Hiii everyone, this is my first time posting here! I have read Hacker News sometimes but only thought about sharing my own post after seeing Manara's post (https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=25849054) last month. I asked them if I can share this here and they said it was a good idea. :)
I’m a 19-year-old Gazan female who participated in Manara last year and got internships at Google and Repl.it. I’m so excited I will spend this summer at Google in Europe! I got lots of questions about my experience when people heard about it on Facebook so I wrote this blog post to let other young engineers in Palestine and the Middle East know how they can get into amazing companies like this too.
Congrats! This post is awesome and really put a huge smile on my face. It reminded me of how enthusiastic I was about programming at your age and there aren't a lot of better places to start your career than at Google. Best of luck.
Probably the best post I’ve ever seen on HN. You’re a really good writer too, which is very rare for developers, so you’ve got a huge differentiator there!
Hi! I have some statements and one question. I love seeing women making their way into the field of technology and I truly wish you the best of luck. I have two daughters who are interested in computer science and engineering, and my oldest will be attending University this fall after being accepted at age 16. She has had to fight for things which would have been, in my opinion, granted without thought if she were male.
Thank you for being awesome! The world is already a better place with you in it!
As for my question, a friend of mine from Palestine told me that if I ever make it to Palestine that I must try ice cream from Rukab's Ice Cream. I've never made it there, and I'm not sure that I ever will. Have you eaten this? How does it compare to the ice cream in Europe?
Manara's Polish-American co-founder catching up late here to say I never tried that ice cream, but I do recommend eating knafeh in the West Bank and fattet hummus in Gaza! The food in in West Bank vs Gaza is quite different... I think Gaza is particularly good... but unfortunately it's almost impossible to get there unless you're a humanitarian worker or a journalist.
NOTE: if you work in tech and want to mentor in Palestine, check out Gaza Sky Geeks and Code for Palestine. They organize on-site travel for select volunteers (full transparency: I'm involved with both organizations)
I don’t in any way want to diminish the many good spirits here. Just to add a little fire under western readers’ butts.
It’s good to know when talking about Palestine whether you’re geographically talking about the West Bank or Gaza. They’re separated by not a lot of distance but a lot of different kinds of restrictions.
A lot of the rule over the West Bank vacillates between heavy lockdown and expansion of Israeli urban development. Most (not all) Gazans don’t get to experience even that flux.
Looks like Turkish ice cream (I don't know who invented it, it's what I've seen people call it). The article mentions this a bit.
There is a place in Sydney in Newtown that makes a great tasting one, and I had some from a theatrical man in a stall in Singapore once so something similar can be found around the world.
Yes that's the one, I think I tried some kind of chocolate/hazelnut but it's been a while.
I strangely detest rose flavour unless it's also mixed with chocolate in which case I love it (and will devour a bag of chocolate coated Turkish delight).
The generic name is "booza", and it's popular in lost of countries in the region. The most famous comes from a shop in the souq in the Old City in Damascus, which is also the most efficient shop I've ever seen. The number of people they serve per minute is quite a sight. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Booza
PLAN is a great charity for that. They do things like give girls food to take home from school. It made it so the family would be better off sending their girl to school. Efficient and effective!
PLAN has low overhead, too. They don't spend fortunes on marketing. A high percentage of donations (~90% IIRC) goes to the people in need.
I learned this from PLAN Canada, but I'm sure it is the same elsewhere. I have no relation, just a fan of their work.
Nothing against educating girls, but this is probably the wrong conclusion. Economic situation determines whether girls can get an education or not, so educated girls correlate with a good economic situation. Not the other way round (educated girls causing a good economic situation).
Personally, I think this focus on girls only is sexist and I take care to never donate to charities that only want to help girls.
I think in areas with more traditional cultures, educating girls DOES improve the situation over a longer time horizon.
Those girls will become mothers, and their education will translate to providing better opportunities and a more sophisticated outlook for their children.
I agree it seems sexist to only help girls, but helping anyone is good.
Your enthusiasm is actually charming. I'm sure it has put smile on many faces. It brings this nostalgic feeling of how many actually started. Have a blast in your career!
On another note, the repl.it interview sounds awesome. It's a rare interview process where the candidate gets to do useful and interesting work (in this case, work with operational transformations) as part of the interview process. Kudos to repl.it for their awesome sounding interview process and to you for crushing it. :)
Congrats Dalia! And may your story - that someone from Gaza, especially a girl, is a talented dev (and writer!), and has landed a top global tech job - one day be so commonplace that it's not breaking news.
I am so happy for you. Obviously you are very talented and determined and despite the obvious handicaps this too often shitty world gave you, you are breaking out to the world stage. Congratulations!
How can we help? Do you need money for housing in Europe, better computers, anything? I am quite sure a lot of us would be glad to chip in.
Oh this is so kind of you. Right now I am all set but it is possible that I need help especially with simple things like how to find a place to stay when I arrive in Germany this summer. Again, thank you for offering help :)
I'm curious: do people from Gaza primarily identify as "Gazan" versus "Palestinian"? I was confused for a moment by the title before I clicked, as I'd not seen that adjective used in that way before.
No, it's not about "Gazan vs Palestinian". It's that Arabs sometimes refer to someone using his city. For example, if someone is from the city of Khalil (Jericho), he might be called as "khalili", people from Nablus as nabulsi. This is a trend in most Arab countries, in Jordan, people from city of Maan refer themselves as Maanis, from Irbid as irbidawi, etc...
I think of myself as Gazan and Palestinian. Just like a Newyorker and American. But it was important to choose the word Gazan in the title because the Gaza situation is different from other parts of Palestine. Gaza is a very small piece of Palestine near the mediterranean sea. It’s 35 km long and 7 km wide. We are surrounded by walls on 3 sides and most of us have never been able to travel, that’s why I said Gazans because Google seemed as distant as an alien planet.
Congratulations and thank you for posting this inspirational story! I became interested in programming 26 years ago after taking the same class you did. So thanks to David Malan and his forebearer Margo Seltzer for CS50.
Congrats Dalia. I read your post and then returned here hoping that you were active in the comments. Not only are you clearly a strong engineer, but you're also a great writer which is an extremely valuable skill as you'll hopefully discover. Best of luck at Google!
Ooooh thank you so much! That's great! Also, why don’t you hire someone else from Palestine though? They’re just as good and they’re available now…
I was in Manara’s 4th cohort. The 5th cohort just started hunting for internships and jobs. Two of them are my friends Hend and Rula, they’re just like me, they went to RBK and then Manara. You can meet them by emailing Manara (www.manara.tech)
Well, we have good wired connections here in Gaza from Paltel and other companies but our phones only have 2G because of the political situation. The main problem can be with the electricity going off for long hours but we have alternative solutions: generators, batteries, etc.
Dalia I want to wish you the best of luck. I am an Israeli and I loved reading this. I really hope to see more and more engineers from Gaza getting opportunities like the one you have.
In a previous role of mine I had the privilege of meeting and working with some Palestinian Engineers from the West Bank. It was only for a few days as it was an internal company hackathon, but it was still great and we are still in contact today.
Sure there were some differences and some interesting conversations but it also allowed us to hear each other’s perspective and to solve engineering problems together.
I hope to see more Palestinian Engineers succeeding like you are and also more Israeli and Palestinian engineers working on projects together.
Thank you for posting this. It reminds us that in any difficult situation the common man and woman on the ground can still be civil and have mutual respect
More often than not the common people on the ground have no personal reason to hate each other. Activists (I’m using this term to refer to all politically engaged individuals taking action according to their camp) and politicians are the ones stoking the tensions and creating situations to their advantage.
It's happening already! The Abraham Accords are the first step. Another half- generation or so, leadership issues will have resolved themselves. There's no point twiddling thumbs and waiting for bibi or abbas to expire.
Since you passed the bar at repl.it too, after your google internship you could get back in touch with repl.it and tell them you are now more experienced and still want an internship, they might just add you for the next summer.
I have to add, your story is heartwarming and I hope other people who aren't so fortunate will be able to learn and get more opportunity and achieve like you have.
Did Google tell you that you will go physically to Europe for the internship? Last summer internships were virtual due to covid19 restrictions, and with the measures from most countries, I'd be surprised if this summer internships are held on the phyisical office, while Google still has WFH.
The team I will be working with is located in Poland. But the internship will be remotely so I am working on getting a visa to Germany because Germany has a consulate service in Gaza so it’s easier for me to get that visa. I heard about another Manara participant who got into Google Poland and then had to wait 8 months for his visa because of Covid-19. He’s actually in West Bank and there is consulate service there but they stopped during Covid and he recommended I try Germany instead.
Oh wow, that's not good. In normal times, I know some European countries allowed you to enter with a tourist visa, which is much easier, then let you apply for a work visa once you got a job offer... and if you told them you came into the country for the personal job interview, you could wait for the visa while in the country! I know because I've done it... but that was many years ago and with COVID-19 now, I don't think they're even issuing tourist visas anyway. In any case, hope you manage without issues... I've been to both countries and they are both beautiful and very "European" (as in, lovely little towns, great food and very kind people).
This is a very uplifting post. Thanks for sharing. I hope more people will follow in your footprints, when they see it's possible.
About racism, it is sadly alive and well in Europe also. I think the tech hubs are likely better than many other places as they are more diverse. In Stockholm, where I am, we have had to import lots of SW developers as the industry demand is much larger than the local supply (SW developer is the single most common occupation, all categories) but I still see occasional instances of under-the-table racism - e.g. a landlord might prefer to rent out an apartment to a native swede before an immigrant. And women can also find themselves isolated and sometimes have to work much harder to prove themselves in a very male-dominated segment. But I think we're heading in the right direction at least. Hopefully, my daughters will not experience these things, if they choose to work in SW development when they're adults.
It's unfortunate, but it's understandable that "regular" people want to minimize risks by e.g. avoiding the unknown. What I mean is that you can't really blame the typical citizen who sees something unknown, reads the news and is concerned about his/her property.
Non-western immigrants in Sweden have a bad reputation, simply because integration has been handled poorly by the government (and their immigration policies have arguably been way too open), and that people come with all kinds of backgrounds, war torn countries etc.
It's a chicken and egg situation, I think the best thing Sweden can do at this point is to partly shut the doors on immigration and focus on integrating the population currently living in ghetto like suburbs.
Understanding is not condoning. Their motivation for discriminating people on the basis of their ethnicity may be understandable, but cannot be forgiven. You can improve integration while also letting immigration in.
Do you program in - or what do you prefer - right to left as in Arabic or left to right as in Latin ?
edit: I see now that the image was taken through a mirror, I thought it was right-to-left programming.
Despite Hebrew and Arabic being right-to-left languages, all coding is done in normal left-to-right Latin (really, English) programming frameworks.
As Dalia noted, all major programming languages are left-to-right with Latin alphabet, and their frameworks/SDKs/APIs are filled with English words for functions and classes.
This can be amusingly seen peeking through in PHP sometimes. The scope-resolution operator appears in the code as "Paamayim Nekudotayim" (double-colon in Hebrew, for non-speakers). You can see it in parse errors:
we keep it in LTR although some prefer to set up the IDE for their preferred latin based non english language. it's because some software messes RTL and the translations for the technical keywords in arabic are not standardized. For example I can't tell you what "Refactoring" would be translated to in arabic
My first assumption (which I guess was correct) was that the image was flipped, but then I got confused because I started looking closer and, while I could see some English syntax ("for { ..."), it also looked as if there were Arabic characters mixed in, so I wondered if it was some interesting mix, and also that they were rendering English RTL.
Then I realized that was much less likely than simply having flipped the image.
Thank you for sharing this. It was a pleasure to read - the youthful zest of your excitement and passion really expresses itself in your writing. I was also touched by how one of your immediate priorities is to help your parents and brothers financially. (Hope you are able fulfill all your wishes).
If you don't mind sharing with us - I am curious how educated your parents are and what their profession is currently?
Thank you! My father is an engineer and my mother has a master degree in psychology. My father works for al-baladiyya, I think in English it’s called the municipality. My mother is working with the Gaza Community Mental Health Program which is an NGO. My mom’s salary is stable but my dad’s is not.
The problem is that there are few jobs in Gaza due to the wars and the closed borders. Lucky us they are working but my father is earning just 50% of the actual salary. This happens a lot in Gaza nowadays. The economic situation has been getting a lot worse for the last few years.
Forgive my ignorance and curiosity - but why is your father's pay not steady if he works in a municipality? If he works at a Muncipality, it should mean he works for the government, and everywhere in the world government jobs pay may be low but it is supposed to be steady with good job security?
I interviewed Dalia and a few other people referred to us by Manara at Repl.it. It was such a pleasure meeting kids that are so smart and have an insane drive.
We have a really high bar for hiring at Repl.it, Dalia and the other youngsters from Palestine performed better than at least half the experienced engineers I've interviewed in the past. We extended an offer to one Dalia's classmates and he started yesterday as an intern with high potential for full-time, as our internships usually are since we invest a lot in them.
It was such a pleasure meeting you Dalia, wish you all the best. Hope to work with you in the future (maybe when we can offer US visas).
Thank you so much Faris! It was such an amazing experience interviewing at Repl.it and I am glad I got to know you. For sure, I will come back and reapply to to join your team :)
> We have a really high bar for hiring at Repl.it, Dalia and the other youngsters from Palestine performed better than at least half the experienced engineers I've interviewed in the past.
I really don't want to sound negative, but I find this difficult to believe. Sorry if I sound too harsh, but experienced engineers who don't perform better than recent graduates sure it's a thing, but 50% of the ones you have interviewed don't perform better than a recent graduate? Perhaps you were exaggerating? Or perhaps your interview process is really focused on what recent graduates know best (popular algorithms) and not in what experienced engineers know best (how to deal with real world codebases). Again, I don't mean to sound harsh, I think perhaps that "...at least half..." was just a way of saying "Dalia was really good" (which sounds more credible).
Experienced engineers who perform better than a recent graduate are usually not interviewing. They have jobs that pay them extremely well.
There's an adverse selection problem with interviewing, in that people who are good tend to disappear from the labor market and when they do appear on the labor market they get snapped up quickly. New grads don't have this adverse selection effect: there is a very good reason why they don't already have a job. This is why companies invest so much in internships: this will often be the only time to snap up a promising young developer before they start building a career at your competitor.
> Experienced engineers who perform better than a recent graduate are usually not interviewing. They have jobs that pay them extremely well.
Doubtful. There is constant churn in tech, as the best way to get a raise is to switch jobs. It's well documented that junior/senior engineers (and beyond) switch jobs, on average, every 2-3 years. Longer tenures are generally favored due to vesting schedules (though I've had several friends ditch Amazon before the [iirc] 4-year cliff).
Eventually you hit a ceiling, and there aren't companies that pay better than your current employer. You're getting raises each time you switch jobs because your experience & job performance qualifies you for jobs at progressively more economically successful businesses, which both can and will pay you better. This can't last forever: eventually you get to the "center" of your industry, the set of companies with more money than everyone else, and you're better off performing better within them than finding another job.
(Or alternatively, you find a fast-growing startup that's growing faster than the wealthiest companies in your industry, hop on the ground floor for stock options, and ride the stock up. Once that happens you don't need money, though.)
You switch jobs every two years, applying to four companies, getting two offers and taking the one that most closely doubles your salary, then you’re gone from the market again.
Meanwhile the other 1000 guys who applied for that gig you took are still out there looking. They'll apply for 50 jobs this week, 50 next week, and 50 more every week for the next two years. They’ll be your competition again next time you’re on the market.
Now think about how many of “you” it will take doing your four interviews every 2 years before you are anything but noise in the process from a hiring perspective.
It’s the reason guys like you get offered nearly every job you apply for. Because the person in charge of hiring is amazed to have found somebody capable of programming computers at all.
A few years back when I was not so good at being a leveraged employee delivering value, I remember doing ~30 interviews in a single week because I needed to talk to that many people to find a job in a timely manner.
Is the constant churn just a Silicon Valley thing? I get a raise every year of about 8% which keeps me well compensated even after working at the same job for 8 years. It’s possible the company I work for is an outlier? We have lots of engineers who have been working here for 15+ years.
As a result, my interviewing skills have deteriorated significantly. I wouldn’t be surprised if a talented programmer straight out of college could out-interview me even though I have much more experience.
I doubled my salary each time I changed jobs, from internship -> first job out of high school -> first job out of college -> Google. When I got to Google I said, "I guess that's the end of the doubling." Nope, my compensation doubled again while I was an employee there, and then doubled again. Left to do a startup and then went back - at double the compensation.
The "problem" that I have now is that there are few companies that can offer me double my salary, and none in my area. I'm not willing to relocate so my only hope is that FAANG-type companies start to hire remote developers.
I put problem in quotations because it is very hard to complain about being paid too much :(
You're an exception. In developed countries for sure most companies don't give out raises higher than a few percentage points, and definitely not constantly 8%. For reference, at your current rate in 10 years you're doubling your salary.
In developing countries your story is a bit more common but even there you can accelerate things by switching companies once every few years (somewhere between 3-5). After a while you probably want to stay put to get promotions.
It also depends where in your career are you. When I started as a junior and improved year by year, my salary grew 10% yearly in the same company, for 6 years.
It definitely depends on industry location. In the big tech centers, 10% avg increase over time would be, well average (Seattle, Austin, NY, Boston, bay area). I was shocked when I learned my last company was paying new college grads more than 100k. Then it got to be 120, 130 (total comp, salary, bonus, stock). I think the starting salary could have gone up 10% a year. This was a company that wasn't a faang but competed with the faangs for hiring.
Interview skills do degrade. You have to practice before you interview if you haven't been doing it recently. Interviewing is a performance, it's different than normal programming, but the world mostly expects you to handle that difference.
1. You have to solve a problem immediately (whiteboard or now in a webbrowser)
2. It's often frowned upon to research via google search something, although in real life most people do it all the time.
3. you have only an hour to solve a problem, and what if you don't see the 'right and easy way' to do it? In real life things aren't so simple.
4. Don't forget it's a performance! You have to be on your best, sharpest most intelligent and witty behavior, think through things, it can be exhausting.
These are just a few of the ways that interviewing is artificial.
Interviewing is a performance, it's different than normal programming, but the world mostly expects you to handle that difference.
I was looking last year, I flunked my few interviews. Then I paused and spent a few weeks working through CtCI. After that I was easily getting offers. Was I a better programmer than before? No, of course not, I had just learned how to put on a show, and I forgot it all the moment I had an offer I was happy with.
I think you need to define "interview". I recently just got a new job and in the interview process I definitely did worse on the algorithms than I would've done right out of college, but everything else went great. "Here's how I've done it for 8 years that has been to the satisfaction of people who write paychecks" goes a long way for many companies.
Yes, that's true. It depends on how the interview is structured. I would not excel in an interview that relies on whiteboard coding, algorithm problems, and CS trivia, but I can talk for hours about the projects that I have worked on and real problems that I have solved.
A steady raise rate of 8% when not being promoted would be phenomenal. After 15 years you'd be triple your original pay, which, for non-promo compensation, is unheard of.
I agree that it is pretty great. I think triple my starting pay is very doable at my company. I know that the people at the top of the engineering org chart are doing quite well for themselves.
Looking at my friend group, it seems like a mixed bag.
We're in our early 40s. About half have been at their current place of employment for close to 10 years now. The other half seem to change jobs every couple of years, although some of those had a long tenure before the recent bought of job swapping (they haven't found a new place they like).
Yes, but even in that case, they tend to get picked up quickly. They're not staying in the pool for months and months and months, racking up dozens of interviews.
Yep. Last time I interviewed I did one interview at a random place I didn't care about just to get rid of jitters, one at a mid-tier place I'd actually accept if I didn't get another offer and then two at FANG companies. I easily passed all of them except one of the FANGs and then I was off the market. The time before that I did a single interview. The time before that though I wasn't as experience and probably interviewed at 20-30 places before I got a job.
This is such a weird comment to make: these are companies that can quite literally (and quite often) let you go for any reason at all (if you live in an at-will-employment state). I've done this exact thing before, and I've also resigned without 2 weeks notice to chase greener pastures. Business decisions should always be purely transactional and borne out of your own interest. Anything else is self-sabotage.
Companies sure as shit don't care about you, and you caring about them gives them a leg up, not you.
Most of the time when people do this, they're open to accepting an offer if it turned out to be really great. They just know that such an offer from a particular company is really unlikely.
I don't see a big problem with it. While it may 'waste' some time on the company's part, it also sends a signal of, "hey, you could get some of these really high quality engineers if you were willing to [pay more/offer more vacation/offer remote work/etc.]".
Now, if you're unwilling to accept an offer from a particular company even if their terms blow you away, then yeah, that's a dick move.
This is exactly what I've done the last few interview cycles I went through. For me, my screening interview was with a company that had a tone of public problems with treatment of female engineers and fired the ceo soon after. But they had some good engineers too. I interviewed with them and it was a mess, but I did get good experience. I thought I failed, they never told me, then 6 months later tried to get me to come do a full loop.
I think it's a smart strategy to pick 1 or 2 companies you'd never want to work out, including for low pay, and do your practice there. You should tell them if you pass why you don't want to come there, including for the low pay.
Exactly. People who are good are always going to be referrals, once they've worked at a few places, their networks are just not going to let them get away. The only times I've found where you are interviewing someone experienced who turns out good is
1) someone coming from a big corporate job where they were undervalued/underutilized
2) someone coming from a different region, different country, where they have no local network
Its the old boys club. You do realize there are tons of programmers in just the US that have no contacts with the coasts? This is what makes the Ivy League so valuable which is very good at discriminating over large groups of people.
My favorite is businesses and colleges that don't take applicants from PO Boxes.
Sounds nice and awfully convenient for those supporting the current interviewing practices. But does this apply to all experienced engineers, 50%, 5% ? US only, Europe, Russia, India?
We need better proof and better data than a 2006 blog post.
It doesn't have to apply to all experienced engineers to make a big difference. Say that only 50% of engineers on the job market are bad, but the bad ones apply for 100 jobs and the good ones apply to 2. Then of the interviews conducted, 98% of them will be with bad engineers.
You’re simply taking away from an incredible achievement here.
She cleared interviews at both Repl.it and Google. She implemented an assignment based on operational transformations and having studied this myself it’s far from trivial. If you folks ever retire this question Id love to have a crack at it.
She also cleared the Google interview which goes deep into algorithmic aspects and system design. Which means that she’s brilliant at both abstract design and execution.
To be able to do both while graduating does place someone in the upper brackets of engineering skill. Some don’t fulfill it because of other reasons but that’s another matter.
It’s not like the bar is being lowered. They’re held to the same bar as Stanford and MIT grads who apply and they come from a third world country with only a bit of remedial coaching. It’s what top school grads already know from their campus coaching and tips from their seniors.
People who say this is akin to gaming the process you too can easily get the same by dropping a trivial amount of money on CTCI, EPI and Pramp for mock interviews.
I wrote this a little bit too much in frustration but I’m tired of these assumptions that people from the third world cannot show incredible potential sometimes exceeding their first world peers and are only held back by bad systems and politics.
There are untold depths of genius all over the planet. We haven’t even come CLOSE to most people on earth realizing even a fraction of their potential.
“ I am, somehow, less interested in the weight and convolutions of Einstein’s brain than in the near certainty that people of equal talent have lived and died in cotton fields and sweatshops.”
- Stephen Jay Gould
I feel like you’re projecting unrelated frustrations onto the questions being asked:
> taking away from an incredible achievement here
> held to the same bar as Stanford and MIT grad
> you too can easily get the same
> assumptions that people from the third world cannot
These have nothing to do with the discussion, which is that it’s disingenuous to call a new grad better than an experienced engineer in that the interview process is obviously biased towards new grads.
No one is complaining that she got the job. We all know how to “game the system.” Whether from Stanford or community college, anyone with Leetcode and a few weeks can easily pass these interviews. So I am not sure why you are implying that people are bitter about some perceived inability to get such a position.
People are just pointing out how disingenuous of a statement it is for the OP to say “better than an experienced engineer” when they have literally no metric to judge this. And no, system design interviews don’t really count. A few days with the System Design Primer will solve that.
>These have nothing to do with the discussion, which is that it’s disingenuous to call a new grad better than an experienced engineer in that the interview process is obviously biased towards new grads.
From root comment: “Dalia and the other youngsters from Palestine performed better than at least half the experienced engineers I've interviewed in the past.”. There’s nothing disingenuous about the interviewer’s belief.
From Dalia’s article: “repl.it’s interviews were really different. First they gave me an operational transformation homework assignment.”, “For my second interview, about two weeks later, I had to prepare a presentation with ideas to improve the product.”.
You are making stuff up about Leetcode and whatever - the article itself has facts that show your assumptions to be wildly incorrect.
But this is what people are objecting to, isn't it?
That anyone reasonably clever which spends months studying CTCI, EPI and Pramp and whatever else and doing mock interviews will pass the interview, while an experienced programmer will not just by virtue of their skills and knowledge.
> anyone reasonably clever which spends months studying CTCI, EPI and Pramp and whatever else and doing mock interviews will pass the interview
Spoken like someone who has never interviewed at Google.
I have 6 years experience, a M.S. in CS, have worked at SV unicorns, and studied for 2 months for my Google interview and still failed. Am I an idiot? Possibly, but more likely that the interviews are hard and there is a lot of randomness.
Until you actually study and try yourself, don't talk about how easy it is for anyone "reasonably clever".
Randomness is definitely a factor, there are so many things that can go wrong, from having a bad day, an interviewer having a bad day, just bad luck on the set of questions you are asked, the list goes on.
I have performed a lot of coding interviews (probably 400+), I'm painfully aware of how limited the signal is that I can reliably read from 45 minutes with a candidate
I deliberately ask a question that has no algorithmic or data structure component to it (and tell candidates that) it's just a simple problem solving coding question which allows some insight into general coding and engineering chops
I still see experienced engineers struggle. It is hard to pinpoint exactly why, but lack of preparation/practice definitely seems to be a problem
Covid appears (at least for me) to have killed off the whiteboard
I've seen experienced engineers who I know for a fact can code and solve problems decently completely freeze and blank out during easy live coding challenges.
I think interviewing is a stressful situation. It's hard for reasons outside an applicant's knowledge or intelligence. Interviewing seems to be a skill in itself. I know I hate it... :(
I give out a certain coding question to my candidates. I recently interviewed and was given the exact question - and I blanked! Like, this was a coding kata style problem that I’ve done in several languages and seen done in others. I just absolutely blanked. Brains are strange.
Steve Yegge famously talked about Google's "interview anti-loop", where you get two interviewers in your process who wouldn't have hired each other, so the things one of them values are actually negatives for the other, and viceversa.
I don't know if that's still a problem at Google, but it could explain why some people don't pass the interview process even though they are reasonably clever.
From my more than 5 years at google I saw a lot of random stupid interview questions. I was astounding. 10 years ago they didn't seem to do any interview question checking, you could ask anything.
I was referring to tech interviews in general, not a specific company. Interviewing's like dating: if you do all the right things you may still not charm the person you want, but the odds are very good that you will be able to find a good partner.
I believe all of the Palestinians Repl.it has interviewed have come from Manara. Manara has a pretty strong vetting system and in order for applicants to be accepted into the cohorts, they have to pass a coding assessment, video interviews, etc. Manara takes strong Palestinian talent and tries to make them exceptional. This is the reason why they might be performing better than more experienced engineers.
Our interview has almost zero traditional algorithms. And no, he’s not exaggerating. I’ve been interviewing people for a decade now and neither experience or pedigree is a good predictor of success.
Read the post if you haven’t because it touched on our process. And watch this video to learn more: https://youtu.be/kABh44IVWMo
College kids often just took an algorithms course. Experienced devs have to brush up on this stuff to jump through the hoops while also managing their day job and any other commitments.
I do a lot of hiring at a "big n" company and I'd agree with this
It sounds like you simply don't have experience interviewing engineers, especially since you don't cite any such experience to back up your beliefs. I interviewed exactly 151 engineers over the last year for a mix of entry-level and senior roles, using the same format for all the interviews. The interview is a mix of scenario-based questions and actual coding. There is no discussion of data structures or algorithms, the coding exercise requires no special knowledge and can be done in any language, and there are no trick questions. If you can build useable software you can ace the interview.
My experience lines up exactly with what the GP said. The overwhelming majority of experienced engineers that are interviewing simply can't write useable code. I understand it's hard to believe, but it is the reality whether you believe it or not.
Can you elaborate? I believe that a fair amount of people coming out of college cannot merge 2 sorted linked lists, they can't code even fizzbuzz. But for people that write code every day, I think all of them could do those things. PMs and managers who used to code 10 years ago (like me, ahem) should be able to do that but they might be rusty.
Interview processes are significantly biased towards seeing large numbers of non-hire-able people over hire-able people. It's not surprising that someone with few connections and just starting their career could perform well against the biased view of an unfiltered interview pipeline.
My wife just interviewed and got a new job in the past week, for a proposal writing job at a decent-sized tech consulting firm (300 employees) where she'll be making six figures.
To get this job, she spent about two hours of preparation learning about the company and hunting down samples of past proposals (this is her standard process for preparing for an interview, by the way), then had one 30 minute interview with her would-be boss, and one 30 minute interview with three would-be coworkers (at the same time). She had a job offer a few hours after the second interview.
Now she's had several years of prior experience for some pretty large companies and worked on very large proposals in the past, but the difference seems to be in her industry they trust past experience, whereas in tech it has almost zero value, they just care about whether you can past their coding exercises.
The programmer/software engineer interview process is just so broken. I have to grind toy algorithm coding problems and rewatch algorithm lectures for weeks just to psyche myself up to go through the interview gauntlet again.
I've even neglected getting back to pings from recruiters just because I wasn't feeling up for going through the whole process at that point in my life and/or I knew I wouldn't have enough time to prepare myself for the interview to even have a chance to make it through it and I'd be wasting my time.
I get that employers are getting inundated with people that they at least feel they couldn't code (I bet they'd think that about me as well if they brought me in to interview today, even though I've been basically a one man dev team for startups before and currently developing and supporting software that services millions of customers) so they feel the need to verify the skills.
I just find verifying skills in the midst of the interview very difficult, especially if it's testing knowledge I haven't used very recently, since my brain is constantly context switching out technical details and platforms and apis based on my current work needs.
There needs to be a good way I can prove "Hey, I really can code" outside of an interview, once, that's somehow trusted. I thought that's what a degree in Computer Science was supposed to prove, but apparently that was a waste of money.
There needs to be a good way I can prove "Hey, I really can code" outside of an interview, once, that's somehow trusted.
Some people say this is what fizzbuzz is supposed to do. Others, particularly people outside the USA, say the solution is engineering licensure. A lot of people in hiring think that's not enough. But what is definitely lacking is institutional trust between companies outside the FAANG bubble, and perhaps blue chip companies like IBM.
The problem of low institutional trust means that working for Company A as a programmer for years means nothing to Company B, and you have to prove yourself all over again if you have to interview for Company B even if your GitHub is loaded with open source side projects. So the problem is not proprietary code or not being able to show your work to a new employer, it's trust.
Anyway, the developer interview culture is severely broken, and it's been discussed a lot elsewhere on HN, yet nobody has been able to solve the problem. We have smart thermostats, can order books with our voice from the couch, and 3D print a house, but we can't solve hiring and just have to accept the status quo if we work in tech.
> the difference seems to be in her industry they trust past experience, whereas in tech it has almost zero value, they just care about whether you can past their coding exercises.
I'm of two thoughts.
One, the hazing ritual (reversion to mean) is because we forgot how to interview properly and can't think of any other strategies. For this, I mostly blame corporate HR wankery and failings.
Two, some Mensa style geeks do a weird bully flex, probably out of insecurity. And per our common negative attribution bias, these few "bad apples" are the ones we remember.
Well in academia, and generally in research, interviews are about 1.5 days of solid interviews, plus an hour presentation. In normal times, add a good dose of jetlag.
I once interviewed at a place that was almost two solid days of 30 minute interviews, one after another. By the end of the second day I completely didn't care about anything they wanted to ask about or what they thought about my responses. I think this stamina crushing test was actually part of the evaluation. Not kidding about that.
They didn't say all recent graduates performed better than 50%, just the ones that they interviewed from Palestine. It sounds plausible that they only interviewed a handful and they were better than that 50%.
where did he draw any conclusion?? It seem like you're the one who jump to conclusion here.
It was just merely stating a fact that Dalia and her acquaintance perform better in the hiring process than at least half the experienced engineers he has ever interview.
Yea, the numbers would be if that was the case. I don't think the person that said that statistic was saying it like it passed the 5 sigma mark. It was given as an offhand anecdote and I didn't see a reason for the overly negative post that I responded to originally.
The interview process is being gamed. Just read the article. I am not trying to single out her. It is an industry wide practice. You mostly get people who are good at passing the interview versus who know how to program. But that is ok, because the promotion process is being gamed too. You have people who know how to get promoted vs who know how to provide value. Don’t worry, our educational system is being gamed as well.
* Experienced engineers will perform better than graduates in general
* The distribution of experienced engineers who are poor performers won't over represent application to one particular company unless they are an outlier (Repl.it is not Google)
This makes me wonder what Repl.it's hiring process is and why it is not doing well at attracting good people.
> Experienced engineers will perform better than graduates in general
In my experience there are a lot of experienced engineers that are very low quality, and it isn’t uncommon to have experienced engineers that have negative productivity (working with them costs more than they produce). See https://thedailywtf.com/ . Starting with recent grads (filtered for potential) can easily be more productive over time, because you can teach them good habits.
> The distribution of experienced engineers who are poor performers won't over represent application
"other youngsters from Palestine performed better than at least half the experienced engineers I've interviewed in the past."
This comment caught me a little off guard. You are saying that these young people with no experience perform better than half of the experienced engineers you interview.
My question is what is wrong with your hiring process? It sounds broken.. What part of the process are the experienced developers failing in? What are you asking for
in candidates that these experienced developers lack but can be found in this group of inexperienced engineers? Curious about salary, would you say Dalia friends makes the same as an experienced developer?
I've interviewed hundreds of "experienced" engineers who could not code for the life of them. Not sure why you assumed the process is broken without first asking about it.
I agree with this (maybe not the "you sound bitter" part), but it still seems like there's something interesting going on. Why are Palestinian youngsters outperforming experienced engineers from elsewhere? Presumably we would expect Palestinian youngsters to perform on par with youngsters elsewhere unless they had access to additional relevant education or experiences, right? Maybe there's some selection process that filters out all of the under qualified Palestinian youngsters before they enter repl.it's pipeline?
Hi all, jumping in here as the CEO and co-founder of Manara just to say that all the Palestinians that Repl.it interviewed came from Manara (I think). We have in place a very intense vetting system and a training program to teach these CS grads how to interview effectively. At Google our referral-to-hire rate is 67%. That probably explains this experience.
The talent in the Middle East & North Africa is very strong. We believe it's the next Eastern Europe, which used to export refugees and is now a hub of world-class talent.
It's simply selection bias. Anyone can write up a resume and land an interview. Most great people have jobs and aren't interviewing, so the talent pool of 'active interviewees' is limited to those who either couldn't land jobs elsewhere or are new. It's rare, but sometimes someone takes time off.
The quality of folks coming from a very selective program in a different country, however, has selection bias in the opposite direction; nearly everyone from there is going to be better, on average, than the 'average' interviewer, because as mentioned elsewhere, roughly half (likely a bit more) of people we interviewed could not pass FizzBuzz, despite having stellar resumes.
We saw the same thing with MEET, which I helped teach a decade ago too.
Exactly. I was reflecting on this topic as well and for lack of a better word I started calling it "code fluency" [1].
These kind of programs select developers with much higher code fluency, which is usually the result of a deeper dedication to coding, either in a previous work experience, in their free time or taking part in additional training.
I was taken by that statement that more than half of the people you considered experienced engineers you also judged them to have no ability to code.
But you said I shouldn't assume your process is broken. If those are your results the process is broken.
Either your pipeline of experienced engineers needs to be fixed.
Or your ability to judge either who is experienced
Or your ability to judge who can't code for the life of them.
Your comment made it sound like 51% of experienced ngineers looking for a job can't code when the truth is 51% of your experienced candidates can't. It is broken..
This is trite, but I am replying for the sake of learning how to phrase it. A candidate can be broken down into a lot of characteristics:
1. Base technical skills - typing (yes, typing), ability to recognize and solve standard problems, and ability to process information quickly.
2. Familiarity with specific technologies (.NET, Angular, SQL, whatever you are working with). This is vastly underrated for line of business applications.
3. Architectural patterns - DRY, SRP, dependency injection, inversion of control, queue/msg based patterns, etc.
4. Domain knowledge, perhaps company specific
5. Social skills, etc
A lot of senior devs ride out their career on number 4. For a new hire, especially for a junior position, #1 is critical, because there is no #4 to speak of and #3 and #2 are handled by other devs.
100%. Younger devs are more eager to work and prove themselves as well, and that's very valuable for a lot of the lower level work. Those are definitely the reasons for perceived and actual ageism.
The pool is already pre-vetted through another company so in essence they are going to two sets of interviews. If you've already passed one set of interview then the probability that you pass the second one is much higher. That's how you can have a situation where a group of inexperienced candidates perform better than experienced interviewees.
Hit the nail on he head. You could do that with nearly any group. Coal miners, orphans, community college dropouts, deaf people, whatever. As long as your pool is large enough and you select the top handful out of that pool.
I would assume that the employer has to take the statements of these experienced engineers on faith until interviewed where as the student may be a more easily known quantity in advance.
Hard(er) to fudge your knowledge when your standing (even virtually) in front of someone.
First of all - big props to Dalia. She clearly worked her behind off to earn those offers.
Second - this definitely, to me, proves that Manara has a good business model. I actually don't think the fact that the Manara students are from MENA is all that important though. However, I do think that their extremely hands-on, and intensive "bootcamp for FAANG interviewing" model is clearly an advantage for early career technical candidates.
Thinking back to my college days (in the US, mid 2010s) - we were not given any sort of class that focused on professional interviewing. The college career center was also very general, and not knowledgeable about the specifics of passing the coding interviews. The best advice I got was a recommendation from a guest lecturer to read "cracking the coding interview" (which to be fair, was better than nothing).
As a result, the people from my school who did the best right out of the gate, were largely people who already knew people already in a FAANG roles and who could rely on that person for a referral, interview advice and practice feedback. Our school was not in SV (or anywhere close), so realistically, that was not an option for most of us. Additionally, I always applied for internships at FAANG companies while I was still a student - but never even got called in to interview - so it wasn't like I could practice that way either. I ended up doing fine for myself by accumulating a good base of practical experience from local non-FAANG companies before graduating, but I really believe my peers, and aspirational novice engineers of all backgrounds would have benefited greatly from having a hands-on course like Dalia described. I especially would love to see efforts like that extending out to under-served communities here in the US as well (native american reservations, appalachians, rust belt cities).
Thanks so much for sharing this perspective! I'm Manara's Co-Founder and CEO. I wish that we could tackle all these communities at once because you're right - there's undiscovered talent in many underserved communities and everyone (them, employers, society) would benefit from bridging the small gap they're facing to world-class employment.
We chose to focus on MENA for a few reasons. First, it's the region that we know best and can therefore be competitive in.
Second, it truly is a large, exceptional pool of diverse STEM talent - it will soon be as many STEM grads as Eastern Europe (and more than half of them are women!)
Third, we can scale our impact by building a brand for this talent pool & referral networks. Similar to what happened in Eastern Europe.
Finally, our focus helps to attract precisely the resource we need to fulfill our mission: highly talented engineers from top tech companies around the world. Some are alumni, most are currently volunteers who care about MENA. They volunteer to do mock interviews, mentor the participants, etc. We could never do this without them.
My co-founder Laila (who is from Gaza, and like Dalia, made it to Silicon Valley... but back in 2016) and I are both passionate about untapping human potential. While we can't tackle all underserved communities at once, we are actively sharing lessons learned with organizations doing similar things in other regions. :)
Thanks for responding! It absolutely makes sense that Manara is targeting a specific talent pool in order to leverage the founders' personal skills, experiences and connections. If anything, targeting the entire MENA region seems like incredibly ambitious undertaking on it's own. I certainly didn't intend to imply that the burden to serve those other communities in similar ways should fall on Manara in particular!
Rather, I think everyone who cares about those communities I mentioned should be paying very close attention the work you're doing, and the exceptional results you're seeing. The fact that you are already sharing those lessons with other regions - well, that just gives me another reason to keep cheering you on. Wishing you all the best!
Thank you for sharing your experiences, here Dalia. I have not heard a first person account like yours from Gaza before. The news we see from Gaza in Australia is almost exclusively bleak - a never ending tale of injustices, deprivation, losses, and endurance. Your story is a wonderful counterpoint that lifts my feelings.
Congratulations for being recognised as a capable engineer by two organisations that you hold in high regard. In addition to your engineering aptitude, it sounds like you know how to direct yourself and to connect with your poise in professional circumstances that some other talented engineers might find trying. These capabilities are rare and valued, because they distinguish you as someone who can join a group and move it forward.
Please keep posting here at HN from time to time. I wish you happiness and satisfaction, and look forward to hearing how you get on with whatever you choose to work at and discover.
Yes I know! Gaza is so much more than that. There are a lot of smart motivated people. Did you know that one of the people who worked on the Mars Helicopter - NASA that just landed on Mars is from Gaza? https://www.linkedin.com/in/elbasyouni/
I want you to know that I’m not the only one. I worked hard but so did lots of other people and some of them are even smarter than me. 4 people from Manara in Palestine got into Google this year and I think there will be more (I was in Manara’s 4th cohort and the 5th cohort is just applying to jobs now. I think at least 6 people are interviewing at Google from both West Bank and Gaza).
I’ll keep you updated and if you want I can tell them to share their stories here too :)
I worked in Gaza for close to 3 years and led a team of 6 software engineers. We worked on a pretty complicated business app (UN project). We were a very quality-focused team and did some pretty cool and advanced stuff.
What I can say from my time in Gaza is that there are many very driven, talented software engineers there. Some of the best engineers I ever worked with were Palestinians (and I don't say this lightly).
I'm an Israeli/American founder of a software company. I'm very happy to hear your story. I hope you inspire many other Gazans. I'd hire Palestinians remotely too.I recall my first airplane trip. Very exciting times for you. I wish you lots of success and happiness in your journey. You've chosen a fantastic path that will God-willing reward you and your family. May there be peace between our people soon!
I wouldn't really say that...the newer generation knows much less Hebrew than the older ones that used to work in Israel, and in Gaza probably even more so than the West Bank. But all the hitech work is in English so it is not really a problem in this sense.
I know Mellanox has some:
https://www.haaretz.com/israel-news/business/.premium-israel...
But the bigger issue is the willingness to hire Palestinians(and legal issues as well), and afterwards to work with them as well, as there is animosity on both sides, especially with people who currently live in Israel/Palestine as opposed to ones that live in Europe.
> Repl.it is my best friend as a developer. I use it every day. I didn’t realize I could work there!
This reminded me of when I first came to the US from India and started realizing that all the software I used (Windows, Gmail etc) and videogames I played were made by ordinary people like me.
Love this! I'm Manara's co-founder and CEO. One of the things we hear from people like Dalia is how much they LOVE getting mock interviews & mentorship from people who work at Google, Netflix, Amazon, Wayfair, Spotify, Twitter, etc. Over and over again they say, "I thought you had to be a genius to work there, but after meeting these people, I feel like I could do it too."
Thank you so much Amjad! I really love Repl.it and I think I am a startup person in my heart. If you have a fall or spring internship opportunity don’t forget about me!
Moving to the United States is almost impossible for junior engineers from the Middle East. They can relocate to Europe quite easily though. Dalia is going to relocate to Germany or Poland.
They can come to the USA for an internship quite easily on a J-1 visa, but they won't be able to stay easily once you want to hire them full-time.
Have you considered remote work or opening an office in Europe? Feel free to contact us at www.manara.tech/hire-engineers and we can set up a call.
Do you think Poland is a good place to relocate to for person from the Middle East? I'm Polish and the country never struck me as particularly tolerant for foreign cultures, although I have some anecdotal evidence of Indian people who relocated here and they do quite well from what I understand. I don't have any first hand account, but there is a sizable group of doctors and civil engineers from the Middle East / North Africa who I believe migrated here during the communist period (as our government back then had good relationships with some of their governments, they've often arrived on students exchanges and stayed).
Note, I don't want to discourage anyone, I hope Dalia and people in the similar situation have a great career in front of here. I'm curios about the outside perspective and why you've indicated Poland as a potential destination to relocate to the EU.
First time I heard of repl.it. I read your message and went to the home page. I saw you name under Multiplayer code together. And I thought, doesn’t that name sound familiar. Lol. Best wishes.
It's hard to overstate how great FAANG internships are for giving a leg up in life to third world university students.
Like Dalia, I thought it would be almost impossible to get a good job on a developed country if you didn't do well in the birth lottery until Google figured out I was good at programming and gave me a nice internship project.
I bombed that first internship, but with the extra experience and the knowledge that I had more open doors than I thought allowed me to get a nice job in the UK after the second one.
I got the internship after only one year of college, and I had nowhere near the amount of experience necessary to solve the particularly complex project I was in: I was a very good programmer but a very bad engineer.
When I got accepted for my second internship years later I decided to get a real job 3 months prior to learn how to work in teams in the industry. I think this gave me the correct context to do well later.
If I were to give an advice to other third worlders with FAANG internships: work like you've never worked before and like you'll never work afterwards. This will change your life if you do it right.
> I became passionate about programming in high school. My teacher selected me for a robotics competition. We built a line follower robot using Arduino.
To me this is important to know how to get younger people interested in programming. The application approach seems better than the "cool, trendy online class" approach.
I also think Dalia is an exception and not the norm. I also want to know about those that didn't succeed and what obstacles they faced, and as an instructor what can we do differently?
Just give a damn and focus on passionate students who are actually interested in something rather than the superficial students doing it to look good for a college application.
Sorry if I use this bit to rant but I'm still mad at a teacher from high school decades later. As a child I was mad at the injustice done to me. Thinking back as an adult I'm mad at all the potential she probably squandered in others.
She taught the electronics classes and was put in charge of the cube satellite project. It was an extracurricular activity where students work with volunteers to design and build a small cube satellite that would launch into space.
It wasn't announced to the school and I only caught word of it from a friend. I rushed to get an application filled out and turned in but the teacher said that I missed the cut off by one day (a date arbitrarily set by her). I was devastated. A few weeks later I was told by a volunteer I could still join in and help, so I did. I put in some serious work and at some point I find out I missed a big meeting. I asked the teacher about it and she refused to believe I was a participant and would not add me to the mailing list.
All my passion and love for wanted to building something and send it into space was converted into vengeful teenage angst and by that young logic I wanted to see her name plastered all over the failure. The best way to accomplish that was to stop showing up and helping. Times goes by and right after all the college applications are submitted I find out that most of the students immediately stopped working on it. Went from something like 100 students down to 3. The satellite was never finished and didn't get launched into space.
I'm probably the exception with the after story: taught myself some rudimentary things from a RadioShack book, got into college and graduated with a BS in EE. Now a days I see all these cool youtube videos and how easily it is for kids to discover things but have may not necessarily have the resources or guidance to get going.
> Just give a damn and focus on passionate students who are actually interested in something rather than the superficial students doing it to look good for a college application.
It's not that easy. Teachers are evaluated on the competency of the entire class, not just the ones who want to be there to learn.
in algebra, sure. like it or not, everyone is expected to attain some basic level of competency by the end of the course. GP is describing something that sounds like an extracurricular/club activity. grades are not involved, and it's pretty common for students to abuse these sorts of activities to pad out their college applications. as a kid, it was dead obvious who was genuinely interested and who was just doing it for college applications.
I can't begin to say how nice it is, seeing something like this. So often, we see complaints (often, accurate, but still complaints) about how bad things are. For myself, I try not to whine too much (with debatable results).
TBH, when I read the title, I was expecting this to be one of those posts that exposes the industry and the process as some kind of abusive fraud. I was really happy to see it be pure joy and positive affirmation.
I have more than a few qualms about the way things are, but it's still an awesome field to be in. I am glad to see you do well, and get acclimated to the engineering culture at these corporations. I suspect that you will have many opportunities, and wish you, and your classmates, well.
In my graduating class (at a top engineering/cs school) the smartest person with the most consistent high grades was a palestinian immigrant (who would always whisper the correct pronunciations when the professors were butchering the pronunciation of a TA's names). I don't think I fully understood the life he had come from, but this is a reminder that we should stop saddling the youth with the battles of their parents.
I gave a few workshops on golang development in Jordan and what i noticed is that women were much more common in the comp sci department. They also were way more interested in the topic- is the situation in gaza similiar? This was really refreshing to see
Yup! In Palestine 52% of CS students are women. In Tunisia 62%. In Qatar 80%. This is one of the main reasons Laila and I decided to launch Manara. :) Our 5th cohort (the one after Dalia's... they're just starting to hunt for internships & jobs now) is 100% women by the way! They're a mix of interns, junior engineers, and mid-level engineers.
A bit of our story in case it's interesting: I was working at Upwork with an engineering team that could hire talent from anywhere in the world... and still our engineers were almost all men from Eastern Europe. I loved them but also missed having a more diverse team and worried that our company wasn't going to be competitive... diverse teams usually outperform non-diverse was, and for a company like Upwork, being familiar with users around the world is critical.
I had met Laila in Gaza. Like Dalia, she studied computer engineering there. She moved to Silicon Valley in 2016.
In 2017 (or was it 2018? hard to remember now) we started working nights and weekends on what we thought would be an all-volunteer side project to connect the talent we knew from Palestine to employers in Silicon Valley. Already in our 2nd cohort someone got into Google. That's when we realized we had created something that worked. Last October we couldn't keep up with helping Cohort #4 search for internships & jobs (that's the one Dalia was in) and training Cohort #5 so I took the plunge and started working on Manara full-time. :)
In my experience, pretty much everywhere else out of the US you will find plenty of women in STEM. Admittedly not 50% but it’s certainly much more common.
In my experience that's not the case in quite many countries. Most of western Europe is the same as the US though it varies from country to country; e.g. the nordics are a bit better on this front then e.g. Germany or my home country the Netherlands. I suspect most of South America has similar demographics.
As far as I know Asia is generally better on this front I suspect it has a lot to do with women being more interested in things that give them economic opportunities.
This is something driven by women themselves. IMHO women are actually also part of the problem in the west. There seems to be a dynamic where women self select out of career paths long before they would even be in a position to be subjected to the type of workplace abuse that is often blamed for this. Don't get me wrong, that abuse needs to be fought and challenged and rooted out. But it's not going to be enough.
You see similar dynamics across many developing nations where women empower themselves by taking on anything that earns money. Many of these countries are otherwise pretty conservative/unremarkable when it comes to women rights and arguably a lot worse than most of the west. But that doesn't seem to stop women being successful doing all sorts of things for which many high-school girls would pull up their noses.
Wow, it really irks me that truthful comments that add something to the discussion gets down votes as soon as it is stating anything that could maybe be construed as negative against the US.
I think it does its job perfectly; gives them candidates who are willing to put up with 10 hour study sessions for weeks OR people who are naturally brilliant (and don't break under pressure while being watched). It filters out a lot of insanely good candidates by doing so, but who cares when you have 100,000+ job applications?
Today I learned about Manara. I'd never heard of it before, but I look forward to using it the next time I need to hire someone! Sounds like an awesome platform.
Yes you should! The Manara community is amaaazing. They are super smart motivated people who already have computer science or engineering degrees. Manara teach us how to interview at companies… both technical and soft skills… I have a bunch of friends in their 5th cohort who are looking for opportunities right now.
By the way the CTO of Manara is from Gaza too. She often tells me I remind her of her a few years ago. :))) She lives in Silicon Valley now and started Manara because she knew how many smart people there are in Palestine.
Wow, sometimes I get so caught up in my dislike of social media (especially facebook), that I forget how useful it is for certain underprivileged demographics. Good on you Dalia for grabbing the opportunities with both hands :)
Really nice !
I have seen code written by folks who have participated in Gaza Sky Geeks program. I was really impressed.
Almost every one I interacted with virtually were very good at html / css / js.
> We will meet for the first time in Europe this summer! The other 3 classmates (Muath, Mohammed, and Hamza) live in the West Bank. I live in Gaza. It’s not far away but I can’t go to the West Bank and they can’t come here. I can’t wait to take a selfie in front of the Google office together and share it with everyone at Manara. :-)
This is so surreal to me that it sounds like something from a book or an odd dream. Super happy for you!
I feel like there are a large number of comments here stating how many obstacles the author is likely to face going forward because of race and gender.
I wonder whether people have really examined the utility of repeating this claim.
The huge obstacle in the author’s story was country of birth.
OTOH race and gender can have pluses and minuses. There is casual and subconscious bias on one side, but on the other side we have explicit corporate hiring policies that seek to counteract this. It is possible that the net balance is in favor of the author because of this.
Members of underrepresented groups could benefit greatly from knowing how many programs are in place to encourage, nurture, and welcome them into this industry. This could make it seem more achievable and encourage people to try.
Members of underrepresented groups do not benefit from being told how hard it will be in tech, and I think it isn’t in even in evidence when all factors are included. Saying ‘you are going to face tons of discrimination’ is a form of keeping people out. It may seem like it is empathy, but it can just have the effect of discouraging people.
If we want more diversity in tech, we should be saying things like ‘This is great! And you will find many people will be very welcoming. Please join us.’
Yaasss of course! This is why I wrote this post and am sharing on social media too. :) lots of people are contacting me now on facebook asking how to do it. www.manara.tech will help them. that’s how I got into these companies. their mission is to help palestinian and middle east engineers fulfill their dreams and work at international startups & companies! Now that I got in, I am going to go back and mentor the next Manara cohorts to help more people do it
> On January 1, 2021, I received an email from Repl.it letting me know that I had been selected.
To me this is a huge red flag. To receive a work related email on what is probably the most widely recognized holiday in the world is the sign of a company with terrible work-life balance.
I hope I'm wrong, but I have ignored such a flag in the past and got bitten.
Oh, I am glad you liked my blog! Thank you for your sweet words. I hope someday I meet all of my friends from the West bank and maybe share a photo together :)
May Allah bless you daliaawad, and I hope you do not use your blessed skills on ads, get your knowledge and work in service to the people when the right time comes or if they do end up largely using your wonderful skills for ads
"my view of Gaza and Palestine is very narrow because all we see on TV is Israel mass murdering everyone in Palestine" This is a very mature realization, and a great example of how media can distort reality. It is far more complex and nuanced than that. I suggest you check out sources from beyond Pakistan and try to learn more about what is going on.
Echoing the sentiment, it's good to see hard work and dedication get rewarded, despite such adversity.
It's safe to say you'll go far and considering what you've had to deal with, a P1 outage (which is a rite of passage) will be a breeze :)
All the best for the future
Best of luck to you! Palestinians are nothing but resilient. Bootstrapping yourself to an internship at Google in a territory where the unemployment rate exceeds 50% takes an amazing amount of grit. Israel's siege of Gaza is truly criminal.
Israel is a apartheid regime that needs to be dismantled and replaced with a country that is fair to all its citizens, rather than an ethnostate based on racist ideas of Jewish supremacy.
You should see how they they treat African Jews from the upper Nile who're definitively proven to be genetically Jewish but who face all sorts of discrimination when it comes to work and inter-marrying with, you know, their fellow Jews
I was so worried opening this link, but really made me happy to see such a great support system and preparation - without that applying can feel like you vs the world. Congrats!
The blog said she went to Jordan overland, which means she has entered both.
You're right though that it's extremely difficult for most Gazans to do so, and many will live and die without ever leaving that cramped little strip of land.
Don't forget the fact that Israel blocks imports and exports, meaning the country has extreme difficulties getting e.g. construction materials, nevermind getting an industry going. Unemployment is everywhere, misery, disaffected youth (as is understandable)... is it any surprise resentment and hatred proliferate?
This is a wonderful post -- reminds me of how important the hiring processes in the tech community are, and how exciting and amazing it can be for the joy of programming to spread to more places in the world!
Hi Dalia. Great article. Very nice of you to pass on concrete career advice to people in your region. I hope you have a fantastic experience at Google.
congrats Dalia! Amazing achievement & you've a great writing style. Would be interested to hear more of your journey throughout your placement & beyond!
Great inspirational story for a grey Thursday morning! :)
Will also keep an eye on Manara Tech — missed that when it was on HN previously.
With Manara and Latam incubators on the rise hopefully the demand will drop for tech people in North American companies and they will finally be able to pay reasonable salaries to tech people.
Yeah lower. Way lower. Maybe it will finally bring some sanity to American worker salaries. Companies can use that saved money for better things. Like executive bonuses and investing in new opportunities.
Great to see the excitement and success story for this hardworking person.
Depressing to see leetcode and data structures interview prep heralded as a positive thing and treated as a neutral, accepted, “nothing wrong with this” aspect of the path to getting a job.
As an Israeli who was involved in Gaza Sky Geeks but didn’t get to follow up with mentees I just wanted to share that your story is inspiring and encouraging and congratulations on your hard earned job.
It’s shameful we have so many bright Gazans but stupid politics prevents the natural technical collaboration that could arise. I work with many Arab developers (in a big company) here and the divide between Gaza/West Bank/Israeli Arabs is so frustrating and upsetting to me.
It will be great if you can speak these opinions out loud in the office and in public. I know it’s hard because so many Israelis have strong opinions about regarding Zionism and the native population which Jewish immigrants displaced but the only way people will stop ignoring the injustice is if people like you speak out in public. It is also nice to read your comments here also.
I agree with you about the injustice that Palestinians face, but I think you have been taught incorrectly about "the native population which Jewish immigrants displaced" in a way that rings of anti-Semitism (e.g. the alt-right's calls that "Jews will not replace us," etc). About half of Israel's Jewish population is "Mizrahi," which refers to Jews native to the Middle East, many of whom predate Arab colonization of the Middle East. I know this is a contentious topic in general and I don't think you're intentionally being anti-Semitic, nor do I think all criticism of Israel's treatment of Palestinians is anti-Semitic! But it's easy to also accidentally fall into anti-Semitism when criticizing Israel, since anti-Semitism is so endemic to Western culture, and I think you accidentally did here.
When I said natives I meant Palestinians who were forcefully displaced from their lands. Those lands then turned into colonies which are occupied to this days by Jewish immigrants from Europe, North Africa, and other regions in the Middle East (Yemen, Iraq, Egypt, and Lebanon).
I’m not sure how I could have phrased this better to make sure I steer clear of any potential offense.
In this conflict the narrative defines your position. A Jewish person might say those people occupied my historical homeland to which they have no right to and from which I've been forcefully removed. A Palestinian can say the Jewish people displaced my ancestors from my home by force. They're both right (to some degree) and both positions are not useful to actually getting a peaceful resolution, they are typically used to justify non-peaceful actions. There's also a lot more detail/colour to those statements and history than meets the eye, some agreed to facts and a lot of historical debates.
I would also add to that that IMO the specific criticism of Jewish people borders on antisemitism. There are very few people on this planet who live on land that was not taken by force from someone at some point, sometimes in very recent history (is there a statue of limitation on this stuff?). There are also many people who immigrated in recent history from one place to another. At the same time there's certainly much to be critical of. I would also say the characterization above of "turned into colonies" is factually wrong. Even if we look at it solely from the Palestinian narrative I think you want to tread pretty carefully, especially if you want someone to listen to your position/argument and maybe change their minds.
All that said, we have to move forward (both in Israel and the rest of the world) through some sort of reconciliation that can acknowledge the wrongs and make amends while at the same time realizing we can't turn the clock backwards. Clearly (to me) there are win-win solutions that are much preferable to the ongoing conflict.
EDIT: I find this story very inspirational and something that hopefully can show everyone that despite all the challenges it is possible to move forward to a better place.
I agree about the narratives. That being said, the recent events — those in the historical record of these lands — should not be dismissed simply because “everyone lives on land taken by someone”. I mean, are you proposing to ignore the nakba?
In my opinion, it is one thing to say we that should move on from what happened centuries ago to indigenous populations in the Americas and another thing entirely to say let’s ignore a settler colonial movement which operates in the modern era.
Regarding what you mentioned on the anti-semitism of criticizing Jewish people: what should the approach be for good-faith critics? Say I want to criticize the modern day policies of the Israeli military/government which create a reality of Jewish supremacy in the occupied territories, how do I do it? This is the unfortunate reality of today and we should be able to speak out against it without being labeled as anti-semites.
I don't think there's a problem with you being critical of any specific action without being labelled an anti-semite. Some things are just plain wrong. Some things are more nuanced so it's nice to acknowledge this nuance, e.g. "I disagree that X is a good reason for Y" rather than saying "I condemn Y". Sweeping generalizations are probably less useful.
That said, if one's focus is 100% on "things that Jews do wrong" .. maybe that's something else.
Also indigenous populations in the Americas are still being wronged today!
I posted a longer comment elsewhere in this thread, but in short: prior to the 20th century, everyone in the Middle East were Ottoman citizens, had been for hundreds of years, and the "other [countries] in the Middle East" you reference didn't exist even as provinces of the Ottoman Empire. Mizrahi Jews were Middle Eastern native Jewish citizens of the Ottoman Empire and had lived in the region for thousands of years, predating the Ottoman Empire, and there had not been a meaningful distinction between "Palestine" and "not Palestine" in the empires that ruled there since the fall of the Jewish kingdom (or to some degree the fall of the Roman Empire, when still none of the people you term "native" yet lived there). Palestine was created in the 20th century by the British and existed for less than a few decades as a British colony; effectively no one is a native of "Palestine," they are natives of the region and empires that predated the British, which includes the Jewish natives of the region and empire that predated the British. After the new territories were carved up post-WWI, (some) of those native Jews moved to Israel (although some were already living there and had been for thousands of years) due to persecution, but calling them "immigrants" is about as sensible as calling someone who moves from Connecticut to Massachusetts an "immigrant" — or in fact even less so, because "Palestine" hadn't existed in the Ottoman Empire, and it makes about as much sense as calling someone who moves from one Bay Area city to another an "immigrant." They also didn't move in order to replace Palestinians; they were fleeing extreme anti-Semitic violence from the neighboring (newly created) countries.
Your comment seemed to differentiate "Jews" and a "native population," with the non-native Jews having "displaced" the natives. If that's not a distinction you intended to draw, then I think your intentions were totally fine — although your phrasing was easily misinterpreted. If that is the intention you meant to convey, I believe you are in a large part incorrect — the largest subgroup of Israeli Jews are native to the Middle East and have been for thousands of years — and your initial comment (hopefully unintentionally) drew on anti-Semitic tropes of Jewish interlopers and replacers, which are about as old as Western society, on the basis of largely arbitrary, briefly enforced territorial lines drawn up by a European colonial power that had little reflection of the people it attempted and failed to rule.
Again, none of this excuses Israeli treatment of their former neighbors. It's atrocious and deserves to be called out. I just want to avoid anti-Semitism when we do so (as I have tried to also do in this thread).
It’s the first time I ever came across the opinion that anyone in the Middle Eastern region is considered native to historical Palestine because of Ottoman citizenship. At best, this is technically correct but practically useless. What would you say if a bunch of bedouins from the deserts of the Arabian Peninsula decided in 1948 that they were sick of the desert and went to conquer Palestine displace its present inhabitants?
Anyone in the Middle Eastern region is considered native to historical Palestine because of Ottoman citizenship.
That's not quite what I said. Palestine was a British colony on a fractured sliver of a former empire that existed for less than 30 years. Unless you consider native status to be determined by where you lived for a 30 year period, there's no "historical Palestine" for someone to be native to: Palestine was not a region in the empire that preceded the brief British rule, and people's identity was not distinguished on the basis of Palestinian borders. They would have been considered Jewish or Muslim or Christian, and lived in one city or another in nearby areas, but wouldn't consider someone to be an "immigrant" if they moved cities, as you've previously described Jews in Israel: some of whom are in fact literal natives and have lived within those borders for hundreds or thousands of years, and some of whom lived in nearby cities but not technically within the boundaries of Palestine (which again, at the time, didn't exist as a meaningful concept).
What would you say if a bunch of bedouins from the deserts of the Arabian Peninsula decided in 1948 that they were sick of the desert and went to conquer Palestine
Um, first of all, the British mandate of Palestine was in large part a desert. So, bad move on their part if they were "sick of the desert." Second of all, the Bedouins do currently live in the deserts of Israel, as they also have for thousands of years; they are not confined to the Arabian Peninsula as it seems you're claiming (they do in some sense come from the Arabian Peninsula, just as the Palestinians do — although in fact the Bedouins arrived thousands of years before the Palestinians did). So I'm not sure where you're going with this; they were also inhabitants and would not be some non-native interlopers, as you're claiming they would be? And as you're claiming Jews are?
Jews, like Bedouins, have been native to the region for thousands of years. They were also native to the region you call Palestine — there are synagogues hundreds of years old in Safed, Jerusalem, and other Israeli cities — but the boundaries of that region were not historically meaningful, and they were spread out throughout the surrounding area as well, as a small but meaningful minority. After WWI they faced massive repression in the new Muslim countries and consolidated in the boundaries of what is now Israel, but previously was also not meaningfully separated from the surrounding countries. Referring to them as "immigrants" is disingenuous: there was no country they were "immigrating" from or to that existed for more than a handful of years, and the previous longstanding country was one they were already citizens of and had been for its entire existence; they were native to it, and to the region it occupied. They predated almost anyone in the region by millennia.
Also, I just want to say that if a Mizrahu finds himself Palestine/Israel today born or after decades of immigration to simply go back to Morocco. Practically speaking that is ridiculous. Israel/Palestine is now his home.
Okay now it just seems like you are arguing for the sake of argument. I know you know that the land of milk and honey has copious areas rich in greenery and water. Yet you act like it’s equivalent to the deserts of Saudi Arabia?
And also, while I’m here, we don’t define “historical Palestine” by some maps. We can define it very clearly by a
Jews were native to the Middle East! Nobody is disputing that. What people are disputing is your claim that a Morrocan, born and raised in Morocco to parents born and raised in Morocco has the right to displace some Palestinian villagers just because he thinks his ancient homeland is from the time of after Joseph and Moses because of his ancestors.
By the way, for your information, my friends tell me that in their neighborhood they had a “harat al sumarah” which is translated neighborhood of the simarians. These people never accepted Israel and refused to move. My friends also tell me the IDF hate them because they both resist the occupation and are considered anciently Jewish so the IDF is not allowed to kill them. That is just what I hear from them, but I bring it up so you know that there are some people of ancient Jewish lineage who are still living in Palestine alongside Palestinians.
I know you know the land of milk and honey has copious areas rich in greenery and water
Ok, I think you are very misinformed by Biblical quotes from thousands of years ago, when the climate of Mesopotamia was very different. Israel is considerably more than 50% desert or "arid steppe." The rest is either dry, temperate, and hot, or dry, temperate, and warm (with a tiny mountain peak defined as dry, temperate, and cold). [1] Rain does not fall at all for over half of the year. There is only a single major source of above-ground freshwater, the Kineret lake (also called the "Sea of Galilee"), which wasn't even fully in Israel until 1967, is at "dangerously low levels at times," and which continues to exist in part thanks to Israel pumping freshwater from its seawater desalination plants into the lake to refill it since 2018. [2][3]
The Negev desert [4] covers over half of the state of Israel. The Negev Bedouins live in the Negev. [5]
I am not joking, and hopefully these Wikipedia links can convince you that you have been misinformed.
What people are disputing is your claim that a Morrocan, born and raised in Morocco
Not all Mizrahi Jews are from Morocco, and you have chosen the farthest point in the Ottoman Empire to make your point. Morocco is not even in the Middle East, which is the region we're talking about. While perhaps one could view Moroccan Jews migrating to Israel as immigration, I think it is much more nuanced in the parts of the former Ottoman Empire that were actually in the Middle East. The Jewish communities of Cairo, for example, were about as far from the modern state of Israel as Boston is to New York. The distance from Damascus, the home of another large Mizrahi Jewish community, to the modern state of Israel is half that. They were part of the same country, and were in cities that were extremely close to each other, in the same region. I don't dispute that the Israelis had no right to kick out Palestinian villagers, but I do dispute your definition of Jews as non-natives due to borders that existed for less than 30 years and were imposed by the British (and which some Jews fell inside anyway, e.g. in Jerusalem.)
[The Samaritans] are considered anciently Jewish so the IDF is not allowed to kill them.
There are no laws in Israel that I know of that determine whether or not the IDF can kill someone based on their religion. It would be helpful if you could cite some sources here.
(I think your friends mean that they hold Israeli citizenship? Which probably means they can more easily pass border checkpoints traveling to and from the Palestinian territories and Israel. There are a group of Samaritans that hold dual Israeli/Palestinian citizenship that live in Qiryat Luza. For reference, there are also millions of Muslim Arabs who hold Israeli citizenship and live inside Israel; what is unique about that group of Samaritans is they hold both Israeli and Palestinian citizenship, whereas the Israeli Arabs are simply Israeli and not Palestinian. The situation in Palestine is super messed up either way and I don't condone the Israeli government's actions towards the Palestinians, though.)
This is all fine and accurate but it seems like you are not addressing my point. First, for the purposes of my analogy the relevant detail is that Israel/Palestine has substantially more fresh water then Saudi Arabia. So now, applying your logic from above it would be justified for the Saudis to come and displace Israelis/Palestinians. Why? Because they used to be under Ottoman rule. See why your remark justifying colonization of Palestinian is absurd?
You know, I wish that a reality can be realized where everyone coexists happily. But when a people have been harmed so directly and for so long acknowledging these points is the only way towards that reality. If we keep arguing then things will never change.
The fundamental fact is hundreds of thousands of Palestinians were wronged. Today millions are victims. We can’t just ignore that or marginalize it via debate.
You can drop the term "colony", or "colonizer" et cetera. At this point the term means nothing more than "person who deserves to be displaced owing to his ethnicity and present location."
Modern Israel is absolutely a colonizer state. At around the same time that Western empires were dissolving, mostly Western mostly white settlers colonised a piece of the Middle-East by force. I know the situation is complicated, but this is an accurate description, from a dispassionate point of view.
There you go. Rationalizing an intent to subject people to ethnic based displacement. (People who at this point are of mixed descent of every Jewish community, including those displaced INTO Israel from the Arab world)
But Celts have settled the land that is now my country since before Christians conquered the peninsula and established the kingdom that would become my country. By your argument, should the Irish have the right to kick me out, or at least carve a piece of my country for themselves and their ethnic group?
The Irish literally did kick the UK out and carve a piece back for themselves in 1937, which is around the same timeframe we're talking about Israel in the Middle East. That's why Ireland is an independent country from the UK, and they're still in the EU while the UK isn't. So, er, yes, I suppose by my argument, it was valid for the Irish to do so. Great point on the parallel there.
(I think you are possibly misunderstanding what "Mizrahi" refers to. Mizrahi Jews are native to the Middle East and never left and were living there at the time of Israel's founding, as they had been for thousands of years.)
Mizrahi does not refer to 2nd generation immigrants [1]; it refers to descendants of local Jewish populations in the Middle East. While the Wikipedia demographics link you posted is technically accurate (the best kind of accurate), it doesn't correctly capture Mizrahi Jews, because Mizrahi means native to the Middle East, not specifically to the region called "Palestine," the modern borders of which were defined by the British after WWI. Those borders also include much, much more than just the "Palestine" you're referring to — it includes all of Jordan and part of Syria.
Prior to the British occupation, the entire region was part of the Ottoman Empire and had been for hundreds of years; the modern borders and boundaries of various countries were largely invented during the 20th century after the fall of the Ottoman Empire to the Allied Powers. When Israel was founded, most Mizrahi Jews moved to Israel due to extreme persecution in the Muslim-majority countries, which were mostly also all new countries carved up from the remains of the Ottoman Empire. Prior to the borders of the 20th century, these Jews were citizens of the Ottoman Empire just like everyone else in the region, and were native to the Middle East. (The Ottoman empire did have provinces, but they don't match the British borders or the post-British borders.)
Mizrahi Jews make up 3.2 million of Israel's Jewish inhabitants [1]. Israel's total Jewish population is 6.7 million [2], so they're about half.
Edit: Since this is frequently a contentious topic, I want to reiterate that I do not support the Israeli government's treatment of Palestinians. Israel's treatment of Palestinians is terrible. This post is meant to counter anti-Semitism, not criticism of Israel. In most of my posts in this thread I have also criticized Israel for its treatment of Palestinians. The fact that many Jews are native to the Middle East does not justify depriving Palestinians of land or self-determination. However, I think it's useful in these discussions to not rely on anti-Semitic tropes e.g. the idea that Jews are non-natives and of Jewish replacement. Jews are in fact natives of the Middle East and have been so longer than anyone else (well, ethnic Lebanese people actually give Jews a run for their money, but those are the two longest-dwelling ethnic groups in the region).
Edit 2: Since it looks like you're getting downvoted — FYI I didn't downvote you and I think your question was legitimate and wasn't ill-intentioned.
To quote the first Wikipedia link I posted in the comment that you're replying to, yes. "From 1948 to 1980, over 850,000 Mizrahi and Sephardi Jews were expelled, fled or evacuated from Arab and Muslim countries."
Hajj Amin al Huseini supposedly influenced the persecution of Mizrahi Jews all around the Middle East? That doesn’t seem very plausible, what real power and authority did this guy have over peoples outside of Palestine?
He was funded and supported by the Nazis to build up pan-Arab support for Jewish genocide, and lived in a variety of places both inside and outside of Palestine, including Germany and Egypt. He met with Adolf Hitler himself. In the late 1930s while living in Beirut he put a bounty on the head of any Jew, paying 10 pounds per murdered Jew. Here is the Wikipedia link: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Amin_al-Husseini
A choice quote, of which there are many: "On 1 March 1944, while speaking on Radio Berlin, al-Husseini said: 'Arabs, rise as one man and fight for your sacred rights. Kill the Jews wherever you find them. This pleases God, history, and religion. This saves your honor. God is with you.'"
Note that the calls for genocide started well before 1948. He was fomenting genocide the entire time. His messages during WWII were extremely popular in the Arab world and upon his return to Palestine after the war "Arab leaders rushed to greet him ... and the masses accorded him an enthusiastic reception."
One does not so much "fall into it" so much as one is accused of it whenever one's opinion about political or military actions runs counter to Zionism.
I would love it if your response addressed the points in my comment, but it seems like you're deliberately ignoring them.
Again, I agree that the Israeli government's treatment of Palestinians is abhorrent. That's not an anti-Semitic opinion! Claiming that Jews are not native to the Middle East and are an attempt to replace Palestinians is factually wrong, though, and does rely on anti-Semitic tropes.
Yes, Jews are native to the Middle East, specifically the area of Israel/Palestine. But why should that make Palestinians who lost their land feel any better? It's irrelevant.
It shouldn't, and it doesn't. I agree that it doesn't and that Israel's treatment of Palestinians is terrible. My point is we can have this discussion without also (incorrectly) relying on anti-Semitic tropes of Jewish replacement.
(I am Jewish, but I do not support the Israeli government's treatment of Palestinians.)
> Claiming that Jews are not native to the Middle East and are an attempt to replace Palestinians is factually wrong, though,
You stuck an 'and' between two ideas there. Native? Sure. Not an attempt to replace Palestinians? That's an uphill argument you've carved off for yourself that runs counter to all observable facts.
May as well just fall back on the classic "it was our land first" and have done with, since honestly you're not going to come up with any moral justification that holds up any better.
Exactly. Israel and its supporters have successfully weaponized accusations of antisemitism to make political attacks.
It's actually quite rare to see genuine antisemitism these days. Most of what we see claimed as "antisemitism" is just vague insinuations and associations, or inventing supposed "antisemitic tropes" in what people have said.
In fact it's got to the point now where if someone is accused of antisemitism, it's best just to assume it's a malicious accusation with no substance behind it.
I mean, when you have the Zionists accusing people like Noam Chomsky and Bernie Sanders of antisemitism, you just know it's a bad faith exercise.
Truly, we live in fascinating times. One amazing thing is that if you had the exact same politics and policies as a Zionist but for any other cause, the same elite Americans who support Zionism would lambaste you as a maniac.
Referring to Jewish settlement in Palestine as "immigration" doesn't really paint the complete picture, generally.
Sure, some Jews immigrated to Palestine/Israel as we think of immigration. But many did not.
For example: I had a great-great uncle who was originally from Poland. Fearing the Germans, he escape Poland (on foot, alone, as a young teenager) shortly after the German invasion to live with his family in Ukraine (my direct ancestors). They survived together in Evacuation [1]. After the war, he decided to go back to Poland. What happened to him there, in 1946, was that he was forcefully removed from the country by his neighbors [2], who were pleased that Jews had been removed from their society and did not want them to return. He ended up in a DP camp, and with nowhere else to go, went to Palestine.
Did he displace the local population there? I guess. Did he have other options? No. What was he supposed to do, drown himself? In his story I see a plight not very different from Syrian refugees in Europe or Guatemalan refugees in the United States. I think his story is hardly unique, and explains largely why Israel exists in the first place. If you view the presence of Jews in Palestine as European Colonialism, I think your perspective has a very limited and selective in scope.
And half the population of Israel came from the mid-east. Either "Palestine" proper, or Egypt, Syria, Iraq, Lebanon, Jordan, etc. They were all displaced by 1948.
Today the issue is not the existence of Israel- right or wrong, it's the birthplace and homeland of millions. The issue is its recent and ongoing expansion in territories outside its legally recognized borders, and the violence and oppression that accompanies it. The situation in the occupied territories is one of actual apartheid, with Jews allowed to retain Israeli citizenship and subject to Israeli laws, and Palestinians basically stateless and subject to military laws.
Thanks for answer the question I asked elsewhere on the thread [1]. I think people misunderstood what you were saying.
I appreciate your perspective that the Jewish people who were born and live in Palestine now have a right to be there, but I am not sure that this is a commonly held perspective among Palestinians. To be honest, as much as I want there to be peace, I don't expect Palestinian Arabs to give up on Palestine, because why would they? In their perspective, it's their land, and 5-6 million foreign Jews are living on it. They've had several solid opportunities to accept this as reality and establish a state, but they did not. Had they done this, the military occupation of the West Bank would have ended 10-20 years ago. The military occupation of Gaza ended in 2006, and the territory is now under blockade by Egypt, The Palestinian Authority and Israel, due to the ruling party's perspective that with enough time and dedication they can liberate the rest of Palestine. Perhaps they will! I sincerely wish them the best in this endeavor, because you must admire tenacity, however self-destructive it may seem today.
> outside its legally recognized borders
It is also valuable to recognize that beyond its borders with Egypt and Jordan, Israel does not actually have legally recognized borders. Many entities (countries, international courts) have proclaimed Israel's borders to be this or that, but aside from settlements resulting from their formal peace treaties, Israel's "borders" today are actually war zones buffers established and governed by ceasefire agreements.
That is not true, they did not have any such opportunity. The best Israel has been prepared to offer was autonomy. That is, the Bantustan option favored, by, for example, Menachem Begin. The notion that the Palestinians "oppresses themselves" by not accepting "Israel's gracious offers" is completely absurd.
The Palestinians signed the Oslo accords in 1993. What has happened since? Israel has strengthened its grip on the West Bank and more than doubled the settler population. Despite the fact that everyone in the whole world recognizes that transferring your civilian population to occupied territory is a war crime. Why? Because Israel is run by supremacists and religious nuts who think that their holy book gives then an eternal and inviolable right to "Eretz Israel". In fact, they refer to the West Bank as "Judea and Samaria" to underscore their view that the territory belongs to the them.
> Israel does not actually have legally recognized borders
Let's start from this. Israel has a legally recognized border with Syria which doesn't include the Golan Heights. It also has a legally recognized border with the West Bank on the Green Line, and which doesn't include East Jerusalem. It's that simple. The reason these borders are called "disputed" or unclear, is that Israel refuses to give up illegally annexed territories or- in the case of the West Bank- because the lack of a border allows Israel to keep expanding without officially invading a different country. In other words, the lack of borders is not a bug: it's a feature.
What I expect from Israel as a necessary sign of good will, is to relinquish most of the annexed territories and to declare, once and for all, what are its borders. So that not a single Israeli soldier or citizen could cross them without authorization from the state on the other side of the border.
> They've had several solid opportunities to accept this as reality and establish a state
No they didn't, for the reasons I stated above. In fact, at the present, Israel's government is opposing by all means the possibility of an international recognition of a Palestinian State. Why? Because that would establish a border, and with it the end of Israel's expansion in the West Bank. Since Israel removed a few thousand settlers from Gaza, it has installed hundreds of thousands in the West Bank, creating a de-facto annexation that will be almost impossible to revert.
It also has a legally recognized border with the West Bank on the Green Line.
No, it doesn't. The GP is correct. The "Green Line" is not a legal border. It was a de facto border established along armistice lines between the armies of Israel on one side, and the armies of Egypt, Jordan, Lebanon, and Syria on the other side. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Green_Line_(Israel)
There was also no country called "the West Bank" on the other side of the line. The other side of the western portion of the line in 1949 was Jordan, and it ruled there until 1967 when Israel captured the territory in the Six Day War. Jordan presently makes no claims on the West Bank and agrees its border with Israel runs along the Jordan river.
It has a legally recognized border with Syria.
Again, it doesn't. You are (perhaps unknowingly) once again referring to the Green Line, as per that same Wikipedia link. The border with Syria was a de facto border established by war. To quote Wikipedia:
The 1949 Armistice Agreements were clear (at Arab insistence) that they were not creating permanent borders. The Egyptian–Israeli agreement, for example, stated that "the Armistice Demarcation Line is not to be construed in any sense as a political or territorial boundary, and is delineated without prejudice to rights, claims and positions of either Party to the Armistice as regards ultimate settlement of the Palestine question." Similar provisions are contained in the Armistice Agreements with Jordan and Syria.
Notably the border with Lebanon was the only border in 1949 that didn't include those terms, and was established as the official international borders of the State of Israel and Lebanon. Although Lebanon and Israel have gone to war since, Israel has not tried to annex territory from beyond the Lebanese/Israeli border line agreed to in 1949.
Why? Because that would establish a border
I think your present misconception as to why Israel and the Palestinians have yet to reach peace is due to your misconceptions about borders, since you believe Israel is anti-border in general and that it has repeatedly violated legal borders in the past. The GP is correct that the borders you've claimed Israel has violated were never legal borders, and were merely de facto borders established by war, which both sides agreed were not to be considered valid. When Israel has established treaties that create international borders, such as it did with Lebanon in 1949, Egypt in 1979 (in which Israel returned massive amounts of land, equivalent to larger than the entire remaining state of Israel, in exchange for a peace treaty), and Jordan in 1994, it has not sought to annex territory beyond those borders.
The root issue of the Israeli/Palestinian conflict is... complicated, and a lot more complex than "Israel does not want any borders." One of the core issues that in part torpedoed the Oslo Peace Process is that both relatively-mainstream Israeli Jews and relative-mainstream Palestinian Muslims view an agreement that gives Jerusalem to the other side as a religious heresy that neither is willing to cross, and they both also have refused to share it. But it's not just as simple as that, either. The extreme religious right of Israel (e.g. the Shas political party) views any peace treaty that returns land from the original Jewish kingdom as religious heresy, and the extreme religious right on the Palestinian side (e.g. Hamas) views the entirety of Israel as an Islamic waqf [holy possession] that cannot be owned by any non-Muslim.
You got downvoted for some reason, but that's a totally legit thing to say in my opinion.
However, the problem of Jewish assimilation in Europe was much more complicated than you might imagine. Prior to the United States, not many places in history really let Jews assimilate. A notable example is China, where Jews moved over the last few thousand years only to always vanish due to assimilation. Non-religious Jews (ie. those willing to assimilate) are vanishing in the United States, too, because the local population is not particularly intolerant of assimilation.
In Europe, however, assimilation was largely not an option, even for Jews willing to assimilate, and even after WWII. This very topic is what spurred Theodore Herzl to become a Zionist, after initially rejecting it for many years. There's a whole book about it: Theodor Herzl: From Assimilation to Zionism [1], but if you search the web you can find plenty of information about it.
I like your response, and I will take a look at that book since you're probably the first Jew who's tried to argue with me in good faith on this matter.
But to respond to what I can, yeah, exactly. Your great-great uncle could try to assimilate in a non-Jewish country and hope they trust him, which they may or may not given the history of organized Judaism, or he could colonize Palestine and screw them over. He chose the latter, now some people (not me, I'm not Palestinian) hate him for it. Given human history he certainly knew there would be attempts at further expansion in the future, so they hate him for that, too. Why is any of this surprising? I feel like if you believe your great-great uncle deserves a pass you must believe that Palestinians were either uneducated or grossly immoral and bigoted for wanting to keep their land because that would have meant possible death for Jews. And if you do believe that then that could be a really interesting discussion.
Overall though it just seems easier to me to accept that he screwed someone over to get something good. My ancestors have done that plenty of times.
>Did he displace the local population there? I guess. Did he have other options? No. What was he supposed to do, drown himself?
Those were not the only two options. You mentioned the Syrian refugees. They did come here where I live but unlike in Palestine they don't displace anyone but became part of the populace. No-one is or were forcing anyone to displace Palestinians. You are turning a sad story into a propaganda piece which helps no-one. Just like my Syrian friend, who now owns a restaurant he started with local help, one could become part of israel without being part of the forced displacement programs.
> You mentioned the Syrian refugees. They did come here where I live but unlike in Palestine they don't displace anyone but became part of the populace. No-one is or were forcing anyone to displace Palestinians.
The displacement of Palestinian Arabs occurred as the result of a civil war that took place between them an Palestinian Jews in 1948. Prior to that, there was no displacement, at least nothing like what happened in 1948. Yes, the dynamic with Syrians in Europe is different, because they can't possibly engage in a civil war with the local population. But the Civil War between Jews and Arabs in Palestine occurred, and the result was mass displacement of Arabs as the Jews won. Had the Civil War not occurred, Arabs would have been part of the Jewish state as partitioned by the United Nations in 1947. Many Arabs are, in fact, Israeli Citizens (with a Covid vaccination rate roughly as high as Ultra Orthodox Jews).*
What I am saying is: Yes, there were aggressive Zionists who came to Palestine to fight fight fight**. But the majority of refugees who came to Palestine just wanted to be left alone, and were forced into a fight by their ethnic alignment that was decided for them at birth, the same ethnic alignment that forced them to Palestine in the first place.
[*] And why are these Arabs citizens of Israel? More often than not, because their ancestors who were alive in 1948 had a history of peaceful enough co-existence with Jews, or their village was location geographically such that they did not pose a perceived threat during the civil war. As bad as population displacement is, the Jews by and large did not arbitrarily displace people in 1948. The perspective was at the time that either a strategic foothold is established, or the opposing Arab armies will finish Hitler's job, which would have certainly been the case.
Why do you say that the Arabs would have finished Hitlers job? Jews had been living for centuries in the Middle East alongside Arabs. Even today Morrocan Jews in Israel talk warmly of their past lives as Morrocans.
I once met a Lebanese whose friend growing up was Jewish. Later he grew up and moved to Israel only to come back to Lebanon as a military commander. He saw him at a military checkpoint in the city they grew up in.
My grandma was born in 1936 in the city of Poznan as ethnically german child with a polish passport. Her family owned a shop and house the shop was in. Then, the nazis occupied poland, and the family prospered shortly. But the father, who had been a polish soldier before, had to enlist in the german forces and fell on the eastern front. Then the SU conquered the entire area and my grandmas familty lost every thing they could not carry: the house, the shop, the grandparents house with farm land, etc. More people lost their lives, greatgrandma was most likely raped, etc. Grandma missed a year of shool and ended up 5-10 centimeters shorter than the relatives.
Now, 70 years later, does she hate the polish, or the russians, for what happened? Of course not.
I think you're getting flagged for personal attacks and slurs (e.g. "You're just an American who wants to hate someone"), which is quite different than telling your story.
I totally get and appreciate why you have strong feelings on the topic. But we can't have comments breaking the rules like that here.
This is a thread on that part of the world. It’s insane that you would insinuate antisemitism because someone made a relevant comment about the region.
Can you point me toward other threads about other parts of the world where a particular ethnicity is singled out in a negative light for immigrating? I'll take back everything I said if you can find ONE.
Han Chinese in Xinjiang today? Anglo Americans immigrating to Western North America in the 1800's? Germany's failed attempt to immigrate to eastern Europe in the 1940's? All of these are rightfully singled out in a negative light.
There is not a single mention of Han Chinese immigration to Xinjiang, in either positive or negative light.
The Jews who immigrated to Israel were fleeing persecution at home and you chose to attack them. That is shameful and you should be ashamed of yourself.
All people have the right to live wherever they choose, whether they be Jews, Arabs, or any ethnicity. Singling people out based on their ethnicity ... well, that's just racist, isn't it?
There's a vast difference between legitimate, legal, welcomed immigration and invasion sanctioned by foreign states that results in the creation of an occupied territory, but you already knew that.
I mean, if you think that a land that is filled with 20th century cities and has a documented history of being highly populated for thousands of years is the same thing as a continent that is practically empty, I don't know what to tell you.
South America had cities. (not 20th century, admittedly). The settlement of south africa involved murdering a large amount of natives... I'm not not sure what to tell you!
Wait, you said South America and South Africa. The former certainly had cities; the latter was mostly wasteland with some amount of nomadic peoples who couldn't stay in one place because living off the land in one place was impossible without agriculture. Vastly different situation.
Either way, sounds like another case of wrongdoing that doesn't excuse anyone else's actions. What is my takeaway from this supposed to be? Murdering Palestinians with sniper rifles and lobbing bombs at them is OK because someone a hundred years ago elsewhere did something entirely unrelated that was evil? Or that colonialism is just generally OK overall and should be fine?
I didn't mean to criticise, I actually appreciate the spirit of the comment I replied to. But I do think- and wanted to point out- that waving it off as "stupid politics" is maybe a form of self-deception, when you live in a country that hugely profits from the situation.
First when you take our extremely complicated political situation and shove it into a 1d box it comes off as both condescending and paternalistic. The situation is complicated and difficult, I am not denying there is a problem.
Second - I am volunteering in organizations like GSG, I am not for the west bank settlements and I vote left. That’s mostly irrelevant though - since I am not “Israel”, like the OP I am just one human living my life out trying to be better.
Third - the “complicated politics” in this case does not refer to West Bank settlements. It refers to my inability to hire, mentor, collaborate and befriend Gaza engineers easily.
I am a hacker, I am not trying to solve “peace in the Middle East” and I think I am entitled to feel frustrated by this :)
It really is. Like "haha, we just took over your country, destroyed your homes, killed your families, and called your land ours, gee those politics are ridiculous!"
Congratulations and thanks for writing this. It is easy as an American male to overlook how much harder others might have to work to achieve what I think of as very approachable goals. You've not only put in all the work but also had to rely on the good graces of these programs to support you! That work ethic you've cultivated is what you now must rely on to succeed and by far your most valuable asset.
You will still face difficulties because of your gender and ethnicity. It's horrible and wrong, and I hope it changes. But your tenacity and drive will show everybody your real value in the end, and I think you'll do well! I believe you are and can continue to be part of the change.
I think the comment was very reasonable. Yes, it mentions gender/ethnicity/nationality in a way that is likely to incite some people to attack, but in this case gender and ethnicity/nationality was mentioned in the article as a relevant detail, so I think it's reasonable to include it in a comment.
I just feel that it's not reasonable to hold GP responsible for a touchy subject, when the touchy subject is part of the article they're commenting on in the first place. If it came out of nowhere, then obviously that'd be a different story.
Btw, I don't think it's quite true to say that the touchy subject was part of the article. Even if it were, though, the burden is on commenters not to take an HN thread further into flamewar. This is in the site guidelines:
"Comments should get more thoughtful and substantive, not less, as a topic gets more divisive."
"Eschew flamebait. Don't introduce flamewar topics unless you have something genuinely new to say. Avoid unrelated controversies and generic tangents."
1) They clearly didn't intend to incite people to attack, and
2) How much responsibility are you really going to lay at their feet for that? If I say in a comment, "yes, we really need to do better at fighting climate change", there will absolutely be some people who will take that as an opportunity to start a flamewar. Some topics are controversial enough to where fairly innocuous statements might get people flaming -- is discouraging the innocuous statements really the right move? You're essentially saying that it's each commenter's job not to offend people, even if the offended parties are being unreasonable. That effectively hands a subject-matter banhammer to them.
I don't entirely disagree with what you're saying about expected value of the subthread, I just think that there's a line there, and in this case the GP stayed well on the right side of it.
I don't think there's much point trying to agree on every case, only on the principles, since different people will always call different cases differently. From my perspective, the comment wasn't innocuous. It clearly steps away from the specifics of the OP's story into generic ideological themes. Asking HN commenters not to do that is standard HN moderation (https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=all&page=0&prefix=true&sor...). It did that repeatedly (though subtly, because it superficially takes the form of a friendly congratulation) in a way that was bound to land as flamebait in the thread. When a friendly congratulation comes with a political agenda, the political agenda will forever be the high-order bit.
"You will still face difficulties because of your gender and ethnicity" seems particularly subject-changing, and also patronizing, since it replaces the author's specific story of her own experience with a generic story based on different filters. We can't know and shouldn't presume to tell her what her future experiences will be.
I feel bad spelling this out because it makes the GP comment sound worse than it was—it doesn't deserve an exhaustive critique. But when people question what I posted, I feel obliged to share my thought process. Which requires figuring out what it was, since a lot of it by now is instinctive pattern-matching.
I was definitely not trying to introduce an agenda. I will admit I was a bit naive about how my words were going to be taken by some (really just a couple people who took my comment in the _worst_ possible light, in my opinion). I really just wanted to thank her for being part of a positive change in society and encourage her to continue.
The specific comment I made about gender/ethnicity seemed to me like an obvious given, not some prophetic word. The article implied this struggle quite clearly, I thought, as well as the tone of the the OP's other comments in this discussion.
I think given how things actually did play out that dang's actions were totally fine here. As a result I'll try and be more conscious of my words, because I don't want to be a part of a flame war anyway. I try to avoid sarcasm and destructive criticism in general. My history on this site shows that, I think.
I’m sincerely sorry. I didn’t realize that the mere mention of gender and ethnic discrimination being a problem in general was all that controversial. I was hoping to be a source of encouragement for OP, but seeing how people responded I understand and appreciate you stepping in. I know keeping a community civil is an important and difficult task, so thanks for all you do dang :)
It stepped noticeably away from the specifics of the article and noticeably into generic flamewar topics. Other commenters predictably responded in kind, just with more indignation and lower-quality comments. This is how flamewars get started and it's clearly traceable to this root. If you want more explanation, I've written more in a sibling (cousin?) comment here: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=26255991
The general principles are repeated (ad nauseum, I'm afraid) here:
Not the time for "Remember the Asymptote" here actually. The world is being taken over by new generations free to break the framework. This type of post is about that.
It might also be about spread of corporations into every culture, but here I remember the "Other Conquest" in Central America where it didn't ultimately matter who came into the culture, because the culture held up under force. Both sides changed. I am as excited for Google as for the OP. These moments make the past unreal, and the future becomes about this kind of dream coming true and surpassed.
> You will still face difficulties because of your gender and ethnicity.
She is going to Europe, not USA. Unless she picks a really bad place (but most Google HQs there are in a good place), she won't have any such issues.
Europe doesn't talk as much about gender and race, but they actually do things as well, while in the USA everyone kinda pats their back for "walking out for Black Lifes Matter" and calls it a day.
You needn't use your real name, of course, but for HN to be a community, users need some identity for other users to relate to. Otherwise we may as well have no usernames and no community, and that would be a different kind of forum. https://hn.algolia.com/?query=community%20identity%20by:dang...
While it's true that racial oppression is often less in Europe due to better government regulations and social safety nets and whatnot, on a personal level there's still plenty of bigotry and xenophobia, sometimes moreso than the US.
I'm an American living in Munich (working for Google actually), go ahead and try telling foreigners here that landlords they're talking to while applying for an apartment treat them the same way as native Germans. The idea is laughable.
But you don't have to take my word for it. Here's a poll on whether people in different countries feel that increasing diversity is a positive change. Note that the US comes out ahead of most of the European countries listed, as well as substantially ahead of the European median: https://www.pewresearch.org/global/2019/04/22/how-people-aro...
I'm not sure this is true, having worked in both the US and Europe. The US definitely talks about it more, often to an absurd excess. But I've seen far more real-life examples of casual racism in Europe, stuff that no one would even dream of saying or doing in the US. I'm not hanging out in terrible neighborhoods in either place.
Having worked in both Europe and the US, and being from neither of those places, I can absolutely say that the amount of _open_ racism in Europe was significantly greater than in the US.
One example out of many: while walking on the street in Denmark, there were two instances of passersby on bicycles yelling racial slurs at me as they drove by.
Considering America’s obsession with diversity, I find it hard to believe that she would have an easier time in Europe or anywhere else in the world. In America she would receive countless offers purely as a diversity hire. That’s not to say she wouldn’t deserve the offers based on merit, but Silicon Valley has decided that pure ability is less important to hiring than race and gender. That gives her an enormous advantage over white and asian males.
Errr I’d want to see hard evidence this is the case before I’d take it as a given.
There’s no part of me that finds it easy to believe that a female, minority worker in tech is going to get the same opportunities as a white male anywhere in Europe.
I’d think the more sinister patting of one’s own back is assuming that “at least we’re not like that here” without hard evidence to back up that assumption.
>There’s no part of me that finds it easy to believe that a female, minority worker in tech is going to get the same opportunities as a white male anywhere in Europe.
I agree, she's a woman, she will definitely get much more opportunities than a man. The potential employers will bend over backwards to fill their diversity quotas.
The (billion dollar) company I work for in Europe has a policy that they hire twice as many women as men. Women also get twice as long contracts and better career paths. They are also trying to hire a lot more people of color. Statistically you have an extremely higher chance of getting hired as a black female than a white male.
> Europe doesn't talk as much about gender and race, but they actually do things as well, while in the USA everyone kinda pats their back for "walking out for Black Lifes Matter" and calls it a day.
Please explain how things like 'Zwarte Piet' fit into your narrative? I remember the first time I walked around a town center around the holidays and was accosted by multiple white Europeans in blackface asking for donations.
I think Zwarte Piet is racist only when seen through American lenses. Which unfortunately today is the norm, but that doesn't make it more sensible. Zwarte Piet is basically Santa's little helper, as they exist in many traditions. He's black so he's represented by people with their face painted black. The fact that blackface has a connotation of racism in a country where racial laws where abolished only in 1964 has nothing to do with the substance and meaning of a Dutch Christmas tradition.
I don't think this is the right place to make a EU vs. USA point, to be honest. And a Google HQ itself isn't a safe-haven either.
I'm not as confident as you are about the author of this post getting an easier life in the EU vs. the US. People escaping the wars the EU/US coalition (in whatever form) have started in the middle east are going to find their way to greener pastures through Turkey, Greece, Italy and be shunned every fucking step of the way, no matter where they settle.
But you don't have to be coming from Turkey or be somehow Arabic, or Muslim in appearance, you only have to turn to the UK to see the sheer derision towards Polish people and immigrants further east despite the immense proximity between the countries. Or the attitude to the Romani people across the whole continent.
The author is from Palestine. She will suffer from prejudice purely for having a name that ignorant people will connect to Islam or terrorism, and ignorant people who will take Israel's side on the matter without thought.
If Dalia Awad has an easier time and avoids issues wherever she is, it's because of what she's had to do for it, not because she chose the EU over the US.
I took it too far in that respect, and since I can't do a faithful edit on HN to correct that (without erasing the evidence of me being wrong), it doesn't mean the rest of the post is wrong.
The EU isn't the paradise the parent poster thinks it is.
I suppose everybody's impression of inequity is mostly shaped by their experience and perhaps the anecdotal experience of a few close friends. The US is by no means a model for how to handle inequities but my experience has been that the US actually does a better job handling and talking about it, at least in the sciences, than do lots of places in Europe. IDK, everything is subjective and depends. Bearing that in mind I would encourage you to approach commenting on topics like this without drawing such a hard line in the sand. Whether or not you meant it, your comment comes off as pretty aggressive and somewhat flame-war-y.
Perhaps Europe is better at gender (due to strong social policies), but Europe is't immune to racism.
It's not talked about so loudly like in the US, but I've experienced so much low-key, out in the open racism in Europe towards Arabs, Moroccans, Chinese, Africans and so on.
I'm not white and while I don't feel like my life is in danger, I know from looks and behavior that I'm not on equal footing with a white European.
The US has been grappling with these issues for a long time, so it's normal to discuss it there.
In Germany, I get more of the feeling of, "oh, we don't have those kinds of problems here". It's basically denialism, like when the Dutch defend Zwarte Piet. Not that you don't see that in the US for some people too, but it seems to be more widespread in many European countries, where the very fact that it hasn't been as widely discussed before leads people to believe that it must not exist.
Please don't take HN threads further into flamewar. Obviously any mention of Gaza is one step away from major politics, but I don't think it's fair to impose that on the OP.
Unreal how competitive the virtue signaling is on HN, when the reality is that every major tech company is falling over itself to hire anyone who isn’t A) Male and B) either white or Asian/Indian.
am I the only one that doesn't care about working for a FAANG? The only intrigue from these companies is that they offer golden handcuffs. I occasionally go through the interview cycle at these companies just to get offers I could use to leverage other companies.
there's probably a limited number of projects that interest me at these companies and knowing my luck I would get assigned to some maintenance project doing "plumbing" (internal use only libs for example) or assigned to cleanup shitty code from a nearly dying project.
if you are graduating college and get into these companies, don't drink the koolaid. keep your eyes open and don't waste your potential on these companies. Save up your $$$, and build something that people will use.
It says that she chose Google instead of Repl.it because they'll also send her to Europe for a summer internship, which may open up quite a lot of possibilities for her (regardless of if she likes/dislikes FAANG). When you're in a relatively obscure country outside of the US, every networking opportunity counts, regardless of what you want to achieve with your expertise.
yes exactly! this is something that I discussed a lot with my mentor at Manara and this is what we agreed on. I’ve never been on an airplane before, I think being in Europe will be life-changing for my career and also for my personal experience. Gaza is tiny, it’s 30km x 6km. I want to see some new things. :)
As someone who works at Google Munich, sounds like a smart choice to me! Seeing different parts of the world, different lifestyles and cultures can be very eye-opening.
You’re not the only one. But there are a lot of people whose life situation might dictate that choosing a safe FAANG job beats the risk of working for a startup or striking out on their own.
Or maybe they just want to work on interesting things, have a good work life balance, and get paid really well.
Your golden handcuffs might be someone else’s golden parachute.
Few of them pay what fang pays, though, and even fewer have the same brand recognition. If by 30 she gets bored, with conservative investments into broad market funds, she'll have a few millions in assets and the luxury to choose between a cushy well paid job and maybe starting her own thing.
FAANG companies are good options for foreign engineers because they have a very organized application -> visa -> green card pipeline. If you're interviewing at a small startup, it's very hit or miss whether their legal team will be willing and competent enough to get you into the country safely.
I'd actually recommend small startups for most people, given growth opportunities, but if your primary concern is to get into the US on a permanent basis, it's much safer to apply to a large boring enterprise with a good legal team.
I don’t know why you’re getting the downvotes, this is the reality of the situation. People who already live in the US are in a privileged position and cannot emphasize with this point of view.
Organized application -> visa -> blackhole (greencard). If you see recent greencard backlog timelines for the categories most engineers are on, only first two steps are more realistic. :-)
And yes, very well done Dalia, good luck and best wishes!
If you're a foreigner it's much harder to get sponsored by a smaller company. I know a bunch of people are essentially "locked in" to FAANG until they get their green card and are chomping at the bit to work on more exciting things.
Also I think there's a shine to FAANG from the outside (if you're young and/or don't know the area)
Count your blessings that you can see things as they are, but also remember your perspective
> If you're a foreigner it's much harder to get sponsored by a smaller company. I know a bunch of people are essentially "locked in" to FAANG until they get their green card and are chomping at the bit to work on more exciting things.
I don't believe this, especially not in the current market. Anyone who is actually eager to hire people will be grabbing them up too.
The comment was about being restricted by sponsorship, not pay.
According to public records, the average salary for a visa holder is around 140k at Apple. At that level I wouldn't expect stock and bonus to be particularly earth-shattering, though I'm sure it's nice.
* Prestige (looks good on resume/opens doors later)
* Smart coworkers
* Huge customer bases
* Lots of internal transfer opportunities
* Well established competence in handling foreign hires
Now, obviously plenty of companies offer a lot of those things too...but not many offer all of them.
And even then, often there's the visibility issue: maybe there's a bunch of ~200 person companies that do, in fact, offer the same things -- but will {Random Engineer X} actually be aware of that? With a company like Google, where I work, there's been enough written about it to have a decent idea of what you're getting into before you even apply. Discoverability is a bigger challenge with smaller companies.
Have you lived in a place when you are scared to listen to music on a bus that you ride for hours every day, because you are afraid that people will rob your mobile phone (which is practically all you have)?
This is reality for hundreds of millions or billions of people who just want to live somewhere safe.
F and G are off my list because they're detrimental to society and individuals. G offered me hundreds of thousands of dollars, any department, and to design my own role, but I turned them down for the 8th time.
Apple and Amazon are wobblers depending on what type of role, the impact you're trying to have, and the benefits vs. harm you think they make.
Netflix is essentially harmless because they're a TV and movie store.
It's very tempting to go for the big salary and benefits package, but then having to rationalize, normalize, or compartmentalize the fact that the business makes billions at the expense of harming society. It should ultimately make the employee feel guilty if they're honest and paying attention, but should give pause if it doesn't.
If I could make a steadier living (enough clients with periodic, on-going needs) at SRE/DevOps tech and management consulting, I would never work for any company other than my own.
Younger people should consider working for large organizations to get immersed in that field if they're looking to go the consulting or related enterprise startups route later.
What the heck is your problem and why the personal attacks?
I was discussing my take on the aspect of FAANG, and why saying "they're all bad" is silly.
You don't know anything about me. I was homeless for 8 years and paid my way through school by working. It took me 10 years to graduate, and I had to go back and forth because there was no continuous offering of requisites courses and money was tight.
Maybe you're projecting and should consider glass houses and such? I hope your life is Oreos and you had nice parents, because mine were shit. It's too bad you're unable to have positive conversations and have to jump straight to prejudice and negative behavior.
I wish you good health, empathy, and better curiosity in the future.
The way so many new to this industry, or never able to measure up, ooze over FAANG just shows how uninspired, unskilled, unoriginal and sheeplike they actually are. Anyone with actual chops can stand by their convictions for a better world. Few do, which keeps these companies sucking the lifeblood out of the universe. But yeah, keep thinking it's just an entitled opinion. Just like climate change. Just like any change...
To trot out the old tired phrase : "no ethical consumption..."
Focus on doing what you can and fixing systemic problems, and you'll get way farther that you would by deciding not to work at a company and not much else.
> The reality is that people have a day to day life and right now we are talking about that.
Asking what role Google has as one of the most atrocious in privacy violators, is something that is relevant to the day to day of Gaza.
The fact that you so quickly dismiss their plight the way you do is why this can never be more than a walled garden, and why I honestly think she should see what working in Silicon Valley minded corps is like before she goes any deeper: you want your narrative to be the only one, even while building tools that keep people in that position in their very business model.
Sidenote: I donated to send food via Flotilla that got raided by Isreali forces in 2010, so don't tell me what I think of the situation much less belittle my experiences in such a condescending way.
Speaking of being condescending, on what ground do you base your assumption that you know more than she does on the topic? Seems to me someone here needs to question their assumptions, and it isn't the person you're responding to.
Now let's talk about what her experience in Europe will be like and all the cool things she should do and see
Not everyone's interest or goal is "using their platform", this thread is about being judged by the merits of their marketable skills
we can all perceive the involvement of big tech in 100 applications simultaneously, including the 2 or 3 government contracts you referred to. this isn't the thread for that and you are trying to shoehorn your platform into it
this isn't apathy on our part, its maturity on our part
> Not everyone's interest or goal is "using their platform", this thread is about being judged by the merits of their marketable skills
Granted, but then one has to ask why her situation makes her so remakable and the exceptional, and the glaring situation becomes obvious: she comes from a region that is in an internment camp due to illegal occupation from a country that uses every surveillance tool at their disposal. My question is simple: what role does Google play here?
> this isn't apathy on our part, its maturity on our part
The rest of your response goes to show you want to treat her like the winner of the hunger games, in some perverted and distorted version of reality, instead of asking how we got here, you're asking the most feckless of questions in a typical Silicon Valley minded manner that is so pervasive their now.
You conflate maturity with malice when you do that, in my opinion, not apathy. You know what you're doing, which makes it worse than apathy because you know how effective it is.
Edit: Came back to this after HN revoked my ability to post, probablt automated response rather than dang's hand, this will be my last response on this matter, as I'm not wasting more time on this:
> Speaking of being condescending, on what ground do you base your assumption that you know more than she does on the topic?
I don't in regards to Palestine, but I saw Silicon Valley go form a cypherpunk based playground from 80-90s with exciting tech made by amateur technologists to the disgusting censorship, cancel culture, lemming zone made up of the privileged class with nothing more than virtue signaling via degrees enter into these corps that it is now working on the most privacy violating technology in what Chamth so aptly described as Silicon Valley and FAANG's practices as the 'intellectual lobotimization' of some the brightest minds we have on Earth.
Take one step out of bounds and that's your career, hell just look at how Google is firing people for having unionized, or even Timnit Gebru's situation is very telling, given he was trying to explain why being a female in tech is rare, let alone why it's even rare and even why daliaawad is unicorn. But that's heavy handed quelling of bad optics, and using sensationalist mob mentality is easier, and this the core premise I want to convey.
It's why I'm asking the question that I did, your erroneous leap in logic and cancel culture practices seem to be redlining as you're ignoring the fact that I got upset because now my question is being blacked out. I was responding to vmception in his dismissal of what he was conveying was a shallow understanding on my part of the situation as he wrote this dismissal:
Obsessively focusing on oppression just because you recognize the name of an area
I'm lost for words, I honestly had a higher opinion of you guys collectively than most of you deserve... I've lived and worked (my own startup) in the valley too, and while I despise what you've built I always respected you individually as I recognize your talents and respect your skills but then I fear your conditioning to respond negatively anytime anyone that deviates from the established narrative is hard to undo.
Even when you're not at work.
I wanted to ask a sincere question from someone with more knowledge than myself on what her perspective is, and instead we've derided this about me and I've wasted 20+ mins responding to the same absurd things that has made me never adopt social media. And got my account frozen from posting, again. But it also underscores what this FAANG and the braoded Silicon Valley 'culture' is really like.
Sorry, daliaawad, I wish we could have gotten to speak... but it's clear this place will never change from it's censorship based roots that Silicon Valley is built upon now, and I hope that makes it clear what you're getting yourself into.
I look forward to your work, and what I'm sure will be a fruitful career.
All the best!
> Frankly, we have more leverage to fix systemic problems if we DON'T ragequit one problematic company after another.
Doesn't make a difference, as Google now goes after it's tech employees that were involved in unionizing, you think making an impact there and 'not ragequitting' doesn't ensure you being blacklisted when you try to resolve the systemic problems from within?
It's the chilling in effect, and from the outside, though I did live in the valley at one point for a short period of time, and as a multi generational Californian I have to say you people have collectively created a perversion of the Californian spirit there for such short term gain then enriched the biggest megacorps: the high poverty, homelessness and now crime rate are reflecting just how deeply rotted your cancer(s) made that place.
Enabled by corrupt politicians, for sure, but it's f'ing disgrace what you people allowed it to become. You've made your bed, and now you have to sleep in it. I just fear it won't be people like you on HN who likely work for FAANG that will suffer the consequences, it will be everyone else as you can afford to just leave.
There are several organizations finding ways to work with software engineers in Gaza, so I don't view it as her being a winner of "the hunger games", I view it as an expanding talent pool. What I like about the approaches that I've seen is that the administrators are finding the interest in software development to be less gendered, compared to other markets, which is something I find interesting.
For me, this thread is seeing one of the approaches come to fruition. I was interested in this thread to see which approach was tried and her experience with it.
This thread isn't about how we got here. This thread is about the privilege of being able to ask "feckless questions" because she is going to be a 19-20 year old in Europe. Many immigrants have their own causes and people they want to support financially, and that's up to her. This thread is about what's new in her life and how her career in the broader software engineering world can develop.
> What role do _you_ think they play? I'm not aware of any Google projects to help with government surveillance in Gaza.
I don't know, I don't work for google, and after buying a Nexus 5 I never bought another google product and I adopted DDG very early on as I never left the Mozilla platform... but one has to ask with Google being such a high profile customer for nations state's survielence model what role it plays in allowing Isreal to keep the gross violations in Gaza underwraps is a critical question.
I know throughout the years and several UN inquiries that stated Israel committed war crimes in Gaza was brushed under the rug almost never appeared via most search engines when I tried to look [0], but that is anecdotal at best.
I want to know what she thinks first hand being from Gaza and now working at Google.
Please don't take HN threads into nationalistic flamewar. We're trying for something else here, and the pressures driving all related discussions in that direction are pretty significant. It takes effort not to succumb to the defaults.
What a harmful viewpoint. A single lifetime is nothing in the context of a country's history, but it's all a person has. Might as well go somewhere you'll be able to realize your full potential. If only to gain the skills and influence to actually to change something in your home country.
What an unthoughtful viewpoint. You are correct: all we have is life. Humble bragging about selling one's soul for clout is rather uninspired.
We both know that with a computer and internet connection, one can gain the skills and influence to do nearly anything, from anywhere.
Full potential is hardly realized only by joining FAANG. If anything, it can cause irreversible harm and arrest a guileless mind.
The callow campus life at FAANGs is ripely built to conceal the geopolitical and capitalistic affront. The workers tacitly support this affront through their mental givings, active labor, and passive complicities of employment.
> I’m so excited I will spend this summer at Google in Europe! ... amazing companies like [Google]
You should be aware, that Google is actively supporting the continued siege of Gaza and occupation of Palestine, in at least the following ways:
1. Financial support for US politicians (and political groups I suppose) which themselves support and execute the US policy of supporting Israel's direct occupation and siege. The US finances Israel and equips it with much of the technology it uses in these activities, and Google avtively supports this political status-quo.
2. Ditto, but as it regards support of the military junta ruling Egypt, which is repressing the Egyptian population but also enforcing the siege of Gaza from the South.
4. Promotion of pro-Zionist news outlets - the mainstream outlets in the US, such as CNN, NBC, ABC, CBS and Fox news; all of these have a pro-Israeli bias in their cover, and none of these meaningfully covers the situation in Gaza, nor calls for the lifting of the siege, nor supports the right of return of the refugees in Gaza, nor gives voice to such positions, while official Israeli and many pro-Israeli voices are often heard when Israel and Palestine are covered.
Also, Google engages is mass surveillance of Internet users at the behest of the US government, as has been revealed confirmed by the revelations of Edward Snowden. It is also involved in supplying AI capabilities to US military initiatives. etc.
Thus, while it is of course not at all my business to tell you what you should and shouldn't do, I urge you to consider the implications of working for Google, as this choice is at the very least problematic.
I urge you to consider the implications of working for Google, as this choice is at the very least problematic.
Not everything has to be political, maybe she's just happy she's going be learning a lot from a tech company that has brought a lot of good stuff into the world both technical and otherwise.
I'm not sure what you mean by "has to be". Google is a not-insignificant force in world politics. And - Google is not the only place to intern in Silicon Valley.
I’m a 19-year-old Gazan female who participated in Manara last year and got internships at Google and Repl.it. I’m so excited I will spend this summer at Google in Europe! I got lots of questions about my experience when people heard about it on Facebook so I wrote this blog post to let other young engineers in Palestine and the Middle East know how they can get into amazing companies like this too.