Over the past few years I've been on numerous hiring events with my company for dev/ops jobs and I would say that the percentage of candidates that were black roughly matched your team...maybe 2-3% (and most of them were not US citizens). Of the remaining i would say about half were Asians (east/west) on visas, a third were US citizens (mostly white) and the balance were mostly Europeans on visas...super rough numbers obviously.
It's strange because we have a bunch of older black folks in IT roles that have been around for a long time. I've worked with quite a few black folks in my career (boring city not near the coasts) and the overall demographics are actually fair to middling (racially anyway, male/female is still a mess). New hires though? Not not so much. I don't see how we fix this overall situation without understanding what's causing that discrepancy.
It's not a quick fix but personally I feel we have to do more to inspire young kids to dream about this type of career and visualize it as part of their future. Part of that is (probably?) going to be seeing folks that they can identify with in those roles. Another part is (probably?) to make that resources are available for them to test the waters and develop those skills and refine their interests. I'm white, i don't know what it's like to grow up going to school in the setting most young black kids find themselves. I went to a mostly white school in the suburbs in the midwest and it treated 'nerds' like dog shit back in the day. Something tells me the story doesn't get better in metro public schools. Pop culture really seems to hold sway in those settings, maybe some help there wouldn't hurt.
It's strange because we have a bunch of older black folks in IT roles that have been around for a long time. I've worked with quite a few black folks in my career (boring city not near the coasts) and the overall demographics are actually fair to middling (racially anyway, male/female is still a mess). New hires though? Not not so much. I don't see how we fix this overall situation without understanding what's causing that discrepancy.
It's not a quick fix but personally I feel we have to do more to inspire young kids to dream about this type of career and visualize it as part of their future. Part of that is (probably?) going to be seeing folks that they can identify with in those roles. Another part is (probably?) to make that resources are available for them to test the waters and develop those skills and refine their interests. I'm white, i don't know what it's like to grow up going to school in the setting most young black kids find themselves. I went to a mostly white school in the suburbs in the midwest and it treated 'nerds' like dog shit back in the day. Something tells me the story doesn't get better in metro public schools. Pop culture really seems to hold sway in those settings, maybe some help there wouldn't hurt.