Black Conservative Programmer

I'm only acquainted with two black programmers (and I shared this link with them in case they want to comment on their own) but neither of them are conservative.

For my part, I have a hard enough time fathoming why working-class white people like me would buy into conservatism; the movement has become more blatantly populist and authoritarian since 2001, and its economic aspects only seem to benefit the already-wealthy. Most of them do it because of cultural conservatism, which does them few favors either. I won't even attempt to speculate on why black people would choose conservatism since most of my few conservative neighbors are still nostalgic for Jim Crow.

My bet is HN will downvote this post because HN fights hard to "conserve" against alternate viewpoints such as those of the author

Montreal (white) engineer here: I've been working as an FPGA guy here in Canada for 30 years, and black programmers and engineers are as rare as hens teeth up here. I have met only 2 or 3 over the span of 3 decades and there are zero black managers in engineering/software. It's mostly a question of supply, only 4% of the province identifies as black. I see far more asians and Indians than blacks, which is a bit sad, since I learned digital logic design from a black engineer in Los Angeles when I started out.

I’m somewhat confused by this question.

Stats show that there are fewer black programmers than there are in the general population, and that African Americans tend to vote for democrats over 90% of the time. Add to that the general political slant of the tech industry, and it’s not surprising that there are few black conservative programmers.

What are you looking to glean from this post?

I worked for a big tech company for a while, and there were a moderate number of black engineers. Not tons, but not "almost none" either.

Politics is harder to judge. At that big tech company, it was not safe to be conservative, or indeed anything other than the extreme left. In my time there, I found maybe a dozen people who could reasonably be described as "conservative" -- but because being outed had such strong negative consequences, I'm sure there were tons more that I never detected.

None of the black engineers that I knew expressed explicitly conservative views, though one did mention quietly that they didn't like how uncomfortable everybody made it for him to express his Christian faith and the degree to which it was just a tacit assumption that everybody was atheist. Religious, though, isn't the same thing as conservative.

I just interviewed and gave a thumbs-up to a Black programmer. I didn’t inquire about his politics, not relevant.

In my 40 years in the software business I have worked with quite a few Black programmers and technical managers, but they do seem under-represented. Women were more common in my workplaces until the mid-80s, then seemed to disappear for some reason.

Until recently it seemed understood that the workplace was not the forum for airing political or religious views, so I probably worked with people I’m not particularly aligned with on those issues, but we didn’t conflict because it didn’t come up at work.

I did have to fire a conservative programmer once because he insisted on bringing a handgun into the office, asserting his rights. Management (and I, and his other co-workers) did not agree. He had vocally expressed his conservative views at every opportunity but no one seemed to care until he armed himself at work.