1. There were ERGs for old people, young people, people who brought dogs to work, Irish people, Jewish people, etc. I can't imagine why they would say you couldn't create one for the group you wanted.
2. One thing hot-shot programmers fresh out of college need to learn is that while their opinion is valued, they need to listen to other people on the team as they may have important points as well. While it's nice to show initiative, that's L3-L4 thinking. To get to L5 or higher, you need to be able to listen, strategize, and drive consensus. All of those fuzzy things that you became a software engineer to avoid. Because at the end of the day, no one is particularly interested in how clever you are, they're interested in what you can get done. And you can get a heck of a lot more done through working with other people, even if they aren't quite as clever as you. After all, quantity has a quality all its own.
3. Every new employee gets assigned a mentor (at least at the office I was at). I'm not sure how this would differ from the "special" mentor you're talking about, but maybe you can inform me. Though with the level of ego reflected in your post, I'm not sure you would have benefited from a mentor, special or otherwise.
4. Some people that are hired are not as good, technically, as others. I'm aware of confirmation bias, so seeing a few less technically capable employees that happen not to be white doesn't surprise me. And when I do the math, assigning scores to previous co-workers and talking it up, I don't actually see a statistically significant difference in the capabilities based on race (though it does lean a bit towards white males being less capable).
But maybe my Google office wasn't representative, as we weren't one of the main ones.
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