And it had a very ugly result…You see, throughout my career, I never ever sought a job with HP. I was celebrating when Carly Fiorina destroyed HP, and when many people at HP from that Palo alto office were looking for a job when I was still up there, I made sure to toss all their resumes in the trash can, among many reasons, many of their engineers had their head up in the clouds with that sorry excuse of a distributed software architecture called “e-Speak”…. I never entertained a resume from Palo Alto HP. Neither did anyone in my group…never bought any office equipment from HP, or computer, or computer peripherals with HP label on it.
For me, there was no unconsciousness in my bias. I was young them, and didn’t know better ..
So forgive me if I roll my eyes when someone mentions about how “diverse” they think they are champions of “diversity”. In my experience, most of the time people who claim they are champions of diversity are most of the time full of shit and have a lot of unconscious biases lurking in their closets that either they don’t realize or even if they do, don’t care so long as they have something they can do to easily check the diversity box….[/quote]
When I graduated with a CSCI degree in northern CA, HP did very heavy recruiting at my university and supplied most of the servers in our labs. We used bid points to do interviews, so I bid heavily on HP, Lockheed, and Chevron. I was young and stupid and didn’t know that my GPA wasn’t high enough to get hired by any of those companies. My GPA wasn’t bad, it’s just those companies wanted the very high end of the GPA curve and I wasn’t it.
When I did land a job with another company, it was in San Diego and because of my college experience with HP equipment, I was assigned projects that developed software to run on HP servers. I worked with the HP reps very closely and got to like them a lot. They had a certain way of dressing, of acting, of caring for the customer and I began modeling myself after them. They were great guys and I think learning from them has helped me in my career.
At my company, the attitude everyone had was that HW developed by HP was very high quality, but any SW they put out to run on that HW was terrible. And it was. I went to several HP SW training courses at HP’s Fullerton location and part of my mission was to ask for workarounds to the shortcomings of their SW. As it turns out, I knew more about their SW than HP instructors. One started turning to me for answers when other students asked questions! It was bizarre.
On to your bias comments. Completely agree – I have a great deal of skepticism when someone portrays themselves as unbiased. Quite often, it ends up being that they are biased in the other direction!
Everyone is biased. Whites, blacks, hispanics, asians, everyone. The best we can do, in my opinion, is to be aware of our biases and do our best to not act on them, to take them out of the equation. That is easier said that done, I know.
