways? Might as well gain the experience and be in the same position 4-5 years from now?” if that makes sense but I understand it sounding rash through text.

> why not apply for an internship?

It seems we all have the same issue of never getting responses online. It’s very odd considering we’ve done incredibly well when the interview is direct with the person hiring (as in this is the person that makes the final decision), but situations like that are limited.

Apologies if this is obvious, but if you're not getting callbacks, usually the issue is with your resume or application. If you haven't already, I would look for groups that review resumes and applications (especially groups that involve people who are already working or have experience hiring.) You could also try posting on the /r/cscareerquestions subreddit to have people critique your resume.

> usually the issue is with your resume or application

The parent commentor stated that their cohort has seen evidence of systematic rejection of their resumes. It is a well-documented fact that this happens all the time for female-sounding, black-sounding etc names and pictures.

Suggesting that "no, it's probably just some missing fine tuning on your resume" doesn't really seem like the right response here...

This doesn't match up with my experience as an interviewer at several FAANGs.

HR typically wants their diversity numbers up badly so if you're gay, a woman, and/or black they are already incredibly inclined to hire you, as long as you pass the interviews.

It's not a walk in the park, but you have this going for you and it's a big advantage imo.

There are a lot more people of color trying to break into the field than there are companies willing to hire them. There is a big difference between what they are saying and what they are implementing and I can say with absolute confidence that diversity is just lip service. FAANGs primarily recruit from other FAANGs. If none of those companies are diverse how are they going to diversify their recruitment?

Why attribute malice to people at these companies when it is possible that all the challenges and disadvantages minorities and women have to surpass, in the end, result in those groups not coming up at the top, with the ultimate sorting function being the hiring process?

I see getting hired as the last stage in the pipeline, with the first stages being your family, then your education and then employment.

The more things go wrong in the first stages, the less likely it is for one to succeed at getting to the top of the next stage.

If people from underprivileged families can only afford to go to the 50% best school in the state, then to the 75% best college, then by the time they enter the job search page, they won't be at the top of the list (again, on average).

I'll use myself as an example: I had the privilege of coding for entire weekends when I was young, while my peers had to work the land. This gave me a distinct advantage early on, which I capitalized on, so at an interview with a company I am more likely to get hired than if those same peers had hypothetically applied, again because it wouldn't make sense for a company to pass on the best candidate when they are all competing for talent, regardless of race, gender, height or other ways of splitting people into groups.

I think everyone agrees that the current situation when it comes to diversity in the workplace is not acceptable, and we should definitely fix it, but in my opinion, if companies are competing fairly for talent, then that part of the pipeline doesn't really need fixing. We can instead use it as a test to see if the attempts at fixing the earlier stages result in better numbers.

P.S. This a difficult subject and I don't intend to offend anyone. Despite my relative privilege above, compared to my peers in the US, I still grew up in a poor and underprivileged family and am behind my current peers both financially and socially, so it's a topic that hits home for me.

It's not offensive per ae but it is a worn-out canard that has been plied by the likes of Richard Rodriguez and apologists for segregated systems for decades. "I'm all in favor for equality but you're too late when it comes to [job applications, college admissions etc] because the damage is already done."

Truly qualified people on the margins are still getting shut out at every level, every age and stage. Mediocrity is still pushing the center ahead of everyone else. The fact that wsj/economist/HN has turned anti-woke doesn't change the facts.

> FAANGs primarily recruit from other FAANGs

How could that be? I was under the impression that a huge amount of new hires come in each year from fresh university graduates.

There was actually a big twitter thread by a black recruiter at Google (now cut) who out and out said that Google's interviewing engineers looked down on black seniors and ranked them universally lower than white seniors, particularly black seniors from historically black universities. She had to fight tooth and nail to accomplish getting the first black entry-level-from-college hire in all of Google's history.

The thread https://twitter.com/realabril/status/1341135819487100928?lan...

And it was specifically about hiring from HBU's vs other elite institutions, not about hiring black applicants in general which is how you described it.

Take Apple for example, out of the 600+ jobs posted on their career website only 19 even mention students. And some of those are actual student jobs: student outreach, student recruiters. If they have a different pipeline for recruiting students I'm not aware of it. If new graduate positions are only recruited at campus job fairs that has a greater potential to be worse. FAANGs haven't been recruiting from majority minority schhols or HBCUs.

Wait wait wait let's get back to how white dudes are dropping out because of woke tyranny! Nobody wants to hear about failing DEI efforts. Sure whites still dominate the workforce but it just isn't fun anymore!

Your experience does not match research on the job market generally. Multiple studies show increased responses to resumes with "whitened" names. This is, of course, at odds with the white victimhood narrative that unqualified minorities are taking jobs, when it is in fact the opposite which is occurring.

https://hbswk.hbs.edu/item/minorities-who-whiten-job-resumes...

I just went over the actual study itself and it does not support your claim:

http://www-2.rotman.utoronto.ca/facbios/file/Whitening%20MS%...

It's a sort of interesting read but nothing too dramatic and whether it's evidence of racism is subject to interpretation. What isn't subject to interpretation is the claim that the study shows that "whitened" names increase callbacks. On the contrary whitening names has no effect on callbacks as indicated on page 31:

"Whitening the name only (versus not whitening at all) did not make a statistically significant difference for black applicants"

The actual study shows that removing racial indicators from experience is what results in a gap in callbacks. So someone who represents themselves as the leader of their campus' "Black Student Business Association" is less likely to get a call back than someone who represented themselves as the leader of their campus' "Student Business Association". They refer to the removal of racial indicators as whitening but I think that's prematurely jumping to conclusions. The name aspect is certainly a form of whitening, since black names are being changed to white names. But it's premature to refer to the removal of racial indicators and making the experience racially neutral as a form of whitening.

Other forms of experience that explicitly mention race result in less callbacks than when that same experience doesn't mention race. Whether this is racism or not can not be concluded strictly based off of the study's parameters. For example, if I were presented with one candidate who was in charge of the university's "Law Society" I would probably pick that person over someone who was in charge of that university's "Black Law Society", and I don't think I would be racist for doing so. I would consider being in charge of an organization that is open to all races or is independent of race as a more prestigious accomplishment than being in charge of an organization that is race specific.

To test whether I was racist in my decision making, I would need to pick someone who was not in charge of anything over someone who was in charge of the "Black Law Society", with all else being equal. The study did not do this comparison and unfortunately the study does not present the raw data so there's no way for me to do this analysis myself.

I could bicker about some of the methodological issues as well which are not exactly rigorous, as well as the fact that this study is not exactly pertinent to this conversation as they only looked at internships for jobs that are not technical in nature, with the bulk of them being sales and marketing, and customer service jobs, instead of engineering, computer science, law, or professional jobs.

Ultimately no study is going to be perfect but one should not read too much into many of these studies. They are not nearly as rigorous or definitive as one would expect and furthermore they don't tend to generalize.

> I just went over the actual study itself and it does not support your claim:

Good catch, I had been thinking of another study which looked specifically at only changing names on resumes. That's:

Are Emily and Greg More Employable than Lakisha and Jamal? A Field Experiment on Labor Market Discrimination

https://www.nber.org/papers/w9873

In any event, its not a single study that's looked at this. Have a look at this meta-analysis of 24 studies

https://www.pnas.org/content/114/41/10870.full

You are assuming that FAANGs are representative of the general job market. The parent was referring to CS degrees specifically.

Imagine you having always bought tasty tomatoes from your local farm, and someone steps in to show you studies that determined that the generally tomatoes in the US are tasteless.

I'm also not arguing that tasty tomatoes are taking shelf space away from other fruit.

I explicitly said the general job market, I made no claims about the behavior of FAANGs. Indeed, I think there is little value in considering the behavior of FAANGs in a discussion of the general job market. I was responding to head off the generalizing of the white victimhood narrative which often happens in these discussions.

> as long as you pass the interviews.

Aren't these are known to be extremely difficult interviews compared to most tech interviews? What percentage of candidates who apply get hired? I would imagine the numbers are quite low?

My opinion is that generalist interviews are difficult but not 'extremely'. For example, here is a problem I came up with at one company:

Given a list of chapters in a video course, and a list of user bookmarks, write a function that groups the bookmarks by chapter. Chapters and bookmarks are defined as millisecond offsets from 0 (the start of the video file).

I'd specify the data structures for junior devs and let the more senior people work those out.

Your average developer that gets hired can solve and unit test the solution in less than 35 minutes. Those who don't might be having an off day, or I didn't do a good job at explaining the problem and details, or they didn't ask the right questions or who knows. The point is, a thousand things can go wrong, but the problem itself isn't that difficult. A few loops and a hashmap gets you an acceptable solution.

This and the other problems in the interview question databases at FAANGs are typical of what's in the Cracking the Coding Interview book. Whether someone's ability to solve these types of problems quickly is indicative of their skill level is a hot topic of debate, but if one wants to join these companies, then hacking the process by learning to solve algorithm and data structure problems is acceptable and not a particularly complex process. It's high overhead for the candidate, but at the very least it proves that they can learn, and learning the custom tools and code quickly is about half the skillet required to be successful at a FAANG.

> then hacking the process by learning to solve algorithm and data structure problems is acceptable

Have you considered that underrepresented candidates might not have the free time outside of university, family, and job responsibilities in order to compete with those whose families can support them to focus on only university and preparing for interviews?

If HR wants their diversity numbers up, maybe HR needs to consider having some diversity in the interview process itself? I wouldn't expect a cookie cutter process to result in much diversity of background or thought.

> Whether someone's ability to solve these types of problems quickly is indicative of their skill level is a hot topic of debate

One of the best interviewing tips I learned that has served me extremely well is to try disprove my impression of the candidate. It seems like this process entirely fails at that.

The problem is that companies also want an objective hiring process, because otherwise employee bias will seep in. The fact that these two issues are in opposition (plus the general recruiting pipeline issues) are why this is such a difficult problem to solve.

> The problem is that companies also want an objective hiring process

Usually only at a very superficial level. Enough to comply with the law. And to be fair, some companies do have good intentions with a little extra effort and money put into diversity efforts.

A truly objective hiring process would take into account that Joe and Charley who both got the same results on the coding test are not equally qualified if Joe grew up poor, with parents who never graduated high school, paid his own way through university by working full-time, and along with raising a child as a single parent. While Charley comes from a wealthy family and focused only on studying and job interview prep. With his parents passing along some of their own higher education to him as needed, connecting him to their large network for job opportunities, etc.

Joe is obviously a better candidate. His starting line was far behind Charley's and yet he crossed the finish line at the same time. Joe would be a better candidate even if he passed the finish line a little after Charley. If you want a truly objective hiring process you need to look at starting lines, not just finish lines.

Most companies are doing almost the opposite and only looking at the finish line. They want to look only at the skills and exclude the actual person in a misguided effort to be objective.

All that really does it amplify existing societal bias and privilege by rewarding those who got the most breaks in life.

> this is such a difficult problem to solve.

Agreed. And it would be more expensive. Part of why the status quo is so hard to change. You've got to spend the money and do the work. Or take shortcuts and discriminate on one side or the other.

But looking at what a candidate can do is objective. Trying to compare how tough each one had it is extremely subjective. Is being a woman harder than a minority? Is having a low iq harder than being poor? Being a single parent harder than being addicted to alcohol?

Maybe Charley had depression and anxiety and never made any friends while Joe is outgoing and did allowing him to form study groups easier. Maybe Charley's parents insisted he become a lawyer and he never touched code until college. Maybe Charley has a speech impediment, maybe he is ugly, maybe he is on the spectrum, maybe, maybe, maybe.

We are here to judge how someone can do the job, not go through their life history trying to judge how much harder or easier they had it than someone else.

> We are here to judge how someone can do the job.

You missed the most important part of my point. Someone who crosses the finish line at the same time as someone else, but started from further back is almost always better at doing the job.

I already said it's very difficult to objectively measure. But any improvement in doing so will give you a competitive advantage in finding the best candidates.

I can't agree with your generalization that people who faced more challenges are likely to be better at doing the job. It seems possible those early life difficulties could be traumatizing, leaving those folks less resilient.

The US military used to think successful soldiers with childhood trauma, had coping skills that protected them in deployment. When they ran the studies, they found they were completely wrong - people with childhood trauma, regardless of their military success, were multiple times (4-6x odds ratios) more likely to develop PTSD, (re-)start smoking, or misuse substances.

It's a neat narrative: go through hardship + come out the other side = better coping skills / more productivity. However, humans are complex and often fragile.

I accept the argument that a person who has experienced more hardships has accomplished more to reach that same point. That could be justified if your hiring principles are "who has earned this spot more". It doesn't necessary follow that their trajectory has a steeper slope from the point of hiring.

Clearly the person is not less resilient in the stories I gave. They made it to the finish line. They have already demonstrated years of resilience and dedication to a goal. Why would you expect that to change so suddenly?

You've also created a strawman. I never mentioned childhood trauma or much at all of early life aside from growing up poor. Whatever trauma that may have caused certainly did not interfere with their accomplishments to date.

> The US military used to think successful soldiers with childhood trauma...

This is not war nor the battlefield. Let's see studies about people and their career success.

> Usually only at a very superficial level. Enough to comply with the law

Any objective evidence to support this? My experience has been the opposite - people care deeply about being objective, in order to make better hiring decisions.

Here is a meta-analysis of "every available field experiment of hiring discrimination against African Americans or Latinos".

Just a simple name change on a resume can result in discrimination. Lots of it.

"On average, white applicants receive 36% more callbacks than equally qualified African Americans (95% confidence interval of 25–47% more), based on random-effects meta-analysis of data since 1989, representing a substantial degree of direct discrimination"

https://www.pnas.org/content/114/41/10870.full

> people care deeply about being objective, in order to make better hiring decisions.

They really don't. It costs a lot of money to care deeply. Most companies optimize for rejecting too many candidates, looking for red flags as a time saver. This has been common practice for decades. They do it because there are usually a lot of applicants, and it's a cheap way to reduce the numbers quickly.

But it's even worse now. It's has been codified into job candidate filtering software. "Applicant Tracking System software is used by 75% of US employers to help filter job candidates".

"If an applicant's work history has a gap of more than six months, the resume is automatically screened out"

That's the opposite of caring deeply about being objective for who is the best candidate. You are making decisions based on very superficial information.

It does seem objective at first. Because it is objectively looking at one factor and making a yes or no decision. But that's exactly what I meant when I said at only a superficial level. You aren't objectively screening for the best candidates. Instead you are objectively screening for a signal, and not even a good signal. You need to screen humans, not signals.

https://www.cnet.com/tech/automated-hiring-software-rejects-...

The study suggests there is discrimination, it does not speak to anyone's intent. You are doing a lot of psychological projection on a large, diverse group of people whom you have never met nor spoken to about what they care about.

You are judging intention based on results. Those are not the same thing.

If you are discriminating that early in the process and with such high numbers, and with no improvement, you can't be said to care deeply. That's called lip service.

You said that they care deeply. You are doing a lot of psychological projection on a large group of diverse people. I proved the results are concerning. Prove they simultaneously care but have somehow managed to make no improvements in decades in the results. Lacking proof on your side, we'll have to judge based on results.

> long as you pass the interviews.

40 applications and 2 resume consultations later and no interview even offered. Meanwhile, some guy you run circles around in real world programming/business experience is 8 for 10. My white classmates noticed this before I did because I’ve just accepted it as part of life.

Referrals is the secret sauce. Those 8/10 guys don't just send resumes to the public company address.

> HR typically wants their diversity numbers up badly so if you're gay

You're right, I always fail that interview question where they ask me what my sexual preference is and I say women... ...Seriously? you are just making stuff up now.

> HR typically wants their diversity numbers up badly

This kind of implies that they don't actually hire diversely or the issue wouldn't be so dire ...

It could also imply lack of candidates.

Which is demonstrably true; they're not hiring from the general population they're hiring largely from universities, and you can look at those universities and see there's already an imbalance in demographics of the available job candidates.

Do you mean by "we know we’re not what companies are looking for even with fancy CS degrees", simply that they're looking for identically qualified people that aren't black? If so, I'm extremely sorry to hear this, and disgusted that its happening. I can't actually think of anyone I worked with who'd knowingly treat or value a black colleague or interview candidate any differently, but maybe that's white blindness on my part, maybe its been going on and I didn't notice. In case this is helpful info, I know that Capital One tech has robust D&I policies and seeks to redress the balance. They sponsor an organisation called "Blacks in Tech". Their senior management seem to say it makes good business sense and provides competitive edge, to reward talented people who happen to be black, whom other employers are too stupid/racist to consider hiring and/or promoting quick enough once hired. so, if I were a black American looking for a job in tech I'd look at Capital One if struggling to get anywhere with other employers.

>that they're looking for identically qualified people that aren't black?

You see this here on HN all the time, articles about "how we do hiring" that start out with "I would only hire someone who I'd want to get coffee with." Which, to me at least, makes it sound like the person is looking to hire friends/drinking buddies that also have technical skills, not employees. It's a signal that the person is looking for "their type of people."

It's so acceptable to hire this way that people feel comfortable opening publishing that, under their own name, as something they are proud of.

I'm not even black (but I am a woman, I grew up poor, and I'm on the older side) and constantly reading about hiring procedures like that makes me feel like I'm very much not welcome.

Seems to me 100% their loss, if they don't want you! I'm white and male, but the wrong side of 40. Occasionally I've faced ageist "humour". But anywhere that's unfriendly to older people, women, non-white people, would IMHO suck to work even if you were young, white, male etc. Wouldn't wanna work with prejudiced people even if they think I'm "like them". Working in a diverse inclusive team is far more joyful, as well as more productive. BTW in my current workplace, there's a lady who's both older and black. She's awesome at her job, has a unique set of skills built up over many years. IMHO she's irreplaceable as well as a fun nice person to work with. So thank goodness we don't have something that'd have made her feel unwelcome....

Capital One is a great place to work. When it comes to corporate behemoths it doesn't have much competition that I know of. Very supportive culture that is obsessively focused on improving teams, the culture, and processes.

"I’m a black college student now and every conversation with friends back home includes some mention of dropping out because it’s not for us as well."

I can only recommend that you have to base life decisions on your own experience, because it can differ dramatically.

I have an experience from which I have drawn some conclusions - I am an immigrant and many of my co-immigrants are convinced that the locals dislike them, they feel they are being treated unfairly, etc.

I was unable to square my experience with their's: surely they can't be imagining things, but at the same time I cannot be just magically lucky. Some of them are older generation, maybe things were different back then. Maybe, when they face difficulties they are more likely to attribute it to discrimination. Maybe some behavioural stereotyoes play a role - I don't know.

For a while I wanted to try a 'secret shopper' experiment, create two fake Linkedin profiles, identical except background- try applying for jobs with them. Never got round to it.

A study has been made with your experiment here in Canada. The result was that the white-sounding profiles got more interviews based solely on last name, no picture needed.

[PDF, French]: https://www.cdpdj.qc.ca/Publications/etude_testing_discrimin...

> For a while I wanted to try a 'secret shopper' experiment

We did something like this! But we swapped slightly reworded resumes and the response ratio leaned even further in the white classmate’s favor. We just laughed, as if we couldn’t believe that what we half-joked about actually happened. I’m long past the point of being sad. I guess that’s life.

> “We know we’re not what companies are looking for”

Why do you say that? Because I can tell you as an employee of a FAANG company that you are exactly what these companies are looking for. They’ve got serious diversity issues - especially among Black men (not assuming a gender here just facts) - and they are desperate to balance themselves out.

I mean that as an encouraging statement. You ARE who is being looked for. Be confident in that and use it to your advantage.

> some mention of dropping out because it’s not for us as well

That is cultural transition & stereotype threat first-generation college attendees face, regardless of race.

> When you see people with equivalent resumes already coasting by in the job market because they could get their last names and LinkedIn photos past the screening and into an interview it’s hard to believe that’ll change post-graduation

If anything, they are probably getting introductions/doors opened for them by friends & family. It sounds like you are probably applying for some of the most competitive positions in the world, Google and many other places have less than 1% acceptance rate for interns. Harvard is an order of magnitude less selective. It sucks, but don't let struggling to get an internship get you down.

I can't speak for your personal experience, but at least on paper, companies are begging for more diverse hires, even blatantly admitting to breaking the Civil Rights act to do so.

https://careers.google.com/jobs/results/132267679726609094-s...

>students who are a member of a group that is historically underrepresented in the technology industry will receive priority in the selection process. This group includes women, ethnic minorities and students with disabilities.

Unfortunately, once you’re giving “priority” to such a broad group of people (e.g. every permutation of gender, whatever you consider ethnic, and ability minorities) it becomes easy to say one thing and continue doing another.

The companies that have to virtue-signal do so because you wouldn’t notice if they didn’t tell you. I’d prefer they skip that and hire who they want without the pretense, and if that’s not me, fine, but please be honest.

I think your comment, and the responses to it help advance my point: there are a bunch of narratives out there that are not wholly rooted in reality (or out of date in your case). These can have detrimental effects.

There are certainly black individuals who would pursue a career in tech, if not for the (perhaps earned) perception that tech is hostile towards black people. Things have changed, but the narrative hasn’t, and that is doing real damage.

I’m trying to say the same sort of thing applies to white men and college—just there being a perception of college campuses being hostile to them is going to prevent many of them from going. And people will be hurt by that, in one way or another.

  > I’m a black college student now and every conversation
  > with friends back home includes some mention of
  > dropping out because it’s not for us as well.

Naive question, I don't live where you live. But who is the "us" that your friends speak of? Black people? Black Americans? Black people from a specific subculture?

And finally, what determines that college is not for the "us" your friend refers to? Culture? Post-graduation job prospects? At least from his perspective.

complete your degree and then do federal contracting; for entrepreneurship:

https://www.sba.gov/business-guide/grow-your-business/minori...

> we’re not what companies are looking for even with fancy CS degrees.

You are exactly what the federal government is looking for. US contract procurement has a significant racial spoils system within it.

This is one of the things I was looking into, thank you!

One of the things everyone hears from some cousin, uncle, aunt, brother, sister, parent, or friend when they don’t get selected for something these days is some form of, “oh you didn’t get it because you are insert [black, white, latinx, male, female, young, old, etc].” This comment is about them not you.

Avoid this line of thinking. It may be true, or it may not be. You will probably never know. What I do know is this is an unhelpful and defeatist line of thinking. Instead prove the haters wrong.

I can't speak to hiring practices at larger companies, but if my experience working at smaller companies is any indication I think things might be shifting. At my last job, they were focused on hiring for diversity to create a more desireable workplace and improve retention. I think this mindset is starting to become more commonplace, so you may find that you're no longer in such a bad position once you graduate.

Please reconsider.

As far as I can tell, Big Tech has terrible numbers for diversity and they are tripping over themselves trying to bring the numbers up. I really, truly believe that non-white, non-male candidates are not going to suffer if they can get the resume on the table.

Stay the course. Good things await.

Where are you and your friends getting your information from? If you're in the US or Europe, IMO the market for programmers has never been better. It may be a struggle to get the first job but if you persevere, it will get easier.

You must have bad information because FAANG companies compete over hiring black software engineers. They want to get their numbers up and there aren’t many to hire.

How many FAANG companies are there? I guess five from the name. Does every black applicant with a CS degree get a job if they apply? It's a free pass?

Your sample size of five elite companies can't be taken as a serious attempt to describe the actual experience of black CS grads applying for jobs.

The top 5 have recruited over a million people between 2000 and 2018. That's an average of about 50,000 new recruits per year. Not all of those are in engineering of course, and those are global numbers, but still they hire tens of thousands of engineers every year. Here in the UK local software companies constantly complain that the cream of every year's CS grads emigrate to the US.

Doing the rough math, Google employs about 80,000 engineers today. Generously assuming the other FAANGs employ as many engineers, you get about 400,000 engineers. There are about 26 million software engineers in the world.

So that's 1.5% of all engineers. And that's being very generous. The real number is surely below 1%. No surprise that the most desirable companies hire the top 1%.

(Happy for someone to correct my numbers and the resulting percentage - it's based on a few Google searches).

Unless my numbers are way off, it's safe to say that over 99% of engineers in the world are not working at a FAANG. I stand by my claim that we should not be using what happens at FAANGs as reliable anecdotal evidence of the interview experience for most candidates.

A charitable (and, I think, reasonable) reading would be that the poster used FAANG as a representation of the overall trend in tech. FAANG are what the rest of the industry aspires to be, after all.

How many CS jobs are even in the "the industry" though? Home Depot, Walmart, and Nestle are examples of massive companies that do not aspire to be Facebook or anything like it, but who hire lots of software engineers. Most companies are not tech companies, although a handful of tech giants have done very well.

What's "tech?" Large VC funded B2C companies get a lot of press and are most well known but I'd imagine most software engineering jobs are either at "non-tech" companies or companies that provide B2B services.

My company is only hiring black engineers or women. You have no chance if you are a white man and don’t have an in.

It's not as extrem for me, but I was told by HR that all female/non-white applicants had to move automatically to the phone screen step, regardless of the resume.

I assume Chinese and Indians are not included in "non-white"?

I personally do count them as "non-white" when reviewing applications. Our DE&I group only reports "white vs non-white" and "males vs females" ratios, so I assume they are considered "asians" and lumped into "non-white".

That really makes no sense if the goal is to increase “minority” representation. In my experience at BigTech Indian and Chinese applicants outnumbered white by at least 2:1.

But it’s not the point. The point is to keep the Twitter mob at bay.

So you're guessing everyone's race/ethnicity and gender identity based on their resume?

Our application form has a required field for LinkedIn profile, so we use the picture/name. If there is no way to make a guess we just treat it as a normal application and review the resume.

When was the last non-black hire at your company?

What company can afford to be so exclusive in hiring?

How is that legal?

Breaking the law is only illegal if the law is enforced.

It isn’t. But nobody cares about that. Employment law appears to only work in one direction.

I hope you’re kidding. What a terrible thing to do.

It's also terrible to consider that "enhanced health services" are only reserved for certain shades on the color wheel.

You're absolutely correct. The government giving preference to suppliers on the basis of ethnicity is a huge step backwards.

People can just go on the internet and say whatever they like.

As a black person, living in Europe (Netherlands) I feel this too.

But there's more because I just started college and going to finish it.

> Innovation out of desperation, I guess.

It's the only way to innovate imo.

Send me your resume to and I'll pass it along:

[email protected]

>It’s like if I’ll have to sell sneakers to make ends meet after college anyways

Just for what it's worth, I (not black, but from a different group that is not looked upon kindly by HR types) took the route of EEE Degree -> PhD (dropped out) -> Software Engineer at Relatively Elite company (not FAANG, but about as good as we have in Melbourne, AU) -> running eCommerce businesses from home (selling used video games on eBay as well as a USB oscilloscope I designed as a student, mostly through Amazon).

If you're smart and skilled, you can make an absolute killing doing something that stoners or less intelligent people do to "get by", and at the same time spend massive amounts of quality time with your (probably at this stage future) wife and kids.

If you want to have a chat about it, feel free to shoot us an email (see profile). But long story short, even if you're locked out of the traditional job market it doesn't mean you should give up on developing your skills or give up hope. Capitalism provides, man.

Both can be true. The number you really need is what percentage of black people with a CS degree end up actually getting a job offer.

And highly publicized diversity efforts by tech giants does not necessarily reflect what the average company in Ohio is doing. The news is not the data, so yeah, you really do need more evidence than "it's what I heard".

I'm sorry, I'm black and this is not my experience. I will not bother posting evidence either, because why does evidence matter when you already know something to be true, right?