Comment by FT_intern | Hacker News Reader

Comment by FT_intern | Hacker News Reader

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I'm sorry that happened but I don't think it's indicative of some trend in the industry.

I've been a minority almost my entire life. Most of the issues with being a minority are not really present on software engineering teams. The demographics are too widespread.

There is no in-group. I would estimate 50-60% of software engineers are immigrants. That group is further segmented by country of origin. Everyone is different from each other.

Country of origin transcends both gender and race in terms of shared experiences and commonalities. American born people of all races and gender are more likely to befriend each other than to befriend a person who speaks broken English.

This diversity on software engineering teams minimizes the effects of being different because everyone is different from each other.

Software engineers also tend to be more introverted and immigrants are more polite (due to unfamiliarity with American culture).

For people to make inflammatory comments and get away with it, they need to have allies and be part of an in-group. These prerequisites are much more difficult to fulfill as a software engineer.

Software engineering is one of the best professions to be a minority in.

There is always an in-group, it's just a matter of which one. I have worked at places where I was part of the in-group, and places where I wasn't. Sometimes it was nationality. Others, the school you came in. The gender divide is not a big issue in some places, while in others I've ended up talking to HR about harassment that I saw in front of my own eyes. I've been the shoulder to cry on, literally, in one of those cases. And don't get me started with discrimination due to sexual orientation.

It's really easy to know when you are not part of the majority though: When you don't see any differences and everything looks cheery and happy, congratulations, you are not treated as a minority.

We can't really boats about the industry when we have 15% women and about under 10% African-American. I've worked at a place where we had a large architecture meeting: 25 architects, zero women. The company boasted 50-50 gender split, but with vert few exceptions, you could make a great guess of role and gender. Guess that men sitting in an engineering pod are developers or managers, and that women are either QA or systems analysts, and you'll get it right. The testers had the same CS background as the developers, except they were paid a good 30% less. The rest of the women came from recruiting and HR. You could also guess which department they worked on just by looks too.

I know four women that have dropped out of software engineering in the last year, just because the toll of being treated differently made them lose any love they had for the industry, and are now doing jobs that pay way less, but where they don't have to work twice as hard as a man to get half the recognition. One of them is rather unattractive by your typical standards. When she quit her last job, many people didn't even know she had been working there for years: She might as well have been socially invisible.

Maybe you've been very lucky in your career, and haven't seen the discrimination, or maybe you really are part of the in-group and don't know about it.

> We can't really boats about the industry when we have 15% women and about under 10% African-American.

Disagree. We have amazing contributions from a variety of people from Europe, South America, and Asia. It's not perfect, and it should get better, but it's nothing to be ashamed about.

It's interesting how the NBA happily celebrates black culture and black people who represent their game despite the fact that they are overrepresented relative to the general population, but the tech industry basically never celebrates the contributions from a variety of immigrants and non-whites in its own industry.

And can't even safely mention whites.

This argument (or more specifically, personal accounts) doesn't really respond to the original argument about a high % of immigrants.

Why is there always an in-group?

What is the in-group of a place with:

- 10% Asian Americans

- 10% Indian Americans

- 10% various white European immigrants

- 15% Indian immigrants

- 20% Asian immigrants (14% Chinese, 4% Korean, 2% other)

- 25% white Americans

- 5% Black/Hispanic Americans

- 5% Black/Hispanic immigrants

(With 10% females spread among those race/country lines)

What I see happen is that the various groups separately cluster based on country of origin. None of the groups are dominant, so no one person (even a leader of a group) will feel comfortable making inflammatory remarks.

Many times everyone on the team is introverted and no groups form at all.

>Maybe you've been very lucky in your career, and haven't seen the discrimination, or maybe you really are part of the in-group and don't know about it.

Ad hominem? I've been a minority in the most formative years in places where being different is tough and I understand the difficulties. I contrast the experience and demographics of work with those years.

The ingroup there is pretty obvious: being a dude.

I don't know how that's even a question -- one group composes 90% of the workplace, and its a group that enjoys special privileges.

Racial discrimination and in-grouping isn't the only kind of in-group.

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