[rrrx3]

Exactly. There are numerous HBCUs that have very well structured CS programs. I'd be willing to put money on the fact that those graduates don't even get a second look. Valley people are too preoccupied with the optics of having a BIG SCHOOL NAME to actually care if an employee without the school name can do the job just as well or better.

[steven2012]

This is generally false in Silicon Valley, both currently and in the past. The only company that made having a big school name important was Google, and even then it's only a factor. The vast majority of Silicon Valley companies don't care where you come from, or even if you graduated from college. All they care about is if you're smart and if you can contribute quickly.

Half my current team at a well-known company doesn't even have CS degrees. The youngest one never went to college, but he's one of the smartest members of our team. I was recently hired, and I'm in my 40s and there's another guy who's older than me. My boss was a high school teacher, and he was one of the instrumental programmers in the entire company for the last several years.

Over the last several years, I've been intimately involved in hiring, and I can tell you straight up that no one looks at schools, and anyone who has half a chance at passing a phone screen will get a call. People might get more excited if they have a good name on the resume, but we called everyone that seems like a decent candidate.

[moby]

"All they care about is if you're smart and if you can contribute quickly."

You do realize that both of those descriptors are immensely subjective, right? How you assess "smart" is different from how I do, and there's no guarantee that the environment you create will allow me to contribute quickly compared to another one.

[rrrx3]

Sure. Except that the OP of this on Medium went on to detail a very different scenario, outlining behavior that mirrors exactly what I said. You assert that the companies you've worked for do it differently? Ok, that may be so. But you're also not the bellwether for the entire industry, no matter how you may characterize your 20 years of work. I've been in it half as long, and as a person of color I can tell you unequivocally that you have no idea what you're talking about when it comes to exposure, opportunity or lack thereof, or general desire to be involved in technology as a profession from that community.