Re tech companies diversity and "meritocracy". Guys, it’s all about culture and ethnocentrism.
At equal skills set and experience if the team hiring loves indie rock, between a candidate that listens to Radiohead and another one that listens to The Whispers, the former has way more chances to get hired. It’s called affinities. You heard about bromance right?
There are black people in tech, they just move on to other careers once they see that they will be in a corner all their lives at best, barely surviving and taking so much shit at worst. Fourteen years in a 1.5% black field, I know. It is hard. And I only survive because I’ve been living with white people all my life, otherwise I would have quit, unable to fit in.
Every time I hear a white person being like, “dude, I was the only white person for like an hour!” I smile and feel insanely strong before realizing that my resilience just doesn’t matter and is not valued at all. How come? It means I have integrated many cultural codes and experienced which ones are universal, isn’t that valuable? It is, not for most white people in power unfortunately.
White tech guys never see diversity as an opportunity to grow they see that as an annoying deal breaker, unless you’re Asian or have tits or both. White guys are down with Asians and breasts, that’s about the only diversity they genuinely embrace. And that’s the problem.
It’s about being threatened, I think. For some reason, sharing power and money with black and brown people makes so many white people and especially white guys super sweaty and uneasy. I don’t know if it’s because of guilt, because for instance most drugs are used by white people but black people go to jail way more for that than any other ethnicity. Maybe it’s because of the prison system that put hundreds of thousands of black men behind heavy walls or maybe because some tech companies owe much to black people (EA and sports games, Google and its cheap ass Android tablets), I don’t know.
Maybe that too.
It is annoying though. Especially with all that BS about “think different”, “think out of the box” ‘”yay generalists” mantras, how are you supposed to think out of that white box when you all are the same? You can’t and I think it’s one of the main reason why tech is stagnating. Also, we’re supposed to be smart by now, as a species. Why do I have to explain this? Because of comments. Which make me think of that:
White people searching for a job: “but I’m more than just ticking all the boxes on a job listing!”
White people on lack of diversity at Google: “they should tick all the boxes, period.”