BLACK ENGINEERS JOIN FORCES TO BOOST DIVERSITY
Makinde Adeagbo knows how isolating it can be to live and work in Silicon Valley as an African American. He says it’s even more isolating to be a software engineer here.
Adeagbo, who works for Pinterest, says he can go weeks without spotting another black engineer in America’s tech hub.
“It’s not only that you are the only black person in the room or in the company,” says Adeagbo, 30. “Oftentimes you are the only black person you see in Palo Alto or Menlo Park.”
About 1% of engineers at Facebook and Google are black. The population of Palo Alto, Calif., is 2% black; Menlo Park, Calif., is less than 5%.
Over the summer, Adeagbo founded /dev/color, a non-profit for African-American engineers that officially launched last week. The group brings together engineers from top companies such as Facebook, Uber and Airbnb to provide support and a voice to African Americans and give them the opportunity to raise up the next generation, Adeagbo says.
Adeagbo says he hit on the idea while volunteering as a mentor to computer science students.
“These students knew they had someone who had their backs, whom they could look up to and reach out to when they needed help. I thought to myself: Every black software engineer could accomplish a lot if they had someone like this,” Adeagbo says.
The name /dev/color is a reference to a common directory on computer systems “as well as our efforts to strengthen the community of black software engineers, engineers of color,” he says.
Adeagbo’s /dev/color is joining Black Girls Code, Code 2040 and the Hidden Genius Project, a new and growing wave of enterprising organizations founded by African Americans aimed at addressing the scarcity of African Americans in the tech industry.
The challenge is daunting: Only 1% of venture-capitalbacked start-ups are led by African Americans and fewer than 1% of general partners at major venture capital firms in Silicon Valley — the ones that back tomorrow’s Facebooks and Googles — are African-American.
The high-tech industry’s diversity problem is being met with a growing sense of urgency. The predominantly white male industry runs the risk of losing touch with a diverse nation — and world — that forms its customer base.
“We are a community that helps one another, and part of that is that younger people get to see these role models: black software engineers who are getting into management or trying to start their own companies or are becoming real experts in their technical domain,” Adeagbo says of /dev/color.
The group has held fireside chats with tech pioneer Ken Coleman and Facebook’s chief technology officer, Mike Schroepfer, and plans more.
To help make a concrete difference in members’ lives, /dev/color matches each member with another to offer guidance and set goals. In an online community, members pick up the skills and connections needed to advance in the tech industry. .
Civil rights activist Jesse Jackson, whose Rainbow PUSH Coalition has urged the tech industry to take meaningful steps to close the racial gap, commends the effort. “They are not just talking about the problem. They are acting,” he says.
It’s in Adeagbo’s nature to take action. Born in Nigeria and raised in Louisville, Adeagbo says his parents nurtured his interest in science and math, sending him to every summer program they could find. At the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, he homed in on software engineering.
“What always blew me away with mechanical engineering is that if you wanted to build a new car, it takes millions in capital, but if you want to write software to compete with Excel, you have access to the same tools as Microsoft does,” Adeagbo says. “It’s empowering.”
During the summer, he had internships at Microsoft and Apple. He says he rarely saw any other African Americans. At Microsoft, he was the only African American on a 100-person team.
His first job out of college was at Facebook. One of his first assignments: Work on the network’s frequent service outages.
Adeagbo says he was drawn to solving big problems in the tech industry and beyond, in search of ways to make people’s lives “tangibly better,” working on software for schools in Kenya and coaching track in East Palo Alto, Calif.
Dev/color has 20 members. Among them is Aston Motes of Dropbox, who was Adeagbo’s roommate at MIT. Motes says /dev/color has ambitions to reach engineers worldwide and give them a place to start, and stay, in the industry. “Kind of bold, but I think we can create an organization that can eventually be home to engineers of all career levels,” he says.
“They are not just talking about the problem. They are acting.”
Jesse Jackson, civil rights activist