If you wondering where I’m been, then I have to ask do you know what the heck is going on right now? When Russia decided to launch an attack on Ukraine, this caused a massive ripple effect in the tech sector. Both Russia and Ukraine have some of the most critical tech talent skills in the world and now we have to scramble throughout this disruption, including me.

There are some massive fallouts people have not even realized or thought about. Most of the tech talent from Ukraine is likely going to Warsaw first where there is a tech shortage of talent but there are neighboring Lithuania and Germany that are going to scoop them up as well. Many tech companies that invested in Ukraine basically lost their tech employees, some of them uber talent and now that tech talent got a clean slate to start somewhere new.

Then on the Russian side, a lot of tech firms in that country that provide services and consulting are gone as well, leaving a lot of companies vulnerable and scrambling to find another firm around this world to replace their Russian tech connections. Again, Israel has a huge Russian Jewish tech scene but now there may be a migration to possibly China or other Asian nations of these tech talents to grab up and allow countries to advance their fintech and artificial intelligence programs.

One of the biggest hidden gems – El Salvador, Argentina, Brazil, Cuba, and basically Latin America will be a spot that may attract these tech talents from both Ukraine and Russia to build up that region of the world. But let me explain what’s not going to happen and I’m going to speak as an African-American Black person.

What this event going to do is squeeze out the fake Black in tech crowd that are basically posers and pretenders. When you look at the raw talent exiting out of both Ukraine and Russia, we talking about data scientists, artificial intelligence, financial technology, robotic automation, smart cities, chemists that are going to be chased down by the corporates and the startups with big money to recruit. Meanwhile, that fake Black in tech crowd who wanted some attention is going to realize Black History Month is over and no one cares about them anymore.

This is a pattern among Black people I have seen over and over again in cycles in my life when it comes to major events. My first encounter was the 2000/2001 dot-com bust/911 fallout. A lot of Black professionals had cushy corporate positions but they had no fundamental skills and were let go in masses – spent all that time looking the part. The second was the 2008 mortgage-backed securities or MBS crisis where a lot of Black people had bad mortgage loans just to tell me and you that they have a nice home, Black folks were paying 15% mortgage interest and had good credit signing bad discriminatory loans, for real! But the biggest one is the outsourcing wave – finding call centers, teachers, and other jobs being done outside of the USA.

Now this event with both Ukraine/Russian tech talent on the market, we are about to see house cleaning with all these no-talent made-up Black in tech characters running around smiling talking about their generic apps they created that a Ukrainian tech talent can create for fun over the weekend. The new cute narrative will be how a Ukrainian/Russian escaped conflict and came to America and started the next big tech firm – that’s going to be the new story as Black folks are kicked to the side because they were nothing but no-talent tokens at best to appease the whole Black Lives Matter movement in 2020.

The moral of the story is you cannot be a fake Black person out in this global economy because all it takes is a Black Swan event to knock out fake Black folks. Too many of our people keep talking about “looking the part” that only works with impressing dumb folks – the smart folks see right through these lame brothas and sistas. Now, brothas and sistas wanting to talk and front, have to come real against real talent from Russia and Ukraine arriving in the marketplace. And you and I both know the fake folks don’t have a leg to stand on when the ish hit the fan.