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Tech journalism is less diverse than tech (2020)

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Re: Tech journalism is less diverse than tech (2020)

#91

Post by kodah »

quadrifoliate wrote: post #10

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 "E…

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.

Re: Tech journalism is less diverse than tech (2020)

#92

Post by thenanyu »

skulk wrote: post #66
rayiner wrote: post #60

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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 ov…

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.

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

Re: Tech journalism is less diverse than tech (2020)

#93

Post by thenanyu »

whimsicalism wrote: post #53
dayvid wrote: post #46

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

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.

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.

Re: Tech journalism is less diverse than tech (2020)

#94

Post by beaconstudios »

Zababa wrote: post #85
beaconstudios wrote: post #58

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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 adv…

> 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…

> 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.

Re: Tech journalism is less diverse than tech (2020)

#95

Post by agentdrtran »

secondaryacct wrote: post #2

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 pra…

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.

Re: Tech journalism is less diverse than tech (2020)

#96

Post by angelzen »

thenanyu wrote: post #92
skulk wrote: post #66

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

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

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/foreign...

Re: Tech journalism is less diverse than tech (2020)

#97

Post by whimsicalism »

thenanyu wrote: post #93
whimsicalism wrote: post #53

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

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.

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.

Re: Tech journalism is less diverse than tech (2020)

#98

Post by endisneigh »

adwn wrote: post #13

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

When does the author reduce diversity to different skin colors?

Re: Tech journalism is less diverse than tech (2020)

#99

Post by agentdrtran »

Mountain_Skies wrote: post #73
rajin444 wrote: post #59

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

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.

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.

Re: Tech journalism is less diverse than tech (2020)

#100

Post by endisneigh »

secondaryacct wrote: post #2

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 pra…

Is there any definition of race, other than “human”, where the authors point changes in correctness or lack thereof?
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