Live data from Hacker News

Privilege and Inequality in Silicon Valley

medium.com

281–290 of 322 posts

Re: Privilege and Inequality in Silicon Valley

#281
He conspicuously missed the part where time spent working a job, studying and generally acting like a responsible adult is time not spent networking.

The "poor" kids also tend to find each other at college and over the first few semesters form separate networks from the rich kids. People tend to want to hang out with people who are similar to them. One group goes out partying together, the other sits in a dorm room listening to music and drinking a $15 handle. Their friend groups don't overlap over much.

The poor kids tend to build networks where the members personal skills and resources they bring to the table in the present are important (or that was my observation). I guess when you can't throw money at a problem knowing who's the IT guy and the car guy becomes more important.

Re: Privilege and Inequality in Silicon Valley

#282

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Every job, startup accelerator, and VC checks your background. They check your education, not your family background. Nobody has a clue whether your parents were middle class or lower income.

That may be somewhat true if education was completely or even somewhat disconnected from familial background... are you completely ignoring all the discussion going on here? One major point is that without that background, your resume isn't ever even going to be on the hiring person's desk, much less under their attention.

I'm not saying that education is complete disconnected from familial background. But the latter isn't solely a determinant of the former.

Ricky, for example, has a Stanford degree. No hiring manager will know about his low family income. Pretending that VCs/managers somehow have an invisible ball to peer into an applicant's entire life is completely disingenuous.

Re: Privilege and Inequality in Silicon Valley

#283
post #251

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Thanks for not denying that privilege exists, and for pointing out that some of it is likely due to the unconscious bias we can politely dub "human nature"! E.g. we hire people who look like us, even if they're not the best people for the job... You know, in situations like this I'm often reminded of that Upton Sinclair quote, "It is difficult to get a man to understand something, when his salary depends on his not u…

I'd like to see some of those insanely documented things and look at them critically. For example, the job callback thing pertains to people with black-sounding names , not whether the the applicant is actually black. Perhaps that speaks to cultural privilege instead of racial. Consider scholarships: if you're a white male, you have to be exceptional vs your cohort in some other way (academics, athletics, etc) to fin…

Frankly speaking, It kinda sounds like you're so invested in the idea of privilege being fictional that my guess is nothing anyone says to you via the internet would ever change your mind.

Which, funnily enough, is one of the benefits of it, you can ignore it and pretend it doesn't exist, because the bias it implies wouldn't effect you anyway.

I don't try to convince climate change deniers either, because I learned long ago that you can't logic someone out of a position they didn't logic themselves into.

Re: Privilege and Inequality in Silicon Valley

#284
post #215
post #206

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I feel like the majority of people make the mistake of reflecting on themselves and saying "if only I had this", or "if only I wasn't disadvantaged in this way"... In reality, everyone is disadvantaged in some way, and I can guarantee you that the successful people had a lot of disadvantages and setbacks. You shouldn't dwindle on what you don't have, but rather on what you do have. Successful people don't wait for th…

Are you seriously saying that everyone's disadvantages are the same? Wow.

It's called the Law of Averages. It's a type of magical thinking.

Re: Privilege and Inequality in Silicon Valley

#285
post #273

Earlier quoted context omitted.

99% of the time, when you do something that lots of smart people say will fail, you fail. People look at that 1% and conclude that if you just keep whacking your head against a brick wall, it will eventually turn into gold, completely ignoring the combination of smarts, habits, and the sheer dumb luck that are actually behind success. But the gutters are full of ambitious failures.

Ambition != working hard and smart Spoken like a critic. Not a producer. I know lots and lots of smart people who know how to criticize but not to create.

Yeah, that's a standard rhetorical catch-22. Virtuous people always succeed, so anyone who doesn't succeed is by definition not virtuous--the system works! It's the same kind of thinking as "If God doesn't answer your prayers, it's your fault for not praying hard enough," or "Communism cannot fail, it can only be failed."

Re: Privilege and Inequality in Silicon Valley

#286

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I'm a she, btw.

Off-topic, but I wanted to say that I really appreciate this comment/clarification - the matter-of-fact tone makes the point without getting anyone's back up, which (IMHO) is exactly the right way to reach hearts and minds. I'm pretty bad about defaulting to masculine pronouns myself, and this simple exchange has done a lot to motivate me to break that habit (I would have also assumed your gender to be male, and woul…

Thank you for this comment. I suffer severely from low self esteem and impostor syndrome. Coworkers from several previous jobs have even gone so far as to tell me they thought I was a genius, and it made me feel immensely guilty every time.

I'm going to try putting some of your suggestions into practice. I'm at a crossroads in my career, having recently been separated from my job due to budget cuts. Even though my job loss wasn't an indictment of my worth as a person or the craftsmanship of my work, my confidence still took a significant blow.

Staying motivated while looking, applying, and interviewing for jobs you believe you don't deserve to get is challenging, to say the least.

Re: Privilege and Inequality in Silicon Valley

#287

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I think he's point is that there are also disadvantages of growing up under high income (of course it depends on parenting too). Too spoiled, cannot relate to ordinary people, etc. I seem to remember that many entrepreneurs are born to upper middle class parents. Not spoiled enough that they cannot work, but still fortunate to have a safe upbringing and be risk tolerant. (I do agree with you that people are born with…

Wealth is not a disadvantage. Period.

The point you seem to be missing is that relative wealth is not a trump card that erases all opposition magically.

Re: Privilege and Inequality in Silicon Valley

#288
post #10

Great read. I've become allergic to words like "privilege" as they usually are seen in the company of ill-thought-out and grandiose/insulting/wrong proclamations about How Things Should Be Done, ..but this is none of that - it's an honest look and deep analysis of someone's experience. And knowing how important upbringing is, and the sheer (almost superhuman) tenacity the author had to go through to even partially ov…

To be honest, one thing you can do is retrain yourself to be un-allergic to words like "privilege", and see their use as the consequence of a lot of people's suffering systemic unfairness and injustice. When I see that word, "privilege," especially tied to attacks on white/male/hetero/whatever, my response isn't "oh jeez, not that again".....it's "yeah, that is a problem, and I really wish the other white male hetero…

It's not the word that is the problem. The problem is that the word is used with intent to insult people for the sin of being white and male. No matter what word you choose to use for that insult, it will be met with an eye-roll.

Re: Privilege and Inequality in Silicon Valley

#289
post #283

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I'd like to see some of those insanely documented things and look at them critically. For example, the job callback thing pertains to people with black-sounding names , not whether the the applicant is actually black. Perhaps that speaks to cultural privilege instead of racial. Consider scholarships: if you're a white male, you have to be exceptional vs your cohort in some other way (academics, athletics, etc) to fin…

Frankly speaking, It kinda sounds like you're so invested in the idea of privilege being fictional that my guess is nothing anyone says to you via the internet would ever change your mind. Which, funnily enough, is one of the benefits of it, you can ignore it and pretend it doesn't exist, because the bias it implies wouldn't effect you anyway. I don't try to convince climate change deniers either, because I learned l…

That's weird, because I said nothing of the sort. In fact my GP comment pretty strongly implies my belief that some privilege does exist.

My argument is fairly constrained in scope and can logically be broken down like this: privilege can be used to describe a group but not applied to an individual. This should be axiomatic; incorrectly applying group properties to an individual is known as an ecological or division fallacy. Whenever you hear (or invoke) an admonition to "check your privilige", consider whether this error is being made.

The thing is, people know this. I know they know this because any example of "anti-privilige" is summarily dismissed as a unique case representing the elastic nature of privilige.

The other thing that makes privilige hard to discuss is that when you question assumptions or ask for specifics, you are instantly dismissed as an enemy of the cause. Your reply here is a great example. Above you mention "a million other things" that have been "insanely thoroughly documented", I said I'd like to see them to look at them critically, and that trigged Red Alert. At that point you lumped me in with climate change deniers and considered me irrational, because asking questions makes me the Enemy. This is a pattern that occurs frequently; the CoC discussion on php-internals took a similar path. It's such a bizarre thing to me, because as engineers we all follow a rubric that's roughly: 1. identify and describe the problem 2. consider solutions 3. implement the best solution. But in the social justice arena, trying to participate in #1 gets you cast out as oblivious, ignorant, irrational, or worse -- unless you belong to a certain in-group.

In the quest for inclusion, it seems like there's a lot of exclusion happening.

Re: Privilege and Inequality in Silicon Valley

#290
post #64
post #38

This sounds very familiar. When I was in University I didn't understand why some people didn't care about grades and partied so much. When we left school and got into the real world I understood why: they had rich parents with contacts that could get them good jobs or seed capital for their own businesses. I had lots of ideas and worked in a lot of startups for more than 10 years but now the following phrase from the…

The other possibility is that going to the parties is a good use of time, and that is where many students develop their networks. In addition to that, signalling theory would indicate that what classes you take and how well you do are much less important than the university you attend and the faculty you graduate from.

Signalling theory absolutely does not indicate that.
Post reply on HN