Being black and working in the Technology sector has been a joy and a pain. At times I am treated like an expensive novelty creature like a unicorn or a sphinx who has no counterpart and magically just is. The people at company see me and immediately say OOOOO or AHHHH as if I am the first person that they have ever met working in the technology sector. Don’t get me wrong, for some of them, this is the first time they have encounter me a black female in the technology sector. With me being fairly new to the technology sector, initially I was enthralled by their fascination and indulged them with funny tech stories and infused them with obscure tech knowledge, and invited their curiosities with my “tech origin story” of how I got into this field.

Every time a new hire comes in they look at me with the same inquisitive excited face and expect me to tell my same ole funny tech stories and tech origin story all over again. Now, I am a great story teller and do actually have MANY really funny tech stories just from working here. But I am also noticing the less intriguing part of being a black woman in tech. The times where I am having to assert myself to a user who knows absolutely nothing about a computer because they want to tell me they think they know what their technology issue is.

Or the times where I say something to my boss about a system wide outage that is occurring and he shrugs me off only to declare it an emergency an hour later (after the damage is done). But is what I am encountering specifically about being a black woman in tech or is this systemic in all industries? Is it possible that because I am no longer an entry level employee that I am both noticing and experiencing the way the corporate world dismisses its employees who aren’t white males?

This is just a snippet of the concepts that we want to tackle here at Melanin Megabytes. The purpose of this blog is to explore those questions and others and try to get as much information as we can from people of color in the technology sector. We want to challenge technology tropes, but we also want to be able to laugh at some of them as well. Here we will give you stories, articles, interviews, etc. everything about people of color in the technology sector. Why? Because we can and because we love doing it.

We love to hear from our readers. As a person of color in the technology field what has been your experience? Feel free to comment, email us, etc so we can make your voice heard.