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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)

#211

Post by 1cvmask »

oh_sigh wrote: post #207
Jensson wrote: post #182

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

You may find that the black people they favor are also privileged. IE a Nigerian 1-percenter is just as black for affirmative action metrics as an African American from a broken family living in inner-city Baltimore, but the Nigerian is probably 1000x more likely to be accepted into an American college.

Yes exactly. That is why the diversity metric that would actually alleviate the situation of poor blacks like being income based is NOT used as that would also cripple the rich white elites.

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

#212

Post by 1cvmask »

8note wrote: post #197
1cvmask wrote: post #141

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

You still have advantages in how the tests are written. The questions still privilege people who grow up speaking a specific version of English

For sure. Although one thing that has baffled me is that all Swiss Germans do their school work in traditional German and NOT the language they speak. Swiss Germans understand Germans but the vice versa is not always true:

The dialects of Swiss German must not be confused with Swiss Standard German, the variety of Standard German used in Switzerland. Most people in Germany do not understand Swiss German. Therefore, when an interview with a Swiss German speaker is shown on German television, subtitles are required.[6] Although Swiss German is the native language, from age 6, Swiss school students additionally learn Swiss Standard German at school and are thus capable of understanding, writing and speaking Standard German with varying abilities mainly based on the level of education.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Swiss_German

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

#213

Post by paisawalla »

brendoelfrendo wrote: post #193
commandlinefan wrote: post #171

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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 accura…

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 tutorin…

> if you want something meritocratic, what we find is that testing ends up reinforcing existing social strata more often than not

Compared to what? It's not a criticism to simply state that standardized testing fails to be perfectly meritocratic.

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

#215

Post by humanrebar »

Traster wrote: post #61
brabel wrote: post #7

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...

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.

And don't forget that the data group everyone with ancestors from Asia, a rather large and diverse place, as being from a single demographic. That is, if they don't group people from an Asian background in the broad "not historically underrepresented" category. As if Uighers and Cambodians (for instance) have massive institutional advantages.

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

#216

Post by sangnoir »

ratww wrote: post #188
sangnoir wrote: post #158

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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…

> 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.

That approach is new to me, I'm as I like planning my vacations ahead of time, and am more flexible on when I switch jobs.

Have you ever run into a situation where you realize it's not a good fit a few days into the process? Do you cancel your vacation, or do the rest of the days go to waste?

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

#217

Post by quadrifoliate »

filmgirlcw wrote: post #138
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…

>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 commen…

Thank you for the detailed response with your real-life experience and links; material like this is why I come here! Link 3 in particular sounds like a tailor-made companion piece to this article.

> 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.

This is exactly what I don't get. You'd think at least one large regional newspaper would have the gumption to try and pivot completely into an app-only, region-wide live version of Twitter or something like that. Currently, small swathes of this are being captured by (terrible) startups like Citizen [1].

Basically, what you're saying is the standard narrative, that free content on the web has destroyed the traditional media model. What I'm saying is the traditional large media houses have totally failed at embracing this model, and converting themselves into efficient producers of it. If they had shown more imagination, maybe we'd be reading information-packed Live Wires on NYTimesWire interspersed with ads, instead of Tweets interspersed with ads.

----------------------------------------

[1] https://www.theverge.com/2021/7/27/22595648/citizen-app-crim...

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

#218

Post by lelandfe »

1cvmask wrote: post #141
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…

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…

> When you are privileged you have no extra weight or leg up over someone else on standardized tests

American kids from poor families do worse on average than kids with more money on the SATs.

https://www.researchgate.net/publication/280232788_Race_Pove...

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

#219

Post by OJFord »

notaniitian wrote: post #195
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.

It's not meritocratic. Almost 70% seats are reserved in IITs. https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Reservation_policy_in_Indian... 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 t…

Recommend Netflix's Kota Factory that I happened to watch recently to anyone interested in this. (Not vouching for any accuracy, I'm British, (and it's a fictional drama series) but this comment reminded me of it since it does portray the sort of madness(?) described.)

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

#220

Post by hn_throwaway_99 »

1cvmask wrote: post #141
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…

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…

> When you are privileged you have no extra weight or leg up over someone else on standardized tests.

That is demonstrably not true. Wealthy people can and do spend legions on test prep and tutoring.

But that said, I generally agree with some of the underlying sentiment, which is that many wealthy people value education and status that can be attained through scholastic achievement in a way that many poor people do not. I think that even if you had loads of high quality, free SAT prep classes and tutors that you'd still see a large test score gap.

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