[HN Gopher] Tech journalism is less diverse than tech (2020)
___________________________________________________________________
Tech journalism is less diverse than tech (2020)
Author : 1cvmask
Score : 192 points
Date : 2021-11-19 14:44 UTC (8 hours ago)
(HTM) web link (oonwoye.com)
(TXT) w3m dump (oonwoye.com)
| ilamont wrote:
| _So here is a more comprehensive data bank of 982 individuals
| across 14 publications._
|
| This is not comprehensive. It's a subset consisting of newer
| online technology publications, skewing toward consumer niches.
| Enterprise-focused publications are not included. Editors are not
| included unless they are on the masthead and/or have bylined
| articles. That excludes specialist roles such as copy editors and
| feature editors.
|
| The other problem is tech journalism doesn't start and end at the
| U.S. border. On HN, I frequently see articles from Europe or
| Asia, such as news from Nikkei or Digitimes or Wired UK.
| Shouldn't that data be included on the graph?
|
| That said, even if TFA is restricted to U.S.-based publications
| and enterprise tech is included along with all of the other
| behind-the-scenes tech journalists who are seldom acknowledged or
| credited, the race disparity that the authors identified would
| still be there.
|
| Why? It's because the talent pipeline has been broken for two
| decades.
|
| Before 2000, tech journalists used to come up through daily
| newspapers and then were hired by one of the consumer or trade
| tech magazines or sometimes a business newspaper or magazine.
| U.S. daily newspapers in the 20th century were pretty white
| places to work, and that was reflected in the makeup of the tech
| newsrooms (I worked in 3).
|
| After 2000, the pipeline suffered. Newspapers folded, and there
| were few entry level positions for college and grad school
| journalism majors (who were increasingly diverse) to apply to.
|
| Concurrently, traditional tech newsrooms started consolidating
| following the first dot com bubble, the 2008 recession, and the
| shift to online. Art departments and copy desks were let go en
| masse. Reporters and editors were let go as well, usually
| starting with the younger journalists but later expanding to very
| experienced senior writers and editors.
|
| At these publications, there was almost no new hiring for FT
| reporter or editor roles. Empty positions were not backfilled.
| Among the younger journalists who left or were laid off, most did
| not go to Mashable or TechCrunch, which paid little and often
| would only hire stringers with no benefits ... instead, they went
| to industry, where Microsoft or Intel or PWC or whoever would
| give them 2x the salary and real benefits to work in their
| expanding marketing and digital content departments.
| quadrifoliate wrote:
| > The other problem is tech journalism doesn't start and end at
| the U.S. border. On HN, I frequently see articles from Europe
| or Asia, such as news from Nikkei or Digitimes or Wired UK.
| Shouldn't that data be included on the graph?
|
| Diversity in tech is usually discussed from a U.S. perspective.
| I don't think anyone is looking at diversity figures in Asian
| tech companies. So restricting the comparison to U.S. tech
| journalism seems fair.
| ghaff wrote:
| I hadn't thought of that but, yeah. While I know people who
| jumped straight to name publications based on some combination
| of connections and college newspaper experience, it was also
| pretty common to "pay your dues" at small town papers before
| (again, often through connections) landing at some big-time
| pub.
|
| And, as you say, those small-town newspapers are pretty hurting
| these days where they still exist at all.
| [deleted]
| secondaryacct wrote:
| I'd be curious how they define race. Do they have a rule book
| with color pigment density, size of external attributes and maybe
| even a grading scale of good to bad "diversity factor"?
|
| I find it more disturbing they consider diversity on a pseudo
| scientific race definition than the supposed lack of diversity.
| What if in those they call white, many are women, many are young
| or old, fulltime or partime, idealists or pragmatists, some kind
| of attributes that could actually matter for writing ? I d be
| more worried if all journalists are students of the same school
| of thought than if they were all blue-skinned.
|
| And I say that myself as a minority where I am (happen to be
| white-skinned western europe pigment variant, italian hair-
| colored, northern continental medium sized, but live and work in
| China...) where Im still probably graded as part of a non diverse
| "race" in my company's corporate diversity index :D
|
| And when the government in China asked me my "self reported
| racial origin" last census, I said "Other: Normandy", not sure
| what exactly they want to mean by "westerner" as opposed to
| "vietnamese" in the multiple choice combo box...
| endisneigh wrote:
| Is there any definition of race, other than "human", where the
| authors point changes in correctness or lack thereof?
| nverno wrote:
| Yes, a common conception of race is nation/region/tribe- eg.
| Trojan, Roman, Mongol, or the various SA tribes. So, a modern
| US-centric version could be the state you are from, or
| rural/urban, etc. It's meaningless, though, unless society
| adopts the concept, and given the worldview nowadays it's
| hard to imagine anything more granular than continental
| origin gaining traction (at least in US).
| agentdrtran wrote:
| There's obviously not a perfect definition of race, but it's
| also obvious that many news orgs are, by basically any
| definition, very disproportionally white compared to the racial
| markup (however you decide to define that) of their candidate
| pool.
| nverno wrote:
| I think of race as an ideology- different groups seem to have
| roughly similar views about it when they have shared history-
| it's a social construct, so it's difficult/impossible to really
| convey to other people what it means to someone. For example,
| the concepts of white/black races seem to have originated in
| the US somewhere around 1700 [1], and are noticeably absent
| from older writings.
|
| For some people, skin color is as meaningless as eye color, but
| for others everything is viewed through the lens of race, so it
| has the added difficulty that its meaning is context dependent.
| The racial jargon is often so amorphous, it's impossible to
| interpret literally.
|
| 1. https://www.amazon.com/Birth-White-Nation-Invention-
| Relevanc...
| grenoire wrote:
| Isn't it a luxury to be able to put down money for a journalism
| degree tuition in the US? I think this may already be explained
| quite well for the US higher education system, how do these
| ratios compare to journalism degrees'?
| whimsicalism wrote:
| The luxury is more in the post-college pipeline.
| ghaff wrote:
| A journalism degree is by no means a pre-requisite to working
| as a journalist. In fact, a fair number of people would argue
| it's a negative relative to real-world experience. I'm not sure
| any of the working tech journalists I know have a J-school
| degree.
| brabel wrote:
| How do they become journalists? Straight out of high school?
| Or there are non-university shorter courses they need to
| take?
|
| I always thought that you even had to take an oauth to be a
| journalist, as the impact of the profession can affect the
| public opinion and therefore comes with a good amount of
| responsibility. To think someone without any qualifications
| can just start writing for credible news outlets seems quite
| scary to me.
| ghaff wrote:
| By journalism degree/J-school, I was referring to the
| (essentially) masters degree in journalism that
| universities like Columbia offer.
|
| The more typical route in my experience is that people get
| some sort of liberal arts undergrad degree like English,
| communications, or journalism (not sure how common this is
| as an undergrad major). Though you also get journalists
| with various science or engineering degrees who end up
| gravitating to science reporting. In many cases, people
| going into journalism have worked on the school paper. I'm
| guessing straight out of high school is uncommon these
| days; I assume "apprenticeships" are rare though poorly
| paid/unpaid internships may be less so.
|
| There is also a lot of movement in and out of journalism
| (though mostly out these days) to a variety of other fields
| that involve a lot of writing such as IT industry analysts
| and content teams at companies.
|
| But in general my experience is that journalism doesn't
| especially gatekeep by credentials (though it does by
| connections to a non-trivial degree). And a lot of working
| tech professionals publish blogs etc. in various online
| tech pubs. For a number of years I had one when CNET used
| to have a whole external blog network.These days I write
| for TechTarget every now and then as well as a couple of
| sites my company sponsors. There are some bad examples of
| this but it's widespread. Papers like the NYT segregate
| external content more carefully.
| mayli wrote:
| How about NBA is less diverse than tech?
| orangepurple wrote:
| "Anti" racists are professional victims. Don't engage with them.
| They will always find a way to twist a disagreement going against
| their favor into an oppression narrative.
| hagbard_c wrote:
| "Anti" racists are racists, leading to the last few years
| seeing an enormous increase in the number of explicit racists
| in the public discourse. Their methods are very similar to
| those of the groups they claim to shun while their numbers are
| far higher. They have also managed to achieve positions of
| power from where to express their explicit racism and have been
| doing so at an increasing pace because they don't get any real
| blowback. I can only assume this to be caused by the fact that
| this is such a recent and brazen phenomenon that people are
| just stunned into silence, not willing to believe that the
| public discourse has suddenly been set back a century.
| dang wrote:
| Please do not take HN threads further into generic ideological
| flamewar. It's just what we don't want here; it's extremely
| repetitive and almost always turns nasty--probably as a way of
| compensating for the lack of any interesting new information.
|
| We detached this subthread from
| https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=29277764.
| greenail wrote:
| I'll admit this is a pessimistic take but it seems to be
| something that is happening throughout our society.
|
| The goal of something like this is to center race to gain
| power.
|
| The first step in the playbook for entrenching a woke ideology
| into a bureaucracy is to demand racial data/reporting. "hey
| look, this is an obvious problem... just look at the data". The
| next step is to demand a full diversity initiative. Next is
| hiring diversity inclusion and equity bureaucrats be installed.
| Once you have your own bureaucrats installed "inclusion" is
| used to promote fear and stifle speech or any descent. Now that
| no one can disagree or challenge the bureaucracy you can grow
| it and force it into the other bureaucratic functions.
|
| As an journalism specific example: this is exactly what played
| out at The New York Times
|
| This seems to be a very effective political strategy to gain
| power. It does seem to work. The question is how much does our
| society benefit?
| secondaryacct wrote:
| I think I disagree a little bit. You're right to say this
| would be abusive, but the obvious right thing to do is not to
| do quota on color pigment (why would a brazilian descendent
| of slave be equaled to a nigerian, or an american Irish the
| same as a south african descendent of colons, they're
| obviously all so different the color is irrelevant) but maybe
| really ensure no such selection is applied so I get why they
| re so stuck on doing stats to find a bias.
|
| I m just sad Ill always be suspicious since I fit their
| whiteness definition each time I take a hiring decision...
| gladly I can be xenophobic and hire only multicolor french
| people in China hehehe and create diverse homogeneity ...
| secondaryacct wrote:
| Yeah in France where I was born, which is no perfect by any
| means of course, we tend to call the american obsession with
| racial segmentation "racialism" and consider it just as bad as
| racism. Like racism is to grade races when racialism is to
| accept humanity can be segmented is such races, which we
| strongly deny as a nation, or so I was raised to believe (but
| again no lessons to give, we have issues in France)
| whimsicalism wrote:
| Yeah I am not going to take lessons from the nation that
| almost elected the daughter of a Nazi after you got a few
| brown people immigrating in.
|
| From what I've read, the racism in France is quite bad. Your
| habit of "not discussing" race makes it more difficult to
| enforce the law - for instance, the phenomena of nightclubs &
| bars turning away black patrons is quite common in Paris.
| emsy wrote:
| I'm from Germany, so I'm close to France but still have an
| outside perspective and your comment is ridiculous.
| whimsicalism wrote:
| Based on? Nobody with as close of ties to white supremacy
| has ever gotten as near to the presidency in the US as
| Marine Lepen.
|
| US nightclubs do not routinely filter based on race,
| unlike a sizeable percentage of Paris nightclubs from
| past investigative reporting.
|
| Is it possible that maybe you just don't notice the brunt
| of it because there are fewer people of African descent
| in both of these countries?
| furgooswft13 wrote:
| > Nobody with as close of ties to white supremacy has
| ever gotten as near to the presidency in the US as Marine
| Lepen.
|
| lol what rock are you living under. It's gospel to the
| left and all "anti-racists" that Trump is Hitler
| incarnate, the purest embodiment of white supremacy in
| this day and age. Makes it easy to think that your
| accusations against Le Pen are equally absurd.
| whimsicalism wrote:
| My accusations against Le Pen are equally as absurd as
| some other accusations that you brought up that I never
| made?
| furgooswft13 wrote:
| Yes.
| twofornone wrote:
| Maybe people like LePen are growing in popularity because
| people like you absolutely refuse to acknowledge the
| social, cultural, and financial costs of importing
| millions of, as you put it, "brown people"? Maybe these
| people are tired of being dehumanized as nazis for
| attempting to voice legitimate grievances?
| whimsicalism wrote:
| Sorry I'm having whiplash - which line are we sticking
| with,
|
| 1. the one where France is a post-racial utopia with
| barely any consideration of race at all.
|
| 2. the one where people are already up in arms about the
| "costs" of having non-white people in a country that
| doesn't even begin to approach the diversity of the US.
|
| It's not even false when it comes to the Nazi thing - by
| the way. Jean-Marie had extensive ties to Nazi
| collaborators and the Vichy regime. What's so bad about
| these ties to the Nazis if, as Jean-Marie put it, the
| Nazis were "not particularly inhumane"?
| twofornone wrote:
| You've reinforced both of my points without contributing
| anything more than a false dichotomy.
|
| That the cost of immigration is negligible to you does
| not mean that it is negligible to the Frenchmen voting
| for LePen - and one does not need to invoke racism/nazism
| to explain this.
| NikolaeVarius wrote:
| > From what I've read, the racism in France is quite bad
|
| Links
| whimsicalism wrote:
| https://www.connexionfrance.com/Archive/Clubs-accused-of-
| rac...
|
| https://www.nytimes.com/2018/11/08/sports/psg-racial-
| profili...
|
| https://www.luminosoa.org/site/books/m/10.1525/luminos.39
| /
| NikolaeVarius wrote:
| Several isolated incidents does not make a larger problem
| whimsicalism wrote:
| So you want me to provide statistical evidence of a
| broader problem in a country where it is illegal to
| collect any statistics around race?
|
| https://www.newsweek.com/french-activists-39-percent-
| paris-t...
|
| 39% of Parisian hiring agencies agreeing to filter out
| non-white job applicants: You would never get anywhere
| near that number in an urban US core.
| NikolaeVarius wrote:
| > So you want me to provide statistical evidence of a
| broader problem in a country where it is illegal to
| collect any statistics around race?
|
| Yes? Since apparently you feel perfectly comfortable with
| a link trying to prove this very fact, but lets see the
| claims of the article you linked.
|
| > called 69 temporary employment agencies in the Paris
| area posing as employees from a construction firm.
|
| Already an extremely small sample
|
| > The French government said it would summon the
| companies in question.
|
| Audited
|
| > It said 55 percent of the branch offices it contacted
| refused requests to discriminate.
|
| Okay
|
| > Although limited in scope to a small number of
| agencies, the findings highlight what anti-racism
| campaigners say is a wider problem of discrimination in
| some French workplaces.
|
| A claim of wider effects from a noted small sample
| whimsicalism wrote:
| variance = p*q/n, gives an estimate of ~0.3% which puts
| >95% probability of the the true proportion of racist
| french temp agencies >25%.
|
| It's more than large enough of a sample size to put a
| tight confidence interval around the proportion.
|
| Again, as I've said - you would never get anything
| remotely like this in the urban core of the US.
| kleene_op wrote:
| Yes. I'm convinced the most racist people are those who can't
| stop talking about race, and that would include a fair amount
| of self-proclaimed and vocal "anti-racists".
| whimsicalism wrote:
| This seems extremely premature given the massive disparities
| that still exist today racially.
|
| The average wealth of a black family in Boston is $8 whereas
| the average wealth of a white family is about $200,000. How
| do we talk about these disparities if we throw away the
| language to talk about race?
|
| Or is your argument that these disparities are innate? Or
| that they are not at all due to the legacy of explicitly race
| based discrimination in the US (the last school desegregated
| due to Brown v. Board was in 1998)?
|
| If you're not making either of those arguments, it seems
| kinda obvious why discussing race is still necessary today to
| me, not sure what you are missing.
| jackling wrote:
| Could you provide a source for the average wealth based off
| race? $8 is pretty wild and hard to believe.
|
| I agree with your point, if disparities exist, they should
| be discussed.
| whimsicalism wrote:
| https://www.bostonglobe.com/metro/2017/12/11/that-was-
| typo-t...
|
| sourcing: https://www.bostonfed.org/publications/one-
| time-pubs/color-o...
| jackling wrote:
| Interesting read, one thing to point out, seems that the
| median wealth is $8 and not the average as stated before.
| Don't think it makes a difference to your point though.
|
| What's surprising is that when looking at the sample
| breakdown, even thought the # of observations and median
| age was approximately the same for White and U.S. Black,
| the U.S Black sample group where significantly less
| likely to be married (and thus not able to account for
| any spouse's income/wealth in the calculations for
| household net worth).
|
| > Although members of communities of color are less
| likely to own homes, among homeowners they are more
| likely to have mortgage debt. Also, data on student loans
| and medical debt for whites and racial/ethnic minorities
| suggest that whites are often less likely to have these
| forms of debt.
|
| This looks like the most critical reason for such a
| disparity.
| whimsicalism wrote:
| > median wealth is $8 and not the average as stated
| before.
|
| Median is an average. [0] If anything the fact that it is
| a median makes it only more compelling, at least to me.
|
| > thus not able to account for any spouse's income/wealth
| in the calculations for household net worth
|
| Yes, maybe if more were married they would have double
| the net worth up to $16.
|
| > This looks like the most critical reason for such a
| disparity.
|
| It seems like a reflection of disparities in wealth, not
| the reason for it. My guess is there is a sizable
| historical component to the disparity, given that 60% of
| private wealth in the US is inherited [1], that would
| make large portions of that wealth inherited from either
| times where black people were actively enslaved or
| excluded from wealth acquisition mechanisms by law or
| custom. Such exclusion by custom is ongoing today, there
| is clear evidence for it in hiring and real estate
| markets.
|
| [0]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Average
|
| [1]: https://www.washingtonpost.com/us-
| policy/2019/02/06/people-l...
| jackling wrote:
| I always took average == mean, and median to be another
| measure, but I could just be mistaken on that.
| kleene_op wrote:
| I don't know where in my comment you read that race issues
| should not be discussed anymore.
|
| I'm merely denouncing those who try to shoehorn the subject
| of race in every discussion.
| whimsicalism wrote:
| Ok. Given that the initial article posted was about race,
| it doesn't really seem like a shoe-horning.
|
| I think I took your agreement that anyone identifying as
| "anti-racist" is a professional victim as suggesting that
| we should refrain from discussing race.
| rajin444 wrote:
| What's the correct wealth for white and black families?
|
| If you say "I don't know, but it needs to be closer" that's
| just in group preference - which is fine, but don't present
| that statistic as evidence of anything but a disparity. You
| need to prove (while accounting for all confounds) that
| this gap is a result of x.
| whimsicalism wrote:
| "accounting for all confounds" is a moving standard
| because you can always claim an additional confounding
| factor. I'd love if you would be explicit about what
| confounding factors you are discussing? I have a guess,
| but I'd want to hear it.
|
| It doesn't take a genius to recognize that
| intergenerational wealth will have large disparities as a
| result of vastly different starting points in wealth
| (yes, due to slavery), jim crow legal constructs, as well
| as the ongoing fact that there is large ongoing (and
| well-studied) discrimination against black people in job
| and real estate markets, at minimum.
| orangepurple wrote:
| Affirmative Action and the Black Experience in America
| (October 01, 2009)
|
| https://www.americanbar.org/groups/crsj/publications/huma
| n_r...
| aspaceman wrote:
| By talking about policies that uplift the poor generally.
| And worker friendly policies all around.
|
| If more black people are poor, then more black people will
| be helped by such policies. If we want to help the poor,
| let's help the poor.
|
| If we only help the "black poor" we have to precisely
| codify what being black is, and I'm sick of such race
| science. The argument that being black implies the need of
| additional help is even _further_ condescending.
| whimsicalism wrote:
| > If more black people are poor, then more black people
| will be helped by such policies. If we want to help the
| poor, let's help the poor.
|
| But I don't think the causes of poverty are universal,
| and for lots of black people, they are racially driven.
|
| Discussing policies around the "poor generally" while
| banning discussion of race means abdicating any attempts
| at integrating schools, means that it is impossible to
| address discrimination against pepole with black sounding
| names (50% less likely to get a callback), means that it
| is impossible to discuss ongoing discrimination in the
| housing market (rampant,
| https://projects.newsday.com/long-island/real-estate-
| agents-... is a great resource if you want to see what
| racism in the urban US in the 21st century looks like).
|
| _None_ of those problems - all of which are likely large
| proximate causes for the racial disparities here - could
| be addressed if we are only allowed to talk about class
| and not race.
|
| No compelling reason for why any discussion of race
| should be taboo has been provided. If the people who are
| discussing race in this manner are the "most racist",
| they're doing a pretty bad job at it given the massive
| disparities benefiting white poeple in pretty much all
| sectors of society in the country.
|
| It seems ridiculous to me that the solution is to stop
| discussing race at all in a country that had legally
| enshrined anti-black discrimination within living memory.
| Jensson wrote:
| > It seems ridiculous to me that the solution is to stop
| discussing race at all in a country that had legally
| enshrined anti-black discrimination within living memory.
|
| You can make it illegal to discriminate against black
| people without creating a race database of every single
| worker in the country. Requiring every employer to ask
| every applicant "what kind of human race are you?" is so
| dumb that you can't make that up, asking applicants what
| race they are should be illegal but instead USA requires
| you to do it! That is like requiring every employer to
| ask every woman if they are pregnant or not and then
| report those statistics to the government, since how else
| can you ensure that pregnant women aren't discriminated
| against? It is almost as if the policy was made to
| encourage discrimination and white supremacy, but it is
| fine since you say you do it for good!
| whimsicalism wrote:
| Not going to continue arguing because I think my point
| has been clear.
|
| I think it is telling on HN that many seem more up in
| arms around the reporting requirements stemming from the
| 1964 Civil Rights act than any of the huge racial
| disparities I've identified above.
|
| Given that the government has not been able to do
| anything about rampant racial discrimination in the real
| estate space, I am unsure how you think the government
| could do better if it can't even consider the race of
| employees or customers when making an equal opportunity
| case.
| Jensson wrote:
| Everyone knows that the employer discriminates against
| you based on what race you select in the survey you have
| to fill in. Black people have to constantly lie about or
| deny their race or get discriminated against before
| people even see that they are black. I don't care what
| reason you say you have, that is a horrible practice that
| just makes the race problem you have worse. I am certain
| that racism would be less of an issue if you didn't give
| racists such a powerful tool to both keep themselves
| relevant and to discriminate as they please. It is much
| harder to do anything if you don't even get called in for
| an interview.
| fossuser wrote:
| Somewhat related tweet thread from today:
| https://twitter.com/paulg/status/1461633512344326146?s=21
|
| Don't talk to journalists (at least if you work in tech, but
| probably outside of it) - they're not your friends and your
| incentives are not aligned with theirs (and they're not looking
| to tell the objective truth).
|
| You're better off writing your own articles about what you're
| doing. They historically owned distribution, but they don't
| anymore. We don't need them.
|
| If you do want to interview, find a smart individual. Like
| Zuckerberg's recent interview with Ben Thompson of Stratechery.
| The difference in quality between someone like Byrne Hobart, Ben
| Thompson, Sam Harris, or Scott Alexander compared to someone at
| the NYT is night and day.
| ravenstine wrote:
| "Don't talk to cops" is a popular idea, but nobody thinks the
| same of journalists even though most are effectively undercover
| idea-police for the establishment. Anything you say or do can
| and _will_ be used against you by a journalist at no potential
| benefit to you. At best, they _won 't_ fuck up your public
| image.
| morelisp wrote:
| Haha, you're all so fucking angry you don't have breathless
| useful idiots like Wu, Scoble, Kelly, Swisher, or Shirky
| dominating the tech press anymore. It's precious!
| fossuser wrote:
| Swisher was hardly positive tech press.
|
| I'm just glad there's people like Ben Thompson where the
| quality is so much higher. It's nice to have real competition
| now with people that can own their own distribution and
| aren't writing everything as some dumb narrative hit piece.
|
| The only ones left at the large orgs when the dust settles
| will be the mediocre writers targeting engagement via
| controversy. There's no reason to give them access.
| havkd wrote:
| Does "white" include "Jewish"? :')
| dang wrote:
| Since whatever your problem with Jews is is showing up again,
| I've banned this account. You can't do this here.
| whimsicalism wrote:
| For white jews, yes?
| oogali wrote:
| https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=I3cGfrExozQ
| Traster wrote:
| Some of this looks quite.... questionable, and ironically for
| people that spend so much of their time attacking "the media",
| this authors would do well to learn something about journalism,
| and some of it seems downright disingenous. For example, the
| author talks about representation and talks about that in terms
| of percentage of white people hired in big tech, but if you dig
| in to those numbers you find out that basically the reason the
| big tech companies have a low number of white employees is
| because they have an _enormous_ over-representation of asian
| employees. It 's all well and good to say "Only 51.7% of
| employees at Google are white, so clearly we've got great
| diversity" - but using the same statistics you can also say "93%
| of the workforce is white or asian and that rises to 95.5% in
| leadership positions". Sudenly that doens't look so stunning. In
| fact it almost looks deliberately misleading.
|
| Then you look at their methodology for looking at who is in Tech
| journalism. There are just some glaring issues.
|
| First of all - are we really grabbing a single month of authors
| in the NYT? And if you're grabbing the data from the NYT website,
| why not just do that over a few years?
|
| Why have we chosen these 13 random publications? I'm assuming
| that the NYT is included literally just because the people who
| did this study don't like the NYT? And meanwhile, they therefore
| completely skate over a massive obvious problem - a massive
| amount of Tech journalism is independent or covered in
| publications that aren't listed here - does AnandTech not count
| as tech journalism now? Let's completely ignore independent
| journalists shall we?
|
| The second list of tech journalists is literally just "We found
| this random list of tech journalists and took it at face value".
|
| Now there are about 1000 different problems I have with this
| study (I think it's frankly just quite shoddy) but a real
| highlight was where they just admit to basically finding the list
| of jouranlists (a list I quite frankly think is just worthless
| due to the methodology) and then just start _guessing_ whether
| they 're white.
|
| The author complains that no tech journalists will cover this,
| but this is just really really shoddy work, and that doesn't even
| get into the _obvious_ fact that Big Tech and Big Tech journalism
| are not the same! We 're literally comparing a list of less than
| 1000 journalists to companies that employ _hundreds of thousands
| of people_.
| noslenwerdna wrote:
| The author calls for tech journals to release their race data.
| This is why the author has to resort to the approximations you
| take issue with.
|
| "Big Tech Media corporations should do the right thing and
| release the demographic breakdown of their employee base. There
| is even a federal requirement to file the form EEO-1 Survey
| which breaks this data down."
| Traster wrote:
| My issue isn't that he comes up with an approximation. My
| issue is he comes up with a _bad_ approximation. Are you
| really telling me all 13 news organisations declined to
| comment to him? Or did he not even ask. And at least justify
| your arbitrary 13 organisations. It 's just really damn lazy.
| I mean, at the very least they could have just pinged each of
| the people they found a DM saying "Hey I'm doing a survey
| would you be willing to share your self-identified race" - a
| level of fact checking that the actual media would go through
| before publication.
| throwaway192874 wrote:
| > Why have we chosen these 13 random publications? I'm assuming
| that the NYT is included literally just because the people who
| did this study don't like the NYT?
|
| These are some of the biggest media publications that write
| about tech issues, these aren't just "random" choices. This
| author seems to focus on "big tech media" as is mentioned in
| the article multiple times, these are big tech media,
| independent journalists are not.
|
| Anecdotal, but I know every one of them off the top of my head,
| I've personally never heard of AnandTech and had to google it.
| Traster wrote:
| The big tech media term is just bullshit. "Big Tech"
| describes a handful of companies that employ _hundreds of
| thousands of people_. "Big Tech media" is either media about
| big tech - in which case this list is a horrible mis-
| representation missing some of the most obvious names in big
| tech journalism (Gruber, Gurman, MKBHD for Apple journalism
| for example, the Wallstreet Journal breaking the Facebook
| whistleblower and Theranos). Or it can be read as big "Tech
| Media" in which case it's also misleading- since the 13
| companies in "Big Tech Media" account for less than 1,000
| employees compared to the the "Big Tech" companies that
| account for hundreds of thousands of employees each. You're
| literally comparing an ant hill to mount everest.
| throwaway192874 wrote:
| Well now you're shifting the goal posts to a different
| topic. I was responding to your claim of this set of
| companies being random and your concern about some not
| being included
|
| The size of these companies is irrelevant to that point
|
| And who are these companies you keep mentioning? They don't
| even come up when I search them on DuckDuckGo. That's how
| small they are in comparison to the companies the author
| included as "big tech"
| Traster wrote:
| I'm not moving the goal posts -the goal posts as I'll
| state them is "Big Tech Media" is a nebulous term that
| you can't reasonably define as these 13 companies. I
| don't know why you're struggling to find the people I've
| listed, MKBHD is arguably the single largest tech
| youtuber, John Gruber at daring fireball regularly
| appears on HN, Mark Gurman - at Bloomberg is basically
| the leading reporter to cover Apple, and I don't think we
| need to explain how big Bloomberg or Wall Street Journal
| are. But they're conspicuous by their absense. As for the
| ones that are on the list - they're largely just brand
| names as part larger conglomerates like Conde Naste or
| Future Plc, or Yahoo!
|
| What I'm saying is we can have standards like "I took the
| 10 brands that have the top ranking on Alexa in this
| category plus 5 tech arms of larger titles" - or
| something like that, an actual objective standard for
| what they're selecting rather than a grab bag of 13
| random companies.
| ghaff wrote:
| I've heard of them. GigaOm is more on analyst firm in its
| current incarnation but overall it seems a reasonable list of
| media companies.
| brabel wrote:
| Currently, the USA population is 60.4% white [1].
|
| So, whites are under-represented in big tech (50.1% white
| according to this post) while over-represented significantly in
| tech journalism (80% white). That's difficult to understand: why
| is there such a bias in favour of white people in tech jornalism,
| but not in tech in general??
|
| [1] https://worldpopulationreview.com/countries/united-states-
| po...
| [deleted]
| awillen wrote:
| Much, much smaller population.
|
| From OP: " So here is a more comprehensive data bank of 982
| individuals across 14 publications."
|
| It's that, vs. the millions of employees in big tech. So first
| you're dealing with the fact that smaller samples are going to
| have higher variance. Beyond that, though, since diversity has
| become important to businesses, tech employment has grown much
| faster than tech journalism. If you're actively hiring a lot of
| people, you can shift the mix by bringing in a larger
| proportion of people that are different than the initial
| population that you started with. If you're not growing, then
| that means people have to leave the original population, either
| by firing or quitting, and then be replaced. The latter takes
| longer than the former, particularly when you're comparing big
| tech, which has a huge amount of turnover at a given company,
| and tech journalism, which has much less.
| whimsicalism wrote:
| I think it is more that industries that rely heavily on
| actual productivity/measurable competency are going to lean
| more heavily on the immigrant population because domestic
| STEM education largely seems to suck.
|
| It's been my experience in every high-stakes knowledge work
| job (not journalism) that many of the people I work with are
| immigrants from the continents of Asia, Europe, and Africa.
| walshemj wrote:
| Nah they want low cost warm bodies in seats that are
| compliant and used to terrible management practices.
| cuzBchain wrote:
| Because it's low effort work that doesn't require real manual
| labor.
|
| Anglo-gibberish is great for generating semantic nonsense and
| given the US is 9th in reading education, 31st in math, you
| expect these dim white people to work when they can generate
| cognitive noise to stay busy? Their dad owns a dealership and
| their mom is on a school PTA. They're better than work.
|
| It's has nothing to do with data and the emotional entitlement.
| Traster wrote:
| Because if you look at the actual data from the big tech
| companies there is literally 1 very obvious reason that all
| groups are under-represented. Because the "Asian" group in most
| big tech companies is about as big as the "White" group despite
| being a faaar smaller part of the population.
| cuzBchain wrote:
| The only tech writing worth reading is technical.
|
| Everything else is traditional gossip based hype generation. Not
| a shock it's a bunch of white people hyping America's financial
| economic hustle.
| mactavish88 wrote:
| Focusing on such statistics usually encourages equality of
| outcome as opposed to equality of opportunity.
|
| A far more helpful metric would probably be to know how many
| people want to be in tech (or tech journalism in this case) but
| can't, along with the various factors that are preventing them
| from getting into their desired profession.
|
| If you do then break down the numbers by ethnicity, gender, etc.,
| you may be able to tease out a correlation that may hint at
| institutional bias, but there's still no way to prove causation
| with just that data.
|
| You would at least be clearer on the what the obstacles are
| that're faced by people, perhaps marginalized people, that put
| them at a disadvantage when it comes to trying to get into those
| fields. Then you can proactively and practically start to do
| something about those specific obstacles.
| whimsicalism wrote:
| Can you explain more? It seems like it would only encourage
| equality of outcome if you took the assumption that black
| people are innately less interested in tech as true.
| xondono wrote:
| > if you took the assumption that black people are innately
| less interested in tech as true.
|
| Or maybe more interested but much more discriminated. The
| point is that you can't see equality of opportunity by
| looking at the output.
| whimsicalism wrote:
| I think a good baseline is similar levels of innate
| interest. The fact that the output is so skewed seems to
| logically suggest some issue with equality of opportunity?
| sokoloff wrote:
| I agree it _suggests_ that possibility. Now what?
|
| IMO, you have to look deeper to try to understand the
| drivers of the suggested inequality for fixing the
| drivers is what fixes the system.
|
| What are the filters or moments that create skew between
| interest and eventual accomplishment? How do we
| remove/reduce them?
| whimsicalism wrote:
| Oh I absolutely agree that you have to look deeper to
| understand the drivers. I also agree that many of the
| drivers are from far before any candidate hits the hiring
| pipeline or anything like that.
|
| But given that in this thread there are lots of people
| denying that this is even suggestive of a problem, I can
| also see the merit in collecting the information just to
| demonstrate that a problem even exists - it is hard to
| get buy-in among people who do not believe that race
| should be discussed in the 21st century.
| mactavish88 wrote:
| It seems to me as though people who make a big deal out of
| "lack of diversity" in any field are saying that it's because
| of some form of discrimination or bias in hiring. This is the
| primary hypothesis they're putting forward, often as fact, as
| opposed to the reality that it's a hypothesis until it's
| adequately substantiated with unbiased data collected from
| multiple sources.
|
| The hypothesis may be true, but it's hard to tell objectively
| (e.g. I don't know many managers who would even be capable of
| seeing that they're biased, let alone acknowledging their
| biases). Accusing people of being biased without evidence
| isn't constructive for anyone involved either.
|
| So we need to come at the problem a little differently, and
| accept the fact that we're never going to get a 100% clear-
| cut answer, but we can get much closer to the truth than we
| are right now. We also need to accept the fact that the
| reality will change over time, and so regular interrogation
| of the hypothesis is necessary.
|
| We can look at a variety of metrics to try to tease out
| whether there are biases in specific companies (this list is
| by no means complete, these are just two studies that I can
| think of conducting off the top of my head):
|
| 1. Compare the candidates who actively apply for jobs to
| those who actually get the jobs. This comparison must not
| only include candidates' group affiliations (ethnicity,
| gender, age, etc.), but reliable measures of _competency_ for
| the particular role for which they applied.
|
| 2. Find out from a larger pool of people outside of (1)
| whether they would have applied for a particular job but did
| not or could not because of particular barriers.
|
| If you find that the data from (1) shows that there are
| candidates who have particular group affiliations _and_ meet
| the competency criteria for the roles, and they are less
| preferred by a particular company than people of other group
| affiliations of similar or lower competency, then you can say
| with a reasonable degree of likelihood that _whoever made the
| hiring decisions at those specific companies_ is /are
| probably biased. Not the company as a whole - just the people
| who made the hiring decisions (there won't be data on the
| other people in the company, so you can't make judgements of
| them from such a study). Do that for enough companies in
| different geographies and you'll get a sense of the different
| biases in different cities/states/countries (e.g. some places
| may be biased against competent women, others may be biased
| against competent older people).
|
| Then, (2) should help us to find out qualitatively what
| factors are actively contributing to people not even applying
| for particular jobs in the first place. These may be
| structural problems in countries'/states'/cities' education
| systems, lack of access to food or housing, poverty, etc.
| (the possibilities are almost endless). This will form the
| basis for more study to figure out how to best address
| particular structural problems/impediments.
| whimsicalism wrote:
| I don't have the time right now to respond in a longer
| form, but I will say this:
|
| I make a big deal out of "lack of diversity" in the field.
| I, like most people I know who think this is a big deal, do
| not think that this is exclusively or even primarily due to
| bias in hiring. I attended a majority black school, so I
| certainly understand that there are upstream problems.
|
| All of the problems you identified with (2) are still
| problems of equality around opportunity, not outcome.
| Identifying that there is a problem, even if it doesn't
| naturally point to solutions, is still worth doing -
| because as you can see in this thread, there are plenty of
| people with a lot invested in denying that there is any
| problem at all.
| mactavish88 wrote:
| I think study (1) is something that companies could
| implement internally (hopefully in a somewhat unbiased
| way). That'll at least help address localized bias in the
| hiring process.
|
| As for (2), I'm aware of the fact that many people around
| the world don't have access to opportunities to do things
| that they'd be really good at. I'd really just like to
| understand the nuances there and how to practically make
| a difference.
|
| Part of the problem I see is that the conversation around
| "diversity" (at least in popular media) is very US-
| centric, when the majority of the human species lives
| outside of the US. Different countries, states and even
| cities have very different sets of problems when it comes
| to lack of access to opportunity.
| quadrifoliate wrote:
| Compared to programming and tech, success in a lot of fields in
| the humanities, including journalism is _far_ more connected to
| who you know, what family you were born into, what college you
| went to, and your overall personal network. In such an
| environment, it is unsurprising that there is a severe lack of
| diversity.
|
| I have never received a satisfactory answer for why a lot of
| people from these fields are all about "Everyone should learn to
| code" initiatives, but not, say "Everyone should learn to be a
| citizen journalist", or "Everyone should learn to be a copy
| editor". Indeed, in many aspects, the latter would seem to share
| many aspects with learning to code (attention to detail, focus on
| syntax, etc.), and be more accessible.
|
| My conclusion is that there is no desire to increase
| participation in or accessibility to the field of journalism,
| because of a rejection of the Jevons paradox. And consequently,
| the shrinking field seems to rely heavily on credentialism and
| connections to choose who becomes a journalist.
| whimsicalism wrote:
| This hits the nail on the head. All of my friends who are in
| the process of becoming journalists have to spend tons of time
| working unpaid shitty internships just to get a low paying
| bottom rung job.
|
| The only people I know who are even able to get jobs like this
| either have parents in the industry or have rich parents, often
| both.
|
| This is also true for the humanities in academia writ large -
| most of the people I know getting a PhD in the humanities have
| rich parents.
| dahfizz wrote:
| The cause is pretty obvious: journalists and other humanities
| do not pay well. People are not willing to pay for the
| garbage modern journalists put out, so there is not much
| money in the field. The only people going into the field,
| therefore, are those who are independently rich (rich
| parents) and ideologically motivated (which further reduces
| the quality of modern journalism).
| TheOtherHobbes wrote:
| Journalism and the humanities can pay extremely well _for
| insiders._
|
| The humanities - especially law and some corners of
| academia - also have far more direct political leverage
| than tech does.
| goatlover wrote:
| Sounds like a problem with politicians as well,
| particularly beyond the local level.
| closeparen wrote:
| People say "everyone should learn to code" because that's where
| the money is. It's well understood that becoming a journalist
| is a cause of, not a solution to, financial woes.
| Zababa wrote:
| > I have never received a satisfactory answer for why a lot of
| people from these fields are all about "Everyone should learn
| to code" initiatives, but not, say "Everyone should learn to be
| a citizen journalist", or "Everyone should learn to be a copy
| editor".
|
| It's easy: they want to protect their field. This is basically
| a "not in my backyard" movement. "X industry should be more
| diverse. Not mine, because that would means more competition
| for me."
| gorwell wrote:
| It's also a large amount of psychological projection and
| intra elite jockeying.
|
| Naval hit the nail on the head here: `The whole Social
| Justice Warrior-ing trend seems like a case of white-on-white
| violence.`
|
| https://twitter.com/naval/status/1132170896817266688
| filmgirlcw wrote:
| >My conclusion is that there is no desire to increase
| participation in or accessibility to the field of journalism,
| because of a rejection of the Jevons paradox. And consequently,
| the shrinking field seems to rely heavily on credentialism and
| connections to choose who becomes a journalist.
|
| As someone who has done both (and moved from journalism to
| engineering 4.5 years ago), I agree with the first half of your
| comment, but I disagree with this conclusion.
|
| I do agree with you that we should encourage everyone to be a
| citizen journalist or copy editor, and to a certain extent,
| social media has done that -- much to the chagrin of many
| members of the public who then decry the state of the news
| media. There was a massive push by many of the leading
| journalism think tanks (Poynter, Niemen, CJR, Jay Rosen, Jeff
| Jarvis, etc.) more than a decade ago for citizen journalism and
| the rise of user-generated content directly led to news
| organizations like The Huffington Post and BuzzFeed, which in
| turn informed news and news techniques from the likes of the
| Times, the Washington Post, etc. And despite media being an
| utter and complete shithole, more people than ever _want_ to be
| journalists. But that 's not the whole story.
|
| The problem, and the reason this isn't a rejection of Jevon's
| paradox, is that even though the appetite and potential
| audience for news has increased, the business models around
| news have collapsed. Larger outlets have managed to sustain,
| and in some cases like the New York Times, pivot themselves
| into even larger and more powerful centers -- but thousands
| more have gone out of business. There have been so many layoffs
| in the last few years (and at digital outlets too - not just
| antiquated local papers), it's beyond depressing. There were
| 16,000 layoffs in newsrooms (print, digital, broadcast) in 2020
| [1], and even with the gains in digital organizations, there
| are still 30,000 fewer working journalists in the US today than
| in 2008 [2]
|
| I don't blame tech for the death of the newspaper, for what
| it's worth, (although Craigslist and the expectation of
| everything online being free didn't help), the print industry
| did a lot of it to themselves. But even digital-first
| publications suffer to make a profit and become a business, and
| because the returns on a media investment are not ever going to
| be the 20x or 30x you get from a tech startup, the appetite for
| investors has wained and even well-funded outlets can go under
| or get sold for next to nothing.
|
| So you have a flooded labor market and not enough jobs. And
| those jobs? Don't pay well. Which means that like a lot of
| other humanities, those jobs are largely taken by the people
| that can afford to do it, and there goes your diversity
| numbers. And in New York, DC, or San Francisco/LA (where US
| news bureaus are largely located), cost of living is insanely
| high. So you have kids who paid $180,000 for a graduate degree
| in journalism making $45,000* a year to work in New York City,
| where they have to live in a shitty apartment in Brooklyn with
| three other roommates. Or, they come from money and have
| parents who bought them an apartment.
|
| From a monetary perspective, I did very well in journalism,
| especially for someone who was mid-career and not an executive
| editor. I make more than double in tech. And in journalism, I
| was making more than double some of my coworkers (close to 3
| times for some of them). To be fair, I work at a FAANG, so I'm
| an outlier -- and I have some friends/colleagues/mentors who
| made/make more in journalism than I do in tech -- so at the
| very top, journalism can be lucrative. But in mid-sized cities,
| it's abysmal.
|
| Part of the reason people encourage "everyone to learn to
| code," is that for now, the labor demand is larger than the
| supply and so salaries are high. That probably won't last
| forever, but it has definitely been the trend for a long time.
| And another part of the reason is that in general, society
| dismisses humanities as being less important. And yes, to your
| point, there probably is also a part of gate-keeping by the
| elites in those fields to keep it rarified, but I don't think
| that's the whole story.
|
| Joshua Benton wrote a great piece for Nieman Lab (part of
| Harvard's journalism institution) last month that really
| encapsulates a lot of the diversity challenge and what changes
| need to happen to make things better [3], but what he doesn't
| touch on as much is the fact that once people are skilled to be
| journalists, the jobs and the pay just aren't there for many
| people, especially compared to other professions.
|
| * Thanks to labor unions, the floor for entry-level newsroom
| jobs at at least major digital outlets is getting closer to
| $55k on average, but I still know of big places that hire
| people in at $45k. And people take those jobs even when they
| cannot really afford to live on that salary.
|
| [1]: https://www.thewrap.com/2020-newsroom-layoffs-data/
|
| [2]: https://www.pewresearch.org/fact-tank/2021/07/13/u-s-
| newsroo...
|
| [3] https://www.niemanlab.org/2021/10/its-time-to-create-an-
| alte...
| dogleash wrote:
| >I have never received a satisfactory answer for why a lot of
| people from these fields are all about "Everyone should learn
| to code" initiatives, but not, say "Everyone should learn to be
| a citizen journalist"
|
| A few years ago when some journos got laid off, people on
| twitter meme-ed that they should learn to code. Not only did
| the journos make it extremely apparent just how far beneath
| them they think software development is, they also went out of
| their way to attack the people ribbing them. (With their
| standard tools: guilt by association to 4chan who got in on the
| ribbing, and getting twitter to categorize criticism in the
| wrong direction as abuse.)
| https://knowyourmeme.com/memes/learn-to-code
|
| It's not the reason, but analyzing this sort of thing is a
| start.
| wolpoli wrote:
| > I have never received a satisfactory answer for why a lot of
| people from these fields are all about "Everyone should learn
| to code" initiatives, but not, say "Everyone should learn to be
| a citizen journalist", or "Everyone should learn to be a copy
| editor". Indeed, in many aspects, the latter would seem to
| share many aspects with learning to code (attention to detail,
| focus on syntax, etc.), and be more accessible.
|
| The answer lies in where those "Everyone should learn to code"
| initiatives come from.
|
| Software/Tech workers, unlike many other fields, don't have any
| prominant organizations that advocate for their rights, set
| working standards, conduct examinations for certificates, or
| even just speak for them in public. The void is currently
| filled by others, such as Tech CEOs and organization in other
| fields, who have other agendas. One of the agenda is to get
| more people into the field, reducing barrier of entry so that
| Tech companies have an easier time hiring.
|
| Essentially, software/tech workers don't have a say in our
| field like the accountants/doctors/pharmacists/lawyers/trades.
| Nasrudith wrote:
| Coding is an accessible path to wealth which conceivably
| could support more. Nursing receives that in pulses and there
| are tons of organizations and outright unions for them.
| Nursing has boom and bust cycle
|
| Those which fail at scalability and wealth would fall flat
| before it gets off the drawing board. An initiative to promte
| being a X would be utterly panned for these for instance.
|
| 1. janitor 2. social worker 3. hollywood actor 4. major
| league athlete 5. CEO
| jasonhansel wrote:
| The answer is: big tech companies are pushing "Everyone should
| learn to code" initiatives to increase their supply of labor,
| thus allowing them to drive prices (i.e. salaries) down.
|
| By contrast, news companies don't have the excess resources
| necessary to engage in this sort of lobbying.
| kodah wrote:
| This may be an unpopular opinion:
|
| > Compared to programming and tech, success in a lot of fields
| in the humanities, including journalism is far more connected
| to who you know, what family you were born into, what college
| you went to, and your overall personal network.
|
| Is tech really that different?
|
| * When evaluating senior candidates one of the criteria that
| candidates are selected on is the prestige of their previous
| companies, which usually hire from prestigious universities.
|
| * Much of what we look at is how many talks a senior candidate
| has done, their name recognition (aka brand), etc... all
| indicators of prestige, but not necessarily talent.
|
| * When evaluating junior candidates with a lack of job
| experience the candidate pool is often selected on collegiate
| prestige.
|
| * Hiring is often done by algorithm interviews which, if you
| went to a prestigious school, are what they spend more time
| teaching.
|
| I've been programming my whole life, but I'm a drop out and
| spent a chunk of my formative years in the military. The only
| way I got into being a full time SWE was working as a SRE-SE
| first. I would've never gotten one of these kush internships
| had I not spent years putting out other peoples software fires
| first.
| Jensson wrote:
| > I've been programming my whole life, but I'm a drop out and
| spent a chunk of my formative years in the military. The only
| way I got into being a full time SWE was working as a SRE-SE
| first. I would've never gotten one of these kush internships
| had I not spent years putting out other peoples software
| fires first.
|
| If you tried to get into journalism instead chances are you
| would be flipping burgers at McDonalds right now. Sure tech
| isn't perfect, but it is much better than almost any other
| field. The fact that you could work your way up that quickly
| is just proof how well we have it in this field.
| teebs wrote:
| I agree with you that it's definitely about who you know - if
| you go to Stanford, you can get better jobs out of college
| compared to someone with similar skills who didn't. But I
| worked at a FAANG (or whatever it's called now) company and
| many of the senior engineers we hired were from small/less
| prestigious companies. These were people with ~10 years of
| experience who had become great software engineers but had
| never considered themselves in a class to work in big tech.
| Then, when given a chance, they got an offer and often
| accepted it because it paid so much better than their old
| job. If there weren't such high demand for software
| engineers, the company would just have hired from other big
| tech companies since it's safer, but they were forced to try
| to find people in unexpected places.
|
| On the other hand, these people were still negatively
| impacted by their backgrounds: they hadn't had the chance to
| join fancy tech companies out of college, which meant they
| missed out on several years of career opportunities. They
| were more likely to be hired at a Senior Software Engineer
| level, for example, when someone similar from a big tech
| company might be hired at Staff+.
| [deleted]
| kodah wrote:
| Thanks for adding that and you're absolutely right from
| what I've seen.
| Hermitian909 wrote:
| > Is tech really that different?
|
| Every profession has problems around social social proof.
| There are limited resources for recruiting and so heuristics
| that work get used. But I really can't think of any field
| that does better than tech in terms of keeping those barriers
| low relative to possible income and prestige.
|
| I know people who dropped out of _high school_ making
| >300k/yr as software engineers, and god only knows how many
| college drop outs (myself included) who are also making that
| kind of money.
|
| Conversely, people I know who went to law schools that are
| not one of the top 10 in the country are never even
| _considered_ for high paying jobs in their industry. If a
| path to those jobs is available, it does not appear to be
| widely known, unlike the path to big tech.
|
| Yes, without social proof getting your start is harder, and
| all else being equal ivy league grads will always have a leg
| up on you, but these are some truly phenomenal opportunities
| for people to climb the ladder.
| Nasrudith wrote:
| As a technicality the music industry might win out given
| the successes from the lows and highs of society (even if
| genre clustered). There are some who got into it by
| industry connections, some with a background of education,
| and others through a whole lot of practice to nurture their
| talent. A good seed alone does not make a bumper crop. The
| industry is also far more of a crapshoot however as luck,
| image, and zeitgeist play a role. You might recommend
| somebody very good at music to give it a try but not an
| across the board career recommendation.
| kodah wrote:
| Our experiences are fairly rare from what I've seen.
| Undoubtedly the door _is open_ , but the weight of that
| door is still far too high and I would not give tech points
| in the category of meritocracy for that. Also worth
| mentioning that 300k is FAANG level compensation, and those
| salaries are fairly rare and not indicative of where most
| people with less-than-prestigious backgrounds end up
| (another commenter posted what I think is a fairly accurate
| average tale). Not to mention those salaries are often geo-
| centric.
| Hermitian909 wrote:
| > I would not give tech points in the category of
| meritocracy for that
|
| Why? I'm not trying to argue here that tech _is_ a
| meritocracy but so far as I 've been able to discern it
| is _more_ meritocratic than any other field offering
| middle class or above wages. If you disagree, I 'd be
| super interested to hear which fields are doing a better
| job. If you agree, why not give credit to the industry
| for doing a better job at solving this very hard problem
| than anyone else?
|
| > and not indicative of where most people with less-than-
| prestigious backgrounds end up
|
| It's hard to tell how much this is an indictment of
| tech's process versus society at large. Anecdotally, I
| find a higher proportion of people from more prestigious
| backgrounds are more skilled at work. This should be
| unsurprising because people from those backgrounds have
| generally been given many advantages in life. In a former
| life I was an educator and was paid a lot of money to
| impart valuable skills to the children of rich families.
|
| If we view meritocracy as judging workers as they are,
| and not accounting for what they might have been in a
| more equitable society, that's the outcome I'd expect
| from a meritorious interview process.
|
| Again, I don't want to argue tech is some perfect
| meritocracy, just that I'm not aware that anyone's done
| better.
| kodah wrote:
| > Why? I'm not trying to argue here that tech is a
| meritocracy but so far as I've been able to discern it is
| more meritocratic than any other field offering middle
| class or above wages. If you disagree, I'd be super
| interested to hear which fields are doing a better job.
| If you agree, why not give credit to the industry for
| doing a better job at solving this very hard problem than
| anyone else?
|
| Apologies, I was not trying to argue that you were
| presenting it was. That's my internal ideal: tech should
| be meritocratic and involve zero prestige. To me arguing
| whether tech is better or worse than any other industry
| is fairly futile. It's more important to say, "Should
| this field require a degree and prestige or not?" The
| answer in tech is, "no", so the fact that we have it and
| that it weighs so heavy is what makes it frustrating.
| It's like saying, "Once you're _in_ it matters less! " In
| medicine or law, that's entirely different. At the end of
| the day, the process of interviewing and hiring is still
| _bad_ (if not worse) so being better (or even drastically
| better) than other fields means very little.
|
| > If we view meritocracy as judging workers as they are,
| and not accounting for what they might have been in a
| more equitable society, that's the outcome I'd expect
| from a meritorious interview process.
|
| That's a fair point, prestigious people generally thrive
| in a meritocracy. Though, I think what this inevitably
| leads to is "invest more in education and opportunity"
| platitudes. The fact is, those things are a long way off
| from getting feasibly better. There are ways to bridge
| that gap, like offering free courses in algorithms and
| data structures for people from non-prestigious
| backgrounds, but I have a feeling the hiring requirements
| would just shift then.
| Hermitian909 wrote:
| > so being better (or even drastically better) than other
| fields means very little.
|
| I think this where we differ. I think this view is a bit
| disheartening to me because it feels like making the
| perfect the enemy of a good. I don't think completely
| removing prestige is a viable option for most companies
| without some replacement that no one has yet figured out,
| so I'm ok with applauding whatever steps can be made to
| make the system better.
|
| Thanks for so clearly sharing your perspective.
| kodah wrote:
| The push and pull of how you and I view these is
| intrinsic (in my view) to preventing the attitude of,
| "this is good enough".
|
| Put in a metaphor: someone has to make the industry feel
| like it's making progress and someone has to drag the
| industry kicking and screaming forward. Both are
| necessary for improvement.
|
| > Thanks for so clearly sharing your perspective.
|
| Always.
| ghaff wrote:
| I read the parent/GP as simply saying that while tech
| doesn't have the same level of gatekeeping as white shoe
| law does or, for that matter, academia in general, if you
| have a decent GPA from Stanford things will be far easier
| than they will be for an _equally skilled_ high school
| dropout with no connections.
|
| The challenge (which has no easy answer) is that it's far
| easier for companies to focus on the Stanford grads with
| decent GPAs than all the high school dropouts who upload
| a resume, especially if they don't have an obviously
| interesting portfolio/presence in open source
| communities.
| dayvid wrote:
| People hate on tech interviews, but it's honestly a lot more
| fair than traditional interviewing if done properly. You only
| gauge the candidate on their ability to solve and think through
| a problem. I also follow a trainer's pattern who doesn't read
| the candidate's resume before a technical screen to further
| reduce bias.
| ratww wrote:
| I kinda agree. When I started in the early 2000s, the norm
| was a 1-2 hour battery of psychological tests that somehow
| tried to assess my intelligence before someone technical even
| spoke to me.
|
| 1-2 hours of leetcode, or a 5-6 hours take-home project is a
| godsend. Programming is my passion anyways.
| whimsicalism wrote:
| In the actual tech world, my view is that these critics are a
| loud minority who forget what the alternatives look like.
|
| As an awkward autistic guy who often gets mistaken for
| hispanic, the tech interviews are a god-send.
| thenanyu wrote:
| There are better signals you could get of job success but
| they require a greater up front investment; I've had a good
| track record with a slightly lower bar on the technical
| screen and a 30 day probationary period.
|
| Some friends of mine user a 2 week work trial for all
| candidates.
| whimsicalism wrote:
| I can't imagine a high-quality candidate agreeing to
| either of those things in the current market. I certainly
| wouldn't.
|
| But software engineering is very bimodal, so I'm sure it
| works.
| commandlinefan wrote:
| He's asking somebody to quit the job they have now in
| exchange for a chance to get a new job... you might be
| able to get new college graduates or already unemployed
| to agree to that, but definitely nobody with any sort of
| options.
| thenanyu wrote:
| The conditions certainly have to be right but it works
| for high quality candidates if your reputation is good
| and you engender enough trust.
|
| High quality candidates are generally confident in their
| abilities and thankful that they can take 2 weeks to show
| you their skills instead of doing it in a high pressure
| setting in a couple of hours.
| sangnoir wrote:
| > High quality candidates are generally confident in
| their abilities and thankful that they can take 2 weeks
| to show you their skills instead of doing it in a high
| pressure setting in a couple of hours.
|
| When I'm interviewing, I prefer interviewing with
| multiple companies[1] while still earning an income. No
| way I'm going through 2 weeks * N companies because it
| entails quitting my old job first, and interviewing for
| months at a time - not _preparing_ but actually
| interviewing - which is crazy talk to me. I 'd rather go
| through the high-pressure/low time-commitment route as
| it's scalable.
|
| 1. Companies are paradoxically "desperate for engineers"
| and more willing to keep positions open for longer, so
| it's prudent to maximize my chances of getting hired by
| spreading my net as wide as possible. Having multiple
| offers in hand also strengthens my negotiating position
| for remuneration.
| ratww wrote:
| > _When I 'm interviewing, I prefer interviewing with
| multiple companies while still earning an income_
|
| That's what I do too.
|
| But my strategy is taking vacation for interviews, and
| then taking a "real" vacation in-between jobs. Not
| possible for everyone, but so far it has worked for me.
| flyingchipmann wrote:
| There are other factors other than time though. In
| current market it's important to get at least 2 or more
| offers for negotiation power. Otherwise you might(or
| will) get the minimum offer of the band, i.e getting
| lowballed. Therefore going through a few of interviews in
| the same time frame is very beneficial to the applicants.
| philwelch wrote:
| > Compared to programming and tech, success in a lot of fields
| in the humanities, including journalism is far more connected
| to who you know, what family you were born into, what college
| you went to, and your overall personal network.
|
| The term for this is "classism".
| throwaway2077 wrote:
| you got outdated info. "learn to code" gets people unpersoned
| on twitter now
| not2b wrote:
| Also, for many of the prestigious publications, the way into
| the door is often via unpaid internships, and interns who do
| really well eventually get paying jobs. Only those whose
| families can support them well into their 20s can afford to do
| that.
| rayiner wrote:
| > Compared to programming and tech, success in a lot of fields
| in the humanities, including journalism is far more connected
| to who you know, what family you were born into, what college
| you went to, and your overall personal network. In such an
| environment, it is unsurprising that there is a severe lack of
| diversity.
|
| This is one of my concerns about the recent antipathy toward
| standardized testing. My family came over from Bangladesh, at a
| time when there were less than 10,000 Bangladeshis in the U.S.
| Didn't have much cultural knowledge, didn't know anybody
| important, and it didn't matter. Did well on the SATs, did well
| on the LSATs--in either engineering or law, being a foreigner
| didn't hold me back. Not sure what would've happened if those
| objective measures hadn't existed. (I mean I guess I do know
| what happened--family connections mattered a lot more in e.g.
| the legal field back in the day.)
| skulk wrote:
| What do you think about the system on the subcontinent? I'm
| not sure how it's done in Bangladesh, but in India your
| higher education is basically decided by your score on a few
| objective measures which are orders of magnitude more
| difficult than the SAT.
|
| It's actually mind-boggling how much harder IIT JEE math is
| compared to SAT math.
| zeusk wrote:
| The physics and chemistry aren't any easier. I'd say at-
| least Physics had the largest delta compared to SAT subject
| tests or even APs.
|
| While the SAT was asking about basic kinetic motion in
| classical mechanics, JEE was asking about wave-particle
| duality and calculating uncertainty in motion of photon-
| electron collisions iirc.
| thenanyu wrote:
| Chinese Gao Kao tests are similarly much harder than
| American tests; but at the end of the day I don't think
| absolute difficulty matters too much as it's a comparative
| test.
|
| As long as there is differentiation it does it's job. If
| the test taking population is very large the tests might
| need to be more difficult to make finer distinction
| angelzen wrote:
| Not surprisingly, the population of STEM graduate
| programs is vastly dominated by foreign students. "81
| percent of full-time graduate students in electrical and
| petroleum engineering programs at U.S. universities are
| international students, and 79 percent in computer
| science are."
|
| https://www.insidehighered.com/quicktakes/2017/10/11/fore
| ign...
| quantumwannabe wrote:
| That is more because a grad degree is a unnecessary
| expense for an American who wants an industry job, so the
| only Americans who go for grad degrees are people who
| want to be in academia. A masters contains a lot of
| repeated information from a bachelors, and many masters
| programs from "reputable" schools are now diploma mills
| that prey on international students willingness to pay
| large amounts of money an American degree.
| cameldrv wrote:
| Advanced degrees also make getting certain visas easier.
| The relative value for spending money and two years on a
| Masters or six years of your life on a PhD is much higher
| if it carries with it a ticket to stay in the U.S.
| filmgirlcw wrote:
| I was going to say the same thing. Immigration into the
| US is extremely difficult if you aren't already
| famous/wealthy/well-connected, that if you want a visa,
| coming in through education is your best bet. And getting
| a job with a company that will sponsor your visa (to say
| nothing of one that will sponsor your potential green
| card) is already difficult, but being a student and
| having a graduate degree is a good incentive.
| notaniitian wrote:
| It's not meritocratic. Almost 70% seats are reserved in
| IITs.
|
| https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Reservation_policy_in_India
| n...
|
| Relative ranking is something no one should adopt unless
| they have a population problem. Unlike SAT, your rank
| relative to your peers in the exam decides your fate. The
| problem with such system is it encourages people to
| participate in the race earlier. Parents are sending their
| kids earlier to JEE prep every year and increasing the
| difficulty. It will continue to go up unless it's humanely
| impossible.
|
| Coaching industry built around it has bigger market value
| and revenues than government spends on IIT (the test that
| JEE is supposed to get you in).
|
| Our most valuable startup is byjus, an edtech focused on
| helping students pass JEE. More and more foreign companies
| like Amazon are also opening JEE prep centres here.
|
| https://academy.amazon.in/
|
| Please don't adopt it.
|
| Despite above, our educational outcomes in higher education
| are worse than most developed countries including US. (We
| are good at employment at tier 1 colleges though)
|
| These students get burned by the time they get into college
| of their choice. There isn't much focus on actual academics
| and coursework unlike developed countries where
| universities get more difficult. Further, most students are
| encouraged to practice leetcode from year 1 instead of
| focusing on academics.
|
| Everyone is slacking off after getting in so curving keeps
| their grade good despite a huge drop in effort.
| commandlinefan wrote:
| > What do you think about ... how much harder IIT JEE math
| is
|
| Seems to me that there are only a couple of different ways
| somebody _could_ feel about that. The first is to be
| opposed to the "the smarter you are, the more money you
| make/better you do in life" meritocratic egalitarianism
| that these tests support. The second is to support that
| ideal (whether you agree we're there or not), but insist
| that tests don't accurately measure intelligence.
|
| Either way, while I can sort of see where the opponents are
| coming from, I don't see them offering many good
| alternatives. I don't think it's cosmically "fair" that
| being born to insanely rich parents leaves you better off
| in life than being born to unemployed drug addicts, but the
| only "solution" anybody's ever put forward is massive
| ongoing wealth redistribution which is demonstrably worse.
| Similarly, it's not necessarily fair that people who are
| born smart do better than people who are born stupid, but
| what do you do? Require as many stupid doctors as smart
| doctors? Demand that for every smart highway engineer, a
| stupid one be included as well?
|
| I can also sympathize with people who insist that tests
| don't accurately measure intelligence - I've always done
| well on tests, so this system has worked out well for me,
| but I can see how somebody could be otherwise intelligent
| but unable to perform on tests. But again... what do you
| do? Just declare everybody equally intelligent and don't
| measure anything? Like it or not, tests _do_ measure
| something that does correlate with that hard-to-quantify
| trait we call "intelligence" and while there are
| regrettable false positives as well as false negatives,
| it's the best we have.
|
| So I wish our tests were harder so there'd be a more fine-
| grained stratification of actual ability, even if I ended
| up being closer to the middle than I am now - that would be
| ok, because a lot of other people would be closer to the
| middle too! A tests that accurately measured intelligence
| such that only the most intelligent people in the world
| could dominate it would necessarily be almost impossible to
| score perfectly on it, by definition. In the face of such a
| test, a 50% would be something to brag about and the top
| scorers would be off curing cancer or something for the
| benefit of all of us.
| brendoelfrendo wrote:
| I guess it depends on what you want out of the test; if
| you want something meritocratic, what we find is that
| testing ends up reinforcing existing social strata more
| often than not, because wealth often correlates to
| factors like quality of education, which in turn
| correlate to test scores. A stupid rich person will
| always be stupid, but a smart rich person will probably
| have access to better schools, private tutoring, and test
| preparation resources.
|
| So there's the challenge that the anti-testing/testing
| reform crowd wants to solve: how do you call testing
| meritocratic when the equality of opportunity isn't
| there? And are we ok with that?
| 1cvmask wrote:
| When you are privileged you have no extra weight or leg up
| over someone else on standardized tests. That's why it is the
| privileged elite who decry tests and call for "diversity."
| Under the guise and mask of diversity they try to maintain
| and entrench their privilege while giving the occasional
| breadcrumbs to the truly historically disadvantaged.
|
| I can't for the life of me understand how the daughter of
| Bill Gates is the same as a poor African American from the
| ghetto.
|
| Diversity initiatives are almost always a subterfuge or false
| flag operation.
|
| -
|
| Diversity apparently includes fencing and rowing at most
| elite colleges. Just another filter with the benefit of
| virtue signaling and posturing.
| 8note wrote:
| You still have advantages in how the tests are written. The
| questions still privilege people who grow up speaking a
| specific version of English
| Jensson wrote:
| Privileged white people who wants to preserve their
| privilege says that the poor white people are the problem
| and then kick those out in favor of black people. But the
| privileged white people are still there. And people wonder
| why poor white people don't like all of this "diversity"
| rethoric.
| 1cvmask wrote:
| The poor whites are the collateral damage to the false
| flag diversity operation of the white elites. Otherwise
| the privileged white elites would be replaced/displaced
| by the test acing primarily non-white immigrants.
|
| "Diversity" initiatives is an act of self-preservation
| for the rich white elites.
| ASinclair wrote:
| > I have never received a satisfactory answer for why a lot of
| people from these fields are all about "Everyone should learn
| to code" initiatives, but not, say "Everyone should learn to be
| a citizen journalist", or "Everyone should learn to be a copy
| editor".
|
| Software pays significantly more. Why push people into lower
| paying jobs?
| Iefthandrule wrote:
| You don't see narratives about how everyone should get into
| finance. That is certainly a good ol boys club.
| chrisseaton wrote:
| Getting into tech and getting a great-paying job is
| achievable and realistic for anyone from any background,
| right now. It's completely unregulated, there's no
| gatekeeping outside of factual knowledge, and people are
| actively encouraging diverse applicants with non-
| traditional educational backgrounds. Even if the experience
| for these people is not always as good as it could be, the
| community is trying.
|
| Getting into finance is not even remotely like this. It's a
| brutal old-boys' club.
|
| That's why they recommend the former. You'd have to be
| insane to recommend that most people try to break into
| finance.
| Iefthandrule wrote:
| The point being made is that finance is far more
| exclusionary and racist/sexist than tech, but tech gets
| all the articles written about it. The onus would be on
| those with power to change hiring in finance, much like
| the big tech companies are tasked with making tech more
| inclusive.
| chrisseaton wrote:
| Tech gets all the articles written about trying to change
| it, because it's easier and more impactful to change so
| that's what people are trying right now.
| MisterPea wrote:
| I think the point is the articles are often extremely
| derisive and therefore hypocritical when finance or
| <insert any other high-paying industry> companies don't
| receive the same attention if at all
| rayiner wrote:
| The HuffPo editorial board is less diverse than the GOP:
| https://www.mic.com/articles/144177/this-tweet-from-a-huffin...
| AlanYx wrote:
| You see this phenomenon in policy development too.
|
| My current favorite example is the AI ethics/policy space. A lot
| is being written by policy people about the "whiteness" of AI and
| those developing it. But most real world technical and research
| teams are actually remarkably diverse along many lines (I'm not
| saying there isn't still work to be done though).
|
| Then you take a look at the AI policy/ethics space... for
| example, here's the team behind the Council of Europe's Ad-Hoc
| Committee on AI (CAHAI): https://www.coe.int/en/web/artificial-
| intelligence/cahai A couple hundred people, all but one who are
| from the same general demographic and rough age range. Yet it's
| these people who feel that their energy is best spent criticizing
| tech teams.
| adwn wrote:
| Where's my PC Bullshit Bingo (TM) card? I need to cross off a
| couple of fields:
|
| 1) reducing "diversity" to "different skin colors"
|
| 2) fixating on the Third-Reich-esque concept of "human race"
|
| 3) insisting that skin colors can be neatly sorted into 4-5
| discrete categories
|
| 4) lamenting the ratio between these categories, without stating
| what the _correct_ ratio should be, and why
| throwaway2077 wrote:
| >without stating what the correct ratio should be, and why
|
| oh, they don't really hesitate to state that the lower the
| ratio of a certain group of people is the better. not just in
| the "melting pot" of the US, but everywhere in the world,
| including the countries where that group of people is the
| indigenous population.
| mjburgess wrote:
| It's better to read this as just a form of "genuine politics"
| in the sense that it's one group saying they want more
| resources than they have.
|
| Here, the message is basically: our people want more of what
| your people have. ("Proper ratios" arent the point). This is
| what most of these movements are about, a certain type of
| economic-political warefare most accute when high-status
| positions are rare and there's a lot of competition for them.
|
| I think this perspective also, in some sense, "humanises,
| justifies and rationalises" this type of agit-prop. Ie., I
| actually have a lot of sympathy for "genuine politics" -- ie.,
| competition over finite resources and their allocation.
|
| It's just some people saying, "we think we're owed more than we
| have" -- and that's a real political claim everyone, at
| somepoint, makes justifiably. Here, I say: let them make their
| demands. It's part of politics. It is likely this author (or
| their group) wants a resource: a job in journalism. There arent
| many. If they have some grounds to demand it, let them demand
| it. (It is however dressed up and disguised in this weird
| theology of race, gender, etc.).
| commandlinefan wrote:
| > our people want...we think we're owed
|
| As somebody who is prohibited from having "people", the whole
| "our people" thing rubs me the wrong way from the beginning.
| whimsicalism wrote:
| HN is such an idiosyncratic place. You could frame any number
| of struggles this way and feel smug about being "above it
| all."
|
| "our people want more of what your people have." -> What
| "your people have" could be freedom from slavery in 1864,
| ability to attend the same schools, etc. etc.
|
| Framing it in this way does not make the argument less
| compelling and I have no idea why you think that race-based
| discrimination is a "theology" in a country that had explicit
| legal discrimination against black people up until the 70s
| and plenty of informal discrimination afterwards.
| mjburgess wrote:
| I think it's an anti-smug move: the point is we are all
| "within it all".
|
| Yes, we could talk about systemic racism etc. That is why
| one might engage in a lot of political projects. However a
| highly specific demand about ratios in upper-middle-class
| high-status industries... these specific demands are a
| little harder to parse.
|
| The #metoo movement was not about the masses in the
| industry, it was about the elites. The academic "fire them"
| movements (eg., against pinker) are likewise not about the
| army of PhDs and their sexism. Rather these are intra-elite
| warfare using _somewhat valid_ grounds to wage an attack on
| resource-horders.
|
| I agreed that these groups _have justifiable reasons_ to
| make demands; that 's partly my point. The issue, where it
| exists, it their methods.
|
| It is very easy to become cynical and take these demands
| "too literally" as demands for quotas, and for
| reinstitutionalising racism "as a corrective".
|
| Rather, it is better to see them as the same ordinary
| politics everyone both engages in, and is entitled to
| engage in.
|
| As for the "theology" that refers to the particular
| dogmatic moralising and evangelising approach taken, and
| the frequently dubious premises.
| whimsicalism wrote:
| I think you are mistaking the media's tendency to focus
| on controversy in high-status arenas with a broader
| cultural/political movement that is not at all
| exclusively focused on elite status.
|
| Calls to integrate schools, calls to reduce our massive
| incarceration - all of those are designed to be broad
| based. That those people also want the people who tell
| media stories and who make political decisions and who
| run major enterprises to be representative of our
| population as a whole does not, in my view, indict those
| people as "elitists."
|
| What's wrong with moralizing? I think some things in how
| our society is structured _ought_ to change. Is that
| "theology"?
| beaconstudios wrote:
| > fixating on the Third-Reich-esque concept of "human race"
|
| what does this mean? I'm no historian, but I'm pretty sure the
| Third Reich was focused on the "German race", to the exclusion
| of all others.
|
| As for ratios, the ratio indicates an uneven pipeline. If idk,
| programmers were all white and highly rewarded, you might ask
| why that is. The reason can be one of two things: white people
| are culturally/systemically advantaged in getting those jobs
| (for example, those jobs are only available in predominantly-
| white areas or the education to do the job is more accessible
| to white people), or white people are more fundamentally
| capable of programming than others. The former is a social
| critique, the latter is white supremacy.
|
| If you reject the white supremacist position (as you should),
| then the question becomes whether you can make the system
| provide more of an equal opportunity.
| twofornone wrote:
| >white people are culturally/systemically advantaged in
| getting those jobs (for example, those jobs are only
| available in predominantly-white areas or the education to do
| the job is more accessible to white people), or white people
| are more fundamentally capable of programming than others.
| The former is a social critique, the latter is white
| supremacy.
|
| Or: "white" culture emphasizes values that tend to produce
| people who are more interested and/or more capable
| programmers. The same way that, say, asian immigrants are
| more likely to value education than other demographics. This
| white supremacy argument is a disingenuous appeal to the
| extremely negative connotation of the term and poisons the
| argument with a dishonest framing, as though the only
| possible outcome in a perfect meritocracy is equal
| representation. Nothing about human nature suggests this to
| be the case.
|
| Diversity of opinion also implies diversity of interests. The
| pipeline problem is not merely a question of unequal
| opportunity, unless you deny minorities the agency to pursue
| their own interests. Some groups of people value athletic
| achievement above intellectual achievement, and it would be
| unreasonable to expect those demographics to produce a
| proportional number of competent programmers.
| okwubodu wrote:
| > This white supremacy argument is a disingenuous appeal to
| the extremely negative connotation
|
| It's a perfectly reasonable argument, if not at times
| overfitted. In the US, zero (0) presidents have been born
| post-Civil Rights Act. In fact, Ruby Bridges [0] is only a
| year older than Bill Gates. So did Ruby's peers just happen
| to not produce programmers at the same rate as Bill's
| because they didn't "value" education? Hey, maybe it's
| true. Who knows? But the idea that a demographic whose
| grandparents had to be escorted by the national guard to
| protect them from white supremacist mobs on the way to get
| an education being behind in education has nothing to do
| with white supremacy, is ridiculous at absolute best.
|
| > The pipeline problem is not merely a question of unequal
| opportunity, unless you deny minorities the agency to
| pursue their own interests.
|
| So let's make the opportunity equal and see where the cards
| fall. Did the kids in my neighborhood and school find
| making computer games any less interesting than I did? No,
| but I could afford a computer. Guess where we are now,
| respectively.
|
| [0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ruby_Bridges
| beaconstudios wrote:
| I agree; I'm not saying that a perfectly fair system would
| produce ratios identical to demographics. There's always
| going to be cultural aspects (though the degree to which
| black and white culture in America are separate is
| obviously a large part a consequence of racism and
| slavery). The point is only to use the outcome as a
| heuristic for what to look into.
| adwn wrote:
| > _what does this mean?_
|
| The Nazis were big on sorting people into genetically
| determined but superficial categories called "races", and
| made decisions based on those categories rather than an
| individual's character, qualifications, or merit. Today's
| "diversity" champions are big on sorting people into
| genetically determined but superficial categories called
| "races", and make decisions based on those categories rather
| than an individual's character, qualifications, or merit.
|
| > _As for ratios, the ratio indicates an uneven pipeline._
|
| Like I said, the article doesn't state what the right ratio
| would be. Without that datum, it's impossible to judge what
| amount of "diversity" is the right amount.
| beaconstudios wrote:
| > Today's "diversity" champions are big on sorting people
| into genetically determined but superficial categories
| called "races", and make decisions based on those
| categories rather than an individual's character,
| qualifications, or merit.
|
| If you're talking about affirmative action, the argument is
| that black people are held back in American society by
| historical and institutional racism (an objective fact),
| and thus are not operating on a level playing field. I
| think affirmative action is a bad response to that problem,
| but the problem it seeks to patch over is real.
| Zababa wrote:
| > what does this mean? I'm no historian, but I'm pretty sure
| the Third Reich was focused on the "German race", to the
| exclusion of all others.
|
| In France, we don't consider that people have a different
| race. We may talk about ethnicity, culture, but not race.
| Asking what race someone belongs to is something that would
| be seen as very offensive. Part of it would be because of the
| racists undertones (we don't make much of a difference
| between people that think human races exists, and people that
| think human races exists and some are better than others),
| part of it because it would be treating someone like a dog.
| Races are concepts that we apply to animals, not humans.
| Saying "the white race", "la race blanche" or "the black
| race", "la race noire" in French, would always be interpreted
| as racist, and most of the time white supremacist.
|
| > As for ratios, the ratio indicates an uneven pipeline. If
| idk, programmers were all white and highly rewarded, you
| might ask why that is. The reason can be one of two things:
| white people are culturally/systemically advantaged in
| getting those jobs (for example, those jobs are only
| available in predominantly-white areas or the education to do
| the job is more accessible to white people), or white people
| are more fundamentally capable of programming than others.
| The former is a social critique, the latter is white
| supremacy.
|
| It feels very weird to me that you consider that races
| exists, but then reject any differences between them. I
| honestly fail to understand why everyone should perform the
| same in every field. That's the opposite of everything I know
| about biology and evolution. I also think that those things
| are not so easy to separate. People will tend to do things
| they are good at, so a field that is dominated by X people
| will often correlate with X people being better in this
| field. You then have two solutions: positive discrimination,
| or changing the field.
|
| As an aside, it also feels weird to me that you call
| believing "white people are more fundamentally capable of
| programming than others" "white supremacy". According to
| Wikipedia, white supremacy is "the belief that white people
| are superior to those of other races and thus should dominate
| them". I personally reject the idea of races. Even if I have
| to work within that framework, I personally don't believe
| that white people are superior to those of other races. But
| even more fundamentally than that, if white people were
| fundamentally superior to those of other races (which I don't
| believe), I absolutely reject the idea that this would give
| them any right or legitimacy to dominate other people. I
| believe profoundely in self-determination. I believe that we
| shouldn't have the right to tell people what they do, even if
| it means they may make mistakes, or non optimal choices. I
| find it surprising and a bit disturbing that you would jump
| so easily from "white people are superior in one field" to
| "white people are the superior race and should dominate
| others".
| beaconstudios wrote:
| > In France, we don't consider that people have a different
| race.
|
| Ah I thought the parent was saying that the Third Reich was
| into the "human race" in the "there is no race but the
| human race" colourblindness way, which threw me off. Yeah I
| agree, race is a social construct and ethnicity/culture are
| historical products. I'm British, I don't think we're quite
| as post-racial but the idea of black and white people being
| culturally divided is pretty weird.
|
| > It feels very weird to me that you consider that races
| exists, but then reject any differences between them.
|
| Maybe I wasn't clear enough; I don't believe races exist.
| Skin colours do, but they don't correspond to some
| categorical human difference whatsoever. That was my point.
|
| > I honestly fail to understand why everyone should perform
| the same in every field.
|
| True, but you have to admit that if all programmers were
| white that would be pretty suspect, and would hint that
| there may be something discriminatory as play. It's not
| prima facie evidence of discrimination, but depending on
| the levels of skew it might indicate something going on.
|
| > I find it surprising and a bit disturbing that you would
| jump so easily from "white people are superior in one
| field" to "white people are the superior race and should
| dominate others".
|
| Well, if you essentialise superiority ie say that a racial
| group is objectively better at intellectual pursuits
| regardless of culture or resources, then yeah that's a
| racial supremacist argument. You can reasonably say that,
| idk, white American culture incentivises nerd stuff more
| than black American culture, but that's an example of the
| former classification ("systemic/cultural reason") that I
| gave - it's not an essentialist argument because culture is
| mutable. In which case, you can decide whether that's
| something that can/should be rectified through outreach or
| whatnot. It's not like all imbalances are a problem.
| Zababa wrote:
| > True, but you have to admit that if all programmers
| were white that would be pretty suspect, and would hint
| that there may be something discriminatory as play.
|
| I don't agree with that. Black people are heavily
| overrepresented in sports in the USA. I personally
| believe that this is partially due to some physical
| differences that makes them better at sports, and that
| even if the cultures were exactly the same, they would
| still be overrepresented (relative to their proportion in
| the total population). I don't think that makes them
| superior to other people. I also don't think that means
| there is something discriminatory at play other than
| biology. As soon as something involves skill, people will
| have different levels of success at it.
|
| > Well, if you essentialise superiority ie say that a
| racial group is objectively better at intellectual
| pursuits regardless of culture or resources, then yeah
| that's a racial supremacist argument.
|
| No, this is not. You are making a jump between "a racial
| group is better at one field" to "a racial group is
| better than all the other groups", and again to "a racial
| group is better than all the other groups and should
| dominate them". Those are three very different things.
| Even if the second one was true, which I don't think it
| is, that wouldn't mean that the third one would be true.
| A group of people being superior doesn't automatically
| gives them a right to decide for others. Again I reject
| that ideology.
|
| > You can reasonably say that, idk, white American
| culture incentivises nerd stuff more than black American
| culture, but that's an example of the former
| classification ("systemic/cultural reason") that I gave -
| it's not an essentialist argument because culture is
| mutable.
|
| So for you any mention of actual biological differences
| that leads to better performance in one domain would be
| supremacism? That's a really weird way of looking at
| things. I'm not sure how you would envision a working
| society considering that even if people were all equal at
| birth, there are quickly differences between everyone.
| I'm good at programming, better than most people that
| I've met, but I don't derive any sentiment of superiority
| from that, and even less of supremacism. I feel good when
| I can help them, and I'm glad to be able to rely on
| people better at other stuff than me.
|
| Even if deep racial differences existed, I think we could
| still build a society where people are judged as
| individuals on what they accomplish, perhaps taking into
| account what they have in some cases, where everyone
| respects each other.
| clairity wrote:
| > "Black people are heavily overrepresented in sports ...
| partially due to some physical differences that makes
| them better at sports.... I also don't think that means
| there is something discriminatory at play other than
| biology."
|
| so let's just ignore 400 years of severe and oppressive
| unnatural selection then?
|
| with that said, these arguments trying to tease out tiny
| differences between arbitrary groups of people are simply
| not fruitful outside of trying to assert
| dominance/superiority over others. the point is always to
| establish a halo effect where favorable group
| characteristics shine generously on the braggart in
| question. it's _always_ an argument about supremacy, not
| 'intellectual curiosity', but it actually signals
| individual insecurity rather than group superiority.
| Zababa wrote:
| > so let's just ignore 400 years of severe and oppressive
| unnatural selection then?
|
| I don't think I've ignored it, as I've said "partially".
|
| > with that said, these arguments trying to tease out
| tiny differences between arbitrary groups of people are
| simply not fruitful outside of trying to assert
| dominance/superiority over others. the point is always to
| establish a halo effect where favorable group
| characteristics shine generously on the braggart in
| question. it's always an argument about supremacy, not
| 'intellectual curiosity', but it actually signals
| individual insecurity rather than group superiority.
|
| No, that's not my point at all. The context was the
| following comment:
|
| > As for ratios, the ratio indicates an uneven pipeline.
| If idk, programmers were all white and highly rewarded,
| you might ask why that is. The reason can be one of two
| things: white people are culturally/systemically
| advantaged in getting those jobs (for example, those jobs
| are only available in predominantly-white areas or the
| education to do the job is more accessible to white
| people), or white people are more fundamentally capable
| of programming than others. The former is a social
| critique, the latter is white supremacy.
|
| > If you reject the white supremacist position (as you
| should), then the question becomes whether you can make
| the system provide more of an equal opportunity.
|
| In that comment, the author said that thinking that
| "white people are more fundamentally capable of
| programming than others" is white supremacy. I agree with
| you that in many cases, people trying to say that one
| group is fundamentally better than the other are
| supremacist. My point was that even if different people
| have different abilities, it shouldn't give them power
| over others.
| [deleted]
| beaconstudios wrote:
| > I don't agree with that. Black people are heavily
| overrepresented in sports in the USA. I personally
| believe that this is partially due to some physical
| differences that makes them better at sports, and that
| even if the cultures were exactly the same, they would
| still be overrepresented (relative to their proportion in
| the total population).
|
| I intentionally chose programming as an example because
| it's an intellectual pursuit. Yes, people of different
| ethnicities can have different physical characteristics;
| that much is observable. But the idea that intellectual
| capacity is an essential difference between racial groups
| is /the/ white supremacist argument. Ie, the idea that
| white people are inherently smarter than black people.
| It's their justification for racial dominance.
|
| > As soon as something involves skill, people will have
| different levels of success at it.
|
| That is true, but it leads to statical variance across
| the board. If, for a large enough sample and controlled
| for mutable factors, white people are more successful at
| programming than black people, that is an essential
| trait. Given that we agree that race isn't an objective
| reality, race can't have essential traits, and thus
| statistically significant, categorical differences
| between outcomes must be caused by mutable
| characteristics like experience, education etc.
|
| > No, this is not. You are making a jump between "a
| racial group is better at one field" to "a racial group
| is better than all the other groups", and again to "a
| racial group is better than all the other groups and
| should dominate them".
|
| How does a racial group be better at one field,
| categorically, unless either a) there are social
| differences like culture or access to education or b)
| there are essential, immutable differences between them?
| The important factor in racist reasoning is the idea that
| black people are less intelligent than white people. It's
| not true, but it's used to justify relegating them to a
| lower class.
|
| > Even if deep racial differences existed, I think we
| could still build a society where people are judged as
| individuals on what they accomplish
|
| We want this society now, except that differences in
| intelligence are not caused by race. So it's reasonable
| to investigate circumstances where outcomes are
| significantly different in order to understand what
| mutable systems and institutions could be changed to even
| the playing field so that capable black and white people
| can both succeed on merit.
| Zababa wrote:
| > I intentionally chose programming as an example because
| it's an intellectual pursuit. Yes, people of different
| ethnicities can have different physical characteristics;
| that much is observable. But the idea that intellectual
| capacity is an essential difference between racial groups
| is /the/ white supremacist argument. Ie, the idea that
| white people are inherently smarter than black people.
| It's their justification for racial dominance.
|
| How are intellectual pursuits different from sports
| pursuits, especially when it's one specific intellectual
| pursuit? And again, you make the jump from "white people
| are better at programming than black people" to "white
| people are more intelligent than black people".
|
| > That is true, but it leads to statical variance across
| the board. If, for a large enough sample and controlled
| for mutable factors, white people are more successful at
| programming than black people, that is an essential
| trait. Given that we agree that race isn't an objective
| reality, race can't have essential traits, and thus
| statistically significant, categorical differences
| between outcomes must be caused by mutable
| characteristics like experience, education etc.
|
| No, I think we disagree here. Race isn't an objective
| reality, but people still can have immutable differences
| between groups. For example, people with darker skin tend
| to lack vitamin D more easily in certain latitudes. This
| is an immutable difference with people with lighter skin.
| But that difference is a spectrum, and given a specific
| individual, you can't always put him in a "light skin" or
| "dark skin" group. What I reject with the idea of race is
| that everyone belongs to a specific race, and that you
| can draw clear lines between them. I don't reject the
| idea of immutable differences between people. I'm
| personally colorblind. I can't do anything about it. This
| makes my vision of color strictly worse than most people.
| But that's one characteristic. I also have brown eyes,
| which means I'm a bit less sensitive to the Sun than
| people with green and blue eyes. I belong to the
| "colorblind" and the "brown eyes" categories of human.
| But there's no "race" for that. White people have brown
| eyes and are colorblind. Black people too. But not all of
| them.
|
| > How does a racial group be better at one field,
| categorically, unless either a) there are social
| differences like culture or access to education or b)
| there are essential, immutable differences between them?
| The important factor in racist reasoning is the idea that
| black people are less intelligent than white people. It's
| not true, but it's used to justify relegating them to a
| lower class.
|
| Again, I don't understand why you're defending the idea
| that if there are immutable differences between people,
| one group must dominate the other. It's possible to
| accept that one group is better at something than the
| other without thinking that this group should dominate
| the other. And one field is not everything. I don't know
| many popular black programmers, and I don't know many
| popular white rappers. Who is the more intelligent here?
| Who should dominate who here? No one.
|
| > We want this society now, except that differences in
| intelligence are not caused by race. So it's reasonable
| to investigate circumstances where outcomes are
| significantly different in order to understand what
| mutable systems and institutions could be changed to even
| the playing field so that capable black and white people
| can both succeed on merit.
|
| I don't think we know for sure the origins of differences
| in intelligence between people. For example, IQ is highly
| inheritable, but malnutrition also reduces it a lot. That
| would mean that even if IQ was perfectly distributed in
| society between classes (which I don't think it is), the
| lower classes would slowly have a lower IQ because of
| malnutrition unless there's some sort of "safety net"
| against malnutrition. IQ isn't a perfect proxy for
| intelligence, far from it, but it's a start.
| beaconstudios wrote:
| > How are intellectual pursuits different from sports
| pursuits, especially when it's one specific intellectual
| pursuit? And again, you make the jump from "white people
| are better at programming than black people" to "white
| people are more intelligent than black people".
|
| Can you name a reason that two populations that only
| differ in racial category would differ on average in
| programming capability that isn't rooted in mutable
| things like culture, socioeconomic status etc? You're
| aggressively missing my point.
|
| > Again, I don't understand why you're defending the idea
| that if there are immutable differences between people,
| one group must dominate the other.
|
| The fuck are you talking about? Point to a single thing I
| said that defends racial dominance (you can't). Correct
| me if I'm wrong but you appear to be taking the position
| that white people /are/ innately more intelligent than
| black people but we should ignore that. My position is
| that they aren't, and even if they were we still
| shouldn't dominate others.
|
| Every other argument you've trotted out here are
| essentialist about intelligence, that some races and some
| classes are more intelligent than others. That's a pretty
| reactionary position, and I don't think it's one you can
| be argued out of because it is axiomatic rather than
| empirical.
| Zababa wrote:
| > Correct me if I'm wrong but you appear to be taking the
| position that white people /are/ innately more
| intelligent than black people but we should ignore that.
| My position is that they aren't, and even if they were we
| still shouldn't dominate others.
|
| No, I'm not taking that position at all. My position is
| the same as yours I think: I don't think white people are
| more intelligent than black people, and even if they
| were, that wouldn't give white people any rights over
| black people.
| [deleted]
| whimsicalism wrote:
| tl;dr In France, we don't consider that people have a
| different race, we only actively consider white people to
| be intellectually superior (or no: only intellectually
| superior at programming. european brains are more suited
| for coding than african ones).
|
| But don't worry, this widespread belief certainly doesn't
| impact any of our hiring decisions or our society
| whatsoever. In fact, it impacts our society so little,
| we've made it illegal to gather any statistics about how
| it might impact our society.
| Zababa wrote:
| No, that's not what I meant at all.
|
| > we only actively consider white people to be
| intellectually superior (or no: only intellectually
| superior at programming. european brains are more suited
| for coding than african ones).
|
| I don't think that's true at all. My point is that even
| if it was, that wouldn't make "europeans brains"
| "superior" to "african brains".
|
| > But don't worry, this widespread belief certainly
| doesn't impact any of our hiring decisions or our society
| whatsoever. In fact, it impacts our society so little,
| we've made it illegal to gather any statistics about how
| it might impact our society.
|
| For people that don't know, racial statistics are
| forbidden by law in France. And you're right, that means
| that we don't have precise data like in the USA on which
| people are represented where. These statistics could help
| affirmative action, or help arguments in favor of anti
| discrimination law.
| adwn wrote:
| > _But the idea that intellectual capacity is an
| essential difference between racial groups is /the/ white
| supremacist argument._
|
| Why do you believe that genetic differences suddenly stop
| at the brain stem?
|
| Most people who accept that genetic differences between
| subpopulations exist, also acknowledge that south-east
| Asians and Ashkenazi Jews are on average more skilled in
| STEM fields than "white" people. So much for _white
| supremacy_.
| beaconstudios wrote:
| Yeah, white supremacists usually do their best to ignore
| that part.
|
| Do you believe race to be a real thing? Like there is
| some unifying trait between "white" people or between
| "black" people, besides a vague notion of skin colour and
| cultural similarity? Bear in mind that Italians and Irish
| used to be called nonwhite, that there are numerous
| different ethnicities in both Europe and Africa
| (including many African ethnicities that you likely would
| not call "black"), and that its extremely hard to isolate
| ethnic causes of variance from cultural ones?
| jhgb wrote:
| > Do you believe race to be a real thing?
|
| That's a very loaded question because the word has like
| six different meanings depending on who you're talking
| to.
| adwn wrote:
| > _Do you believe race to be a real thing?_
|
| "Race" as in "the color of the skin allows statistically
| significant predictions about physical and mental
| aptitude"? No, that's a stupid categorization, because
| it's far too wide and imprecise.
|
| However, I do believe there are (small) genetic
| differences between subpopulations from different
| geographic origins. For example, it's hard to deny that
| Kenyans have an unmatched edge in long distance running,
| one which can't be explained using non-genetic factors.
| beaconstudios wrote:
| Yeah there are small genetic differences between
| ethnicities. Things like height, bone density, certain
| conditions like sickle cell anemia etc.
|
| However, that's a different claim altogether from the
| idea that white and black people (again, an imaginary
| category) have a statistically significant difference in
| average intellectual capacity.
| gruez wrote:
| >However, that's a different claim altogether from the
| idea that white and black people (again, an imaginary
| category) have a statistically significant difference in
| average intellectual capacity.
|
| 1. what counts as "statistically significant difference"?
| A 0.01% increase can be statistically significant if your
| sample size is high enough.
|
| 2. Going back to a few comments ago, why do you think
| that differences can materialize between ethnicities, but
| the differences stop at the brain?
| rajin444 wrote:
| I would desperately love for somebody to tell me #4 and how
| they got there. Most modern (western) social narratives hinge
| on looking at high level distribution by sex/race/etc and
| declaring there's an issue. Nobody is verifying the correctness
| of these distributions because there are so many confounds it's
| nearly impossible, but they move forward anyways.
| Solarsail wrote:
| (Apologies if this is too much a personal anecdote for HN)
| Honestly, this is one of the indicators that forces my
| distrust of the modern family of social discourse. My own
| suspicions have a specific conversation in 2012 spooking a
| few hundred people (online), who lashed out with such odd
| phrasing that it spread contagiously to whoever they met...
| And formed the chimera movement we see now.
|
| ...I might outright have an alternate history of the entire
| '10s "Culture War". Or I might have gone paranoid. Of course
| I can't prove any of it. I'd love an answer to your first
| question myself.
| Mountain_Skies wrote:
| Now that university enrollment is roughly 60% female, 40%
| male, there's very little outcry over this disparity and what
| little exists is drown out by the continued loud cries that
| universities are biased against women. It appears the
| ultimate ideal ratio is infinite of my group, zero of your
| group.
| agentdrtran wrote:
| There's articles written about this every six months or so
| if you read the news regularly, and they are very
| sympathetic to the multiple possible reasons for this that
| negatively affect men in other ways.
| skrbjc wrote:
| Actually they are focusing on the STEM fields now saying
| they enroll too many men.
| dang wrote:
| You started a hellish race flamewar with this comment. Not
| cool.
|
| Please don't take HN threads further into generic ideological
| flamewar. That's just what we don't want here, because it's
| extremely repetitive. It also almost always turns nasty. Those
| properties hold true regardless of which ideologies people are
| battling for or against. All of this is therefore off topic
| here.
|
| https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html
|
| Edit: you badly perpetuated this flamewar downthread. We ban
| accounts that do that, so please don't do it again.
| endisneigh wrote:
| When does the author reduce diversity to different skin colors?
| adwn wrote:
| When their graph titled "Tech Journalism Is Less Diverse Than
| Tech" only shows "white" vs non-"white". When their
| statistic, introduced with "highlight of the results", only
| contains data points about "white" vs non-"white".
|
| There's not much else to this article. Therefore, the author
| reduces diversity to skin colors.
| endisneigh wrote:
| In the context of the article white and black are supposed
| to be races and says as much. There are "black people" who
| are light skinned, and there are people darker than "black
| people" who are not considered black.
| adwn wrote:
| > _There are "black people" who are light skinned, and
| there are people darker than "black people" who are not
| considered black._
|
| Wtf? That's literally the opposite of true. What's next,
| will you claim that there are "blondes" with brunette
| hair, and "dark-haired people" who are considered
| redheads?
| endisneigh wrote:
| Black doesn't mean your skin is literally black, lol.
| Can't take you seriously tbh.
|
| Are Native Americans Black? Certain Indians? Samoans?
| Give me a break lol
|
| Comparing blondes with Black people is an inane
| comparison
| Fordec wrote:
| I would contend that, while a subset, GAMMA companies != all tech
| companies as the headline implies
| xondono wrote:
| Off topic, but I feel obligated to comment each time I see the
| "GAMMA" acronym.
|
| We either change according to parent company, and then we need
| to take the G and put an A. Or we don't and leave the F.
|
| GAMMA makes no sense.
| akavi wrote:
| FAANG started as a stock ticker acronym. Facebook's stock
| ticker's now $mtvs, Google's is still $goog/$googl.
|
| That's _a_ justification at least.
| [deleted]
| truthwhisperer wrote:
| because the quality is not measured on whether you're a male or
| female but on the number of readers or clicks. Very transparent
| and very non-discriminatory. We all know woman write differently
| and generally speaking don't touch the bits and bytes but more
| the feelings/humanity behind.
|
| For example, questions like does a chip have feelings or what
| about this twin brother does he feel lonely
| spamizbad wrote:
| I know two Black technical journalists; they are both blocked by
| various industry people. Their articles are sourced almost
| exclusively from investigative reporting/leaks from lower-level
| employees. Meanwhile super antagonistic while journos will
| weirdly be omitted from block lists.
| WesolyKubeczek wrote:
| Did they publish their articles, though, somewhere at all?
|
| I'd love to read a good quality investigative article any day.
| I couldn't care less about how much melanin the author got, but
| I like good stories with the "from below" perspective. They are
| invariably better than the founders/leaders information bubbles
| a lot of outlets like to fixate upon.
| joeman1000 wrote:
| This graph is bad. It looks like a cumulative frequency graph. It
| looks more like a sediment analysis.
___________________________________________________________________
(page generated 2021-11-19 23:01 UTC)