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.
> 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.)
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.
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Diversity apparently includes fencing and rowing at most elite colleges. Just another filter with the benefit of virtue signaling and posturing.
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.
I never understood this. Imo the moral justification behind affirmative action is that the upper echelons of society should represent the demographic makeup of society in general. Importing people who look like the people who you try to represent is the opposite of representation.
> 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.
> 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.
I'd think it's less about test prep than it is about a stable home and family environment, how well/poorly local schools are funded, access to public libraries and the leisure time required of both parent and child to able to use all of the above. All of which is a lot more than $650 and all of which favors wealthier people.
In a lot of places these days it's really easy to get a $15/hr job (I mean that's like entry-level fast food work, ubering, etc.) So $650 works out to slightly more than a week's work, be super conservative with taxes/expenses/benefits and let's say 2 weeks.
So 2 weeks' work is a considerable amount of work, but it's also certainly within the realm of possibility for the vast, vast majority of people. I'd really say this just highlights how some communities value educational attainment and others do not.
Sure, it's much easier to come up with $650 if you're rich than if you're poor, but that's true of just about anything. $650 is certainly within the reach of nearly everyone, it just depends on whether your parents are willing to sacrifice for it.
I could afford private flights on my salary, for my example, and it’s true: “it’s just more hours.”
The only thing is… I can’t find more hours in my week.
And the real bigger issue is, even through I can afford it, it may be hard to justify it because it amounts to a major opportunity cost.
For a working class family, they probably are going to find it difficult to source $650. …Especially if no one has gone to college and no one even knows the importance of that $650.
If $650 seems like nothing, all that you are saying is that your social group is limited to people who find $650 to be nothing. It’s like the Lucille Bluth banana quote in living…
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.
I generally agree but it’s definitely an advantage to have money, I got tutoring and practice tests from an early age. Someone poorer would have to work twice as hard
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."
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.)
> 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.
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?
If we’re trying to measure something (say strength), should we measure that thing as directly as we can, or should we add a bunch of adjustments to make things more “fair”? Do we want to know how strong someone is, or how surprising it is that they’re as strong as they are given their starting point?
If someone has a home gym, a personal trainer, and time to workout 2x/day, 6 days a week, how much should we penalize their results? Zero? 25%? 50%?
I think that being strong as demonstrated on tests of strength is a valid (and the most valid I’m aware of) measure of “merit” in the context of strength. I think the same is true in other fields as well, including scholastics.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
> 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.
> 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?
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.
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.
Every new hire is subject to a month-long probationary period, everywhere besides perhaps non-essential government positions. The only difference here is someone mentioned it.
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.
>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.
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.
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).
As a (former) lawyer, I wouldn’t clump together law and humanities for this purpose. Many law students and lawyers didn’t major in humanities subjects, and the earning power of lawyers is far greater than academics in the humanities.
> 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."
> 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?
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.
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.
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.
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
> 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".
Because it's a shrinking industry with excess supply where the compensation and working conditions are terrible? It doesn't have to be more complicated than that.
> 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.
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
Heh, touché, I probably should have specified CEO of major corporation. Since technically anyone with sufficent money and expertise could become CEO of a useless shell company that does nothing and lacks even a vague plan to develop a business model. (In the US at least.)
> 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.
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.
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.
> 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.
> 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.
> 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.
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.
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.
Graduating from Stanford with a decent GPA is itself a useful signal and unsurprisingly things are therefore easier.
It gives evidence that not only are you equally skilled as that high-school dropout (as given in the premise of this scenario), but that you have basic life, organizational, planning, and work with others skills to graduate from Stanford.
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.
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.
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+.
> 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.
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.
> "Everyone should learn to be a citizen journalist", or "Everyone should learn to be a copy editor".
In theory, everyone already is a citizen journalist, and everyone should've learned to be a copy editor in the public school system. Much of the impetus for the "everyone should learn to code" effort is by analogy with English class, which is required every year in the public school system, but programming class is usually an exotic elective reserved for upper-middle-class districts. Illiteracy is not socially acceptable in America, but lots of people will say "Oh, I'm just not a math person", and programming is considered a profession rather than a requisite skill.
The woes of professional journalists are somewhat related to this. We're surrounded by a glut of potential writers. Because of that, we need heuristics for who we should actually pay attention to. One easy heuristic for that is pedigree: who do you know, what family were you born into, which college did you go to?
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.
> 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.
>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.
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.
> 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.
I actually don’t disagree with you at all. I think many of the newspapers have only themselves to blame. They were entirely unwilling to embrace digital until it was too late. But for many of them, it is too late. Because they are dead or owned by hedge funds that want to maximize profits and cut costs, and local reporting, even for stuff like city council meetings, is expensive because it has a smaller aggregate audience than just doing national stories. I think the challenge is that even before the collapse of print, you'd had an extended period of rollups of various newspaper owners thanks to eased regulations that has only accelerated over time. Gannett/GateHouse, all of the Tribune drama (which could be its own book), for two more recent examples) effectively means that most local papers are owned by a major conglomerate or hedge fund. I won’t even get into any of the pension stuff that has been horribly mismanaged (Poynter has had great coverage of that), but this report [1] from UNC Chapel Hill is five years old but does a great job showing how ownership of local papers has collapsed over the 2000s and how many papers have died. (It is somewhat ironic that one of the most important endowments/sponsors of journalism grants/research/education is the Knight Foundation, named for the newspaper magnate and half of once super publisher Knight Ridder, which was bought by McClatchy in 2006. McClatchy filed for bankruptcy in 2020 and was bought by a hedge fund in a bankruptcy auction. Meaning, Knight itself hasn’t existed in a material way in 15 years.)
Now, to be sure, as I said, those local papers did themselves no favors. And Knight Ridder and some others were more savvy about technology (McClatchy not so much), but it hasn’t worked. Or at least not at scale. There have been many attempts, but most of it has come from the wrong place. You had initiatives like Tim Armstrong's Patch, which was the idea of turning every local area into a blog, similar to that LiveWire concept you had. Patch expanded fast and was quickly sold along, with Armstrong to AOL, where as CEO Armstrong poured millions and millions into it, before having to accept defeat and sell it off at a massive loss. Patch still exists, but it’s much smaller in scope than what was its plan.
Then you have all of the attempts of Tribune to modernize, which have mostly been disastrous (Tronc). Google Digital First Media and read about how the foxes conspired with some of the hens to raid the henhouse [2]. Gannet has tried too and failed. But you’re not wrong that more innovation was needed from smarter people.
The New York Times did it. In 2014, their current publisher (who at the time was learning the business from his father and as a millennial, was one of the younger people in a power position at the paper), famously commissioned and was the lead author a digital innovation report [3] that excoriated the Times' strategy and seriously set it up for the success it has had over the last seven years. That’s ultimately how he got the publisher job in 2016, several years earlier than people expected. But the Times had a much stronger financial situation than most other papers and the gravitas and hubris to be innovative and take chances. That’s why it’s the Times. (It’s the Yankees of media companies)
I don’t mean to be dismissive. My own bias is def towards the tech/digital side of media, having never worked in local news and spending my whole career in digital (I graduated from college in 2008 and never even thought about going to print), but as someone who has been obsessed with tech and media my entire life, this is an area I’ve been watching for as long as I can remember. CJR, Poynter, Nieman, The Knight Foundation and others are actively trying to fund and incubate ideas for the future of news, especially at a local level, but it’s difficult. The Colorado Sun is one rare example of a local community paper, born from the ashes of the hedge-fund cultures, that has managed to break through, but it’s just a tough business.
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.
"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.
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!
Posting like this breaks the site guidelines badly. Please make your substantive points thoughtfully and drop the name-calling, flamebait, fulmination, and snark.
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.
It would be more accurate to say Swisher is politically-connected press. When tech and political machines were in bed together (e.g., much of her time at AllThingsD and the founding of Recode, Obama in the whitehouse, Newsom in local SV politics...) she was extremely friendly to the industry. After the ca. 2016 fallout between the two she chose the politics side. The tech side of course sees this as a heel turn, rather than a fundamental shift in priorities from both parties.
Ben Thompson is just John Gruber without the sense of taste. You couldn't design a better sycophant if you tried.
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.
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.
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?
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.
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.
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.
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.
How would an internal study of (1) work? If I had any hint of data that we’re passing over fully competent candidates while positions go unfilled, I’m going to have already fixed it. I don’t care if the candidates improperly passed over are right or left handed, what their blood type/Rh factor is, what gender/background, or how tall they are.
If we assessed them as competent originally, we’d have made the offer. I don’t know how looking at the same data again will change anything.
(I think there probably are biases in evaluation of competence, but those likely wont show up in a review of the same data that has recorded those biases as fact.)
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??
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.
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.
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.
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...
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.
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.
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).
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.
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.
> 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.
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.
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'?
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
Why did they choose "white" as a measurement of diversity? I think if they had chosen "Asian", the graph would show an opposite picture: lower diversity at tech than in writers.
This is a great example of fitting data to your conclusion. You're comparing the entire population of employees of major tech companies against specific journalists. Why not compare the entire companies?
Also the idea that diversity at a big tech companies is an indication of diversity in technical fields is just wrong.
It’s worth noting nobody found his data worth publishing. So we have to take his word for it. And surprise, the blog is full of right-wing propaganda. So of course HN signal-boosts it.
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.
> 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.
>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.
> 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.
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.
> 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.
> "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.
> 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.
> 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.
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.
> 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.
> 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.
> 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.
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?
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.
>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?
> 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.
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.
(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.
>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.
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.
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.).
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.
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.
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"?
Who are you even talking about - do you have an example?
Most people who want greater diversity in journalism aren't demanding jobs for themselves (indeed most of them aren't journalists and are not in that profession).
It seems you've constructed this whole narrative on a pretty thin basis.
"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.
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.
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)
> 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.
This is precisely what a racist would believe, and this precise ideology gives perfect cover to racism.
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.
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?
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.
> 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
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".
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.
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.
> 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.
> 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!
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.
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.
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), 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.
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.
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.
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.
> 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.
"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.
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?
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 ...
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.
> 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.
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.
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"
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.
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."
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.
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.