For a few minutes after I was done reading Mr. Adeagbo's piece I wondered if maybe the story of his interview was made up or exaggerated. It's hard to believe someone would do something that mean-spirited (or perhaps just deeply insensitive). I thought to myself that, surely, people in tech don't actually say or do these kinds of things.
But I kept reading comments and the ones at the bottom put my doubts to rest.
I once worked at a large tech company... one of those ruthless fast paced ones. An interviewer liked to ask dumb things like
"what's your GPA"
<reply>
"Why is it not 4.0?"
or
"where'd you graduate from?"
<your school>
"Why not stanford?"
I can't tell if he did it because it was a useful technique to throw people off and test them, or if he was just a supreme dick. Either way the interviewer in the article went too far into illegal mode (interviewer training 101: never mention race, marital status, military service, etc)
Actually, that feeling you had of not believing it because it seemed so improbable is a fairly common reaction (in my experience as a PoC). It was an "aha!" moment for me to realize that not everyone has had those experiences, and if you hadn't, the scenarios just seem so foreign.
I think it's a similar feeling to being a man, and not really understanding all the crazy shit women have to deal with.
But I kept reading comments and the ones at the bottom put my doubts to rest.