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Comment by edthrowaway | Hacker News Reader

There's a possible ugly 5th heartbreaker: "we love your topic and experience but you look too old and unhip for our hip frontend conference".

I've been rejected for conferences where every speaker that was accepted looked well under 30. At the least, no one had grey hair.

It's frustrating to me because the very same conferences are highly vocal about seeking diversity, and do usually end up with some gender diversity (although non-Asian/non-White speakers are almost always poorly represented). But there's no age diversity: everyone on stage is between 20-30, or else goes to a plastic surgeon and dresses to look that age.

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Totally agree. I've noticed something else similarly disturbing. The people who advocate the loudest for demographic diversity aren't really interested in diversity of ideas. They want to see men and women of all shapes and colors saying similar things. If you want thought provoking talks, diversity of ideas is far more important than having a group of speakers that looks like captain planet and the planeteers.

I want to see talks where presentors have radically different approaches to problems. I want to see Zed Shaw and Douglas Crockford have a passionate explitive laden argument about the merits of Ruby vs server side JS only to see Ken Thompson or Rob Pike blow their minds with a talk about go. So what if they all happen to be white guys. What matters is they have interesting things to say and vastly different perspectives coming from long careers in the industry honing their craft.

I don't see these two goals as being mutually exclusive. Even if they are, it'd be good to aim for a balance, rather than just choosing one entirely over the other. They're both good goals for a conference.

Many people don't agree with me and that's OK. I literally couldn't care less about demographic checkboxes when listening to a talk about technology. The number one priority should be having thought provoking, relevant, and high impact talks about technology at a technology conference. Seeing these talks and engaging in conversations about the technology should be the number one priority for attendees.

Ideas are what matter to hackers and engineers. If someone doesn't want to go to a conference on concurrency and distributed algorithms because a demographic de-jour isn't speaking then that person isn't passionate about the subject of the conference and the conference is better off without them there.

That may seem harsh but I'm just throwing my opinion out there for the sake of diversity of ideas ;)

Agree and up-voted.

It's supposed to be about equality, right? How can we get more equal than focusing on the ideas themselves?

I literally couldn't care less about demographic checkboxes when listening to a talk about technology.

Is it safe to say you're a member of a demographic who has never had those checkboxes applied to them negatively?

>Is it safe to say you're a member of a demographic who has never had those checkboxes applied to them negatively?

It sure sounds like you're trying to do that right now.

Can you explain to me why using race/demographics as a means to sideline and devalue my opinion isn't the highest form of hypocrisy in this context?

In other words... Isn't your question a perfect example of you "applying those checkboxes" to me negatively?

Because you're the one saying race and demographics don't matter, yet you're likely a member of the race and demographic who hasn't had negative experiences because of their race/demographic. You don't think it's important because you've never really had to think about it.

>yet you're likely a member of the race and demographic who hasn't had negative experiences because of their race/demographic.

It's funny that you can say that right after someone implied I was a member of an over-represented group and then used that assumption as leverage against me in an argument. So that statement is demonstrably false.

You don't have to be defensive, it was just a yes or no question.

I literally couldn't care less about demographic checkboxes

Then you are not the audience those "demographic checkboxes" are there for. (Neither am I.)

I'm a white male engineer, and I've never had the experience of going to a tech conference and wondering whether I'm supposed to be there because I don't see anyone else who looks like me. That experience is common for engineers who are women, POC, or in various other demographics.

For all I know you might be a member of one of those demographics, but if you "couldn't care less" then I assume you haven't had that experience either. That doesn't affect your right to an opinion, but it does mean you are not fully considering at least one reason that demographic diversity is important.

Ideas are what matter to hackers and engineers.

I haven't met a single hacker or engineer who wasn't also a person, and other things that matter to people include feeling welcome and accepted.

If you're accustomed to feeling welcome and accepted at technical conferences, it's easy to say that feeling welcome and accepted doesn't matter to you at such conferences. If most conferences didn't make you feel that way, it might matter to you more to find one that did.

One way to make people feel welcome and accepted is to reduce the extent to which they feel like the "odd one out", in as many senses as possible.

As autarch points out above, this isn't an argument for accepting any old talk so long as it fills some demographic quota. It would be a strange conference that replaced quality of ideas with demographic diversity in their talk selection criteria. Rather, it just means conferences have more than one criterion to optimise for. Multi-objective optimisation is complicated and involves tradeoffs, but "all or nothing" is unlikely to be optimal.

A warm, diverse, welcoming, and accepting technical conference that contains no interesting technical content is less a technical conference and more a purely social gathering. There's really nothing wrong with that, but at that point it's no longer meaningfully a technical conference.

Perhaps there's a desirable balance to be struck here.

That was the point I attempted to convey with my last paragraph:

this isn't an argument for accepting any old talk so long as it fills some demographic quota. It would be a strange conference that replaced quality of ideas with demographic diversity in their talk selection criteria. Rather, it just means conferences have more than one criterion to optimise for. Multi-objective optimisation is complicated and involves tradeoffs, but "all or nothing" is unlikely to be optimal.

Hopefully we can agree that a conference which had interesting technical content and was welcoming to a broad range of people would be better than a conference that had only one or the other.

In an ideal world, such would be maximally desirable.

Personally, I care about having the most interesting technical ideas and interesting minds at the conferences I choose to attend.

I think we mostly agree. The difference is I believe what makes people comfortable at a technology conference isnt superficial hangups about race and gender, it's the ability to talk shop about that technology and have meaningful discussions surrounding that topic.

The jist of my opinion is this: The subject technology should always be the highest priority at a technology conference.

> The difference is I believe what makes people comfortable at a technology conference isnt superficial hangups about race and gender

If you consider the feeling of being, say, the only person of color at a conference to be a "superficial hangup", then perhaps your beliefs about what makes people comfortable have not been closely examined. It sounds like a statement about what makes you comfortable.

Reminds me of this heartbreaking Bloomberg Businessweek piece: http://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2016-09-08/silicon-va...

> One 60-year-old software engineer, fired in January after seven years at a chipmaker in San Jose, now wears casual button-downs, khakis, and sneakers to interviews, studies embedded systems (cell phones, video game consoles) at a local extension school, and has started working out and dyeing his gray hair a dark auburn. He also had blepharoplasty, plastic surgery to remove bags and dark circles under his eyes. “It’s smart to stay current and look as young as possible if you want to keep working in an industry where so many people are in their 20s,” he says. “I still want to work in tech, because I love solving problems. And I don’t yet have enough saved for retirement.”

Well at least it got him to start working out.

/rimshot

Marketing is key, in any industry. People are run by emotion, including social cues, much more than they'd like to admit. People want to feel like the thing they are discussing is relevant to themselves, so they prefer insular groups that confirm their fantasy. A greying middle-aged guy in a suit doesn't stroke the ego of the exuberant youth.

At the end of the day, people want a movie that reaffirms their personal views more than they want a quality constructed film. They want music that triggers their own pet emotions, not a technically clever composition. And they want a friend, not a coworker.

Which is strange, really. I can't speak for every mid-20s guy, but I'd personally be much more interested in seeing a relatively unknown industry veteran get up to talk about something interesting than see hip funny JS talk #38292 from some guy in a humorous T-shirt.

Yes, no one really wants to talk about the ageism thing. I'm not sure how much the plastic surgery thing actually happens in real life, but I too find it frustrating and sad how it's never included in the topic of diversity. It's a problem that literally everyone who sticks around long enough will gave to contend with.

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