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> Why is this post being penalized? Too many black folks commenting and up voting? (/s)

That's a nasty swipe, "/s" or no "/s". Your question is answered twice in HN's FAQ: once at the top and once again ("Why is A ranked below B even though A has more points and is newer?") for people who don't realize that it was already answered at the top. https://news.ycombinator.com/newsfaq.html

Matter of fact, this thread has been carefully unpenalized by moderators who work tirelessly to support substantive, thoughtful discussion on HN. (Edit: that seems to have been a mistake—not about the thread, a lot of which was reasonably good and some of which was remarkably good, albeit on a tired topic. But it seems to have been a mistake about the article—see https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=26507622.)

My bad. The emotions were high. I wanted to remove it, but I can edit the post anymore.

Much appreciated! I wouldn't worry about removing it - we're all learning this stuff together and examples are good for that.

When I entered engineering in the early 2010s, I quickly started earning more than my parents and their parents did combined at their peak incomes. Hearing my background, most of my peers who weren't immigrants from south/near asia, africa, or latin america seemed surprised that life in the USA could be so "third world" in their words.

I always get a chuckle reading things by these VC types who grew up in upper middle class homes very far from impoverished people and their views on both the problems communities they've never interacted with will face and/or how to solve those problems, as recent as yesterday's post by sama on how innovation will end poverty.

Based on my experiences with people's depth on the subject, I think you have a half decent litmus test.

> How the fuck does one TAKE A VACATION after your startup fails?!

That's hilarious.

But hey, you could technically do that in France without swimming in money: you legally can keep your position in a company on-hold while creating a startup, for 1-2 years (3 if you do tricks with your right to a sabbatical year). If it fails after that, you just go back to work. [0]

The holidays you might have saved before leaving are deferred until you join again, so you can literally have paid holidays after your project fails.

[0] https://www.service-public.fr/particuliers/vosdroits/F2382

Same in Sweden and some basic easy to get by programs apart from the more traditional grants.

I'd still pick sf and infinite funding for every silly project but for the small business rather than startup it's pretty sweet.

indeed, the thing that struck me was how much of a middle class sausage factory SV-tech is.

I had worked in VFX/media for a long time, and we at least knew that we were mostly rich middle class fops. Having heard all the noise about how upset the tech bros were when diversity increased at FAANG, when I got here I expected to have some, well diversity.

I went from a team that had 8/30 female-male, which the company felt was too small, to a team inside FAANG which is all male. Every. fucking. team that I've been in contact, bar one, is an entire sausage factory.

The problem is further upstream. This is the people who graduate. This is the people who enrol. This is the people who fall in love with computers.

At some point, we lose everyone else, and I wish I knew why. I have theories sure, but I don't actually know why.

Some years back I hiked the Inca Trail in Peru. The second day started with a long trek up the side of a mountain, covering a vertical distance of about 1500 m in about 4 hours. You could see the trail ahead pretty much the whole time, including the people on it. It was incredibly challenging to keep going as you were exhausted by altitude and effort and could see it was only going to get more difficult as the day progressed, and still you could see the people who were already on the trail ahead of you. This was the point where many hikers turned back.

What I learned was challenges that defeat you are never what's behind you, only what's in front of you. When it's an uphill climb, the people at the top are causing more of a challenge than what you left or even where you are.

I frequently encounter the position that "we shouldn't do anything at my level because the problem is further down the system" just like the parent comment says. Yes, it makes you feel better to deny you're part of the problem. Unfortunately it's not true in a way that makes the problem worse. It's a close cousin to "she shouldn't have dressed like that" or "she shouldn't have gone out alone". Or maybe "I was just following orders".

What if it was a hike that got less steep toward the top? The lesson you learned would completely fall apart.

I don't think you can apply a blanket logic to this. It's possible for problems to be all over, or clustered near the start or middle or end. It depends on the actual scenario.

It seems quite likely that being pushed out as a child is the biggest problem, and that's not because the kids are peering forward to look at job specifics, it's because of harmful stereotypes about boys vs. girls.

I don't know, I think it's worth trying to at least understand where the challenge lies. Maybe it is some linear progression where every person starts out with the same motivation to be a developer, and faces increasingly more hurdles till they either choose something else or succeed. Or maybe it's pretty easy to get to a certain point, but then there's some filter hurdle like toxic workplaces or university experiences that changes things. Or maybe some people just naturally have more interest in other things.

The better we understand the situation, the better we can allocate resources to address any inequities that do exist.

The problem with tackling diversity at the hiring level is that there's a finite supply of candidates. If you a proportional number of each group, you'll still end up with a large number of white men. What then?

> It's a close cousin to "she shouldn't have dressed like that" or "she shouldn't have gone out alone". Or maybe "I was just following orders".

I really struggle to see how.

yes, that is a problem, one we can't fix directly.

But, with apprenticeships we can grab them before they get put off by a-levels. (this again is UK specific). This means we can skip a layer off loss and get much better candidates in the process. (A lot of CS degrees are highly suspect...)

The reason why is right in plain sight: because most women aren't actually interested in tech jobs. And before you start fuming and downvote me, go look at Scandinavian countries (countries that have the most gender equality in the world) and look at the gender disparities in tech/nursing/schoolteacher jobs. It's not the 50/50 utopian vision you think it is.

> because most women aren't actually interested in tech jobs

Why? Is it written in their genes, or is it something we discourage them from? Is it perhaps something else?

I'm not asking for 50/50, I'm asking for equal opportunity.

At the moment its not equal. There are many societal issues that affect this. They even still affect Sweden et al.

I'm not asking for controversial things, like quotas, I'm just asking for companies to use the training schemes they have to get local talent thats representative of the cohort taking up CS subjects at 16.

Currently, having a 50:1 ratio is not anything like good enough. especially as its something like 25:75 split at 16

Not middle class. That include plumbers, mechanics, and other skilled technicians that really do have to work hard for their living.

SV is stuffed full of upper-middle-class, a category that is more different than the name would imply. These folks (including me) had the luxury of “not knowing what I want to do in college” (or even attending college in the first place) and getting to bounce around until we find something that sticks. Or go to medical/law/graduate school and take on hundreds of thousands of dollars of debt then work a free internship or residency before being able to command a salary that pays off that debt.

It’s a different world from the middle class.

Sorry I should have been more specific.

In the UK developers are overwhelmingly middle-middle class. If you were privately educated then you are much more likely to be on the business side. There are "lower middleclass" developers, but its much more rare in bigger businesses something like 20/80 split. (not as rare as women though..)

In the UK, the "trades" are seen as working class-lower middle class. Which is why the education system didn't bother catering to any kind of practical skill for trades. because Karen didn't want little Andrew to learn a trade.

Whats interesting is that yes, in the US its far more rarefied/isolationist.

> getting to bounce around until we find something that sticks

This is an under-appreciated dividing line between the somewhat-rich and the somewhat-poor. Being able to choose a career that you can stick with and even be passionate about will put you in a much better situation 20+ years later than having to take the first work that comes along out of sheer necessity (often repeatedly and employers get more skeptical each time). Many people never escape that trap; even those that do find themselves many years behind their age-peers financially.

So you're male working in tech complaining about males working in tech?

Did you step aside to make way for a female hire?

I'm struggling to understand your point here.

Are you saying that there aren't enough jobs to go around? because that's patently not the case.

We need more engineers, to do that we need to train them. Instead of overfishing the standard places, we need to look elsewhere. If you want a purely business case, it cheaper to hire women, they are more loyal and don't ask for payrises[1]. not only that training in the UK is effectively free.

if you want a moral case: I want my daughter to work in my role (or what it evolves into.) at the moment she's going to have a shit time

[1]gross over simplification here.

Maybe referring to people by genitalia as their primary characteristic is part of the problem?

>Why is this post being penalized?

HN has an anti-flamewar mechanism that kicks in when posts get too active.

>> Here's a litmus test to know whether you're likely disconnected: As a techie/doctor/engineer did you become by far the highest paid person in your wider family by your mid 20s? If the answer is "NO", then you would be disconnected by default - unless you consciously invested effort to educate yourself.

As the article hints at, many people who come from er, non-traditional tech backgrounds, enter the tech industry later in life. Your test of "by your mid 20's" would hoover them up along with the people you're trying to point to.

Let's just not group people together indiscriminately, shall we? That should be a rule of thumb that might work once in a while.

I think you're using "indiscriminately" as if it meant "if I personally don't like it".

But you're right, my litmus test is very sloppy and it could be phrased much more precisely. I hope most people will understand the spirit of it though.

I think the spirit of it is pretty clear.

If you grew up with access to upper middle class (or higher) wealth, which is what your parents would need to be to match today's early career Silicon Valley software engineer incomes, you probably don't know what it's like to not have access to many of the institutionalized resources you grew up with, because you probably never lived that experience.

That might be an overly broad test, but the underlying point is pretty clear.

I understand your anger, but that piece of advice was meant for the kind of people that CAN afford a vacation after a startup failure. Is something wrong with that? If you can afford a vacation, you take it. If you can't, you don't.

I myself have a failed startup that I ran in 2018-2019. Could I afford a vacation afterwards? Nope. Can I afford another entrepreneurial run now? Nope. Am I bitter about it? Nope.

Also, you mention "incredible disconnectedness from the plight of even regular people by the world's tech bubbles", but then you talk about starting a STARTUP. Regular people don't start companies.

> but that piece of advice was meant for the kind of people that CAN afford a vacation after a startup failure. Is something wrong with that? If you can afford a vacation, you take it. If you can't, you don't.

If they really intended that advice for the audience of 5, they could've sent them an email (or a Clubhouse invite /s) and not put it in an interview on YT. The rest of the audience is just facepalming while listening to this.

>Regular people don't start companies

They do, they're called small businesses instead of startups most often times though. I worked at businesses throughout my adolescence which were created and run by "regular people" - people of color, without generational wealth, who were raising children, and were primary caretakers for elderly family at the time of the company's creation.

In the same vein, I've met a lot of "regular people" in the same situation who've kicked off startups. Do you really think only those with the privilege of being sufficiently disconnected from impoverished communities end up having the opportunity to create a startup, or is there some reinterpretation/disconnect of the previous paragraphs going on?

Unfortunately in many countries progressive taxation means people likely to start business are unable to save and invest in it for long before they have no choice but take a bank loan or look for VC money. It is rarely possible to start a business only with your own money that you saved. I think that's bad, and is often overlooked by people supporting high progressive tax. We are cutting the wings of people who are more likely to succeed and provide jobs and force them to share their business with the rich who likely never worked hard in their lives.

>It is rarely possible to start a business only with your own money that you saved.

People outside of the upper middle class strata usually don't have the opportunity to save significantly anyways after CoL is included in the US, and usually require a loan to start a business (or at least in every case of non-upper middle class business founder I've worked for).

Regular people would personally carry a relatively lower tax burden than a flat tax would require for them actually, and a progressive corporate tax in the US would likely result in them being more likely to be successful once they start their business.

Given that many pro-business states in the US have progressive income taxes to actually encourage reinvestments into small businesses (Carolina, Georgia, Alabama, Mississippi, etc..) and appear to be succeeding quite well in that regard, is there any specific reason you think a progressive income tax system that reduces the burden on regular people relative to a flat tax is a significant blocker for regular people to create businesses?

Looking at your description of the problem, it almost seems like you should be advocating for a *more* progressive tax system where burden is placed further up the chain with regular people maintaining even less of a burden.

I consider myself as a regular person and I am hit by the highest bracket and my take home is like 55% of what I make. This severly inhibits the projects I develop. It is supposed to make the rich pay more but they have ways around it and most pay themselves in dividends which are taxed differently (surprise surprise) or just use offshore cards.

Well, if you're actually not upper middle class and at the top of the bracket then I'm wondering how you came to the conclusion a more regressive tax graduation would help more regular people, rather than a more progressive scheme and closing tax avoidance loop holes like you seem to describe as the problem.

That being said, it sounds like you're the upper "middle class" everyone here is describing since it's really the very rich that have the option to pay themselves in things like dividends in most countries (though this may be a miscommunication).

55% isn't bad most places outside of the US actually, where do you live precisely?

It just demonstrates the disconnect. These people are not fathoming a scenario where people can't afford a vacation and that seems indicative of these issues. Its how you try to fix racism and just end up renaming the master branch.