Hacker News Reader

Comment by sotojuan | Hacker News Reader

I think low-income people who go into tech do not go into start ups. It's a risk. If you fail (very likely), you are back to being poor.

I'm a student and notice that a lot of the other low income students and underrepresented groups (of which I am a part of) in my CS program go straight to "safe" jobs, usually enterprise stuff.

Actually now that I think about it: I work in my university's IT department, helping out with the website. The place is straight out of Office Space, very traditional Java/CMS stuff. It's also incredibly diverse. Blacks and Latinos make up a good portion of the working force and even the higher up/managers. There's a good portion of women as well.

But when I interview at start ups or more "modern" companies it's all white or Asian.

View on HN

As a hispanic person, I always hate it when people see me as some poker chip that should be used to fulfill some arbitrary quota. We have preferences for where we want to work like everybody else, and our backgrounds/cultures definitely have an influence in that. Is it possible that maybe, perhaps these clean-cut trendy startups just aren't appealing to us?

Personally, I can't see myself working at most of these startups, but it has nothing to do with their constituency (I get along great with those 'white and asian' people!), it's just that usually their vision/direction or products are simply uninteresting to me, and I definitely prefer working at startups to big companies. For example, I would much rather work at a food-oriented startup, than another boring code/SaaS type startup, and I certainly wouldn't touch any fashion startups with a 20ft pole, just purely because of what I'm interested in, having grown up in a latino community. Unfortunately, the types of startups that I am interested in, aren't usually the ones that get all the buzz on techcrunch.

Either way, having 'equal opportunity' shouldn't force those of us with different cultural preferences to meet some arbitrary ideals for 'equal outcomes'.

I was "lucky" in that my parents were so terrible with money that every year around tax time assuming we weren't homeless they'd head into Rent-A-Center and rent a computer for the house. If it weren't for that I never would have been exposed to start ups and programming. I didn't go to a real school, opting instead for some community college because the fear of debt and failure were too real, but the years of hustling, jail breaking peoples iPhones, designing sites for other local hustlers, and reading /. and digg meant I'd been exposed enough to the web that I had good js experience. Lucky twice because JS wasn't nearly as enterprise-y when I started wanting to work at start ups.

I think there is a flipside to this too though. If you're not wealthy, you're less worried about living on start-up income. I think you particularly see this among immigrants who realize how incredibly wealthy even the poor in America are by internatiomal standards. People with this perspective are much more willing to drive an old beat up car and share a room relative to someone who feels pressure to keep up with their wealthy friends and family in the suburbs.

Edit: few people work in start-ups as well, so it is probably easy to run into confirmation bias looking at the people you know in your life

Haha. I knew this was coming. You're putting white and asian in one group and blacks and latinos in another group. What should these groups be called, so we don't have to spell it out each time this distinction is made?

Hey, I didn't mean anything wrong by it, and probably should just have had said something like "there's no diversity". Reason I said that is because many people say SV is diverse because of the Asian population, but IMO even though it is a minority population-wise, I would say they aren't in tech.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com