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> The landing page clearly states you double your money if they get hired.

That should be a warning sign to you that this is a scam.

If he used reddit he’d have access to r/antiMLM

It unbalances access to jobs by family wealth and creates yet another:tm: skip annoying thing if you are rich enough and/or have enough friends who are rich enough. Somebody coming out of a life hiccup like family issues or health issues is gonna have a harder time skipping the interview while also having a harder time interviewing.

The return on investment aspect could just get gamed by companies being excessively selective on which candidates they allow to stay past 2 months.

And finally it extends the worse thing that exists in our society: "It's easier to make money if you have money."

This is what creates and enforces our class system, this is what makes it harder for historically disadvantaged groups to get a head, and such a product would just extend this, while benefiting the company.

The anger is justified, such systems can not be allowed to exist.

> Presumably your coworkers can come up with fifty dollars.

It's nastier than that. It'd be one thing if it was just a handful of references.

There's a link in the Reddit post to a Twitter thread where someone was posting listings. The lowest one from that sample was $3000. If you're trying to get just the $50 minimum out of former colleagues, then you'd need to have 60 of those.

I don't know about you, but I sure as hell don't have 60 former colleagues that I know who would be willing to bet $50 that a company hiring this way isn't a den of vipers that will cut me before the payout.

To be clear, the company is not workable in it's current form. I think they're right to shut down and rethink things.

I think the core concept of figuring out a way to get skin in the game for referrals makes sense though. I also don't think the people behind the company should be derided for trying this. And I think it's not racist.

> This complaint relies on a racist argument "black people in general have less money, therefore the black software engineers doing the referrals will have less money."

It's not a racist argument, it's factually true.

https://www.google.com/search?client=firefox-b-1-d&q=average...

https://www.federalreserve.gov/econres/notes/feds-notes/disp...

The racist part is taking a generalization and applying it to a specific subset. Black software engineers and managers probably have enough money to play this game if they wanted. The "software engineers" is the specific subset that the generalization is being applied to.

Based on https://www.payscale.com/research/US/Job=Software_Engineer/S..., while the average income for a software engineer is pretty good, the low end of their reported scale is 63k/yr. Personally, my first salaried job as a software engineer paid 40k. I can attest that I was not able to save much money on that income after expenses like rent, food, and gas. I think it is unreasonable to assume that racial disparities in wealth will vanish just because someone writes code.

In the US there is in fact a disparity in wealth between black households and white households in aggregate as a consequence of slavery, a lack of reparations for slavery, Jim Crow laws, and ongoing discrimination (see, redlining). So it's not a racist argument that paying for job opportunities could perpetuate racial disparities in the workforce. It's a reasonable one.

https://www.federalreserve.gov/econres/notes/feds-notes/disp...

It is a racist argument because you assume things about black software engineers because they are black. That is, you assume a black software engineer has no money because he's black rather than that he does have money because he's a software engineer.

Imagine you and your coworkers are planning to go out to eat for lunch. One coworker says that you should go to a steakhouse. You say "No, coworker X probably won't be able to afford that because he's black. We should go somewhere cheaper instead." Is that racist? I think so, and I think it's the same logic being used here.

You're conflating introducing a new system for how companies hire with direct social interactions. How companies hire is fraught with bias so we should be attentive to not amplifying it. Your example is an obvious false equivalency.

In one situation you assume black peers won't be able to afford lunch. In another situation you assume they won't be able to afford gambling on hiring outcomes. If this is a false equivalence you'll need to explain how.

Strange to use "redlining" as an example of "ongoing" discrimination. It was banned by the Fair Housing Act of 1968 - 53 years ago.

This reminds me of when people use the murder of Emmett Till to argue how evil white people are. He was furtively killed in 1955 - 66 years ago.

When the best latest examples are this old it kind of cuts against the whole accusation. It's like saying Joe is such a jerk, look, he kicked a dog 50 years ago.

In practice redlining is alive and well.

https://news.berkeley.edu/2020/09/10/why-bay-area-neighborho...

Redlined neighbourhoods are still overwhelmingly black. Redlining destroyed property values and scared away businesses, creating ghettos that still exist today. The fact that many of the processes which created an unjust society are no longer in motion doesn't automatically make that society just again.

It does mean those processes are no longer "ongoing".

I meant it in the sense of the long now. 53 years ago isn't long ago in the arc of human history. There are people alive who grew up where they grew up or live where they live because of it.

The rest of your post doesn't merit a response as it has nothing to do with what I wrote.

"The long now" isn't the right model for how humans actually live in the world. In reality, people find their level very quickly and historical circumstances don't hold people down for long.

Lots of examples:

-Vietnamese boat people arrived in the mid-70's with nothing. They quickly became successful and still are.

-Jews lost so much in WW2, including half their families. They quickly became successful after the war and still are. They didn't sit around in ghettos forever.

-Nigerian immigrants to America often come with little wealth and yet do better than American whites economically.

-Iranian immigrants arrived after the 1979 revolution with nothing. Now they do very well - better than average whites.

If "the long now" was real, none of these would be possible and all immigrant groups who arrived poor in the last 50 years would still be poor.

This is actually a really important thing to learn because it's critical in your mental model of the world. You think some event 50+ years ago will keep families in poverty for literal multiple generations - it's not true at all. Families rise and fall much much quicker than this. If someone is in poverty that long (in the context of a somewhat free society) it is because of internal issues, not circumstances.

Society at large treats slave-descended blacks no worse than African-immigrant blacks (or other nonwhite immigrants); the difference in outcomes comes from their own internal issues. The sooner we can acknowledge the actual source the problem the sooner we can make progress on solving it.

Familial wealth has a compounding follow on effect in opportunity and wealth growth. A huge part of current economic disparities is likely attributable to these policies, and subsequent discrimination that's reinforced by entrenched poverty.

> should also recognize people working to improve it

are you talking about this "skip the interview" thing? If so, what?