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Comment by ditonal | Hacker News Reader

You literally directly contradict yourself. You link to two pages that have absolutely nothing to do with getting formerly incarcerated people into law/medicine, then immediately concede that there isn’t an effort to do so because they’re not welcome in those fields.

Your failure to keep two paragraphs of texts consistent and coherent badly undermines your overall point. It’s pretty clear tech as a whole is a lot less elitist than law/medicine.

People are “elitist” because there is non stop pressure to drive down wages of engineers and it’s often disguised as progressivism. It can also undermine the professional and political power of engineers if the field is constantly portrayed as easy for anyone to enter. The AMA knows this better than anyone as they’ve tightly restricted the number of new doctors for decades, so it’s highly ironic you’d even link to them at all.

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oh goodness, there's a lot to unpack here.

>You literally directly contradict yourself. You link to two pages that have absolutely nothing to do with getting formerly incarcerated people into law/medicine, then immediately concede that there isn’t an effort to do so because they’re not welcome in those fields.

I linked to the two respective institutions that lobby for physicians and lawyers respectively. They cannot be compared to some crappy random website for ex-felons going to tech. If that's what you're looking for I can find those for you, too.

Furthermore, it's disadvantaged or incarcerated. Or do you believe that people with disabilities (as referred to by both organizations explicitly) are not disadvantaged?

> People are “elitist” because there is non stop pressure to drive down wages of engineers and it’s often disguised as progressivism. It can also undermine the professional and political power of engineers if the field is constantly portrayed as easy for anyone to enter. The AMA knows this better than anyone as they’ve tightly restricted the number of new doctors for decades, so it’s highly ironic you’d even link to them at all.

there's a lot of problems with the AMA and medicine in general but it's a profession that inherently needs to be credentialed, as is law, due to the fact that failure to perform leads to more severe consequences as compared to tech.

finally you cannot compare doctors specifically to all of tech. if you're talking about health in general there has been a huge push to get more nurse practitioners and physicians assistants in the field to replace many of the doctors that PCPs have.

> failure to perform leads to more severe consequences as compared to tech.

When “we” (people who write code) fuck up, things like this can and have happened:

- people die of radiation poisoning (Therac 25)

- cars crash (Toyota unintended acceleration, Tesla autopilot fails)

- rockets explode (Ariane 5)

- hundreds of millions of dollars are lost (Knight Capital)

- the financial information of millions is exposed (Equifax)

Isn't this why we have unit testing, code review, CI?

Also most of us aren't working in these industries. Most software developers build consumer apps for buying stuff or serving ads.

All of Facebook was just down from a single error. No one died.

This is crystal clear, to the point, and well put. The response to your comment makes no sense and is all over the place.

Anything that starts with 'there's a lot to unpack ' is going to be mental gymnastics communicated in a patronizing tone to defend someone's ego.

Just wanted to say I agree with all of your points and think it does tech a disservice to treat it like a blue collar job instead of a profession but at the same time the lack of professional strictness has led to alot of rapid innovation.

So it's hard to tell what's right.

> treat it like a blue collar job instead of a profession

Blue collar work isn’t a profession?

it's my impression that professionals are business people lawyers doctors etc

Trades people are certainly professionals.

Not saying that trades people aren't professional and work with professionalism.

But there's a common understanding of the noun professional as the upper tier White collar jobs.

accountants lawyers doctors etc

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