CW: sexual harassment

There is a whole other layer to this discussion when it comes to URMs in tech.

I left my first ever job (that I rarelt list anywhere on CV) after a few months because my coworker loved to talk outloud about raping me while my teammates found it hilarious. https://twitter.com/dan_abramov/status/1381569575297372161

At this same place, it was practice to circulate women job candidates code in the team to publicly laugh at it and pick it apart. The women that came in for interviews were rated for hotness and their facebook profiles looked up.

The thing is, no matter how hard you try to weed out these kinds of places at the interview stage as a candidate, you're not always going to succeed because some red flags only emerge months or weeks into a job.

If you are a minority in tech, chances are these flags might more often include harassment or underpaying or other shit that will mess with your mental health.

My second job I left for the reason that the salary was so low, I was struggling to find a landlord in London who would be willing to rent to me without a UK based guarantor.

Another job I left after 2 years - my manager changed and the new one had a habit of calling me into his office to make sure "I didn't waste this attention he was giving my career".

Does this make me look like a job hopper? Probably.

Am I going to bring up any of these issues in a future job interview? Unlikely.

Interviews are not a safe space for these topics and we should not require people to disclose painful experiences

Just to check if they are the right kind of job hoppers (whatever that even means)

A while back an interviewer who for most of his career has either been a founder or a C-level exec asked me during an interview "how do I know you're not going to leave after a year?"

And it hit me that for some people in this industry the idea that they would be forced to leave a job for reasons entirely out of their control (harassment) is so unfathomable they think every job hopper is out there switching jobs every year out of boredom or for new tech stack