This was definitely a trigger for me.
A few years ago, I had some great email exchanges about a position. I was an experienced dev, and I knew what they were looking for. But to make it official, I had to go through their HR person.
This was the first time I was going to talk to someone from the company, live in a video call.
And the moment we jumped on a call, her first words were, “Do you have a green card?”
I was born here. One look at my skin color and that was her question.
I used to work in HR. In my first week, the HR Manager walked around with me on the floor of our factory. We had a lot of Vietnamese employees. She wanted me to start learning people’s names, but the first time we encountered a Viet person she whispered to me “hey, between you and me, I can’t really tell them apart since they all look similar and have similar names, so if you can’t remember them then it’s no biggie”. Like what??? Ma’am you are the HR manager.
