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.