Now today we have a very critical issue to talk about.

It's been on my mind for years, really.

And I think a lot of us have been aware of it,

but nobody really wants to talk about it.

And it is about, how software engineering

has changed over the years.

It is no longer what it used to be.

You know, ever since I was fired from Facebook last year

as an ex-Google tech lead, by the way,

I had asked myself if I want to reapply

to get a job in tech.

I asked myself if I want my kid to get into tech as well,

if I recommend the profession for my nephews.

And the answer to that is not really,

because software engineering is just not what it used to be.

So let's put it this way.

The path to get into a top tier tech company

like Google or Facebook

usually requires, or it really helps

if you get into a very good school,

like say, Harvard, Stamford.

However, even to get into these schools,

a lot of them will reject you simply based on your race,

your appearance, even if you're the smartest kid out there.

Even if your programming skills are top notch,

you could get rejected

simply because they've reached their quota

for the type of people that you are.

Simply because of the way that you are born.

And there could be so many political reasons for this.

Maybe diversity issues.

And they may even be very well reasoned about.

But at the end of the day, you could be rejected

simply because of the way you were born.

So that's the first gatekeeper in this process.

And I can tell you that, at least for myself,

when I first got into software engineering, into programing,

what really drew me into it was that

there would be no gate keepers.

You see, for me,

the reason I got into coding was back in high school.

I used to have one of these cool english teachers

and he liked to align himself with all the other cool kids.

He wanted to be seen as one of the hip teachers,

and I wasn't one of these cool kids

so we didn't get along very well.

And as a result, he gave me poor grades.

It didn't really matter how good my english essays were,

he would just be mentally biased against me,

unconscious bias.

And then he would just give me these bias grades,

meanwhile he'd be chatting it up

with all the other cool kids.

So for the nerdy, unpopular kids

with pale and crusted skin.

Well, we had the few refuges like math, coding, physics

because these were areas that were purely objective.

Didn't matter how much a teacher hated you,

if you got the answer right,

you would get a good grade

and nobody could take that away from you.

It was a pure meritocracy, a battle of skills.

And that's why I fell in love with coding.

We were outcasts.

We wouldn't win many friends necessarily

by our appearances or by our charisma.

And that's where a lot of hacker

and programmer stereotypes may come from.

Where you see these people, they're not very attractive.

But at the end of the day,

they would deliver a beautiful product

like a website or an app,

or a beautifully engineered system

and their work would show for itself.

However, these days,

programming is just no longer objective.

You can be the best programmer in the world,

apply to Harvard and still get rejected

and that has nothing to do with your perfect SAT scores

or how many open source projects you've been building.

They simply will reject you on your appearances.

It's a perfectly valid reason to reject you,

simply based on, say, diversity reasons.

You just weren't the right ethnicity or gender.

Now that may not necessarily be a complete deal breaker

because these days information is largely self-served.

College is not the only vendor of information out there.

There's so much information and knowledge on the internet.

You can go to boot camps

or enroll in my course techinterviewpro.com

where I'll teach you to land the coding interviews.

Check that out, by the way.

But the frustrating thing is

even after you've obtained the necessary programming skills,

there can still be so many other gate keepers further ahead.

For example, if you wanna apply to job fairs,

go to a company, activities, events.

You know, there are so many activities

that will explicitly ban you,

based simply on the way you were born.

For example, builtbygirls.com

they will only allow women or non-binary genders

into their conferences.

And these are job fairs

sponsored by large top tier tech companies.

Opportunities will exclude you

simply based on the way you were born,

your ethnicity, your gender.

And so to me, tech is no longer about objectivity.

It's not a place where you can just say,

don't look at me,

and let's just take a look at this body of work

and judge that work objectively for what it is

and let the results stand for itself.

Because the problem with tech is

it is now evaluated based on equality of outcome.

So it's not about equality of opportunity

because certain groups will just have more access

to private events and functions than other groups.

And back when I was working at Facebook and Google,

they would say,

well, if two candidates interviewed equally well,

then they would prioritize the candidate

who is more diverse.

Which means that you could be rejected

simply based on your appearances, the way you were born.

And I wanted to be clear here

that I am not, by any means, rejecting diversity.

I think diversity efforts have been great.

And we should, by all means,

support as many different types of people

to get into tech as possible.

I just hope that we can be inclusive

and welcoming to everybody,

and not get to the point of reverse discrimination

where certain groups of people will not feel welcome.

For example, at the BUILT BY GIRLS conference,

I actually kinda wanted to go there and support the movement

to bring more women into tech.

But they actually would reject me

simply because of my gender.

In my opinion, it would be great

if these conferences and events

would be welcoming to everybody

to help support some common cause,

whether that be bringing more women into tech,

more black people into tech.

Or any other efforts for diversity

or whatever else that may be.

Okay now, for anyone who's been working in tech for a while

this should all come as no huge surprise.

The fact is being a software engineer

has just become way too popular.

Everybody wants to be doing it.

And it's kind of a shame that for certain classes of people,

it can be a totally uphill battle.

There will be gate keepers every step of the way

whereas in the past, there were no gate keepers.

If you wanted to be a programmer

nobody would be there to stop you.

They would just say, oh, you wanna do that?

Feel free, be my guest.

That's a nerdy profession.

They don't wanna do that.

People wanted to be lawyers, actors, accountants,

investment bankers, architects.

Not so much anymore these days.

Everyone's just piling in on the software engineering game.

So the way I see it,

it is an uphill climb all the way through.

And if you were to ask me, would I recommend this profession

to my kids or my nephew.

I would say, not really

because it is so difficult it is just uphill.

And why do you wanna go uphill,

find some path where you can go downhill

where you don't have to struggle

every single step of the way

where every time somebody is trying to deny you,

based on the way you were born.

Maybe you just weren't born for this type of career.

And what I find particularly destructive about this is that

a lot of these issues you cannot even talk about

on social media like Facebook, Twitter, YouTube, LinkedIn,

because a lot of these companies

happen to also be the same gatekeepers.

So they're not going to necessarily support your rhetoric.

They could even limit your virality censor

you burn your account

or demonetize your channel.

If you happen to be supporting some political stance

that they don't really support as much.

You know, we do have freedom of speech in America,

but we don't have freedom of distribution of speech.

It still happens that speech is pretty much controlled

by the these tech companies.

And there's no distribution platform

for conversation of any other idealism.

The fact is social media networks and platforms.

They are not neutral.

They don't need to be neutral.

They're privately owned entities.

And there's a monopoly on conversation these days,

the way we talk our idealism, our beliefs

are limited to the type of information

that we are able to see.

I believe that one day in the future,

we may look back on this age

and view as the age of censorship

because there's so much that we cannot talk about.

If the topic is controversial,

or potentially not advertiser friendly

distribution of that content will be limited.

In fact, you may have seen the men's rights movement

has been censored and demonetized on YouTube and Reddit.

Zero Hedge which is a day trader blog,

they were banned on Twitter.

And you hear about the coronavirus also been censored

and while some of the censorship may be valid,

it seems to give tech companies incredible and unfair power

to allow them to decide what society is

and is not allowed to discuss.

So what do I recommend.

Well, I would recommend in this day and age

to look into self publishing,

because all of these gatekeepers, they may exist,

but you can still bypass all of them.

Because if you put out good work,

if you come up with the best website, project,

framework or system, then the work will speak for itself.

And overall, I would say that

software engineering programming is still probably

one of the only games in town.

Is still a great field to get into.

But you wanna be careful about

all these gatekeepers along the path.

And look for ways that you can do self publishing,

get into entrepreneurship, personal branding,

learn about marketing, such that

you don't have to go through all of these other people

just learned about what it takes to create a project,

an app or a website and launch it on your own.

Nobody is going to be able to stop you

from doing any of this stuff.

If you wanna write a book, for example,

then you can learn to do self publishing on Amazon