Congrats! This post is awesome and really put a huge smile on my face. It reminded me of how enthusiastic I was about programming at your age and there aren&#x27;t a lot of better places to start your career than at Google. Best of luck.

Congratulations!Your enthusiasm is actually charming. I&#x27;m sure it has put smile on many faces. It brings this nostalgic feeling of how many actually started. Have a blast in your career!

Thank you so much! Sure I can come back and share more updates! :)

Congrats, Dalia! I hope we&#x27;ll continue to see posts from you in the future, documenting your progress.

Congratulations! Your story is really inspiring.

MabrookReally happy to read about your journey, incredibly inspirational.

The team I will be working with is located in Poland. But the internship will be remotely so I am working on getting a visa to Germany because Germany has a consulate service in Gaza so it’s easier for me to get that visa. I heard about another Manara participant who got into Google Poland and then had to wait 8 months for his visa because of Covid-19. He’s actually in West Bank and there is consulate service there but they stopped during Covid and he recommended I try Germany instead.

Which country(ies) in Europe you&#x27;re going to? Hope COVID-19 doesn&#x27;t spoil your travel opportunities!

You&#x27;re doing so much for Palestine just by blogging and being the intelligent girl you are

Ooooh thank you so much! That&#x27;s great! Also, why don’t you hire someone else from Palestine though? They’re just as good and they’re available now…I was in Manara’s 4th cohort. The 5th cohort just started hunting for internships and jobs. Two of them are my friends Hend and Rula, they’re just like me, they went to RBK and then Manara. You can meet them by emailing Manara (www.manara.tech)

Really cool Dalia ! I hope you become a great coder and find your purpose :)If after Google you&#x27;re interested in sustainability and want to come work at a cool startup in France, let me know haha!

Thank you! My father is an engineer and my mother has a master degree in psychology. My father works for al-baladiyya, I think in English it’s called the municipality. My mother is working with the Gaza Community Mental Health Program which is an NGO. My mom’s salary is stable but my dad’s is not.The problem is that there are few jobs in Gaza due to the wars and the closed borders. Lucky us they are working but my father is earning just 50% of the actual salary. This happens a lot in Gaza nowadays. The economic situation has been getting a lot worse for the last few years.

Thank you for sharing this. It was a pleasure to read - the youthful zest of your excitement and passion really expresses itself in your writing. I was also touched by how one of your immediate priorities is to help your parents and brothers financially. (Hope you are able fulfill all your wishes).If you don&#x27;t mind sharing with us - I am curious how educated your parents are and what their profession is currently?

Congrats Dalia! Thank you for sharing your story. I just about teared up in public reading it. I hope you have a great summer.

In a language that I&#x27;m guessing wasn&#x27;t her first, no less!

Completely agree - My eyes were glued to the screen start to finish and felt like I was on the journey with you! Awesome work!

Probably the best post I’ve ever seen on HN. You’re a really good writer too, which is very rare for developers, so you’ve got a huge differentiator there!

it&#x27;s not a choice, we program LTR and in latin because it&#x27;s a requirement of all programming languages (apart from insignificant exceptions)

My first assumption (which I guess was correct) was that the image was flipped, but then I got confused because I started looking closer and, while I could see some English syntax (&quot;for { ...&quot;), it also looked as if there were Arabic characters mixed in, so I wondered if it was some interesting mix, and also that they were rendering English RTL.Then I realized that was much less likely than simply having flipped the image.

Exactly! I program left to right in English like the whole world I think. :)

Do you program in - or what do you prefer - right to left as in Arabic or left to right as in Latin ?
edit: I see now that the image was taken through a mirror, I thought it was right-to-left programming.

Well, we have good wired connections here in Gaza from Paltel and other companies but our phones only have 2G because of the political situation.  The main problem can be with the electricity going off for long hours but we have alternative solutions: generators, batteries, etc.

Hi, if I can ask, what are your choices for ISPs in Gaza? What is the situation like for residential fixed broadband, and for LTE services?

Welcome to Google!Excited for your new adventures - congratulations!

In my experience, yes: Palestinians from Gaza usually explicitly refer to themselves as Gazan (in Arabic: غزّاوي).Source: lived in the UAE and have a number of Palestinian friends.

No, it&#x27;s not about &quot;Gazan vs Palestinian&quot;. It&#x27;s that Arabs sometimes refer to someone using his city. For example, if someone is from the city of Khalil (Jericho), he might be called as &quot;khalili&quot;, people from Nablus as nabulsi. This is a trend in most Arab countries, in Jordan, people from city of Maan refer themselves as Maanis, from Irbid as irbidawi, etc...

I think of myself as Gazan and Palestinian. Just like a Newyorker and American. But it was important to choose the word Gazan in the title because the Gaza situation is different from other parts of Palestine. Gaza is a very small piece of Palestine near the mediterranean sea. It’s 35 km long and 7 km wide. We are surrounded by walls on 3 sides and most of us have never been able to travel, that’s why I said Gazans because Google seemed as distant as an alien planet.

Congratulations!I&#x27;m curious: do people from Gaza primarily identify as &quot;Gazan&quot; versus &quot;Palestinian&quot;? I was confused for a moment by the title before I clicked, as I&#x27;d not seen that adjective used in that way before.

Congratulations! Your story is very inspiring.

Thank you! I am planning to continue my studies after the internship :)

Congrats on your achievement! Do you plan on getting a degree or skipping it if you get an offer?

OT? I read a post about CRDTs being more useful <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;josephg.com&#x2F;blog&#x2F;crdts-are-the-future&#x2F;" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;josephg.com&#x2F;blog&#x2F;crdts-are-the-future&#x2F;</a>

Congratulations! Have a great time at Google.On another note, the repl.it interview sounds awesome. It&#x27;s a rare interview process where the candidate gets to do useful and interesting work (in this case, work with operational transformations) as part of the interview process. Kudos to repl.it for their awesome sounding interview process and to you for crushing it. :)

Congratulations, and I am very proud of you!

Peace is around the corner. Soon more opportunities will open up for more Gazans. .(edit: i&#x27;m looking forward to the day)

Thank you for posting this. It reminds us that in any difficult situation the common man and woman on the ground can still be civil and have mutual respect

Dalia I want to wish you the best of luck. I am an Israeli and I loved reading this. I really hope to see more and more engineers from Gaza getting opportunities like the one you have.In a previous role of mine I had the privilege of meeting and working with some Palestinian Engineers from the West Bank. It was only for a few days as it was an internal company hackathon, but it was still great and we are still in contact today.Sure there were some differences and some interesting conversations but it also allowed us to hear each other’s perspective and to solve engineering problems together.I hope to see more Palestinian Engineers succeeding like you are and also more Israeli and Palestinian engineers working on projects together.Good luck and all the best!

Congrats on your achievement and thank you for sharing your experiences.  Best of luck in your future endeavors!

You can do anything! You are so powerful. Thank you for sharing your story with us.

Rukab’s is in Ramallah, in the West Bank. It looks tasty, and stretches like taffy.<a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.npr.org&#x2F;sections&#x2F;thesalt&#x2F;2015&#x2F;09&#x2F;08&#x2F;438473615&#x2F;gooey-goodness-ramallah-s-stretchy-ice-cream-delights" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.npr.org&#x2F;sections&#x2F;thesalt&#x2F;2015&#x2F;09&#x2F;08&#x2F;438473615&#x2F;go...</a>

Manara&#x27;s Polish-American co-founder catching up late here to say I never tried that ice cream, but I do recommend eating knafeh in the West Bank and fattet hummus in Gaza! The food in in West Bank vs Gaza is quite different... I think Gaza is particularly good... but unfortunately it&#x27;s almost impossible to get there unless you&#x27;re a humanitarian worker or a journalist.NOTE: if you work in tech and want to mentor in Palestine, check out Gaza Sky Geeks and Code for Palestine. They organize on-site travel for select volunteers (full transparency: I&#x27;m involved with both organizations)

Hi! I have some statements and one question. I love seeing women making their way into the field of technology and I truly wish you the best of luck. I have two daughters who are interested in computer science and engineering, and my oldest will be attending University this fall after being accepted at age 16. She has had to fight for things which would have been, in my opinion, granted without thought if she were male.Thank you for being awesome! The world is already a better place with you in it!As for my question, a friend of mine from Palestine told me that if I ever make it to Palestine that I must try ice cream from Rukab&#x27;s Ice Cream. I&#x27;ve never made it there, and I&#x27;m not sure that I ever will. Have you eaten this? How does it compare to the ice cream in Europe?

Congratulations from the MIT App Inventor Team. We&#x27;re glad we could play a small part in your success. Wishing you continued success and happiness.

Congrats Dalia. I read your post and then returned here hoping that you were active in the comments. Not only are you clearly a strong engineer, but you&#x27;re also a great writer which is an extremely valuable skill as you&#x27;ll hopefully discover. Best of luck at Google!

It&#x27;s unfortunate, but it&#x27;s understandable that &quot;regular&quot; people want to minimize risks by e.g. avoiding the unknown. What I mean is that you can&#x27;t really blame the typical citizen who sees something unknown, reads the news and is concerned about his&#x2F;her property.Non-western immigrants in Sweden have a bad reputation, simply because integration has been handled poorly by the government (and their immigration policies have arguably been way too open), and that people come with all kinds of backgrounds, war torn countries etc.It&#x27;s a chicken and egg situation, I think the best thing Sweden can do at this point is to partly shut the doors on immigration and focus on integrating the population currently living in ghetto like suburbs.

This is a very uplifting post. Thanks for sharing. I hope more people will follow in your footprints, when they see it&#x27;s possible.About racism, it is sadly alive and well in Europe also. I think the tech hubs are likely better than many other places as they are more diverse. In Stockholm, where I am, we have had to import lots of SW developers as the industry demand is much larger than the local supply (SW developer is the single most common occupation, all categories) but I still see occasional instances of under-the-table racism - e.g. a landlord might prefer to rent out an apartment to a native swede before an immigrant. And women can also find themselves isolated and sometimes have to work much harder to prove themselves in a very male-dominated segment. But I think we&#x27;re heading in the right direction at least. Hopefully, my daughters will not experience these things, if they choose to work in SW development when they&#x27;re adults.Keep up the trailblazing!

Nothing against educating girls, but this is probably the wrong conclusion. Economic situation determines whether girls can get an education or not, so educated girls correlate with a good economic situation. Not the other way round (educated girls causing a good economic situation).Personally, I think this focus on girls only is sexist and I take care to never donate to charities that only want to help girls.

PLAN is a great charity for that. They do things like give girls food to take home from school. It made it so the family would be better off sending their girl to school. Efficient and effective!PLAN has low overhead, too. They don&#x27;t spend fortunes on marketing. A high percentage of donations (~90% IIRC) goes to the people in need.I learned this from PLAN Canada, but I&#x27;m sure it is the same elsewhere. I have no relation, just a fan of their work.

Such an uplifting post! Your story is one of hope and if it inspires at least one more person, it will have achieved its purpose.Congrats to you, Dalia, and best wishes &#x2F; good luck to your mates as well.To all - investment in girls&#x27; education lifts the entire society [1][2].[1] <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.worldbank.org&#x2F;en&#x2F;topic&#x2F;girlseducation" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.worldbank.org&#x2F;en&#x2F;topic&#x2F;girlseducation</a>
[2] <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.unicef.org&#x2F;education&#x2F;girls-education" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.unicef.org&#x2F;education&#x2F;girls-education</a>

Thank you for sharing! The world is a dark place right now, and your story is very uplifting.

Thanks for sharing such an inspiring story! Best of luck to you!!

Thank you so much for sharing this wonderful story which I am sure will inspire many others.

Yes! How can we help? Having been helped in the past I’d be more than happy to pass it on!Super happy for you!

Oh this is so kind of you. Right now I am all set but it is possible that I need help especially with simple things like how to find a place to stay when I arrive in Germany this summer. Again, thank you for offering help :)

I am so happy for you. Obviously you are very talented and determined and despite the obvious handicaps this too often shitty world gave you, you are breaking out to the world stage. Congratulations!How can we help? Do you need money for housing in Europe, better computers, anything? I am quite sure a lot of us would be glad to chip in.

Congratulations and thank you for posting this inspirational story! I became interested in programming 26 years ago after taking the same class you did. So thanks to David Malan and his forebearer Margo Seltzer for CS50.

Congratulations Dalia! Best of luck with your new adventures in and outside of Google!Your story motivated me even more to keep nurturing my niece&#x27;s interest in programming :)

Congrats Dalia! And may your story - that someone from Gaza, especially a girl, is a talented dev (and writer!), and has landed a top global tech job - one day be so commonplace that it&#x27;s not breaking news.

Since you passed the bar at repl.it too, after your google internship you could get back in touch with repl.it and tell them you are now more experienced and still want an internship, they might just add you for the next summer.I have to add, your story is heartwarming and I hope other people who aren&#x27;t so fortunate will be able to learn and get more opportunity and achieve like you have.

Congratulations Dalia!Did Google tell you that you will go physically to Europe for the internship? Last summer internships were virtual due to covid19 restrictions, and with the measures from most countries, I&#x27;d be surprised if this summer internships are held on the phyisical office, while Google still has WFH.

Hiii everyone, this is my first time posting here! I have read Hacker News sometimes but only thought about sharing my own post after seeing Manara&#x27;s post (<a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;news.ycombinator.com&#x2F;item?id=25849054" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;news.ycombinator.com&#x2F;item?id=25849054</a>) last month. I asked them if I can share this here and they said it was a good idea. :)I’m a 19-year-old Gazan female who participated in Manara last year and got internships at Google and Repl.it. I’m so excited I will spend this summer at Google in Europe! I got lots of questions about my experience when people heard about it on Facebook so I wrote this blog post to let other young engineers in Palestine and the Middle East know how they can get into amazing companies like this too.

I&#x27;m curious what visa you&#x27;d be using to work at Repl.it (if you were going to move to the USA). I&#x27;m wondering if our startup should be using Manara.

Thank you so much Amjad! I really love Repl.it and I think I am a startup person in my heart. If you have a fall or spring internship opportunity don’t forget about me!

First time I heard of repl.it. I read your message and went to the home page. I saw you name under Multiplayer code together. And I thought, doesn’t that name sound familiar. Lol. Best wishes.

Congrats, Dalia! I understand why chose Google over us -- the chance to travel is hard to pass on -- but maybe we&#x27;ll get you next year ;)

Yaasss of course! This is why I wrote this post and am sharing on social media too. :) lots of people are contacting me now on facebook asking how to do it. www.manara.tech will help them. that’s how I got into these companies. their mission is to help palestinian and middle east engineers fulfill their dreams and work at international startups &amp; companies! Now that I got in, I am going to go back and mentor the next Manara cohorts to help more people do it

Congrats, well-deserved. I hope you encourage other Palestinians and Arabs to follow suit!

Congratulations! Extremely well deserved, wish you the best going forward :)

Don&#x27;t go by a list of companies.Look for a place that works on something you care about and allows you to apply and build your skills.That&#x27;s pretty much something a grown up has to figure out individually.

What&#x27;s your shortlist of companies you would recommend to new grads?

I don’t know why you’re getting the downvotes, this is the reality of the situation. People who already live in the US are in a privileged position and cannot emphasize with this point of view.

Organized application -&gt; visa -&gt; blackhole (greencard). If you see recent greencard backlog timelines for the categories most engineers are on, only first two steps are more realistic. :-)And yes, very well done Dalia, good luck and best wishes!

FAANG companies are good options for foreign engineers because they have a very organized application -&gt; visa -&gt; green card pipeline. If you&#x27;re interviewing at a small startup, it&#x27;s very hit or miss whether their legal team will be willing and competent enough to get you into the country safely.I&#x27;d actually recommend small startups for most people, given growth opportunities, but if your primary concern is to get into the US on a permanent basis, it&#x27;s much safer to apply to a large boring enterprise with a good legal team.

&gt;a safe FAANG job beats the risk of working for a startup or striking out on their ownThere&#x27;s an entire universe of companies, thousands in the US alone, that are not FAANG or a startup, but that employee technical people out there.

You’re not the only one. But there are a lot of people whose life situation might dictate that choosing a safe FAANG job beats the risk of working for a startup or striking out on their own.
Or maybe they just want to work on interesting things, have a good work life balance, and get paid really well.Your golden handcuffs might be someone else’s golden parachute.

yes exactly! this is something that I discussed a lot with my mentor at Manara and this is what we agreed on. I’ve never been on an airplane before, I think being in Europe will be life-changing for my career and also for my personal experience. Gaza is tiny, it’s 30km x 6km. I want to see some new things. :)

It says that she chose Google instead of Repl.it because they&#x27;ll also send her to Europe for a summer internship, which may open up quite a lot of possibilities for her (regardless of if she likes&#x2F;dislikes FAANG). When you&#x27;re in a relatively obscure country outside of the US, every networking opportunity counts, regardless of what you want to achieve with your expertise.

F and G are off my list because they&#x27;re detrimental to society and individuals. G offered me hundreds of thousands of dollars, any department, and to design my own role, but I turned them down for the 8th time.Apple and Amazon are wobblers depending on what type of role, the impact you&#x27;re trying to have, and the benefits vs. harm you think they make.Netflix is essentially harmless because they&#x27;re a TV and movie store.It&#x27;s very tempting to go for the big salary and benefits package, but then having to rationalize, normalize, or compartmentalize the fact that the business makes billions at the expense of harming society. It should ultimately make the employee feel guilty if they&#x27;re honest and paying attention, but should give pause if it doesn&#x27;t.If I could make a steadier living (enough clients with periodic, on-going needs) at SRE&#x2F;DevOps tech and management consulting, I would never work for any company other than my own.Younger people should consider working for large organizations to get immersed in that field if they&#x27;re looking to go the consulting or related enterprise startups route later.

doing both of the shitty things you’re describing at a FAANG right now, and I started during the pandemicyeah, it’s way less enjoyable and fulfilling than previous jobs at small companies and startups, but:- i have total control of my workhours, and i can work no more than 40 hours if i want to- i get paid WAY more, and raises&#x2F;promotions are nearly six figures worth of increased TC, instead of 1-10%- i have clear career progression, and an actual mentoring system for once- dont have to worry about my employer running out of money- dont have to worry about getting fired with no notice or warning- I’m more likely to get the things I want &#x2F; ask for- teammates are nicer and more competent- ~prestige~basically everything is better except the work itself. it’s a trade im willing to make

&gt; If you&#x27;re a foreigner it&#x27;s much harder to get sponsored by a smaller company. I know a bunch of people are essentially &quot;locked in&quot; to FAANG until they get their green card and are chomping at the bit to work on more exciting things.I don&#x27;t believe this, especially not in the current market. Anyone who is actually eager to hire people will be grabbing them up too.

If you&#x27;re a foreigner it&#x27;s much harder to get sponsored by a smaller company. I know a bunch of people are essentially &quot;locked in&quot; to FAANG until they get their green card and are chomping at the bit to work on more exciting things.Also I think there&#x27;s a shine to FAANG from the outside (if you&#x27;re young and&#x2F;or don&#x27;t know the area)Count your blessings that you can see things as they are, but also remember your perspective

FAANG companies offer a bunch of things:* Excellent pay* Good benefits* Stability* Prestige (looks good on resume&#x2F;opens doors later)* Smart coworkers* Huge customer bases* Lots of internal transfer opportunities* Well established competence in handling foreign hiresNow, obviously plenty of companies offer a lot of those things too...but not many offer all of them.And even then, often there&#x27;s the visibility issue: maybe there&#x27;s a bunch of ~200 person companies that do, in fact, offer the same things -- but will {Random Engineer X} actually be aware of that? With a company like Google, where I work, there&#x27;s been enough written about it to have a decent idea of what you&#x27;re getting into before you even apply. Discoverability is a bigger challenge with smaller companies.

am I the only one that doesn&#x27;t care about working for a FAANG? The only intrigue from these companies is that they offer golden handcuffs. I occasionally go through the interview cycle at these companies just to get offers I could use to leverage other companies.there&#x27;s probably a limited number of projects that interest me at these companies and knowing my luck I would get assigned to some maintenance project doing &quot;plumbing&quot; (internal use only libs for example) or assigned to cleanup shitty code from a nearly dying project.if you are graduating college and get into these companies, don&#x27;t drink the koolaid. keep your eyes open and don&#x27;t waste your potential on these companies. Save up your $$$, and build something that people will use.

Love this! I&#x27;m Manara&#x27;s co-founder and CEO. One of the things we hear from people like Dalia is how much they LOVE getting mock interviews &amp; mentorship from people who work at Google, Netflix, Amazon, Wayfair, Spotify, Twitter, etc. Over and over again they say, &quot;I thought you had to be a genius to work there, but after meeting these people, I feel like I could do it too.&quot;

This brought a smile to my face :)&gt; Repl.it is my best friend as a developer. I use it every day. I didn’t realize I could work there!This reminded me of when I first came to the US from India and started realizing that all the software I used (Windows, Gmail etc) and videogames I played were made by ordinary people like me.

Congratulations! Looking forward to hearing more positive news from you in the future.

&gt; Just give a damn and focus on passionate students who are actually interested in something rather than the superficial students doing it to look good for a college application.It&#x27;s not that easy. Teachers are evaluated on the competency of the entire class, not just the ones who want to be there to learn.

Try to forgive her, you&#x27;ll make yourself a favor.

Just give a damn and focus on passionate students who are actually interested in something rather than the superficial students doing it to look good for a college application.Sorry if I use this bit to rant but I&#x27;m still mad at a teacher from high school decades later. As a child I was mad at the injustice done to me. Thinking back as an adult I&#x27;m mad at all the potential she probably squandered in others.She taught the electronics classes and was put in charge of the cube satellite project. It was an extracurricular activity where students work with volunteers to design and build a small cube satellite that would launch into space.It wasn&#x27;t announced to the school and I only caught word of it from a friend. I rushed to get an application filled out and turned in but the teacher said that I missed the cut off by one day (a date arbitrarily set by her). I was devastated. A few weeks later I was told by a volunteer I could still join in and help, so I did. I put in some serious work and at some point I find out I missed a big meeting. I asked the teacher about it and she refused to believe I was a participant and would not add me to the mailing list.All my passion and love for wanted to building something and send it into space was converted into vengeful teenage angst and by that young logic I wanted to see her name plastered all over the failure. The best way to accomplish that was to stop showing up and helping. Times goes by and right after all the college applications are submitted I find out that most of the students immediately stopped working on it. Went from something like 100 students down to 3. The satellite was never finished and didn&#x27;t get launched into space.I&#x27;m probably the exception with the after story: taught myself some rudimentary things from a RadioShack book, got into college and graduated with a BS in EE. Now a days I see all these cool youtube videos and how easily it is for kids to discover things but have may not necessarily have the resources or guidance to get going.

&gt; I became passionate about programming in high school. My teacher selected me for a robotics competition. We built a line follower robot using Arduino.To me this is important to know how to get younger people interested in programming. The application approach seems better than the &quot;cool, trendy online class&quot; approach.I also think Dalia is an exception and not the norm. I also want to know about those that didn&#x27;t succeed and what obstacles they faced, and as an instructor what can we do differently?

Yes I know! Gaza is so much more than that. There are a lot of smart motivated people. Did you know that one of the people who worked on the Mars Helicopter - NASA that just landed on Mars is from Gaza? <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.linkedin.com&#x2F;in&#x2F;elbasyouni&#x2F;" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.linkedin.com&#x2F;in&#x2F;elbasyouni&#x2F;</a>I want you to know that I’m not the only one. I worked hard but so did lots of other people and some of them are even smarter than me. 4 people from Manara in Palestine got into Google this year and I think there will be more (I was in Manara’s 4th cohort and the 5th cohort is just applying to jobs now. I think at least 6 people are interviewing at Google from both West Bank and Gaza).I’ll keep you updated and if you want I can tell them to share their stories here too :)

Was electricity reliability a problem for working in Gaza?  Just curious.

I worked in Gaza for close to 3 years and led a team of 6 software engineers. We worked on a pretty complicated business app (UN project). We were a very quality-focused team and did some pretty cool and advanced stuff.What I can say from my time in Gaza is that there are many very driven, talented software engineers there. Some of the best engineers I ever worked with were Palestinians (and I don&#x27;t say this lightly).

Thank you for sharing your experiences, here Dalia. I have not heard a first person account like yours from Gaza before. The news we see from Gaza in Australia is almost exclusively bleak - a never ending tale of injustices, deprivation, losses, and endurance. Your story is a wonderful counterpoint that lifts my feelings.Congratulations for being recognised as a capable engineer by two organisations that you hold in high regard. In addition to your engineering aptitude, it sounds like you know how to direct yourself and to connect with your poise in professional circumstances that some other talented engineers might find trying. These capabilities are rare and valued, because they distinguish you as someone who can join a group and move it forward.Please keep posting here at HN from time to time. I wish you happiness and satisfaction, and look forward to hearing how you get on with whatever you choose to work at and discover.

Please don&#x27;t take HN threads into nationalistic flamewar. We&#x27;re trying for something else here, and the pressures driving all related discussions in that direction are pretty significant. It takes effort not to succumb to the defaults.<a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;news.ycombinator.com&#x2F;newsguidelines.html" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;news.ycombinator.com&#x2F;newsguidelines.html</a>

Really nice ! 
I have seen code written by folks who have participated in Gaza Sky Geeks program. I was really impressed.
Almost every one I interacted with virtually were very good at html &#x2F; css &#x2F; js.

I&#x27;ve interviewed hundreds of &quot;experienced&quot; engineers who could not code for the life of them. Not sure why you assumed the process is broken without first asking about it.

If other people&#x27;s hiring and firing processes are broken, it might be the case that experienced engineers aren&#x27;t that skillful.I&#x27;m sure many people&#x27;s anecdata agrees :)

I would assume that the employer has to take the statements of these experienced engineers on faith until interviewed where as the student may be a more easily known quantity in advance.Hard(er) to fudge your knowledge when your standing (even virtually) in front of someone.

This is trite, but I am replying for the sake of learning how to phrase it. A candidate can be broken down into a lot of characteristics:1. Base technical skills - typing (yes, typing), ability to recognize and solve standard problems, and ability to process information quickly.2. Familiarity with specific technologies (.NET, Angular, SQL, whatever you are working with). This is vastly underrated for line of business applications.3. Architectural patterns - DRY, SRP, dependency injection, inversion of control, queue&#x2F;msg based patterns, etc.4. Domain knowledge, perhaps company specific5. Social skills, etcA lot of senior devs ride out their career on number 4. For a new hire, especially for a junior position, #1 is critical, because there is no #4 to speak of and #3 and #2 are handled by other devs.From that perspective, it makes perfect sense.

This is not a random sampling of youngsters; it&#x27;s presumably an interested, motivated, and exceptional group.

Most interviewing is broken and assesses your skill at “programming interviews” and not “programming.”Experienced engineers can help unfuck a massive complex system. They might not nail your napsack problem right out the gate.But if you want someone who can nail napsack for you, look no further than fresh grads.

The pool is already pre-vetted through another company so in essence they are going to two sets of interviews. If you&#x27;ve already passed one set of interview then the probability that you pass the second one is much higher. That&#x27;s how you can have a situation where a group of inexperienced candidates perform better than experienced interviewees.

I&#x27;m sure Dalia is great.&quot;other youngsters from Palestine performed better than at least half the experienced engineers I&#x27;ve interviewed in the past.&quot;This comment caught me a little off guard. You are saying that these young people with no experience perform better than half of the experienced engineers you interview.My question is what is wrong with your hiring process? It sounds broken.. What part of the process are the experienced developers failing in? What are you asking for
in candidates that these experienced developers lack but can be found in this group of inexperienced engineers? Curious about salary, would you say Dalia friends makes the same as an experienced developer?

They didn&#x27;t say all recent graduates performed better than 50%, just the ones that they interviewed from Palestine. It sounds plausible that they only interviewed a handful and they were better than that 50%.

Experienced engineers who perform better than a recent graduate are usually not interviewing. They have jobs that pay them extremely well.There&#x27;s an adverse selection problem with interviewing, in that people who are good tend to disappear from the labor market and when they do appear on the labor market they get snapped up quickly. New grads don&#x27;t have this adverse selection effect: there is a very good reason why they don&#x27;t already have a job. This is why companies invest so much in internships: this will often be the only time to snap up a promising young developer before they start building a career at your competitor.<a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.joelonsoftware.com&#x2F;2006&#x2F;09&#x2F;06&#x2F;finding-great-developers-2&#x2F;" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.joelonsoftware.com&#x2F;2006&#x2F;09&#x2F;06&#x2F;finding-great-deve...</a>

Our interview has almost zero traditional algorithms. And no, he’s not exaggerating. I’ve been interviewing people for a decade now and neither experience or pedigree is a good predictor of success.Read the post if you haven’t because it touched on our process. And watch this video to learn more: <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;youtu.be&#x2F;kABh44IVWMo" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;youtu.be&#x2F;kABh44IVWMo</a>

Not sure who owns pedantic.com or why it doesn&#x27;t redirect to HN. It certainly should.

I believe all of the Palestinians Repl.it has interviewed have come from Manara. Manara has a pretty strong vetting system and in order for applicants to be accepted into the cohorts, they have to pass a coding assessment, video interviews, etc. Manara takes strong Palestinian talent and tries to make them exceptional. This is the reason why they might be performing better than more experienced engineers.

<a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.joelonsoftware.com&#x2F;2006&#x2F;09&#x2F;06&#x2F;finding-great-developers-2&#x2F;" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.joelonsoftware.com&#x2F;2006&#x2F;09&#x2F;06&#x2F;finding-great-deve...</a>Interview processes are significantly biased towards seeing large numbers of non-hire-able people over hire-able people. It&#x27;s not surprising that someone with few connections and just starting their career could perform well against the biased view of an unfiltered interview pipeline.oh, nostrademons beat me to the punch.

That’s because the interview is basically memorizing algorithms.A real on-site interview should be:1) give vague instructions on a fixing&#x2F;modifying a moderately complex piece of software2) have them ask good questions until they get to the heart of what they are supposed to do.3) work with someone to accomplish this task. Use google or whatever else you need to finish it.This interview should be 5 hours long including lunch. This is your best indicator of success.

You’re simply taking away from an incredible achievement here.She cleared interviews at both Repl.it and Google. She implemented an assignment based on operational transformations and having studied this myself it’s far from trivial. If you folks ever retire this question Id love to have a crack at it.She also cleared the Google interview which goes deep into algorithmic aspects and system design. Which means that she’s brilliant at both abstract design and execution.To be able to do both while graduating does place someone in the upper brackets of engineering skill. Some don’t fulfill it because of other reasons but that’s another matter.It’s not like the bar is being lowered. They’re held to the same bar as Stanford and MIT grads who apply and they come from a third world country with only a bit of remedial coaching. It’s what top school grads already know from their campus coaching and tips from their seniors.People who say this is akin to gaming the process you too can easily get the same by dropping a trivial amount of money on CTCI, EPI and Pramp for mock interviews.I wrote this a little bit too much in frustration but I’m tired of these assumptions that people from the third world cannot show incredible potential sometimes exceeding their first world peers and are only held back by bad systems and politics.There are untold depths of genius all over the planet. We haven’t even come CLOSE to most people on earth realizing even a fraction of their potential.“ I am, somehow, less interested in the weight and convolutions of Einstein’s brain than in the near certainty that people of equal talent have lived and died in cotton fields and sweatshops.”
- Stephen Jay Gould

The interview process is being gamed. Just read the article. I am not trying to single out her. It is an industry wide practice. You mostly get people who are good at passing the interview versus who know how to program. But that is ok, because the promotion process is being gamed too. You have people who know how to get promoted vs who know how to provide value. Don’t worry, our educational system is being gamed as well.

I agree with this. Here&#x27;s some truths:* Experienced engineers will perform better than graduates in general* The distribution of experienced engineers who are poor performers won&#x27;t over represent application to one particular company unless they are an outlier (Repl.it is not Google)This makes me wonder what Repl.it&#x27;s hiring process is and why it is not doing well at attracting good people.

It sounds like you simply don&#x27;t have experience interviewing engineers, especially since you don&#x27;t cite any such experience to back up your beliefs. I interviewed exactly 151 engineers over the last year for a mix of entry-level and senior roles, using the same format for all the interviews. The interview is a mix of scenario-based questions and actual coding. There is no discussion of data structures or algorithms, the coding exercise requires no special knowledge and can be done in any language, and there are no trick questions. If you can build useable software you can ace the interview.My experience lines up exactly with what the GP said. The overwhelming majority of experienced engineers that are interviewing simply can&#x27;t write useable code. I understand it&#x27;s hard to believe, but it is the reality whether you believe it or not.

&gt; We have a really high bar for hiring at Repl.it, Dalia and the other youngsters from Palestine performed better than at least half the experienced engineers I&#x27;ve interviewed in the past.I really don&#x27;t want to sound negative, but I find this difficult to believe. Sorry if I sound too harsh, but experienced engineers who don&#x27;t perform better than recent graduates sure it&#x27;s a thing, but 50% of the ones you have interviewed don&#x27;t perform better than a recent graduate? Perhaps you were exaggerating? Or perhaps your interview process is really focused on what recent graduates know best (popular algorithms) and not in what experienced engineers know best (how to deal with real world codebases). Again, I don&#x27;t mean to sound harsh, I think perhaps that &quot;...at least half...&quot; was just a way of saying &quot;Dalia was really good&quot; (which sounds more credible).

Thank you so much Faris! It was such an amazing experience interviewing at Repl.it and I am glad I got to know you. For sure, I will come back and reapply to to join your team :)

I interviewed Dalia and a few other people referred to us by Manara at Repl.it. It was such a pleasure meeting kids that are so smart and have an insane drive.We have a really high bar for hiring at Repl.it, Dalia and the other youngsters from Palestine performed better than at least half the experienced engineers I&#x27;ve interviewed in the past. We extended an offer to one Dalia&#x27;s classmates and he started yesterday as an intern with high potential for full-time, as our internships usually are since we invest a lot in them.It was such a pleasure meeting you Dalia, wish you all the best. Hope to work with you in the future (maybe when we can offer US visas).P.S. We&#x27;re still hiring

This is awesome!In my graduating class (at a top engineering&#x2F;cs school) the smartest person with the most consistent high grades was a palestinian immigrant (who would always whisper the correct pronunciations when the professors were butchering the pronunciation of a TA&#x27;s names). I don&#x27;t think I fully understood the life he had come from, but this is a reminder that we should stop saddling the youth with the battles of their parents.Glad to hear you&#x27;re getting some freedom.

wow you&#x27;re more accomplished than I am at 35 haha... really impressive. You&#x27;ll go so far!

Yes you should! The Manara community is amaaazing. They are super smart motivated people who already have computer science or engineering degrees. Manara teach us how to interview at companies… both technical and soft skills… I have a bunch of friends in their 5th cohort who are looking for opportunities right now.By the way the CTO of Manara is from Gaza too. She often tells me I remind her of her a few years ago. :))) She lives in Silicon Valley now and started Manara because she knew how many smart people there are in Palestine.

Today I learned about Manara.  I&#x27;d never heard of it before, but I look forward to using it the next  time I need to hire someone!  Sounds like an awesome platform.

I wouldn&#x27;t really say that...the newer generation knows much less Hebrew than the older ones that used to work in Israel, and in Gaza probably even more so than the West Bank. But all the hitech work is in English so it is not really a problem in this sense.
I know Mellanox has some:
<a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.haaretz.com&#x2F;israel-news&#x2F;business&#x2F;.premium-israeli-firm-mellanox-aims-to-bring-palestinian-staff-to-nvidia-after-takeover-1.8446926" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.haaretz.com&#x2F;israel-news&#x2F;business&#x2F;.premium-israel...</a>But the bigger issue is the willingness to hire Palestinians(and legal issues as well), and afterwards to work with them as well, as there is animosity on both sides, especially with people who currently live in Israel&#x2F;Palestine as opposed to ones that live in Europe.

How feasible is it for Palestinian developers to get work in Israel? As far as I understand, all Palestinians speak fluent hebrew.

I&#x27;m an Israeli&#x2F;American founder of a software company. I&#x27;m very happy to hear your story. I hope you inspire many other Gazans. I&#x27;d hire Palestinians remotely too.I recall my first airplane trip. Very exciting times for you. I wish you lots of success and happiness in your journey. You&#x27;ve chosen a fantastic path that will God-willing reward you and your family. May there be peace between our people soon!

I can&#x27;t begin to say how nice it is, seeing something like this. So often, we see complaints (often, accurate, but still complaints) about how bad things are. For myself, I try not to whine too much (with debatable results).TBH, when I read the title, I was expecting this to be one of those posts that exposes the industry and the process as some kind of abusive fraud. I was really happy to see it be pure joy and positive affirmation.I have more than a few qualms about the way things are, but it&#x27;s still an awesome field to be in. I am glad to see you do well, and get acclimated to the engineering culture at these corporations. I suspect that you will have many opportunities, and wish you, and your classmates, well.

I got the internship after only one year of college, and I had nowhere near the amount of experience necessary to solve the particularly complex project I was in: I was a very good programmer but a very bad engineer.When I got accepted for my second internship years later I decided to get a real job 3 months prior to learn how to work in teams in the industry. I think this gave me the correct context to do well later.If I were to give an advice to other third worlders with FAANG internships: work like you&#x27;ve never worked before and like you&#x27;ll never work afterwards. This will change your life if you do it right.

How did you bomb that first internship? I wonder if there&#x27;s a  useful lesson to share here with Dalia and our broader community.

It&#x27;s hard to overstate how great FAANG internships are for giving a leg up in life to third world university students.Like Dalia, I thought it would be almost impossible to get a good job on a developed country if you didn&#x27;t do well in the birth lottery until Google figured out I was good at programming and gave me a nice internship project.I bombed that first internship, but with the extra experience and the knowledge that I had more open doors than I thought allowed me to get a nice job in the UK after the second one.

This is inspirational and your hard work paid off!Congrats Dalia!

I wish I had skipped the first part and just asked the question. Silly me.

&quot;my view of Gaza and Palestine is very narrow because all we see on TV is Israel mass murdering everyone in Palestine&quot; This is a very mature realization, and a great example of how media can distort reality. It is far more complex and nuanced than that. I suggest you check out sources from beyond Pakistan and try to learn more about what is going on.

I am from Pakistan and my view of Gaza and Palestine is very narrow because all we see on TV is Israel mass murdering everyone in Palestine.What is the tech scene in Gaza? Any software houses, companies and startups there? If there are, what are they mostly about?

&quot;Please respond to the strongest plausible interpretation of what someone says, not a weaker one that&#x27;s easier to criticize. Assume good faith.&quot;<a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;news.ycombinator.com&#x2F;newsguidelines.html" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;news.ycombinator.com&#x2F;newsguidelines.html</a>

Wondering why you think 800k Israelis live on Palestinian land and not 5-6 million?

&gt; but stupid politicsI wouldn&#x27;t call 800k Israelis living on Palestinian land &quot;stupid politics&quot;. That&#x27;s a bit dismissive of the issue, don&#x27;t you think?

My Jewish family was kicked out of Gaza in 1929.<a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;en.wikipedia.org&#x2F;wiki&#x2F;1929_Palestine_riots#Jewish_communities" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;en.wikipedia.org&#x2F;wiki&#x2F;1929_Palestine_riots#Jewish_co...</a>You&#x27;ve probably never been to Israel or Gaza.I&#x27;ve very happy to read the story of this woman getting a job in Silicon Valley, and of the success of the people in Gaza.

I agree with you about the injustice that Palestinians face, but I think you have been taught incorrectly about &quot;the native population which Jewish immigrants displaced&quot; in a way that rings of anti-Semitism (e.g. the alt-right&#x27;s calls that &quot;Jews will not replace us,&quot; etc). About half of Israel&#x27;s Jewish population is &quot;Mizrahi,&quot; which refers to Jews native to the Middle East, many of whom predate Arab colonization of the Middle East. I know this is a contentious topic in general and I don&#x27;t think you&#x27;re intentionally being anti-Semitic, nor do I think all criticism of Israel&#x27;s treatment of Palestinians is anti-Semitic! But it&#x27;s easy to also accidentally fall into anti-Semitism when criticizing Israel, since anti-Semitism is so endemic to Western culture, and I think you accidentally did here.

It will be great if you can speak these opinions out loud in the office and in public. I know it’s hard because so many Israelis have strong opinions about regarding Zionism and the native population which Jewish immigrants displaced but the only way people will stop ignoring the injustice is if people like you speak out in public. It is also nice to read your comments here also.

As an Israeli who was involved in Gaza Sky Geeks but didn’t get to follow up with mentees I just wanted to share that your story is inspiring and encouraging and congratulations on your hard earned job.It’s shameful we have so many bright Gazans but stupid politics prevents the natural technical collaboration that could arise. I work with many Arab developers (in a big company) here and the divide between Gaza&#x2F;West Bank&#x2F;Israeli Arabs is so frustrating and upsetting to me.Best of luck and keep inspiring!

Errr I’d want to see hard evidence this is the case before I’d take it as a given.There’s no part of me that finds it easy to believe that a female, minority worker in tech is going to get the same opportunities as a white male anywhere in Europe.I’d think the more sinister patting of one’s own back is assuming that “at least we’re not like that here” without hard evidence to back up that assumption.

Excellent point. Europe has solved racism and sexism, especially in football.

I suppose everybody&#x27;s impression of inequity is mostly shaped by their experience and perhaps the anecdotal experience of a few close friends. The US is by no means a model for how to handle inequities but my experience has been that the US actually does a better job handling and talking about it, at least in the sciences, than do lots of places in Europe. IDK, everything is subjective and depends. Bearing that in mind I would encourage you to approach commenting on topics like this without drawing such a hard line in the sand. Whether or not you meant it, your comment comes off as pretty aggressive and somewhat flame-war-y.

Having worked in both Europe and the US, and being from neither of those places, I can absolutely say that the amount of _open_ racism in Europe was significantly greater than in the US.One example out of many: while walking on the street in Denmark, there were two instances of passersby on bicycles yelling racial slurs at me as they drove by.

I&#x27;m sorry, but this is simply ignorant.While it&#x27;s true that racial oppression is often less in Europe due to better government regulations and social safety nets and whatnot, on a personal level there&#x27;s still plenty of bigotry and xenophobia, sometimes moreso than the US.I&#x27;m an American living in Munich (working for Google actually), go ahead and try telling foreigners here that landlords they&#x27;re talking to while applying for an apartment treat them the same way as native Germans. The idea is laughable.But you don&#x27;t have to take my word for it. Here&#x27;s a poll on whether people in different countries feel that increasing diversity is a positive change. Note that the US comes out ahead of most of the European countries listed, as well as substantially ahead of the European median: <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.pewresearch.org&#x2F;global&#x2F;2019&#x2F;04&#x2F;22&#x2F;how-people-around-the-world-view-diversity-in-their-countries&#x2F;" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.pewresearch.org&#x2F;global&#x2F;2019&#x2F;04&#x2F;22&#x2F;how-people-aro...</a>

Perhaps Europe is better at gender (due to strong social policies), but Europe is&#x27;t immune to racism.It&#x27;s not talked about so loudly like in the US, but I&#x27;ve experienced so much low-key, out in the open racism in Europe towards Arabs, Moroccans, Chinese, Africans and so on.I&#x27;m not white and while I don&#x27;t feel like my life is in danger, I know from looks and behavior that I&#x27;m not on equal footing with a white European.

Considering America’s obsession with diversity, I find it hard to believe that she would have an easier time in Europe or anywhere else in the world. In America she would receive countless offers purely as a diversity hire. That’s not to say she wouldn’t deserve the offers based on merit, but Silicon Valley has decided that pure ability is less important to hiring than race and gender. That gives her an enormous advantage over white and asian males.

I&#x27;m not sure this is true, having worked in both the US and Europe. The US definitely talks about it more, often to an absurd excess. But I&#x27;ve seen far more real-life examples of casual racism in Europe, stuff that no one would even dream of saying or doing in the US. I&#x27;m not hanging out in terrible neighborhoods in either place.

&gt; Europe doesn&#x27;t talk as much about gender and race, but they actually do things as well, while in the USA everyone kinda pats their back for &quot;walking out for Black Lifes Matter&quot; and calls it a day.Please explain how things like &#x27;Zwarte Piet&#x27; fit into your narrative? I remember the first time I walked around a town center around the holidays and was accosted by multiple white Europeans in blackface asking for donations.

I don&#x27;t think this is the right place to make a EU vs. USA point, to be honest. And a Google HQ itself isn&#x27;t a safe-haven either.I&#x27;m not as confident as you are about the author of this post getting an easier life in the EU vs. the US. People escaping the wars the EU&#x2F;US coalition (in whatever form) have started in the middle east are going to find their way to greener pastures through Turkey, Greece, Italy and be shunned every fucking step of the way, no matter where they settle.But you don&#x27;t have to be coming from Turkey or be somehow Arabic, or Muslim in appearance, you only have to turn to the UK to see the sheer derision towards Polish people and immigrants further east despite the immense proximity between the countries. Or the attitude to the Romani people across the whole continent.The author is from Palestine. She will suffer from prejudice purely for having a name that ignorant people will connect to Islam or terrorism, and ignorant people who will take Israel&#x27;s side on the matter without thought.If Dalia Awad has an easier time and avoids issues wherever she is, it&#x27;s because of what she&#x27;s had to do for it, not because she chose the EU over the US.

Please don&#x27;t take HN threads further into ideological and nationalistic flamewar, let alone, god help us, both at the same time.Also, would you please stop creating accounts for every few comments you post? We ban accounts that do that. This is in the site guidelines: <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;news.ycombinator.com&#x2F;newsguidelines.html" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;news.ycombinator.com&#x2F;newsguidelines.html</a>.You needn&#x27;t use your real name, of course, but for HN to be a community, users need some identity for other users to relate to. Otherwise we may as well have no usernames and no community, and that would be a different kind of forum. <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;hn.algolia.com&#x2F;?query=community%20identity%20by:dang&amp;sort=byDate&amp;dateRange=all&amp;type=comment&amp;storyText=false&amp;prefix&amp;page=0" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;hn.algolia.com&#x2F;?query=community%20identity%20by:dang...</a>

&gt; You will still face difficulties because of your gender and ethnicity.She is going to Europe, not USA. Unless she picks a really bad place (but most Google HQs there are in a good place), she won&#x27;t have any such issues.Europe doesn&#x27;t talk as much about gender and race, but they actually do things as well, while in the USA everyone kinda pats their back for &quot;walking out for Black Lifes Matter&quot; and calls it a day.

Not the time for &quot;Remember the Asymptote&quot; here actually. The world is being taken over by new generations free to break the framework. This type of post is about that.It might also be about spread of corporations into every culture, but here I remember the &quot;Other Conquest&quot; in Central America where it didn&#x27;t ultimately matter who came into the culture, because the culture held up under force. Both sides changed. I am as excited for Google as for the OP. These moments make the past unreal, and the future becomes about this kind of dream coming true and surpassed.

Please don&#x27;t take HN threads further into flamewar.<a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;news.ycombinator.com&#x2F;newsguidelines.html" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;news.ycombinator.com&#x2F;newsguidelines.html</a>

Unreal how competitive the virtue signaling is on HN, when the reality is that every major tech company is falling over itself to hire anyone who isn’t A) Male and B) either white or Asian&#x2F;Indian.What planet do you live on?

I think the comment was very reasonable. Yes, it mentions gender&#x2F;ethnicity&#x2F;nationality in a way that is likely to incite some people to attack, but in this case gender and ethnicity&#x2F;nationality was mentioned in the article as a relevant detail, so I think it&#x27;s reasonable to include it in a comment.I just feel that it&#x27;s not reasonable to hold GP responsible for a touchy subject, when the touchy subject is part of the article they&#x27;re commenting on in the first place. If it came out of nowhere, then obviously that&#x27;d be a different story.

Unless the post you&#x27;re replying to has been edited or I&#x27;ve overlooked something, I&#x27;ve a bit baffled by your reply.

I’m sincerely sorry. I didn’t realize that the mere mention of gender and ethnic discrimination being a problem in general was all that controversial. I was hoping to be a source of encouragement for OP, but seeing how people responded I understand and appreciate you stepping in. I know keeping a community civil is an important and difficult task, so thanks for all you do dang :)

This comment started a flamewar. Please don&#x27;t do that on HN.<a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;news.ycombinator.com&#x2F;newsguidelines.html" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;news.ycombinator.com&#x2F;newsguidelines.html</a>

Congratulations and thanks for writing this. It is easy as an American male to overlook how much harder others might have to work to achieve what I think of as very approachable goals. You&#x27;ve not only put in all the work but also had to rely on the good graces of these programs to support you! That work ethic you&#x27;ve cultivated is what you now must rely on to succeed and by far your most valuable asset.You will still face difficulties because of your gender and ethnicity. It&#x27;s horrible and wrong, and I hope it changes. But your tenacity and drive will show everybody your real value in the end, and I think you&#x27;ll do well! I believe you are and can continue to be part of the change.

Wow, it really irks me that truthful comments that add something to the discussion gets down votes as soon as it is stating anything that could maybe be construed as negative against the US.

I am from germany so this is at least not just a US thing.Isn&#x27;t it well known that there are way more male IT people in all western countries?

In my experience that&#x27;s not the case in quite many countries. Most of western Europe is the same as the US though it varies from country to country; e.g. the nordics are a bit better on this front then e.g. Germany or my home country the Netherlands. I suspect most of South America has similar demographics.As far as I know Asia is generally better on this front I suspect it has a lot to do with women being more interested in things that give them economic opportunities.This is something driven by women themselves. IMHO women are actually also part of the problem in the west. There seems to be a dynamic where women self select out of career paths long before they would even be in a position to be subjected to the type of workplace abuse that is often blamed for this. Don&#x27;t get me wrong, that abuse needs to be fought and challenged and rooted out. But it&#x27;s not going to be enough.You see similar dynamics across many developing nations where women empower themselves by taking on anything that earns money. Many of these countries are otherwise pretty conservative&#x2F;unremarkable when it comes to women rights and arguably a lot worse than most of the west. But that doesn&#x27;t seem to stop women being successful doing all sorts of things for which many high-school girls would pull up their noses.

In my experience, pretty much everywhere else out of the US you will find plenty of women in STEM. Admittedly not 50% but it’s certainly much more common.

70% of STEM graduates in Iran are women.<a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;engineering.purdue.edu&#x2F;ENE&#x2F;News&#x2F;the-stem-paradox-why-are-muslimmajority-countries-producing-so-many-female-engineers" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;engineering.purdue.edu&#x2F;ENE&#x2F;News&#x2F;the-stem-paradox-why...</a>

Wow thanks for the detailed answer!Can you point to reasons why IT is not as male-dominated in those countries?

Best wishes to you both. Solidarity forever.

Yup! In Palestine 52% of CS students are women. In Tunisia 62%. In Qatar 80%. This is one of the main reasons Laila and I decided to launch Manara. :) Our 5th cohort (the one after Dalia&#x27;s... they&#x27;re just starting to hunt for internships &amp; jobs now) is 100% women by the way! They&#x27;re a mix of interns, junior engineers, and mid-level engineers.A bit of our story in case it&#x27;s interesting: I was working at Upwork with an engineering team that could hire talent from anywhere in the world... and still our engineers were almost all men from Eastern Europe. I loved them but also missed having a more diverse team and worried that our company wasn&#x27;t going to be competitive... diverse teams usually outperform non-diverse was, and for a company like Upwork, being familiar with users around the world is critical.I had met Laila in Gaza. Like Dalia, she studied computer engineering there. She moved to Silicon Valley in 2016.In 2017 (or was it 2018? hard to remember now) we started working nights and weekends on what we thought would be an all-volunteer side project to connect the talent we knew from Palestine to employers in Silicon Valley. Already in our 2nd cohort someone got into Google. That&#x27;s when we realized we had created something that worked. Last October we couldn&#x27;t keep up with helping Cohort #4 search for internships &amp; jobs (that&#x27;s the one Dalia was in) and training Cohort #5 so I took the plunge and started working on Manara full-time. :)

I gave a few workshops on golang development in Jordan and what i noticed is that women were much more common in the comp sci department. They also were way more interested in the topic- is the situation in gaza similiar? This was really refreshing to see

Do those qualities actually correlate with what you want in an engineer?

I think it does its job perfectly; gives them candidates who are willing to put up with 10 hour study sessions for weeks OR people who are naturally brilliant (and don&#x27;t break under pressure while being watched). It filters out a lot of insanely good candidates by doing so, but who cares when you have 100,000+ job applications?

&gt;At Google there were interviews exactly like what Manara prepared us for: data structures &amp; algorithms problem-solving.I&#x27;m surprised this hasn&#x27;t become the main point of discussion here yet.Edit: I mean Google&#x27;s interview technique, and how people prepare for it

Thanks for responding! It absolutely makes sense that Manara is targeting a specific talent pool in order to leverage the founders&#x27; personal skills, experiences and connections. If anything, targeting the entire MENA region seems like incredibly ambitious undertaking on it&#x27;s own. I certainly didn&#x27;t intend to imply that the burden to serve those other communities in similar ways should fall on Manara in particular!Rather, I think everyone who cares about those communities I mentioned should be paying very close attention the work you&#x27;re doing, and the exceptional results you&#x27;re seeing. The fact that you are already sharing those lessons with other regions - well, that just gives me another reason to keep cheering you on. Wishing you all the best!

Thanks so much for sharing this perspective! I&#x27;m Manara&#x27;s Co-Founder and CEO. I wish that we could tackle all these communities at once because you&#x27;re right - there&#x27;s undiscovered talent in many underserved communities and everyone (them, employers, society) would benefit from bridging the small gap they&#x27;re facing to world-class employment.We chose to focus on MENA for a few reasons. First, it&#x27;s the region that we know best and can therefore be competitive in.Second, it truly is a large, exceptional pool of diverse STEM talent - it will soon be as many STEM grads as Eastern Europe (and more than half of them are women!)Third, we can scale our impact by building a brand for this talent pool &amp; referral networks. Similar to what happened in Eastern Europe.Finally, our focus helps to attract precisely the resource we need to fulfill our mission: highly talented engineers from top tech companies around the world. Some are alumni, most are currently volunteers who care about MENA. They volunteer to do mock interviews, mentor the participants, etc. We could never do this without them.My co-founder Laila (who is from Gaza, and like Dalia, made it to Silicon Valley... but back in 2016) and I are both passionate about untapping human potential. While we can&#x27;t tackle all underserved communities at once, we are actively sharing lessons learned with organizations doing similar things in other regions. :)

First of all - big props to Dalia. She clearly worked her behind off to earn those offers.Second - this definitely, to me, proves that Manara has a good business model. I actually don&#x27;t think the fact that the Manara students are from MENA is all that important though. However, I do think that their extremely hands-on, and intensive &quot;bootcamp for FAANG interviewing&quot; model is clearly an advantage for early career technical candidates.Thinking back to my college days (in the US, mid 2010s) - we were not given any sort of class that focused on professional interviewing. The college career center was also very general, and not knowledgeable about the specifics of passing the coding interviews. The best advice I got was a recommendation from a guest lecturer to read &quot;cracking the coding interview&quot; (which to be fair, was better than nothing).As a result, the people from my school who did the best right out of the gate, were largely people who already knew people already in a FAANG roles and who could rely on that person for a referral, interview advice and practice feedback. Our school was not in SV (or anywhere close), so realistically, that was not an option for most of us. Additionally, I always applied for internships at FAANG companies while I was still a student - but never even got called in to interview - so it wasn&#x27;t like I could practice that way either. I ended up doing fine for myself by accumulating a good base of practical experience from local non-FAANG companies before graduating, but I really believe my peers, and aspirational novice engineers of all backgrounds would have benefited greatly from having a hands-on course like Dalia described. I especially would love to see efforts like that extending out to under-served communities here in the US as well (native american reservations, appalachians, rust belt cities).

This was a heartwarming story to read. Congratulations on your journey so far, wishing you much success in the future.

Oh, I am glad you liked my blog! Thank you for your sweet words. I hope someday I meet all of my friends from the West bank and maybe share a photo together :)

wow, this story is incredible.Dalia, thank you for being so honest about your experience. I have no doubt that your dedication and cheerful approach to the field will take you far.Not gonna lie, the end made me tear up a bit. I hope you an incredible summer with your friends.

I was so worried opening this link, but really made me happy to see such a great support system and preparation - without that applying can feel like you vs the world. Congrats!

Don&#x27;t forget the fact that Israel blocks imports and exports, meaning the country has extreme difficulties getting e.g. construction materials, nevermind getting an industry going. Unemployment is everywhere, misery, disaffected youth (as is understandable)... is it any surprise resentment and hatred proliferate?

The blog said she went to Jordan overland, which means she has entered both.You&#x27;re right though that it&#x27;s extremely difficult for most Gazans to do so, and many will live and die without ever leaving that cramped little strip of land.

Crazy that she can never enter the West Bank or Israel

amazing achievement, this article made me smile and i am confident you will achieve a lot in the future. Keep up the good work

timezones. probably sent on Dec 31 . our company doesnt have holiday for new years eve

it could be automated or timezoned. a positive message could make the person day greatthe privilege has to show up.

Great article, and congratulations!One thing stood out for me though&gt; On January 1, 2021, I received an email from Repl.it letting me know that I had been selected.To me this is a huge red flag. To receive a work related email on what is probably the most widely recognized holiday in the world is the sign of a company with terrible work-life balance.I hope I&#x27;m wrong, but I have ignored such a flag in the past and got bitten.

Great to see the excitement and success story for this hardworking person.Depressing to see leetcode and data structures interview prep heralded as a positive thing and treated as a neutral, accepted, “nothing wrong with this” aspect of the path to getting a job.

You should see how they they treat African Jews from the upper Nile who&#x27;re definitively proven to be genetically Jewish but who face all sorts of discrimination when it comes to work and inter-marrying with, you know, their fellow Jews

Israel is a apartheid regime that needs to be dismantled and replaced with a country that is fair to all its citizens, rather than an ethnostate based on racist ideas of Jewish supremacy.

Best of luck to you! Palestinians are nothing but resilient. Bootstrapping yourself to an internship at Google in a territory where the unemployment rate exceeds 50% takes an amazing amount of grit. Israel&#x27;s siege of Gaza is truly criminal.

Wow, sometimes I get so caught up in my dislike of social media (especially facebook), that I forget how useful it is for certain underprivileged demographics. Good on you Dalia for grabbing the opportunities with both hands :)

Yeah lower. Way lower. Maybe it will finally bring some sanity to American worker salaries. Companies can use that saved money for better things. Like executive bonuses and investing in new opportunities.

Not sure if I understand you. &quot;Reasonable&quot; == &quot;lower&quot;?

With Manara and Latam incubators on the rise hopefully the demand will drop for tech people in North American companies and they will finally be able to pay reasonable salaries to tech people.

Echoing the sentiment, it&#x27;s good to see hard work and dedication get rewarded, despite such adversity. 
It&#x27;s safe to say you&#x27;ll go far and considering what you&#x27;ve had to deal with, a P1 outage (which is a rite of passage) will be a breeze :)
All the best for the future

&gt; The huge obstacle in the author’s story was country of birth.At least much more so than gender or race will be going forward :)

I feel like there are a large number of comments here stating how many obstacles the author is likely to face going forward because of race and gender.I wonder whether people have really examined the utility of repeating this claim.The huge obstacle in the author’s story was country of birth.OTOH race and gender can have pluses and minuses. There is casual and subconscious bias on one side, but on the other side we have explicit corporate hiring policies that seek to counteract this. It is possible that the net balance is in favor of the author because of this.Members of underrepresented groups could benefit greatly from knowing how many programs are in place to encourage, nurture, and welcome them into this industry. This could make it seem more achievable and encourage people to try.Members of underrepresented groups do not benefit from being told how hard it will be in tech, and I think it isn’t in even in evidence when all factors are included. Saying ‘you are going to face tons of discrimination’ is a form of keeping people out. It may seem like it is empathy, but it can just have the effect of discouraging people.If we want more diversity in tech, we should be saying things like ‘This is great! And you will find many people will be very welcoming. Please join us.’

I&#x27;m not sure what you mean by &quot;has to be&quot;. Google is a not-insignificant force in world politics. And - Google is not the only place to intern in Silicon Valley.

I urge you to consider the implications of working for Google, as this choice is at the very least problematic.Not everything has to be political, maybe she&#x27;s just happy she&#x27;s going be learning a lot from a tech company that has brought a lot of good stuff into the world both technical and otherwise.

&gt; I’m so excited I will spend this summer at Google in Europe! ... amazing companies like [Google]You should be aware, that Google is actively supporting the continued siege of Gaza and occupation of Palestine, in at least the following ways:1. Financial support for US politicians (and political groups I suppose) which themselves support and execute the US policy of supporting Israel&#x27;s direct occupation and siege. The US finances Israel and equips it with much of the technology it uses in these activities, and Google avtively supports this political status-quo.2. Ditto, but as it regards support of the military junta ruling Egypt, which is repressing the Egyptian population but also enforcing the siege of Gaza from the South.3. Suppression of political websites which are radically critical of US imperialism in general and its Israeli client&#x27;s policies in particular. See report in the WSJ: <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.wsj.com&#x2F;articles&#x2F;how-google-interferes-with-its-search-algorithms-and-changes-your-results-11573823753" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.wsj.com&#x2F;articles&#x2F;how-google-interferes-with-its-...</a> , and also some items here on HackerNews: <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;hn.algolia.com&#x2F;?q=Google+WSWS" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;hn.algolia.com&#x2F;?q=Google+WSWS</a>4. Promotion of pro-Zionist news outlets - the mainstream outlets in the US, such as CNN, NBC, ABC, CBS and Fox news; all of these have a pro-Israeli bias in their cover, and none of these meaningfully covers the situation in Gaza, nor calls for the lifting of the siege, nor supports the right of return of the refugees in Gaza, nor gives voice to such positions, while official Israeli and many pro-Israeli voices are often heard when Israel and Palestine are covered.Also, Google engages is mass surveillance of Internet users at the behest of the US government, as has been revealed confirmed by the revelations of Edward Snowden. It is also involved in supplying AI capabilities to US military initiatives. etc.Thus, while it is of course not at all my business to tell you what you should and shouldn&#x27;t do, I urge you to consider the implications of working for Google, as this choice is at the very least problematic.

This is a wonderful post -- reminds me of how important the hiring processes in the tech community are, and how exciting and amazing it can be for the joy of programming to spread to more places in the world!

Hiii everyone, this is my first time posting here! I have read Hacker News sometimes but only thought about sharing my own post after seeing Manara&#x27;s post (https:&#x2F;&#x2F;news.ycombinator.com&#x2F;item?id=25849054)last month. I asked them if I can share this here and they said it was a good idea. :)I’m a 19-year-old Gazan female who participated in Manara last year and got internships at Google and Repl.it. I’m so excited I will spend this summer at Google in Europe! I got lots of questions about my experience when people heard about it on Facebook so I wrote this blog post (https:&#x2F;&#x2F;daliaawad28.medium.com&#x2F;my-experience-as-a-gazan-girl-getting-into-silicon-valley-companies-488062d769a1) to let other young engineers in Palestine and the Middle East know how they can get into amazing companies like this too.If you are an engineer or student like me, read it and apply to Manara, they will help you so much!!Btw I have a few friends who just finished the Manara program and are looking for internships now so if you have opportunities make sure to talk to Manara (http:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.manara.tech). Ask them about Rula and Hend! :)))

My experience as a Gazan girl getting into Silicon Valley companies