Having lived in SF for a number of years now, I 100% agree that SF is just dystopian as hell. Trash everywhere downtown, human feces/needles/smell of urine all over downtown & SOMA, depressing mix of aggressive and zombie-like homeless, very few kids/families, very few minorities (especially African-Americans), barely functioning public transportation system, high rents forcing six-figure earners to live with 2 roomm…
How is it that so much aggressive political rhetoric related to race and the tech industry is coming from this area if there are very few African Americans there in the first place? I live in Atlanta where the minority population is much higher all around and I don't get the sense at all that there's rampant racism or discrimination. Is this problem unique to the Bay Area or is this largely white guilt?
1. Large Asian population. The SF companies I've worked at often had 30-45% Asian workforce. In theory this should be a good thing as far as diversity goes (and I have had the privilege of learning from and getting to know people coming from very different societies on a personal level, most of them Asian). But for a variety of reasons I'm not going to dig into, Asians don't count as "diverse" anymore.
2. Overwhelmingly left leaning workforce means that the prevailing liberal attitudes are amplified and go largely unquestioned. This sometimes even manifests itself as the organized exclusion of those that don't harbor the same politics: https://www.fastcompany.com/3067152/lessons-in-techs-past-di...
3. Perhaps as a result of #2, many in the SF Bay area aren't exploring non-discriminatory explanations as to why there are few African Americans in Bay area tech companies. First off, the Black population is not very big in the Bay area. Less than 2% of mountain view's population is black. Overall the Bay area is 6.7% black, about half that of the country as a whole. Couple this with lower rates of educational attainment beyond high school (which is usually necessary for software development roles) and it's not hard to see how a lower black population in Bay area tech roles can happen even absent discrimination in hiring. But saying these things to my coworkers would probably adversely affect my career, so the prevailing narrative of discrimination in hiring is left unchallenged.
This results in some interesting behavior. Tech roles with lower barrier to entry like help desk support are now nearly entirely black, Hispanic, or female. We recently recategorized physical security as a "tech" role (ostensibly because physical security is an important part of infosec) and now easily 70%+ of our physical security staff is black. This has sort of backfired in a sense, the few black developers I know report being consistently mistaken for security or help desk personnel.