In March of this year, I had occasion to participate on a panel at Uber Inclusion Day in Bengaluru, India. Our panel focused on the origin story and impact of the Uber Career Prep program, an eight-month fellowship for undergraduate engineering students that prepares them to excel in the application and interview process and maximize their impact once they are in engineering roles. As founding Executive Director and CEO of The Hidden Genius Project–whose mission is to train and mentor Black male youth in technology creation, entrepreneurship, and leadership skills to transform their lives and communities–I led our organization in collaborating to launch Uber Career Prep.
On its face, it is understandable that some might characterize Uber’s collaboration with The Hidden Genius Project as a diversity, equity, and inclusion initiative (DEI). That is, it is fair that someone might mistakenly conclude that Uber Career Prep was intended to increase the representation of Black men in software engineering at Uber, and–if they were cynical enough–they would assume it happened at the expense of any other groups seeking to work at Uber. With that said, such a characterization would be incomplete, and quite frankly, sorely lacking imagination. Uber Career Prep has always been about expanding opportunity and building pathways for young technologists who companies too frequently overlook. It is about investing in untapped potential, for the benefit of all of us.
At The Hidden Genius Project, our work is grounded in targeted universalism, which asks us to implement a focused strategy for a specific subpopulation, in the interest of attaining universal goals. In this vein, we believe that as we pour our efforts into rising the tide of our Black male youth communities, we ultimately lift all boats, which represent the collective wellness and prosperity of our greater society. Said another way, “We lead ours, as ours lead all.” In that vein, the Uber Career Prep collaboration constitutes an effort to expand and enhance companies’ engagement with the talent pool for the software engineering field writ large.
As Uber Career Prep was first conceived in 2017, Uber was navigating myriad existential and cultural challenges, across multiple dimensions. In short, it was a company mired in low morale, with poor positioning as it hoped to enter the IPO stage within the following two years (which it would ultimately achieve in 2019). To turn things around, Uber would need to attract fresh talent with an innovative approach.
Accordingly, collaboration with The Hidden Genius Project presented a unique opportunity to test and reimagine the company’s talent development process: if Uber could interrogate and address the factors that act as barriers to engaging Black male software engineers, they would, as a matter of course, be able to implement processes that support the activation of a more robust cadre of previously untapped talent from across the entire spectrum of backgrounds, irrespective of race or sex. This included (but was not limited to):
1) training on the technical interview process to ensure that applicants are prompted and prepared to quickly dissect what a question is asking of them and reason their way into a solution if they don’t immediately know what it is (including live role play of what good vs. bad technical interview solutions look like);
2) engaging employee volunteers in engineering management to coach fellows, while also giving them deeper insights into how they might refine their hiring practices and interview processes to truly optimize for merit and remove bias; and
3) including students majoring in computer science (and related areas such as math) at two-year colleges as eligible applicants (along with 4-year university students) to cast a wider net for talent. Thus, in order to sustain and thrive, Uber set out to do good business.
Eight years after its conception, Uber has launched the Uber Career Prep initiative in Europe, India, and Brazil, in addition to a dramatically expanded operation across the U.S., Mexico, and Canada. Importantly, you need to be studying in one of these locations to be eligible for the program, but one could reside in or be a citizen of any country in the world and still participate. As we planned, an initiative that was built with Black men as the initial test case no longer comprises any one predominant group.
Notably, the program only admits students who do not yet meet its technical bar for software engineering interns, and the results speak for themselves: hundreds of alumni from dozens of countries have completed the program, with many landing internships at top-tier companies (including Uber). The beautiful irony in all this is that in order for it to be optimally effective and worthy of investment on four different continents, the program’s design is anchored in addressing an opportunity gap faced by onle group – the same way you’d build an app to solve the needs of a single target user segment first. Said otherwise, both the targeted pilot and the eventual “universal” program served to make all parties involved better off. Building a program to solve for enhancing opportunities for one group served to solve for enhancing opportunities for numerous groups, as Uber Career Prep is now open to all; this is the collective promise of Black male leadership in a nutshell.
Despite the mischaracterization of certain targeted initiatives as DEI, the concept of Black men leading for the greater good of the community is neither new nor alarming to most of us. Consider, if you will, the Men’s Semifinal and Final basketball games at the 2024 Summer Olympics: as the United States navigated treacherous waters and faced deficits late in both games. In both instances, the overwhelming majority of us pulling for TEAM USA placed our hopes on the shoulders of 12 Black men (out of 12 players on the roster), with neither a protest nor a lament that their participation was discriminatory. As LeBron James, Kevin Durant, and Stephen Curry carried us down the stretch to the Gold Medal, we Americans rejoiced without reservation at the fact that “we won”. Again, we did not lament the fact that the team consisted exclusively of Black men, as we realized that these distinguished individuals were committed to excelling on behalf of the larger collective. What’s more, the prevalence of Black male leaders on Team USA did not prove to detract from the potential of other athletes to excel, as the presumptive first overall pick in the 2025 NBA Draft is a white American gentleman named Cooper Flagg.
In engaging the hundreds of Uber employees who have volunteered for Uber Career Prep over the years, I have been struck by how enthusiastic each one has been. So many of these individuals are committing hours upon hours of their time and talent to ensure that the next generation of tech talent and leaders–across all backgrounds–is well-positioned to be resilient and access meaningful career pathways. It has always been refreshing to experience the energy Uber Career Prep employee volunteers regularly exhibit as they commit themselves to such an innovative strategy to enhance the company’s performance.
Further, beyond the phenomenal stories of the fellows (including one fantastic example from the pilot), Uber Career Prep fellows disproportionately land in engineering-related internships within Uber and other companies, thus strengthening the talent pipeline for those companies’ technical roles, while also contributing even more capable talent to the field writ large.
In the end, the Uber Career Prep experience–alongside so many others–has taught me that multiple things can be true at once: we can make investments that remove barriers to access for young people from a single population as we ultimately benefit and remove barriers for young people from a broad spectrum of populations. Investing in our Black male leaders foments a rising tide for society writ large. We see this every day, as The Hidden Genius Project serves young people of all backgrounds, across multiple continents, through programming overwhelmingly facilitated by Black male Alumni of our Intensive Immersion Program. We lead ours, as ours lead all.