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A black man walks into Silicon Valley and tries to get a job

28 pointsby curiouscat321almost 10 years ago

11 comments

shadyshogunalmost 10 years ago
I understand exactly where he is coming from. At the end of the day, most people responsible for hiring go with &quot;culture, values, and gut feelings.&quot; If they do not identify with you, your resume and experience does not matter one whit. Finally getting hired at a firm in Salt Lake City was supposed to happen; The more you go to bat, you will eventually get a hit. In other words, you got lucky at least once.<p>Also, you &quot;may&quot; have tried at tto high a level(Apple, Google, Microsoft, etc.) only reserved for a few who &quot;fit&quot; the culture: Ivy League grads and&#x2F;or those with better references and networks. And then Plan B was to get something &quot;entry-level,&quot; which almost never works out.<p>People in the majority community will never understand that black males many times are victims of lack benefit of the doubt in this country. Again, this falls under that &quot;culture,value, and gut feeling&quot; category. Almost every comment or reply is going to downplay your experience, equate it with theirs, claim you feel entitled, call you a whiner, without realizing they are not the &quot;experiencer,&quot; the &quot;knower within.&quot;<p>I feel where you are coming from, but we must all start somewhere and you never gave up (at least on getting a job in Tech somewhere). Just realize that there are tens of thousands across demographic lines whose &quot;Silicon Valley Dreams&quot; were burned before they ever got started.<p>I will end with this: Underrepresented communities must seek their &quot;niche,&quot; or a form in which makes you stand out from the rest, makes you unique, and increases your intellectual value. Furthermore, start&#x2F;begin&#x2F; create your own opportunities instead of waiting on someone to give it to you.
WalterSearalmost 10 years ago
&gt;They said I didn’t have enough experience — despite graduating with Honors from said college, being a member of the National Communication Honor Society, and holding a part-time job and internship for three of my four years in school.<p>In this statement, you demonstrate such a poor understanding of what technology companies are hiring for, it&#x27;s quite clear where the &#x27;lack of fit&#x27; came from.
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notduncansmithalmost 10 years ago
So, without any work samples from the author, it&#x27;s impossible to say if it really was a &quot;racial&quot; thing, or he just wasn&#x27;t very good at whatever position he was trying to get hired for. I&#x27;ve seen plenty of reports from people of all races being treated much the same way. I&#x27;m not saying the author wasn&#x27;t discriminated against, merely that it&#x27;s difficult to tell that he definitely was from an outside perspective.
pkayealmost 10 years ago
One thing in Silicon Valley is if you are not an engineer, business development, marketing or a few other support positions, it is very hard to find opportunities. The remaining positions just have lots of candidates competing for a few jobs.<p>My wife had a hard time finding a business analyst position when she moved with me and has yet to find anything.
malandrewalmost 10 years ago
I have two questions:<p>What types of positions were applied for? What did the applicant study? Were all the applications via resume submissions?<p>The author may be completely right that the difficulties he had were due to race, but he also may be wrong. There simply isn&#x27;t enough data to figure out from the blog post.<p>I&#x27;m a white male that graduated with similar credentials and when I applied to 50 management consulting after college I had a very similar experience: courtesy rejection letters if I was lucky, but most of the time not even that.<p>In hindsight, now that I&#x27;ve been on the other side of the table and I&#x27;ve learned a lot about how effective hiring is done, I went about it all wrong at the time. My current self would give my past self the exact same treatment I received. give my I had few references and connections to the industry. Most of my applications were letters&#x2F;emails with a cover letter and résumé. Later on I discovered that such a tactic fills less than 10% of jobs out there and there direct referrals is one of the best ways. I was naive and inexperienced and went about it all wrong.<p>Applying from a distance is also a huge strike against you [0]. Only senior people with lots of experience get to apply from a distance. For everyone else, you basically need to move to where you want to be and apply as a local hire.<p>[0] <a href="http:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.bothsidesofthetable.com&#x2F;2010&#x2F;05&#x2F;28&#x2F;you-cant-look-for-a-job-from-a-remote-location-it-doesnt-work&#x2F;" rel="nofollow">http:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.bothsidesofthetable.com&#x2F;2010&#x2F;05&#x2F;28&#x2F;you-cant-look-...</a>
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jasonj79almost 10 years ago
Sounds like sour grapes, not discrimination...<p>I moved coast to coast to work for a SV technology company (fully paid), did NOT graduate from a fancy college (or any for that matter), have my nights and weekends free, and see the struggle daily that is the fight to find qualified talent... Truth is that tech companies are having an extremely hard time filling seats, and they frankly can&#x27;t afford to discriminate on anything other than lack of skill necessary or extreme culture mismatch.<p>The only thing I agree with in this article is that yes, 3 times is a pattern... a pattern that they don&#x27;t want to hire him. Maybe he should figure out why that is before blindly blaming it on race.
orionblastaralmost 10 years ago
Breaking into Silicon Valley is really really hard. It is a totally different culture than the one he had in Ohio.<p>You need more experience than just three to four years as an intern. In fact you have to work for the right type of company to be a good fit in Silicon Valley.<p>You can&#x27;t expect companies to just hand you a job because of your race or gender or whatever, you have to earn it. It means acing the interview including any whiteboard tests and stuff like that. It means impressing them with communication skills and showing them that you are a team player and a good fit with their company. You have to market and sell yourself. It is a lot of hard work and it still doesn&#x27;t always pay off.<p>Silicon Valley is more competitive. Salt Lake City is not as competitive. I&#x27;m sorry he didn&#x27;t get a job in SV, but at least he found one in SLC.
jtmcmcalmost 10 years ago
I don&#x27;t doubt that there are a number of challenges to getting a job in silicon valley - some of these may be racial bias in some cases. However this blog post doesn&#x27;t really demonstrate anything.
dczxalmost 10 years ago
Everyone already stated what I was going to say more thorougly.<p>Ohio Private School != Silicon Valley
paulhauggisalmost 10 years ago
&quot;Or, get this — I was also told my experience made me overqualified for the position and they were afraid I’d get bored.&quot;<p>This happened to me and most my friends. We are all different races. Were you applying for a low-level job (IE: trying to get anything)? You probably would have used it as a stepping-stone for a better job and the employer didn&#x27;t want to spend resources training you.<p>&quot;The formula was largely the same. Most I didn’t hear back from at all. With a few, I had an in-person or Skype interview with the team.&quot;<p>Once again, completely normal.<p>&quot;Yeah, a company in Utah is doing more for diversity than many in Silicon Valley — get over your biases of where you believe real change is championed.&quot;<p>The truth is that you just don&#x27;t have any real-world work experience.<p>&quot;One of the ways my company encourages diversity is by providing fair pay and benefits for all; which includes reimbursement for relocation, the opportunity to work remotely, a generous family leave policy, and flexible scheduling for personal needs&quot;<p>Now you are just sounding entitled. You aren&#x27;t entitled to any of those things and there are plenty of people in Silicon Valley that are qualified and willing to take the job (which is why you had trouble). If you want to compete with them, you will need to move there.<p>I know lots of different people that made the move and found jobs. You can too.<p>This article has nothing to do with &#x27;diversity&#x27; or &#x27;race&#x27;. It&#x27;s just plain silly.
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davidf18almost 10 years ago
&gt; &quot;Hiring managers didn’t like me because I went to a small private university in Ohio.&quot;<p>He is complaining because he didn&#x27;t have enough money to live in SV while looking for a job, complaining that he is not paid for relocation costs, but somehow he had enough money to go to a private college instead of big public university that has lots of computing resources. Marc Andreessen went to the U. of Illinois. So did Larry Ellison. So did several founders of Paypal. So did I.<p>Marc programmed the Mosaic browser while he was in college. I paid for college programming the university&#x27;s supercomputers. I don&#x27;t understand why someone would attend a small private university not known for computing when there are far superior public universities <i>if they want to work in SV</i>.<p>Also, I don&#x27;t know of anyone from college who was worried about relocation costs since they really owned nothing but some books, clothes, etc.