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Viewpoint: 'I feel like I was accidentally hired'

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Re: Viewpoint: 'I feel like I was accidentally hired'

#151

Post by komali2 »

toochini wrote: post #85
octaveguin wrote: post #33

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Isn't that horribly patronizing? I'd feel offended if someone treated me with kid gloves based on my skin color.

https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=gFP4dJHJXoI Couldn’t find the whole thing, but I agree it seems constantly talking about race leads to more racism and not less. Seems so opposed to the civil right movement stance against segregation.

"constantly talking about race leads to more racism not less" Isn't an effective argument against diversity and inclusion efforts.

Racism is real and POC Americans (to scope the discussion) are experiencing it. Maybe Morgan Freeman has the perspective that pretending it's not real will make it go away, but that doesn't change the fact that black programmers are underrepresented, or that police forces are staffed with avowed racists, or that... Etc.

Re: Viewpoint: 'I feel like I was accidentally hired'

#152

Post by komali2 »

xfitm3 wrote: post #135
bJGVygG7MQVF8c wrote: post #102

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Answering for myself / at the level of the individual: yes. I don't want to work with white colleagues who are biased against non-white people. I have been in this situation at a very small startup. I wasn't the only person to notice or complain about it, so I know it wasn't "in my head". So I left. But I also don't want to work someplace where white colleagues are overcorrecting for deep-seated cultural biases. Idea…

> I don't want to work with white colleagues who are biased against non-white people. I don't want to work with people who are biased against white people. I support equality and I genuinely want to see people treated fairly but I can't help but take offense to the notion that because I'm white I am less or should feel guilty.

Allyship for POC doesn't imply bias against white people. Acknowledging and fighting against systemic racism doesn't imply that all white people should feel universal guilt for their very real privilege.

Raising others up doesn't require pushing anyone down. Well, anyone that isn't in a white hood, anyway.

Re: Viewpoint: 'I feel like I was accidentally hired'

#153

Post by komali2 »

SpicyLemonZest wrote: post #117
komali2 wrote: post #71

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Try asking some POC friends or colleagues! Get their perspective. Another user mentioned that it feels like kneeling on the ground and using "baby talk." That's not what's being said here. It's simply taking a moment to observe yourself and other colleagues potentially engaging in unconscious (or even conscious - you may have an avowed racist hiding it very well on the team!) bias. This is being an ally. It's not pat…

Every POC I know thinks that these kinds of efforts are often, although not always, patronizing. (In some cases even beyond patronizing; I've heard a few people say it's actively hurting their career, because they spend so much time being voluntold into diversity discussions that it cuts into their bandwidth for their real job.)

If it's patronizing, it's a shitty diversity and inclusion program.

Your conversations are the opposite of the ones I've had.

Re: Viewpoint: 'I feel like I was accidentally hired'

#154

Post by komali2 »

SpicyLemonZest wrote: post #125
Klinky wrote: post #72

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This sounds kind of like "all workers matter", which ignores the current and historical challenges gender/race minorities have experienced in certain fields of work. If you are the majority it can be very easy to be blind to the plight of the minority. "I see a black man or a woman got hired, so things must be fine." I don't think there is harm in making extra effort to ensure inclusion of minorities within the group…

It's very important to ensure inclusion, and there's no harm in it when it's done well. But if you find yourself keeping mental notes of everyone's skin color to figure out how you should interact with them, that's not really inclusion.

It's more thinking, "did I forget to add {{somebody}} to the engineering help desk email group because they're black" than it is "lemme use my baby voice when talking to the black engineer."

It's about working to catch your own unconscious bias in the act, and then fighting to correct any mistakes you made as a result. And then, you start making yourself aware of how your colleagues and company culture is treating POC, and working to correct mistakes there.

If it sounds like exhaustive policing, I'd simply ask if code review is exhaustive policing. Is it rude to insist on code reviews? Of course not, because we're humans and make mistakes. The whole point of a team and company is to combine strenghts and look out for eachother.

Re: Viewpoint: 'I feel like I was accidentally hired'

#155

Post by komali2 »

numpad0 wrote: post #90
hombre_fatal wrote: post #63

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Eh, that only works if you have trouble treating people equally otherwise which is quite the character trait. That advice goes back to this idea that white people are born with the original sin of racism. I find it incredibly patronizing to actively pursue "okay, black guy is talking, let me me play everything up a little bit!" Yikes. Reminds me of kneeling to talk to a child in a baby voice when they're crying that…

I can’t stop thinking that ideas like GP is explaining is just a modernized racial segregation

This alt-right trope that diversity and inclusion is modern racial segregation should have been DOA but I keep seeing it crop up even here. Frustrating.

The ask is to become aware of and fight against your own unconscious biases, nothing more.

Re: Viewpoint: 'I feel like I was accidentally hired'

#156

Post by dnissley »

mtgp1000 wrote: post #126

I feel like we are all ignoring the fact that literally any perceived disrespect can be blamed on racism, especially if you've been conditioned to look for it, and it's often impractical or impossible to prove otherwise, particularly once the mob has mobilized. Being told you're a victim all your life can make you feel like a victim, even when you aren't. And now that victimhood is currency, all I see as a foreigner…

Yeah, we're in a weird world where there is still some residual racism (which is not evenly distributed -- some areas being worse than others), but so does all of this weird overcompensation for the fact that racism exists in the world.

I've seen some minorities (especially of medium brown skin tone) talk about being asked what their ethnicity is, and being offended by that. I've also had that happen, being a strange looking mix of asian/hispanic/white, but didn't ever know that I should be offended by a question like that. So I just answered their question without even thinking twice about it -- sometimes returning the question and starting a broader conversation about family history. If I had been told that kind of question was inappropriate earlier in my life though, then I might have gone around being offended... and honestly I'm glad I didn't have that idea put in my head.

Re: Viewpoint: 'I feel like I was accidentally hired'

#157

Post by komali2 »

zosima wrote: post #144
komali2 wrote: post #76

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> So all of these groups choose to live in separate neighborhoods, because they all are racist to each other? No, because the empowered class artificially created ghettos, and either forced racial separation directly or indirectly by removing access to societal resources, forcing communities to form to compensate. Of course Cuban refugees will form Spanish speaking communities in a hostile Florida - everything is in…

Pray, tell. Why would these repressed Cubans not live together with hispanics, in hispanic ghettos. Speaking the same language and all. After all, that would make them a stronger force, and definitely give them more diversity.

They... Do...? That's why an empowerment movement might focus on Latinx in general, and as you go more local you might find some of the same people at the state Latinx rally as you do at a city's Cuban American resource exchange group or whatever.

The point is that self-sorting doesn't by definition mean that humans are inherently racist or that it's natural/ethical to oppress minority populations, which I take as one of the many bad taste implications from this thread.

Re: Viewpoint: 'I feel like I was accidentally hired'

#158

Post by komali2 »

throwaway_98554 wrote: post #91
andreygrehov wrote: post #22

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Here is an interesting observation. If we take a look at how different nations are distributed across big cities, we can see that many neighborhoods are race specific. A lot of cities have chinese, jewish, russian, mexican, etc. neighborhoods, meaning that people _naturally_ want to live with _similar_ people. What's more important, it happens organically. It's not like some organization or government forces people t…

You are right. Some of the sibling replies argue the contrary by using a sleight of hand; stating the desire to associate from only one of the two parties. Take for example the relationship between a man and woman. If both want to live with each other, everything is fine. What if the man wants to associate with the woman, but she doesn't? Do we force her to accept the man? Does he have a right to access her? Obviousl…

The desire to prevent a Jewish person from being your neighbor is unethical and Bad. Such a "freedom" should not be encoded into law (as what happened in San Francisco with Chinese populations), or allowed to encode implicitly into societal norms.

People shouldn't be imprisoned or killed for being racist - but they should be scorned, shamed, and cause disgust when their viewpoints are aired.

Re: Viewpoint: 'I feel like I was accidentally hired'

#159

Post by numakerg »

komali2 wrote: post #142
numakerg wrote: post #120

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Thank you for writing this. If there's at least one thing I hope everyone can agree is a positive, it's people sharing their perspectives like this. > look around the office, you immediately notice that black people aren't there. You're right, there aren't. One in ten people in my city is black, but I would estimate* fewer than one in forty developers at my work are. But there were just as few in my college classes,…

It's not exclusionary. I have almost no say at what happens at my local University. Do you? I can at most pay taxes, write my representatives, and maybe a couple other ancillary things. What I can control to a huge degree is who my company hires and how I treat my colleagues. Seeking out how to help POC programmers in the workforce doesn't mean we can't also work to improve the American education gap. We have a lot o…

In what part of my writing did I suggest that it was exclusionary?

> It's not a case of, OK let's hire 20 more black people and it's over. The reality is that, well first you have to find them, and then you have to see if they qualify for a job you are actually hiring for.

I was addressing this statement from the author, suggesting that if my perception of the education system is accurate then it could be difficult to find those developers if barriers at school aren't also broken. Maybe my perception is wrong, but that's why we have discussions.

> I have almost no say at what happens at my local University. Do you?

I do. I am an alumni and can contribute to scholarships that fund students in underrepresented categories. As a student, I published articles supporting my (what I would consider progressive) political positions that opened up discussions but also received significant criticism.

> Seeking out how to help POC programmers in the workforce doesn't mean we can't also work to improve the American education gap. We have a lot of time in the day, after all.

Hopefully. I'm not American, so I can't say much. Best I can do is listen and think about what I do and say.

Re: Viewpoint: 'I feel like I was accidentally hired'

#160

Post by treis »

scarface74 wrote: post #127

Again, for context, I’m Black and I’ve been in the industry for 25 years. I have never experienced what the author experienced. Maybe it’s because I’ve worked in Atlanta all of my career where companies are use to seeing Black professionals? It could be that I’ve spent all of my career in the staid enterprise development space instead of Big Tech? Whatever it is, I can’t ignore statistics because of the anecdotal exp…

>Again, for context, I’m Black and I’ve been in the industry for 25 years. I have never experienced what the author experienced.

>Maybe it’s because I’ve worked in Atlanta all of my career where companies are use to seeing Black professionals?

It's not just you. I'm not black but, am from Atlanta, and maybe that's the common link but this just seems like it's from a different planet. It's just hard for me to grok things like this:

>I've been to job interviews where the receptionist will take me to a whiteboard room. When the interviewer comes in, he'd say: "I'm sorry, you must be in the wrong room."

>But the day I come to the office in person, they are taken aback. I often get: "I couldn't tell where you are from on the phone."

Who are these people that are surprised that a guy named Ibrahim is black?

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