Dear Google, hire more Blacks.

In a post earlier today Valleywag reported that Laszlo Bock, Google’s vice president of people operations, assured members of Congress last June that Google, which was lobbying for more H1-B visas for immigrant workers, had plenty of black employees. “We have a very strong internal Black Googler Network,” he said. “We actually view it as our obligation to reach out to underrepresented communities in our industry, particularly women in engineering, particularly African-Americans. “How many [of Google's employees] are African-American?” asked Representative Maxine Waters. “I don’t actually have that data at my fingertips,” was Bock’s reply. “I apologize.”

Interesting post and even more interesting comments. One commenter, Oh No I Di’n't, reflects on her experience in the Google interview process:

“I’m black and when I was interviewing to work at Google, I asked them about diversity and diversity programs and the HR person kept saying, “Google is welcoming of all types of people”. I finally was like, “Look, I’m black and I’m wondering if there are any support networks for black people?” Again, “Google is a great place for all types of people.”

This was about a year ago and I wasn’t even interviewing for an engineering position. Considering how many people they hire for customer service, the “there aren’t enough African-Americans in CIS” isn’t really that good of an explanation for what’s going on at Google. By the way, I have no idea what the hell is going on at Google in terms of race.

I ended up withdrawing from the interview process to accept another job, but the above conversation had nothing to do with that.”