[quote=Coronita][quote=paulflorez][quote=Coronita]See if I was black, I probably would have been hired according to what Eric said.[/quote]
Black engineers continue to have an abysmally low rate of representation in engineering. Sounds like Eric was feeding you bullshit. Eric would not have hired you if you were Black. Eric wanted to hire another Eric. That’s still how the industry is. People hire people who are like them and avoid hiring people who are different. Not only does it hurt under-represented minorities, but it also hurts the ability of businesses to innovate. Echo chambers are not the optimal places for innovation.[/quote]
I totally agree which is partly the reason why I was pretty happy why HP ended up the way it did, especially after Carly made it into a big mess.
There were so many other instances of unconscious bias throughout my career both when I was an intern and when I was an after I was an FTE. I won’t event begin to tell you the stories at then Motorola in Schaumburg, IL. back decades ago….beyond the original experience that I couldn’t move a computer to a different cubicle before getting a unionized furniture worker to do it that would take a few weeks, a good part of my internship there. I mean, it was pretty tough to get in to “Motorola” as a undergrad asian EE engineer because when you applied, you had to jump through all these technical hoops during the interview. But once you got there, and shared a corporate housing with the other interns , you learned that it was hard to get in as you were asian, worked your ass off, didn’t nearly get invited to as many of the off hour happy hours and etc, and just plain ackward social vibe. But if you were African American intern roommate, you got to do the cool student intern events, parties, had a well organized mentor, well organized events specifically for all the african american interns there, a support network among other fellow AA interns and engineers,marketing, finance employees..And if you were like my white roommate, you were invited to all the happy hours, the chicago cubs games, after work softball, etc… Didn’t need to slave away at the tectronox spectrum analyzer testing the gain of a recover before a deadline, got make a lot of cool powerpoint presentations about the much smaller job you did. And were guaranteed a full time job after you graduated from college the few days you had left with your internship.
I was only asked if I wanted to come back as a full time engineer several months later about 2 months before my graduation after I got a full time job at then rinky dink Qualcomm. There it was a painful interview… Directors, managers, engineers , the only thing the systems engineering group cared about was asking technical skilled questions. no bullshit 49ers questions and frankly no one at least in that dept gave a shit what color you were as long as you were good enough to answer all the questions .. I was sold….well at least until they decided to have all of us pull cables out of the base station equipment for testing 90% of the time as the primary job function…. And then when I tried to transfer into their software engineering group, met some bullshit excuse from that group why I couldn’t… I guess because by that time, Qualcomm had slightly declined, hired a bunch of people for ailing Nortel and Motorola, and brought over some of that frat boy mentality into Qualcomm much easier software engineering group, since funny thing was many of them didnt require a master’s degree and several years of work experience in software as I was told. and frankly couldn’t code themselves out of a wet paper bag if their life depended on it ..hence why their base station business was an absymal failure and eventually sold to Ericcson. So I left there too, and went to the Bay area. (Probably cost me a fortune in stock options. …slightly mitigated by two ipos up there, lol)
I think when I retire from this industry maybe in 1-2 years if they fire/lay me off with my half golden parachute, I’m contemplating publishing my memoirs on LinkedIn just to stir the pot:
“Memoirs of an Angry Asian American Engineer That Got Fucked Over Many Times By Unconscious and Conscious Bias ”
Since at that point I won’t give a shit which bridges I burn.
I would have a lot to say on both the general problem of these biases and how any sort of affirmative action is just lipstick on a pig and not really doing shit to solve the problem, just pretending to fix the problem..At least in engineering though, these biases don’t bubble up nearly as frequently as in other industries , at least not until you get into senior leadership roles.[/quote]
I would like to be your agent. I know i can sell that book.
