HN user
As an aside, it's insane that decisions of such import are being made by folks working at a couple of large US companies. This is going to impact users and small businesses across the world. Where is the representation from African/Indian/Chinese businesses and technologists? This would require the big tech cos to truly be interested in "diversity" of course, instead of the lip-service they pay to it in practice.
Thanks for taking the time to post such a thoughtful comment. The parts about your ego getting in the way of genuine learning are especially insightful.
work that isn't big data with large corporations trying to fuck over their customers and doing bad things collecting/using data
This is something I'm struggling with as well. My company recently acquired another company that collects large amounts of user data. I'm planning to quit as soon as I have a reasonable idea about what to do next.
Why is it that African-Americans (not including Black Africans in this) tend to seek acceptance into White institutions and power structures, instead of building parallel ones? For instance, TiE[1] (The Indus Entrepreneurs) was specifically set up to fund Indian founders. At the time, there was pervasive bias (not that it doesn't exist today) against Indians as being good enough only as rank-and-file engineers, but not as founders or leaders [2]. TiE was instrumental in funding some of the earliest Indian founders many of whom are successful VCs today. They effectively forced the White VC power structure to sit up and take notice. Today, there is a flourishing ecosystem of Indian VCs and founders.
On a related note, as an Indian, I'm envious of what China is doing today - they realized pretty early that the Western world order would never have a place for China as equals. Hence, they began to develop viable alternatives to Western technology and institutions. Those efforts are beginning to bear fruit today. The borderline insanity and paranoia that the West has developed [3] about China is justification enough for those efforts.
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/TiE(https://en.wikipedia.org/w... [2] [https://archive.fortune.com/magazines/fortune/fortune_archiv... [3] https://www.bloomberg.com/news/features/2018-10-04/the-big-h...