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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)

#231

Post by lupire »

kodah wrote: post #133
Hermitian909 wrote: post #130

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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…

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…

There are about a million people with FAANG-tier software/engineering jobs.

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

#232

Post by confidantlake »

Hermitian909 wrote: post #150
kodah wrote: post #133

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 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 sol…

I agree with you for the most part, but one field has done better. Athletics. Getting a job as an athlete is more about merit and less about connections than even tech. This is because it is much easier to measure talent than almost any industry. For running you only need a stopwatch.

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

#233

Post by Iefthandrule »

shalmanese wrote: post #202
Iefthandrule wrote: post #189

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

Finance has plenty of articles written about it but you don't see them because that's not a part of your media diet. Finance has made some pretty significant strides to diversify post 2008 due to public pressure.

Do you have any evidence from your media diet? I see recent articles over the past year that it isn't successful in diversifying.

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

#234

Post by rajin444 »

whimsicalism wrote: post #146
rajin444 wrote: post #112

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

"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), ji…

You should focus on handling specific occurrences of racism as opposed to looking at a high level numbers and drawing conclusions from them. The latter is subjective and can be abused endlessly.

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

#235

Post by robjan »

Iefthandrule wrote: post #144
ASinclair wrote: post #120

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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?

You don't see narratives about how everyone should get into finance. That is certainly a good ol boys club.

There's no desire to commodities finance work, but there is for tech

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

#236

Post by rayiner »

hn_throwaway_99 wrote: post #220
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…

> 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 n…

This is an unscientific point. One, test prep doesn’t help that much. Two, it’s not that expensive: https://www.realclearinvestigations.com/articles/2018/06/21/...

> For them, Jiechu's price – $650 for a seven-week summer course, four hours a day, Monday to Friday – is a doable stretch. That comes to a bit less than $5 an hour, which is not exactly the “thousands of dollars in test prep” that Mr. Carranza cited.

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

#237

Post by rayiner »

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

I’m ESL and no they don’t. They privilege people who read a lot.

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

#238

Post by rayiner »

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.

That’s basically how law school admissions is done in the US. It’s 95% an index score combining LSAT and GPA. It works fine. I think people attribute the desperation and intensity of the Indian system to the tests, but it’s more the limited number opportunities compared to the population.

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

#239

Post by Der_Einzige »

gonehome wrote: post #5

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…

[flagged]

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

#240

Post by adwn »

dang wrote: post #166
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

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/newsguidelin…

I'm sorry, dang, that wasn't my intention. I should have known better.

It won't happen again.

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