Quote: (07-02-2015 03:55 AM)Atlanta Man Wrote:
If you are black you better be all the way competent in your field if you want corporations to hire you. I specify corporations and firms in the private sector (not government) because ain't shit for free when money is on the line and halfway competent gets you all the way fired(or never hired). Trust me, I know the media will have you believe that just be black with a professional degree and you get hired on the spot, but I assure you it is not like that. All the brothers I know that are successful are very hard working, pay attention to detail, and are extremely competent. All the unsuccessful blacks I know are just like the unsuccessful whites, unsuccessful Southeast Asians (Mindy Kaling's sorry ass medical school dropout brother), and unsuccessful Americans of any shade, they are all halfway competent- and no firm or corporation wants to hire them.
The bolded claim definitely does not generalize across the private sector,
especially with corporations. For corporations, this is exacerbated as the straightforward result of the principal-agent problem inherent to corporations: Shareholders bear the brunt of long run profit and losses (and thus market valuations), but middle managers and their peons are the ones who make interviewing and hiring decisions, under the Sauron's Eye that is Human Resources.
I've written about this here on this forum before.
Until fairly recently, I worked on Wall Street for a quantitatively-focused team. We used to maintain essentially three separate tracks (literally three separate resume piles) for interviewing/hiring:
1. Blacks, latinos, women.
2. White (Gentile and Jewish) men.
3. South and East Asian men.
In order of preference. And by "we" I mean my former colleagues, since I had long abstained from the hiring process, as contributing to
actual institutional racism/sexism (as opposed to the usual usage of "institutional racism/sexism", which can generally be read as "imaginary racism/sexism") made me ill.
This kind of hiring practice was pretty typical across different teams in our firm, and other similar firms on Wall Street. Some may split these into fewer or more "tracks," and/or have slightly different rank orders of preferences, but the commonality is that women are prioritized ahead of men, and blacks and latinos ahead of whites and Asians.
What transpired was certainly much closer to interviewing/hiring any halfway (or not even halfway...) competent black/latino/woman than being "demographic"-blind.
A 3.4 from a Top 60 school would be a near-guarantee for an interview with us and subsequent hiring offer if you're black/latino/a woman ("ooh! we absolutely need to talk to him/her"!). It would get you ignored if you're a white male ("ok... next"). It would get you derided if you're an Asian male ("why did he even bother trying? 3.4 from [school] is borderline retarded.")