Black engineers in Silicon Valley get big assist

Ime Archibong was eating lunch on Facebook's Silicon Valley campus with former colleague Makinde Adeagbo last year when Adeagbo pitched the idea for /dev/color, a nonprofit organization to bring together and grow the ranks of African-American software developers.

"We sat outside, right in front of the ice cream shop, and he was painting this vision for me of what he wanted to do," Archibong recalls.

Adeagbo, who at the time worked at Pinterest, was one of the first black software engineers at Facebook and had forged a career path for other black engineers to follow. Now he aspired to do the same thing, only on an industrywide scale.

"That is something I cannot help but get behind," Archibong, a software engineer who is now Facebook's director of strategic partnerships, told USA TODAY.

/dev/color, a support network for engineers of color, officially launched a year ago and has since grown to 114 members, all black, many of whom often found themselves feeling isolated while navigating an industry dominated by white and Asian men.

On Friday, /dev/color held its inaugural conference on Facebook's campus — "Onwards and Upwards: Advancing the careers of black software engineers" — headlined by venture capitalist Ben Horowitz and Facebook chief technology officer Mike Schroepfer and featuring sessions on such topics as how to go from engineer to manager and how to build a business with an engineering background.

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Google adds first black board member.

Google parent company Alphabet is adding finance chops and diversity to its board with the appointment of economist Roger Ferguson.

Ferguson is the first African American to serve on the board of Alphabet and Google, marking a major milestone in Google's effort to bring more diversity to the technology industry.

Ferguson will serve on Alphabet's audit committee. With his appointment, he receives a $1 million equity grant, according to a filing with the Securities and Exchange Commission.

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Tech summit addresses industry's lack of diversity

Civil rights leader Jesse Jackson spent most of this year pressuring the technology industry into facing up to the glaring scarcity of women, blacks and Latinos at companies renowned as great places to work.

Now comes Diversity 2.0 — finding ways to reverse a deep-rooted problem that isn't going to be as easy to fix as writing new lines of code for a computer bug.

The challenges, along with some of the potential solutions, were explored Wednesday at a Silicon Valley summit organized by Jackson and his group, Rainbow Push.

In a show of their commitment, Google, Apple, Facebook and more than other 20 other tech companies sent representatives to the forum held at the Santa Clara, California, headquarters of a Silicon Valley pioneer, computer chipmaker Intel Corp. The crowd of roughly 300 people also included entrepreneurs, academics and nonprofit groups eager to change the cultural and educational milieu that turned computer programming into an occupation dominated by white and Asian men.

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