Comment by nadam

I am with Mike on this one. I am in the position of seeing this whole story from far away from SV from a small Eastern European country. I think to be far away helps me have a perspective on this 'playing the racism/sexism card' story. I know lots of Eastern-European guys who has been programming since they were 12 yeaers old, are very good at it, are intelligent, etc. but have incomparably worse 'social status' than anybody in the U.S, even black people or women. Lots of talent wasted, lots of people earning fractions of money what they could with a little more connections and 'social proofs' behind them. Here in Eastern Europe we are used to that life is hard, you have to be so good that they cannot ignore you. You have to convince people about how good you are through email or skype, you have to try to get a visa, etc... Women and black people who are born in the U.S. are much more privileged compared to most of the world's population. I have worked at local branches of U.S. companies. I had lots of white/black males/females as my bosses. All of them earned much more money than me and not all of them had the knowledge I have on software development. Anybody with even absolutely mediocre knowledge and not very much experience from the U.S was called 'senior associate', but even very experienced eastern europeans were sometimes titled simply 'associate', etc... I've seen lots of brilliant people with Ph.D-s doing the most boring grunt work, because that's what is outsourced here. But that's life. You have to earn 'social proof' with hard work. I don't think black people or women who are citiziens of the U.S are in especially bad situation in this regard.