{"id":1841,"date":"2014-06-03T01:31:32","date_gmt":"2014-06-03T01:31:32","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/har0ld.com\/playground\/?p=1841"},"modified":"2014-06-03T01:31:35","modified_gmt":"2014-06-03T01:31:35","slug":"on-tech-and-diversity-act-xxxxxiviii","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"http:\/\/har0ld.com\/playground\/2014\/06\/on-tech-and-diversity-act-xxxxxiviii\/","title":{"rendered":"On tech and diversity, act XXXXXIVIII"},"content":{"rendered":"

Re tech companies diversity and "meritocracy". Guys, it’s all about culture and ethnocentrism.<\/p>\n

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\u2019s called affinities. You heard about bromance right?<\/p>\n

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\u2019ve been living with white people all my life, otherwise I would have quit, unable to fit in.<\/p>\n

Every time I hear a white person being like, \u201cdude, I was the only white person for like an hour!\u201d<\/em> I smile and feel insanely strong before realizing that my resilience just doesn\u2019t matter and is not valued at all. How come? It means I have integrated many cultural codes and experienced which ones are universal, isn\u2019t that valuable? It is, not for most white people in power unfortunately.<\/p>\n

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\u2019s about the only diversity they genuinely embrace. And that\u2019s the problem.<\/p>\n

It\u2019s 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\u2019t know if it\u2019s 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\u2019s 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\u2019t know.<\/p>\n


Maybe that too.<\/em><\/p>\n

It is annoying though. Especially with all that BS about \u201cthink different\u201d, \u201cthink out of the box\u201d ‘\u201dyay generalists\u201d mantras, how are you supposed to think out of that white box when you all are the same? You can\u2019t and I think it\u2019s one of the main reason why tech is stagnating. Also, we\u2019re 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:<\/p>\n

White people searching for a job: \u201cbut I\u2019m more than just ticking all the boxes on a job listing!\u201d<\/p>\n

White people on lack of diversity at Google<\/a>: \u201cthey should tick all the boxes, period.\u201d<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

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\u2019s called affinities. You heard […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":[],"categories":[3],"tags":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"http:\/\/har0ld.com\/playground\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1841"}],"collection":[{"href":"http:\/\/har0ld.com\/playground\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"http:\/\/har0ld.com\/playground\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/har0ld.com\/playground\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/har0ld.com\/playground\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=1841"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"http:\/\/har0ld.com\/playground\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1841\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":1842,"href":"http:\/\/har0ld.com\/playground\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1841\/revisions\/1842"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"http:\/\/har0ld.com\/playground\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=1841"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/har0ld.com\/playground\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=1841"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/har0ld.com\/playground\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=1841"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}