Diversify Tech #320

Connecting underrepresented folks in tech with career opportunities

Author

Naya Moss
December 17, 2024

Hi! Welcome to Diversify Tech's Professional Edition. This newsletter is for underrepresented people in tech; specifically curated for mid-senior level folks. Every Tuesday, we share jobs, events, and other career opportunities.

In this week's issue,
💼 Wikimedia Foundation, Murmuration and CMU are hiring
📆 GovTechCon is this week
⭐️ Our spotlight is on Suchir Balaji

We value your feedback! Please take a few minutes to fill out this survey. Your thoughts, suggestions, and experiences will help us improve our newsletter and job board to better meet your needs.

We are taking a short break, so this will be the last newsletter for the year. Thank you so much for continuing to be a part of our community! We wish you a joyful holiday season and a Happy New Year.

Cheers,
Veni Kunche

JOBS

Opportunities from our hiring partners

Opportunities from around the web

Please note that these roles have not been vetted by our team! Make sure to do your own research.

Data

Design

Information Technology

Software Engineer

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Looking for internships and entry-level roles?

Our Early-talent newsletter will be most relevant to you! We share entry-level roles, internships and apprenticeships every Sunday.
Join our Early Talent Newsletter!

SPOTLIGHT

Suchir Balaji, a former OpenAI researcher, died by suicide in his San Francisco apartment last month at the age of 26.

At OpenAI, among other projects, he helped gather and organize vast amounts of internet data that the company used to build ChatGPT, its online chatbot.

After learning more about copyright and fair use, he left OpenAI in August after four years. In his interview with the New York Times, he said that he came to the conclusion that OpenAI’s use of copyrighted data violated the law and that technologies like ChatGPT were damaging the internet. He no longer wanted to contribute to technologies that he believed would bring society more harm than benefit.

Prior to joining OpenAI, he was a Software Engineer at Quora and studied Computer Science at the University of California, Berkeley. He was a competitive programmer who won first place in both the Pacific Northwest Regional Contest and Berkeley Programming Contest in 2017. He was also a National Champion at the USA Computing Olympiad in 2016.

Being a whistleblower takes tremendous courage. We applaud Suchir for prioritizing ethics and bravely stepping away from OpenAI despite professional and personal costs.

For those interested in understanding his perspective on the intersection of artificial intelligence, fair use, and copyright law, his final insights can be found in his comprehensive blog post and concluding tweet.

EVENTS

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SPEAK

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RESOURCES

📚 Become a Certified Accessibility Professional with the free CPACC practice quiz made by Ashley Peacock

💡 Discover tips for managing programmers with ADHD with Chris Ferdinandi

🎙 Listen to Talking Postgres: Insights into database management

🎨 Explore The State of UX in 2025 to learn about future trends in user experience

✊ Timnit Gebru talks about how Silicon Valley is chasing military tech and funding, and losing sight of what inspires its workers