I'm in the DC region. Been here since 2015. In the agency I've worked with, once one of the older blacks retire they're replaced by non-black minority or white.
We're losing numbers by attrition.
OK gotcha good info to know in terms of DC. I saw that you mentioned Cali and thought you were in LA. One of my homies (a older brother) out here in DFW works for DCMA as a manager and said he goes to career fairs and its just hard to get a lot of the black folks to join because they view the DoD government jobs as lower paying and boring. Silly to think that way because its job security and consistent pay and benefits.
Another thing he mentioned is that the DoD government jobs have a more controlled pay scale. So young black folks (and other young folks) aren't able to really negotiate and get them big salary price swings by pitting companies against each other than say in DoD contracting. I mean in DoD contracting you might have L-3 offer you 90K plus 7K bonus and then you tell Northrop Grumman and they say well we will give you 105K and plus a 15K bonus. And it ain't helped with the good economy over the last 10 years and inflation which has made all the Lockheeds, Northrops, Raytheons, Boeings, L-3s and etc on the DoD contracting side have to cough up major and I mean major pay raises and salaries and bonuses (shyt they handing out 50K signing bonuses now in some instances) to compete to get talent (within the DoD contractor company field and vs the tech companies).
Hell I even seen crazy shyt in DoD contractor companies where different business units will compete for the same external candidate raising salary offeres higer and higer. So Norththrop Grumman in Palmdale will compete with a Northrop Grumman in Melbourne. Going back and forth with offers even though they know that this is a candidate that is interviewing at both Northrop sites. Seen this with a sista from Jackson State she was able to bleed both business units dry until she got the bump in pay she wanted.
My homie at DCMA is ex military. Retired from the army got into DoD contractor company work at Boeing as an Engineer. But left and got into government DoD DCMA work. His view was even though working for Boeing was cool on their DoD contractor side and paid a lot more (boeing has commercial and DoD). It wasn't as laid back, job safe, less mentally taxing and had the benefits (his years in the military count towards him retiring in government DoD) as the government DoD side. shyt folks talking about working from home now. That brotha was working from home with DCMA back in 2014 only having to go in the office once a week. shyt he could never done that as an engineer on the DoD side within Boing before Covid.
In saying all of that I still encourage these young black engineers I deal with to look into working in DoD for the government. shyt I go to the NSBE National career fair at least once every 2 or 3 years. Every time I go they got the US Navy, Department of Defense, US Army, Army Core of Engineers and on and on and on all hiring for DoD government civilian engineer jobs. And every time their booths are empty they can't even get kids to go up to the booth and ask about opportunities.
One year I was at the NSBA National Career Fair and was taking with the Air Force about DoD civilian jobs and the HR person gave me a list of all the jobs they were interviewing for and most were at Robbins air force base. Anyway the HR person tells me how the kids are the fair would get excited when they said the jobs were in Georgia and then when the HR person was like well its 2 hours from Atlanta in this not so big city. The kids suddenly would become uninterested and then walk away .
This is why ppl keep telling you to stfu. If you don't know the basics of us, why the hell would we listen to your opinion on anything else?