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.”
March 27th, 2008 at 4:33 pm
The interview sounds inconclusive since HR is taught NOT to say anything offensive or politically incorrect. An insider would’ve been more relevant but since it seems there aren’t many African Americans @ Google… I was pleasantly surprised to see many African Americans in the IT Dept. for a high profile College/Hospital in Philadelphia.
March 28th, 2008 at 2:12 am
This is a subject which needs to be investigated for sure. I am not sure about in the US, but they just hired the first “african” employee last year for a continent with millions of internet users already, now thats pretty sad for a company of Google’s size and growth rate!
March 28th, 2008 at 9:40 am
Check out their diversity page, i do see a hand full of Blacks:
http://www.google.com/support/jobs/bin/static.py?page=diversity.html
and supposedly have work locally and nationally with the National Society of Black Engineers
March 29th, 2008 at 5:39 pm
Let’s just say that it is reasonable to conclude that like many companies, Google has a few people of color, but not a lot. Personally I have met two. Additionally as already noted in these comments, for the scale of the company there is a serious underrepresentation. Now if one were to survey a number of Black BW2.0 community members who have attempted to join the Google team in recent years, and if I were a betting man, I might wager that a very large percentage were not offered a position.
March 29th, 2008 at 10:37 pm
Now I am even more interested to know. I have been to the campus before, and I can tell you I have no seen many of “African Americans” represented. I know this is even stranger, but David C. Drummond is the Senior Vice President, Corporate Development and Chief Legal Officer, and he is black. According to the site, He served as Google’s first outside counsel and worked with Larry Page and Sergey Brin to incorporate the company and secure its initial rounds of financing.
Checkout:
http://www.google.com/intl/en/corporate/execs.html#david