Tech journalism is less diverse than tech (2020)
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I have never received a satisfactory answer for why a lot of people from these fields are all about "Everyone should learn to code" initiatives, but not, say "Everyone should learn to be a citizen journalist", or "Everyone should learn to be a copy editor". Indeed, in many aspects, the latter would seem to share many aspects with learning to code (attention to detail, focus on syntax, etc.), and be more accessible.
My conclusion is that there is no desire to increase participation in or accessibility to the field of journalism, because of a rejection of the Jevons paradox. And consequently, the shrinking field seems to rely heavily on credentialism and connections to choose who becomes a journalist.
The only people I know who are even able to get jobs like this either have parents in the industry or have rich parents, often both.
This is also true for the humanities in academia writ large - most of the people I know getting a PhD in the humanities have rich parents.
The humanities - especially law and some corners of academia - also have far more direct political leverage than tech does.
As an awkward autistic guy who often gets mistaken for hispanic, the tech interviews are a god-send.
Some friends of mine user a 2 week work trial for all candidates.
But software engineering is very bimodal, so I'm sure it works.
High quality candidates are generally confident in their abilities and thankful that they can take 2 weeks to show you their skills instead of doing it in a high pressure setting in a couple of hours.
When I'm interviewing, I prefer interviewing with multiple companies[1] while still earning an income. No way I'm going through 2 weeks * N companies because it entails quitting my old job first, and interviewing for months at a time - not preparing but actually interviewing - which is crazy talk to me. I'd rather go through the high-pressure/low time-commitment route as it's scalable.
1. Companies are paradoxically "desperate for engineers" and more willing to keep positions open for longer, so it's prudent to maximize my chances of getting hired by spreading my net as wide as possible. Having multiple offers in hand also strengthens my negotiating position for remuneration.
That's what I do too.
But my strategy is taking vacation for interviews, and then taking a "real" vacation in-between jobs. Not possible for everyone, but so far it has worked for me.
Have you ever run into a situation where you realize it's not a good fit a few days into the process? Do you cancel your vacation, or do the rest of the days go to waste?
1-2 hours of leetcode, or a 5-6 hours take-home project is a godsend. Programming is my passion anyways.
This is one of my concerns about the recent antipathy toward standardized testing. My family came over from Bangladesh, at a time when there were less than 10,000 Bangladeshis in the U.S. Didn't have much cultural knowledge, didn't know anybody important, and it didn't matter. Did well on the SATs, did well on the LSATs--in either engineering or law, being a foreigner didn't hold me back. Not sure what would've happened if those objective measures hadn't existed. (I mean I guess I do know what happened--family connections mattered a lot more in e.g. the legal field back in the day.)
It's actually mind-boggling how much harder IIT JEE math is compared to SAT math.
While the SAT was asking about basic kinetic motion in classical mechanics, JEE was asking about wave-particle duality and calculating uncertainty in motion of photon-electron collisions iirc.
As long as there is differentiation it does it’s job. If the test taking population is very large the tests might need to be more difficult to make finer distinction
https://www.insidehighered.com/quicktakes/2017/10/11/foreign...
Seems to me that there are only a couple of different ways somebody could feel about that. The first is to be opposed to the "the smarter you are, the more money you make/better you do in life" meritocratic egalitarianism that these tests support. The second is to support that ideal (whether you agree we're there or not), but insist that tests don't accurately measure intelligence.
Either way, while I can sort of see where the opponents are coming from, I don't see them offering many good alternatives. I don't think it's cosmically "fair" that being born to insanely rich parents leaves you better off in life than being born to unemployed drug addicts, but the only "solution" anybody's ever put forward is massive ongoing wealth redistribution which is demonstrably worse. Similarly, it's not necessarily fair that people who are born smart do better than people who are born stupid, but what do you do? Require as many stupid doctors as smart doctors? Demand that for every smart highway engineer, a stupid one be included as well?
I can also sympathize with people who insist that tests don't accurately measure intelligence - I've always done well on tests, so this system has worked out well for me, but I can see how somebody could be otherwise intelligent but unable to perform on tests. But again... what do you do? Just declare everybody equally intelligent and don't measure anything? Like it or not, tests do measure something that does correlate with that hard-to-quantify trait we call "intelligence" and while there are regrettable false positives as well as false negatives, it's the best we have.
So I wish our tests were harder so there'd be a more fine-grained stratification of actual ability, even if I ended up being closer to the middle than I am now - that would be ok, because a lot of other people would be closer to the middle too! A tests that accurately measured intelligence such that only the most intelligent people in the world could dominate it would necessarily be almost impossible to score perfectly on it, by definition. In the face of such a test, a 50% would be something to brag about and the top scorers would be off curing cancer or something for the benefit of all of us.
So there's the challenge that the anti-testing/testing reform crowd wants to solve: how do you call testing meritocratic when the equality of opportunity isn't there? And are we ok with that?
If someone has a home gym, a personal trainer, and time to workout 2x/day, 6 days a week, how much should we penalize their results? Zero? 25%? 50%?
I think that being strong as demonstrated on tests of strength is a valid (and the most valid I’m aware of) measure of “merit” in the context of strength. I think the same is true in other fields as well, including scholastics.
Compared to what? It's not a criticism to simply state that standardized testing fails to be perfectly meritocratic.
https://freddiedeboer.substack.com/p/please-think-critically...
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Reservation_policy_in_Indian...
Relative ranking is something no one should adopt unless they have a population problem. Unlike SAT, your rank relative to your peers in the exam decides your fate. The problem with such system is it encourages people to participate in the race earlier. Parents are sending their kids earlier to JEE prep every year and increasing the difficulty. It will continue to go up unless it's humanely impossible.
Coaching industry built around it has bigger market value and revenues than government spends on IIT (the test that JEE is supposed to get you in).
Our most valuable startup is byjus, an edtech focused on helping students pass JEE. More and more foreign companies like Amazon are also opening JEE prep centres here.
Please don't adopt it.
Despite above, our educational outcomes in higher education are worse than most developed countries including US. (We are good at employment at tier 1 colleges though)
These students get burned by the time they get into college of their choice. There isn't much focus on actual academics and coursework unlike developed countries where universities get more difficult. Further, most students are encouraged to practice leetcode from year 1 instead of focusing on academics.
Everyone is slacking off after getting in so curving keeps their grade good despite a huge drop in effort.
I can’t for the life of me understand how the daughter of Bill Gates is the same as a poor African American from the ghetto.
Diversity initiatives are almost always a subterfuge or false flag operation.
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Diversity apparently includes fencing and rowing at most elite colleges. Just another filter with the benefit of virtue signaling and posturing.
The dialects of Swiss German must not be confused with Swiss Standard German, the variety of Standard German used in Switzerland. Most people in Germany do not understand Swiss German. Therefore, when an interview with a Swiss German speaker is shown on German television, subtitles are required.[6] Although Swiss German is the native language, from age 6, Swiss school students additionally learn Swiss Standard German at school and are thus capable of understanding, writing and speaking Standard German with varying abilities mainly based on the level of education.
American kids from poor families do worse on average than kids with more money on the SATs.
https://www.researchgate.net/publication/280232788_Race_Pove...
That is demonstrably not true. Wealthy people can and do spend legions on test prep and tutoring.
But that said, I generally agree with some of the underlying sentiment, which is that many wealthy people value education and status that can be attained through scholastic achievement in a way that many poor people do not. I think that even if you had loads of high quality, free SAT prep classes and tutors that you'd still see a large test score gap.
> For them, Jiechu's price – $650 for a seven-week summer course, four hours a day, Monday to Friday – is a doable stretch. That comes to a bit less than $5 an hour, which is not exactly the “thousands of dollars in test prep” that Mr. Carranza cited.
If your GPA is bad, a tutor will help far more with GPA than test prep will help with your SAT and cost far more.
School project, if you live in a household where one parent doesn't have to work, they can basically do your whole project moving a 50 to a 95.
Extra curriculars, these require a large investment of time and money that is harder for a single working parent to pull off.
College entrance essays. You can literally just pay someone to write them.
You can't look at SATs in a vacuum. You have to compare it to the other possible metrics which all privilege the privileged more.
So 2 weeks' work is a considerable amount of work, but it's also certainly within the realm of possibility for the vast, vast majority of people. I'd really say this just highlights how some communities value educational attainment and others do not.
Sure, it's much easier to come up with $650 if you're rich than if you're poor, but that's true of just about anything. $650 is certainly within the reach of nearly everyone, it just depends on whether your parents are willing to sacrifice for it.
The only thing is… I can’t find more hours in my week.
And the real bigger issue is, even through I can afford it, it may be hard to justify it because it amounts to a major opportunity cost.
For a working class family, they probably are going to find it difficult to source $650. …Especially if no one has gone to college and no one even knows the importance of that $650.
If $650 seems like nothing, all that you are saying is that your social group is limited to people who find $650 to be nothing. It’s like the Lucille Bluth banana quote in living…
It's easy: they want to protect their field. This is basically a "not in my backyard" movement. "X industry should be more diverse. Not mine, because that would means more competition for me."
Naval hit the nail on the head here: `The whole Social Justice Warrior-ing trend seems like a case of white-on-white violence.`
> Compared to programming and tech, success in a lot of fields in the humanities, including journalism is far more connected to who you know, what family you were born into, what college you went to, and your overall personal network.
Is tech really that different?
* When evaluating senior candidates one of the criteria that candidates are selected on is the prestige of their previous companies, which usually hire from prestigious universities.
* Much of what we look at is how many talks a senior candidate has done, their name recognition (aka brand), etc... all indicators of prestige, but not necessarily talent.
* When evaluating junior candidates with a lack of job experience the candidate pool is often selected on collegiate prestige.
* Hiring is often done by algorithm interviews which, if you went to a prestigious school, are what they spend more time teaching.
I've been programming my whole life, but I'm a drop out and spent a chunk of my formative years in the military. The only way I got into being a full time SWE was working as a SRE-SE first. I would've never gotten one of these kush internships had I not spent years putting out other peoples software fires first.
On the other hand, these people were still negatively impacted by their backgrounds: they hadn't had the chance to join fancy tech companies out of college, which meant they missed out on several years of career opportunities. They were more likely to be hired at a Senior Software Engineer level, for example, when someone similar from a big tech company might be hired at Staff+.
If you tried to get into journalism instead chances are you would be flipping burgers at McDonalds right now. Sure tech isn't perfect, but it is much better than almost any other field. The fact that you could work your way up that quickly is just proof how well we have it in this field.
Every profession has problems around social social proof. There are limited resources for recruiting and so heuristics that work get used. But I really can't think of any field that does better than tech in terms of keeping those barriers low relative to possible income and prestige.
I know people who dropped out of high school making >300k/yr as software engineers, and god only knows how many college drop outs (myself included) who are also making that kind of money.
Conversely, people I know who went to law schools that are not one of the top 10 in the country are never even considered for high paying jobs in their industry. If a path to those jobs is available, it does not appear to be widely known, unlike the path to big tech.
Yes, without social proof getting your start is harder, and all else being equal ivy league grads will always have a leg up on you, but these are some truly phenomenal opportunities for people to climb the ladder.
Why? I'm not trying to argue here that tech is a meritocracy but so far as I've been able to discern it is more meritocratic than any other field offering middle class or above wages. If you disagree, I'd be super interested to hear which fields are doing a better job. If you agree, why not give credit to the industry for doing a better job at solving this very hard problem than anyone else?
> and not indicative of where most people with less-than-prestigious backgrounds end up
It's hard to tell how much this is an indictment of tech's process versus society at large. Anecdotally, I find a higher proportion of people from more prestigious backgrounds are more skilled at work. This should be unsurprising because people from those backgrounds have generally been given many advantages in life. In a former life I was an educator and was paid a lot of money to impart valuable skills to the children of rich families.
If we view meritocracy as judging workers as they are, and not accounting for what they might have been in a more equitable society, that's the outcome I'd expect from a meritorious interview process.
Again, I don't want to argue tech is some perfect meritocracy, just that I'm not aware that anyone's done better.
The challenge (which has no easy answer) is that it's far easier for companies to focus on the Stanford grads with decent GPAs than all the high school dropouts who upload a resume, especially if they don't have an obviously interesting portfolio/presence in open source communities.
It gives evidence that not only are you equally skilled as that high-school dropout (as given in the premise of this scenario), but that you have basic life, organizational, planning, and work with others skills to graduate from Stanford.
Apologies, I was not trying to argue that you were presenting it was. That's my internal ideal: tech should be meritocratic and involve zero prestige. To me arguing whether tech is better or worse than any other industry is fairly futile. It's more important to say, "Should this field require a degree and prestige or not?" The answer in tech is, "no", so the fact that we have it and that it weighs so heavy is what makes it frustrating. It's like saying, "Once you're in it matters less!" In medicine or law, that's entirely different. At the end of the day, the process of interviewing and hiring is still bad (if not worse) so being better (or even drastically better) than other fields means very little.
> If we view meritocracy as judging workers as they are, and not accounting for what they might have been in a more equitable society, that's the outcome I'd expect from a meritorious interview process.
That's a fair point, prestigious people generally thrive in a meritocracy. Though, I think what this inevitably leads to is "invest more in education and opportunity" platitudes. The fact is, those things are a long way off from getting feasibly better. There are ways to bridge that gap, like offering free courses in algorithms and data structures for people from non-prestigious backgrounds, but I have a feeling the hiring requirements would just shift then.
I think this where we differ. I think this view is a bit disheartening to me because it feels like making the perfect the enemy of a good. I don't think completely removing prestige is a viable option for most companies without some replacement that no one has yet figured out, so I'm ok with applauding whatever steps can be made to make the system better.
Thanks for so clearly sharing your perspective.
Put in a metaphor: someone has to make the industry feel like it's making progress and someone has to drag the industry kicking and screaming forward. Both are necessary for improvement.
> Thanks for so clearly sharing your perspective.
Always.
A few years ago when some journos got laid off, people on twitter meme-ed that they should learn to code. Not only did the journos make it extremely apparent just how far beneath them they think software development is, they also went out of their way to attack the people ribbing them. (With their standard tools: guilt by association to 4chan who got in on the ribbing, and getting twitter to categorize criticism in the wrong direction as abuse.) https://knowyourmeme.com/memes/learn-to-code
It's not the reason, but analyzing this sort of thing is a start.
Software pays significantly more. Why push people into lower paying jobs?
Getting into finance is not even remotely like this. It's a brutal old-boys' club.
That's why they recommend the former. You'd have to be insane to recommend that most people try to break into finance.
As someone who has done both (and moved from journalism to engineering 4.5 years ago), I agree with the first half of your comment, but I disagree with this conclusion.
I do agree with you that we should encourage everyone to be a citizen journalist or copy editor, and to a certain extent, social media has done that -- much to the chagrin of many members of the public who then decry the state of the news media. There was a massive push by many of the leading journalism think tanks (Poynter, Niemen, CJR, Jay Rosen, Jeff Jarvis, etc.) more than a decade ago for citizen journalism and the rise of user-generated content directly led to news organizations like The Huffington Post and BuzzFeed, which in turn informed news and news techniques from the likes of the Times, the Washington Post, etc. And despite media being an utter and complete shithole, more people than ever want to be journalists. But that's not the whole story.
The problem, and the reason this isn't a rejection of Jevon's paradox, is that even though the appetite and potential audience for news has increased, the business models around news have collapsed. Larger outlets have managed to sustain, and in some cases like the New York Times, pivot themselves into even larger and more powerful centers -- but thousands more have gone out of business. There have been so many layoffs in the last few years (and at digital outlets too - not just antiquated local papers), it's beyond depressing. There were 16,000 layoffs in newsrooms (print, digital, broadcast) in 2020 [1], and even with the gains in digital organizations, there are still 30,000 fewer working journalists in the US today than in 2008 [2]
I don't blame tech for the death of the newspaper, for what it's worth, (although Craigslist and the expectation of everything online being free didn't help), the print industry did a lot of it to themselves. But even digital-first publications suffer to make a profit and become a business, and because the returns on a media investment are not ever going to be the 20x or 30x you get from a tech startup, the appetite for investors has wained and even well-funded outlets can go under or get sold for next to nothing.
So you have a flooded labor market and not enough jobs. And those jobs? Don't pay well. Which means that like a lot of other humanities, those jobs are largely taken by the people that can afford to do it, and there goes your diversity numbers. And in New York, DC, or San Francisco/LA (where US news bureaus are largely located), cost of living is insanely high. So you have kids who paid $180,000 for a graduate degree in journalism making $45,000* a year to work in New York City, where they have to live in a shitty apartment in Brooklyn with three other roommates. Or, they come from money and have parents who bought them an apartment.
From a monetary perspective, I did very well in journalism, especially for someone who was mid-career and not an executive editor. I make more than double in tech. And in journalism, I was making more than double some of my coworkers (close to 3 times for some of them). To be fair, I work at a FAANG, so I'm an outlier -- and I have some friends/colleagues/mentors who made/make more in journalism than I do in tech -- so at the very top, journalism can be lucrative. But in mid-sized cities, it's abysmal.
Part of the reason people encourage "everyone to learn to code," is that for now, the labor demand is larger than the supply and so salaries are high. That probably won't last forever, but it has definitely been the trend for a long time. And another part of the reason is that in general, society dismisses humanities as being less important. And yes, to your point, there probably is also a part of gate-keeping by the elites in those fields to keep it rarified, but I don't think that's the whole story.
Joshua Benton wrote a great piece for Nieman Lab (part of Harvard's journalism institution) last month that really encapsulates a lot of the diversity challenge and what changes need to happen to make things better [3], but what he doesn't touch on as much is the fact that once people are skilled to be journalists, the jobs and the pay just aren't there for many people, especially compared to other professions.
* Thanks to labor unions, the floor for entry-level newsroom jobs at at least major digital outlets is getting closer to $55k on average, but I still know of big places that hire people in at $45k. And people take those jobs even when they cannot really afford to live on that salary.
[1]: https://www.thewrap.com/2020-newsroom-layoffs-data/
[2]: https://www.pewresearch.org/fact-tank/2021/07/13/u-s-newsroo...
[3] https://www.niemanlab.org/2021/10/its-time-to-create-an-alte...
> But even digital-first publications suffer to make a profit and become a business, and because the returns on a media investment are not ever going to be the 20x or 30x you get from a tech startup, the appetite for investors has wained and even well-funded outlets can go under or get sold for next to nothing.
This is exactly what I don't get. You'd think at least one large regional newspaper would have the gumption to try and pivot completely into an app-only, region-wide live version of Twitter or something like that. Currently, small swathes of this are being captured by (terrible) startups like Citizen [1].
Basically, what you're saying is the standard narrative, that free content on the web has destroyed the traditional media model. What I'm saying is the traditional large media houses have totally failed at embracing this model, and converting themselves into efficient producers of it. If they had shown more imagination, maybe we'd be reading information-packed Live Wires on NYTimesWire interspersed with ads, instead of Tweets interspersed with ads.
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[1] https://www.theverge.com/2021/7/27/22595648/citizen-app-crim...
I actually don’t disagree with you at all. I think many of the newspapers have only themselves to blame. They were entirely unwilling to embrace digital until it was too late. But for many of them, it is too late. Because they are dead or owned by hedge funds that want to maximize profits and cut costs, and local reporting, even for stuff like city council meetings, is expensive because it has a smaller aggregate audience than just doing national stories. I think the challenge is that even before the collapse of print, you'd had an extended period of rollups of various newspaper owners thanks to eased regulations that has only accelerated over time. Gannett/GateHouse, all of the Tribune drama (which could be its own book), for two more recent examples) effectively means that most local papers are owned by a major conglomerate or hedge fund. I won’t even get into any of the pension stuff that has been horribly mismanaged (Poynter has had great coverage of that), but this report [1] from UNC Chapel Hill is five years old but does a great job showing how ownership of local papers has collapsed over the 2000s and how many papers have died. (It is somewhat ironic that one of the most important endowments/sponsors of journalism grants/research/education is the Knight Foundation, named for the newspaper magnate and half of once super publisher Knight Ridder, which was bought by McClatchy in 2006. McClatchy filed for bankruptcy in 2020 and was bought by a hedge fund in a bankruptcy auction. Meaning, Knight itself hasn’t existed in a material way in 15 years.)
Now, to be sure, as I said, those local papers did themselves no favors. And Knight Ridder and some others were more savvy about technology (McClatchy not so much), but it hasn’t worked. Or at least not at scale. There have been many attempts, but most of it has come from the wrong place. You had initiatives like Tim Armstrong's Patch, which was the idea of turning every local area into a blog, similar to that LiveWire concept you had. Patch expanded fast and was quickly sold along, with Armstrong to AOL, where as CEO Armstrong poured millions and millions into it, before having to accept defeat and sell it off at a massive loss. Patch still exists, but it’s much smaller in scope than what was its plan.
Then you have all of the attempts of Tribune to modernize, which have mostly been disastrous (Tronc). Google Digital First Media and read about how the foxes conspired with some of the hens to raid the henhouse [2]. Gannet has tried too and failed. But you’re not wrong that more innovation was needed from smarter people.
The New York Times did it. In 2014, their current publisher (who at the time was learning the business from his father and as a millennial, was one of the younger people in a power position at the paper), famously commissioned and was the lead author a digital innovation report [3] that excoriated the Times' strategy and seriously set it up for the success it has had over the last seven years. That’s ultimately how he got the publisher job in 2016, several years earlier than people expected. But the Times had a much stronger financial situation than most other papers and the gravitas and hubris to be innovative and take chances. That’s why it’s the Times. (It’s the Yankees of media companies)
I don’t mean to be dismissive. My own bias is def towards the tech/digital side of media, having never worked in local news and spending my whole career in digital (I graduated from college in 2008 and never even thought about going to print), but as someone who has been obsessed with tech and media my entire life, this is an area I’ve been watching for as long as I can remember. CJR, Poynter, Nieman, The Knight Foundation and others are actively trying to fund and incubate ideas for the future of news, especially at a local level, but it’s difficult. The Colorado Sun is one rare example of a local community paper, born from the ashes of the hedge-fund cultures, that has managed to break through, but it’s just a tough business.
[1]: http://newspaperownership.com/, http://newspaperownership.com/wp-content/uploads/2016/09/07.... alt link https://www.usnewsdeserts.com/wp-content/uploads/2016/09/07....
[2]: https://www.vanityfair.com/news/2020/02/hedge-fund-vampire-a...
[3]: https://www.scribd.com/doc/224608514/The-Full-New-York-Times...
The answer lies in where those "Everyone should learn to code" initiatives come from.
Software/Tech workers, unlike many other fields, don't have any prominant organizations that advocate for their rights, set working standards, conduct examinations for certificates, or even just speak for them in public. The void is currently filled by others, such as Tech CEOs and organization in other fields, who have other agendas. One of the agenda is to get more people into the field, reducing barrier of entry so that Tech companies have an easier time hiring.
Essentially, software/tech workers don't have a say in our field like the accountants/doctors/pharmacists/lawyers/trades.
Those which fail at scalability and wealth would fall flat before it gets off the drawing board. An initiative to promte being a X would be utterly panned for these for instance.
1. janitor 2. social worker 3. hollywood actor 4. major league athlete 5. CEO
The term for this is "classism".
Because it's a shrinking industry with excess supply where the compensation and working conditions are terrible? It doesn't have to be more complicated than that.
In theory, everyone already is a citizen journalist, and everyone should've learned to be a copy editor in the public school system. Much of the impetus for the "everyone should learn to code" effort is by analogy with English class, which is required every year in the public school system, but programming class is usually an exotic elective reserved for upper-middle-class districts. Illiteracy is not socially acceptable in America, but lots of people will say "Oh, I'm just not a math person", and programming is considered a profession rather than a requisite skill.
The woes of professional journalists are somewhat related to this. We're surrounded by a glut of potential writers. Because of that, we need heuristics for who we should actually pay attention to. One easy heuristic for that is pedigree: who do you know, what family were you born into, which college did you go to?
Don’t talk to journalists (at least if you work in tech, but probably outside of it) - they’re not your friends and your incentives are not aligned with theirs (and they’re not looking to tell the objective truth).
You’re better off writing your own articles about what you’re doing. They historically owned distribution, but they don’t anymore. We don’t need them.
If you do want to interview, find a smart individual. Like Zuckerberg’s recent interview with Ben Thompson of Stratechery. The difference in quality between someone like Byrne Hobart, Ben Thompson, Sam Harris, or Scott Alexander compared to someone at the NYT is night and day.
I'm just glad there's people like Ben Thompson where the quality is so much higher. It's nice to have real competition now with people that can own their own distribution and aren't writing everything as some dumb narrative hit piece.
The only ones left at the large orgs when the dust settles will be the mediocre writers targeting engagement via controversy. There's no reason to give them access.
It would be more accurate to say Swisher is politically-connected press. When tech and political machines were in bed together (e.g., much of her time at AllThingsD and the founding of Recode, Obama in the whitehouse, Newsom in local SV politics...) she was extremely friendly to the industry. After the ca. 2016 fallout between the two she chose the politics side. The tech side of course sees this as a heel turn, rather than a fundamental shift in priorities from both parties.
Ben Thompson is just John Gruber without the sense of taste. You couldn't design a better sycophant if you tried.
We've had to ask you this more than once before.
A far more helpful metric would probably be to know how many people want to be in tech (or tech journalism in this case) but can’t, along with the various factors that are preventing them from getting into their desired profession.
If you do then break down the numbers by ethnicity, gender, etc., you may be able to tease out a correlation that may hint at institutional bias, but there’s still no way to prove causation with just that data.
You would at least be clearer on the what the obstacles are that’re faced by people, perhaps marginalized people, that put them at a disadvantage when it comes to trying to get into those fields. Then you can proactively and practically start to do something about those specific obstacles.
Or maybe more interested but much more discriminated. The point is that you can’t see equality of opportunity by looking at the output.
IMO, you have to look deeper to try to understand the drivers of the suggested inequality for fixing the drivers is what fixes the system.
What are the filters or moments that create skew between interest and eventual accomplishment? How do we remove/reduce them?
But given that in this thread there are lots of people denying that this is even suggestive of a problem, I can also see the merit in collecting the information just to demonstrate that a problem even exists - it is hard to get buy-in among people who do not believe that race should be discussed in the 21st century.
This right here.
The hypothesis may be true, but it's hard to tell objectively (e.g. I don't know many managers who would even be capable of seeing that they're biased, let alone acknowledging their biases). Accusing people of being biased without evidence isn't constructive for anyone involved either.
So we need to come at the problem a little differently, and accept the fact that we're never going to get a 100% clear-cut answer, but we can get much closer to the truth than we are right now. We also need to accept the fact that the reality will change over time, and so regular interrogation of the hypothesis is necessary.
We can look at a variety of metrics to try to tease out whether there are biases in specific companies (this list is by no means complete, these are just two studies that I can think of conducting off the top of my head):
1. Compare the candidates who actively apply for jobs to those who actually get the jobs. This comparison must not only include candidates' group affiliations (ethnicity, gender, age, etc.), but reliable measures of competency for the particular role for which they applied.
2. Find out from a larger pool of people outside of (1) whether they would have applied for a particular job but did not or could not because of particular barriers.
If you find that the data from (1) shows that there are candidates who have particular group affiliations and meet the competency criteria for the roles, and they are less preferred by a particular company than people of other group affiliations of similar or lower competency, then you can say with a reasonable degree of likelihood that whoever made the hiring decisions at those specific companies is/are probably biased. Not the company as a whole - just the people who made the hiring decisions (there won't be data on the other people in the company, so you can't make judgements of them from such a study). Do that for enough companies in different geographies and you'll get a sense of the different biases in different cities/states/countries (e.g. some places may be biased against competent women, others may be biased against competent older people).
Then, (2) should help us to find out qualitatively what factors are actively contributing to people not even applying for particular jobs in the first place. These may be structural problems in countries'/states'/cities' education systems, lack of access to food or housing, poverty, etc. (the possibilities are almost endless). This will form the basis for more study to figure out how to best address particular structural problems/impediments.
I make a big deal out of "lack of diversity" in the field. I, like most people I know who think this is a big deal, do not think that this is exclusively or even primarily due to bias in hiring. I attended a majority black school, so I certainly understand that there are upstream problems.
All of the problems you identified with (2) are still problems of equality around opportunity, not outcome. Identifying that there is a problem, even if it doesn't naturally point to solutions, is still worth doing - because as you can see in this thread, there are plenty of people with a lot invested in denying that there is any problem at all.
As for (2), I'm aware of the fact that many people around the world don't have access to opportunities to do things that they'd be really good at. I'd really just like to understand the nuances there and how to practically make a difference.
Part of the problem I see is that the conversation around "diversity" (at least in popular media) is very US-centric, when the majority of the human species lives outside of the US. Different countries, states and even cities have very different sets of problems when it comes to lack of access to opportunity.
If we assessed them as competent originally, we’d have made the offer. I don’t know how looking at the same data again will change anything.
(I think there probably are biases in evaluation of competence, but those likely wont show up in a review of the same data that has recorded those biases as fact.)
So, whites are under-represented in big tech (50.1% white according to this post) while over-represented significantly in tech journalism (80% white). That's difficult to understand: why is there such a bias in favour of white people in tech jornalism, but not in tech in general??
[1] https://worldpopulationreview.com/countries/united-states-po...
From OP: " So here is a more comprehensive data bank of 982 individuals across 14 publications."
It's that, vs. the millions of employees in big tech. So first you're dealing with the fact that smaller samples are going to have higher variance. Beyond that, though, since diversity has become important to businesses, tech employment has grown much faster than tech journalism. If you're actively hiring a lot of people, you can shift the mix by bringing in a larger proportion of people that are different than the initial population that you started with. If you're not growing, then that means people have to leave the original population, either by firing or quitting, and then be replaced. The latter takes longer than the former, particularly when you're comparing big tech, which has a huge amount of turnover at a given company, and tech journalism, which has much less.
It's been my experience in every high-stakes knowledge work job (not journalism) that many of the people I work with are immigrants from the continents of Asia, Europe, and Africa.
I find it more disturbing they consider diversity on a pseudo scientific race definition than the supposed lack of diversity. What if in those they call white, many are women, many are young or old, fulltime or partime, idealists or pragmatists, some kind of attributes that could actually matter for writing ? I d be more worried if all journalists are students of the same school of thought than if they were all blue-skinned.
And I say that myself as a minority where I am (happen to be white-skinned western europe pigment variant, italian hair-colored, northern continental medium sized, but live and work in China...) where Im still probably graded as part of a non diverse "race" in my company's corporate diversity index :D
And when the government in China asked me my "self reported racial origin" last census, I said "Other: Normandy", not sure what exactly they want to mean by "westerner" as opposed to "vietnamese" in the multiple choice combo box...
For some people, skin color is as meaningless as eye color, but for others everything is viewed through the lens of race, so it has the added difficulty that its meaning is context dependent. The racial jargon is often so amorphous, it's impossible to interpret literally.
1. https://www.amazon.com/Birth-White-Nation-Invention-Relevanc...
If the answer is yes, then there should be some specific unspoken criteria that exists, so what are they?
If no, then how do people tell whether a panel is diverse, or a class or company is diverse, when it's not self-reported?
My current favorite example is the AI ethics/policy space. A lot is being written by policy people about the "whiteness" of AI and those developing it. But most real world technical and research teams are actually remarkably diverse along many lines (I'm not saying there isn't still work to be done though).
Then you take a look at the AI policy/ethics space... for example, here's the team behind the Council of Europe's Ad-Hoc Committee on AI (CAHAI): https://www.coe.int/en/web/artificial-intelligence/cahai A couple hundred people, all but one who are from the same general demographic and rough age range. Yet it's these people who feel that their energy is best spent criticizing tech teams.
This is not comprehensive. It's a subset consisting of newer online technology publications, skewing toward consumer niches. Enterprise-focused publications are not included. Editors are not included unless they are on the masthead and/or have bylined articles. That excludes specialist roles such as copy editors and feature editors.
The other problem is tech journalism doesn't start and end at the U.S. border. On HN, I frequently see articles from Europe or Asia, such as news from Nikkei or Digitimes or Wired UK. Shouldn't that data be included on the graph?
That said, even if TFA is restricted to U.S.-based publications and enterprise tech is included along with all of the other behind-the-scenes tech journalists who are seldom acknowledged or credited, the race disparity that the authors identified would still be there.
Why? It's because the talent pipeline has been broken for two decades.
Before 2000, tech journalists used to come up through daily newspapers and then were hired by one of the consumer or trade tech magazines or sometimes a business newspaper or magazine. U.S. daily newspapers in the 20th century were pretty white places to work, and that was reflected in the makeup of the tech newsrooms (I worked in 3).
After 2000, the pipeline suffered. Newspapers folded, and there were few entry level positions for college and grad school journalism majors (who were increasingly diverse) to apply to.
Concurrently, traditional tech newsrooms started consolidating following the first dot com bubble, the 2008 recession, and the shift to online. Art departments and copy desks were let go en masse. Reporters and editors were let go as well, usually starting with the younger journalists but later expanding to very experienced senior writers and editors.
At these publications, there was almost no new hiring for FT reporter or editor roles. Empty positions were not backfilled. Among the younger journalists who left or were laid off, most did not go to Mashable or TechCrunch, which paid little and often would only hire stringers with no benefits ... instead, they went to industry, where Microsoft or Intel or PWC or whoever would give them 2x the salary and real benefits to work in their expanding marketing and digital content departments.
Diversity in tech is usually discussed from a U.S. perspective. I don't think anyone is looking at diversity figures in Asian tech companies. So restricting the comparison to U.S. tech journalism seems fair.
And, as you say, those small-town newspapers are pretty hurting these days where they still exist at all.
I always thought that you even had to take an oauth to be a journalist, as the impact of the profession can affect the public opinion and therefore comes with a good amount of responsibility. To think someone without any qualifications can just start writing for credible news outlets seems quite scary to me.
The more typical route in my experience is that people get some sort of liberal arts undergrad degree like English, communications, or journalism (not sure how common this is as an undergrad major). Though you also get journalists with various science or engineering degrees who end up gravitating to science reporting. In many cases, people going into journalism have worked on the school paper. I'm guessing straight out of high school is uncommon these days; I assume "apprenticeships" are rare though poorly paid/unpaid internships may be less so.
There is also a lot of movement in and out of journalism (though mostly out these days) to a variety of other fields that involve a lot of writing such as IT industry analysts and content teams at companies.
But in general my experience is that journalism doesn't especially gatekeep by credentials (though it does by connections to a non-trivial degree). And a lot of working tech professionals publish blogs etc. in various online tech pubs. For a number of years I had one when CNET used to have a whole external blog network.These days I write for TechTarget every now and then as well as a couple of sites my company sponsors. There are some bad examples of this but it's widespread. Papers like the NYT segregate external content more carefully.
I'd love to read a good quality investigative article any day. I couldn't care less about how much melanin the author got, but I like good stories with the "from below" perspective. They are invariably better than the founders/leaders information bubbles a lot of outlets like to fixate upon.
Also the idea that diversity at a big tech companies is an indication of diversity in technical fields is just wrong.
We either change according to parent company, and then we need to take the G and put an A. Or we don’t and leave the F.
GAMMA makes no sense.
That's a justification at least.
Color me skeptical.
1) reducing "diversity" to "different skin colors"
2) fixating on the Third-Reich-esque concept of "human race"
3) insisting that skin colors can be neatly sorted into 4-5 discrete categories
4) lamenting the ratio between these categories, without stating what the correct ratio should be, and why
oh, they don't really hesitate to state that the lower the ratio of a certain group of people is the better. not just in the "melting pot" of the US, but everywhere in the world, including the countries where that group of people is the indigenous population.
Here, the message is basically: our people want more of what your people have. ("Proper ratios" arent the point). This is what most of these movements are about, a certain type of economic-political warefare most accute when high-status positions are rare and there's a lot of competition for them.
I think this perspective also, in some sense, "humanises, justifies and rationalises" this type of agit-prop. Ie., I actually have a lot of sympathy for "genuine politics" -- ie., competition over finite resources and their allocation.
It's just some people saying, "we think we're owed more than we have" -- and that's a real political claim everyone, at somepoint, makes justifiably. Here, I say: let them make their demands. It's part of politics. It is likely this author (or their group) wants a resource: a job in journalism. There arent many. If they have some grounds to demand it, let them demand it. (It is however dressed up and disguised in this weird theology of race, gender, etc.).
"our people want more of what your people have." -> What "your people have" could be freedom from slavery in 1864, ability to attend the same schools, etc. etc.
Framing it in this way does not make the argument less compelling and I have no idea why you think that race-based discrimination is a "theology" in a country that had explicit legal discrimination against black people up until the 70s and plenty of informal discrimination afterwards.
Yes, we could talk about systemic racism etc. That is why one might engage in a lot of political projects. However a highly specific demand about ratios in upper-middle-class high-status industries... these specific demands are a little harder to parse.
The #metoo movement was not about the masses in the industry, it was about the elites. The academic "fire them" movements (eg., against pinker) are likewise not about the army of PhDs and their sexism. Rather these are intra-elite warfare using somewhat valid grounds to wage an attack on resource-horders.
I agreed that these groups have justifiable reasons to make demands; that's partly my point. The issue, where it exists, it their methods.
It is very easy to become cynical and take these demands "too literally" as demands for quotas, and for reinstitutionalising racism "as a corrective".
Rather, it is better to see them as the same ordinary politics everyone both engages in, and is entitled to engage in.
As for the "theology" that refers to the particular dogmatic moralising and evangelising approach taken, and the frequently dubious premises.
Calls to integrate schools, calls to reduce our massive incarceration - all of those are designed to be broad based. That those people also want the people who tell media stories and who make political decisions and who run major enterprises to be representative of our population as a whole does not, in my view, indict those people as "elitists."
What's wrong with moralizing? I think some things in how our society is structured ought to change. Is that "theology"?
Are, indeed, not what i'm talking about.
Most people demanding jobs in journalism arent engaged in projects to reintegrate schools. I'm talking about those demanding the jobs, not MLK.
Most people who want greater diversity in journalism aren't demanding jobs for themselves (indeed most of them aren't journalists and are not in that profession).
It seems you've constructed this whole narrative on a pretty thin basis.
As somebody who is prohibited from having "people", the whole "our people" thing rubs me the wrong way from the beginning.
what does this mean? I'm no historian, but I'm pretty sure the Third Reich was focused on the "German race", to the exclusion of all others.
As for ratios, the ratio indicates an uneven pipeline. If idk, programmers were all white and highly rewarded, you might ask why that is. The reason can be one of two things: white people are culturally/systemically advantaged in getting those jobs (for example, those jobs are only available in predominantly-white areas or the education to do the job is more accessible to white people), or white people are more fundamentally capable of programming than others. The former is a social critique, the latter is white supremacy.
If you reject the white supremacist position (as you should), then the question becomes whether you can make the system provide more of an equal opportunity.
Or: "white" culture emphasizes values that tend to produce people who are more interested and/or more capable programmers. The same way that, say, asian immigrants are more likely to value education than other demographics. This white supremacy argument is a disingenuous appeal to the extremely negative connotation of the term and poisons the argument with a dishonest framing, as though the only possible outcome in a perfect meritocracy is equal representation. Nothing about human nature suggests this to be the case.
Diversity of opinion also implies diversity of interests. The pipeline problem is not merely a question of unequal opportunity, unless you deny minorities the agency to pursue their own interests. Some groups of people value athletic achievement above intellectual achievement, and it would be unreasonable to expect those demographics to produce a proportional number of competent programmers.
It's a perfectly reasonable argument, if not at times overfitted. In the US, zero (0) presidents have been born post-Civil Rights Act. In fact, Ruby Bridges [0] is only a year older than Bill Gates. So did Ruby's peers just happen to not produce programmers at the same rate as Bill's because they didn't "value" education? Hey, maybe it's true. Who knows? But the idea that a demographic whose grandparents had to be escorted by the national guard to protect them from white supremacist mobs on the way to get an education being behind in education has nothing to do with white supremacy, is ridiculous at absolute best.
> The pipeline problem is not merely a question of unequal opportunity, unless you deny minorities the agency to pursue their own interests.
So let's make the opportunity equal and see where the cards fall. Did the kids in my neighborhood and school find making computer games any less interesting than I did? No, but I could afford a computer. Guess where we are now, respectively.
...I might outright have an alternate history of the entire '10s "Culture War". Or I might have gone paranoid. Of course I can't prove any of it. I'd love an answer to your first question myself.
Please don't take HN threads further into generic ideological flamewar. That's just what we don't want here, because it's extremely repetitive. It also almost always turns nasty. Those properties hold true regardless of which ideologies people are battling for or against. All of this is therefore off topic here.
https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html
Edit: you badly perpetuated this flamewar downthread. We ban accounts that do that, so please don't do it again.
It won't happen again.
The goal of something like this is to center race to gain power.
The first step in the playbook for entrenching a woke ideology into a bureaucracy is to demand racial data/reporting. "hey look, this is an obvious problem... just look at the data". The next step is to demand a full diversity initiative. Next is hiring diversity inclusion and equity bureaucrats be installed. Once you have your own bureaucrats installed "inclusion" is used to promote fear and stifle speech or any descent. Now that no one can disagree or challenge the bureaucracy you can grow it and force it into the other bureaucratic functions.
As an journalism specific example: this is exactly what played out at The New York Times
This seems to be a very effective political strategy to gain power. It does seem to work. The question is how much does our society benefit?
I m just sad Ill always be suspicious since I fit their whiteness definition each time I take a hiring decision... gladly I can be xenophobic and hire only multicolor french people in China hehehe and create diverse homogeneity ...
From what I've read, the racism in France is quite bad. Your habit of "not discussing" race makes it more difficult to enforce the law - for instance, the phenomena of nightclubs & bars turning away black patrons is quite common in Paris.
Links
https://www.newsweek.com/french-activists-39-percent-paris-t...
39% of Parisian hiring agencies agreeing to filter out non-white job applicants: You would never get anywhere near that number in an urban US core.
Yes? Since apparently you feel perfectly comfortable with a link trying to prove this very fact, but lets see the claims of the article you linked.
> called 69 temporary employment agencies in the Paris area posing as employees from a construction firm.
Already an extremely small sample
> The French government said it would summon the companies in question.
Audited
> It said 55 percent of the branch offices it contacted refused requests to discriminate.
Okay
> Although limited in scope to a small number of agencies, the findings highlight what anti-racism campaigners say is a wider problem of discrimination in some French workplaces.
A claim of wider effects from a noted small sample
It's more than large enough of a sample size to put a tight confidence interval around the proportion.
Again, as I've said - you would never get anything remotely like this in the urban core of the US.
US nightclubs do not routinely filter based on race, unlike a sizeable percentage of Paris nightclubs from past investigative reporting.
Is it possible that maybe you just don't notice the brunt of it because there are fewer people of African descent in both of these countries?
This is precisely what a racist would believe, and this precise ideology gives perfect cover to racism.
The average wealth of a black family in Boston is $8 whereas the average wealth of a white family is about $200,000. How do we talk about these disparities if we throw away the language to talk about race?
Or is your argument that these disparities are innate? Or that they are not at all due to the legacy of explicitly race based discrimination in the US (the last school desegregated due to Brown v. Board was in 1998)?
If you're not making either of those arguments, it seems kinda obvious why discussing race is still necessary today to me, not sure what you are missing.
If more black people are poor, then more black people will be helped by such policies. If we want to help the poor, let's help the poor.
If we only help the "black poor" we have to precisely codify what being black is, and I'm sick of such race science. The argument that being black implies the need of additional help is even _further_ condescending.
But I don't think the causes of poverty are universal, and for lots of black people, they are racially driven.
Discussing policies around the "poor generally" while banning discussion of race means abdicating any attempts at integrating schools, means that it is impossible to address discrimination against pepole with black sounding names (50% less likely to get a callback), means that it is impossible to discuss ongoing discrimination in the housing market (rampant, https://projects.newsday.com/long-island/real-estate-agents-... is a great resource if you want to see what racism in the urban US in the 21st century looks like).
None of those problems - all of which are likely large proximate causes for the racial disparities here - could be addressed if we are only allowed to talk about class and not race.
No compelling reason for why any discussion of race should be taboo has been provided. If the people who are discussing race in this manner are the "most racist", they're doing a pretty bad job at it given the massive disparities benefiting white poeple in pretty much all sectors of society in the country.
It seems ridiculous to me that the solution is to stop discussing race at all in a country that had legally enshrined anti-black discrimination within living memory.
You can make it illegal to discriminate against black people without creating a race database of every single worker in the country. Requiring every employer to ask every applicant "what kind of human race are you?" is so dumb that you can't make that up, asking applicants what race they are should be illegal but instead USA requires you to do it! That is like requiring every employer to ask every woman if they are pregnant or not and then report those statistics to the government, since how else can you ensure that pregnant women aren't discriminated against? It is almost as if the policy was made to encourage discrimination and white supremacy, but it is fine since you say you do it for good!
I think it is telling on HN that many seem more up in arms around the reporting requirements stemming from the 1964 Civil Rights act than any of the huge racial disparities I've identified above.
Given that the government has not been able to do anything about rampant racial discrimination in the real estate space, I am unsure how you think the government could do better if it can't even consider the race of employees or customers when making an equal opportunity case.
I agree with your point, if disparities exist, they should be discussed.
What's surprising is that when looking at the sample breakdown, even thought the # of observations and median age was approximately the same for White and U.S. Black, the U.S Black sample group where significantly less likely to be married (and thus not able to account for any spouse's income/wealth in the calculations for household net worth).
> Although members of communities of color are less likely to own homes, among homeowners they are more likely to have mortgage debt. Also, data on student loans and medical debt for whites and racial/ethnic minorities suggest that whites are often less likely to have these forms of debt.
This looks like the most critical reason for such a disparity.
Median is an average. [0] If anything the fact that it is a median makes it only more compelling, at least to me.
> thus not able to account for any spouse's income/wealth in the calculations for household net worth
Yes, maybe if more were married they would have double the net worth up to $16.
> This looks like the most critical reason for such a disparity.
It seems like a reflection of disparities in wealth, not the reason for it. My guess is there is a sizable historical component to the disparity, given that 60% of private wealth in the US is inherited [1], that would make large portions of that wealth inherited from either times where black people were actively enslaved or excluded from wealth acquisition mechanisms by law or custom. Such exclusion by custom is ongoing today, there is clear evidence for it in hiring and real estate markets.
[0]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Average
[1]: https://www.washingtonpost.com/us-policy/2019/02/06/people-l...
I'm merely denouncing those who try to shoehorn the subject of race in every discussion.
I think I took your agreement that anyone identifying as "anti-racist" is a professional victim as suggesting that we should refrain from discussing race.
If you say “I don’t know, but it needs to be closer” that’s just in group preference - which is fine, but don’t present that statistic as evidence of anything but a disparity. You need to prove (while accounting for all confounds) that this gap is a result of x.
https://www.americanbar.org/groups/crsj/publications/human_r...
It doesn't take a genius to recognize that intergenerational wealth will have large disparities as a result of vastly different starting points in wealth (yes, due to slavery), jim crow legal constructs, as well as the ongoing fact that there is large ongoing (and well-studied) discrimination against black people in job and real estate markets, at minimum.
We detached this subthread from https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=29277764.
Then you look at their methodology for looking at who is in Tech journalism. There are just some glaring issues.
First of all - are we really grabbing a single month of authors in the NYT? And if you're grabbing the data from the NYT website, why not just do that over a few years?
Why have we chosen these 13 random publications? I'm assuming that the NYT is included literally just because the people who did this study don't like the NYT? And meanwhile, they therefore completely skate over a massive obvious problem - a massive amount of Tech journalism is independent or covered in publications that aren't listed here - does AnandTech not count as tech journalism now? Let's completely ignore independent journalists shall we?
The second list of tech journalists is literally just "We found this random list of tech journalists and took it at face value".
Now there are about 1000 different problems I have with this study (I think it's frankly just quite shoddy) but a real highlight was where they just admit to basically finding the list of jouranlists (a list I quite frankly think is just worthless due to the methodology) and then just start guessing whether they're white.
The author complains that no tech journalists will cover this, but this is just really really shoddy work, and that doesn't even get into the obvious fact that Big Tech and Big Tech journalism are not the same! We're literally comparing a list of less than 1000 journalists to companies that employ hundreds of thousands of people.
"Big Tech Media corporations should do the right thing and release the demographic breakdown of their employee base. There is even a federal requirement to file the form EEO-1 Survey which breaks this data down."
These are some of the biggest media publications that write about tech issues, these aren't just "random" choices. This author seems to focus on "big tech media" as is mentioned in the article multiple times, these are big tech media, independent journalists are not.
Anecdotal, but I know every one of them off the top of my head, I've personally never heard of AnandTech and had to google it.
The size of these companies is irrelevant to that point
And who are these companies you keep mentioning? They don't even come up when I search them on DuckDuckGo. That's how small they are in comparison to the companies the author included as "big tech"
What I'm saying is we can have standards like "I took the 10 brands that have the top ranking on Alexa in this category plus 5 tech arms of larger titles" - or something like that, an actual objective standard for what they're selecting rather than a grab bag of 13 random companies.