Software engineers paying 75K to get 3 inches taller
businessinsider.com
businessinsider.com
As an example, a slightly above average man who generates 16561 swipes on Tinder will generate 7666 likes and 8675 dislikes. Out of these there will be 290 matches and 7596 no-match. A rate of 2.5 matches per day and an overall 3.7% match rate. Out of 290 matches he will send 87 messages and receive 12. 191 matches will never result in a message. Of the 99 messages 31 will be left on read or never even opened the initial message, resulting in 68 conversations. 40 of these women ghosted him, and our subject gave up on 17 of them. Ultimately this resulted in getting 11 phone numbers. These 11 phone numbers in 4 months led to 3 dates and 8 gave up on texting, declined the dating offer, or our subject simply gave up on them. All 3 dates did not materialize into anything long term. It was a complete waste of time. Considering that online dating is the most common method used to find a date these days, the options are grim for men who are not in the top 5% of attractiveness if they use these online platforms.
Prior discussion: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=31823294
They're rigged for women. Even on the sites that claim to cater to women by forcing them to make first contact, they overwhelmingly use superficial low effort messages to unlock the other side and then proceed to reject 80% of the men they selected just like with regular sites.
If women would rather remain single than setting for a partner who doesn't match all their expectations and they set their expectations unreasonably high and online dating only benefits the top 5% of men and all real life venues of approach close for various reasons.... what are the bottom 90% of men going to do in the future? Is sex going to become a privilege reserved for only the most elite men? If the majority of men cannot enjoy intimacy, expect incel terrorism to increase exponentially.
Sex is unconditionally a privilege as long as we believe in consent. It is the prerogative of anyone who owns their own body to decide whether or not to give themselves to anyone. That includes the prerogative of holding out only for metaphorical Brad Pitt.
I'm not sure "but the incels engage in terrorism" is going to persuade women to give their bodies to the men they don't want.
I’m surprised people seem to think homo sapiens sapiens has somehow moved beyond instinctual behaviors programmed by thousands upon thousands of years of evolution.
We haven’t.
> We haven’t.
I have seen my own children develop their understanding of the world through such stereotypical behaviors that it further solidifies my appreciation of just how much human behavior is derived from innate instinct.
This is why Lori Gottlieb wrote Marry Him: The Case for Settling for Mr. Good Enough. <https://smile.amazon.com/Marry-Him-Case-Settling-Enough-eboo...>
One can also see the relation to the message of Susan "the Princeton mom" Patton's Marry Smart. <https://www.cnn.com/2014/03/13/living/princeton-mom-book-mar...>.
With women, it's different. Each individual woman has a different taste. Some like men with beards, others hate them. Some like tattoos, others hate them. Some like them more chubby, some skinny. Some like a funny guy, some a serious one that doesn't act childish.
If you don't believe me, play a game with a women where you try to guess which guys she finds attractive. Very hard. With guys, that game is easy.
Beyond this there are about 55 features that need to come together to get the 95th percentile phenotype. Rather than enumerating them all here, there is a four part analysis on YouTube:
1. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ZhEuWSXxu5k
2. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=qwbGW9jeDeo
3. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Fz7tI7qT5t8
4. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=2otjA_98StYEvidence from 2014 craigslist personals: https://incels.wiki/images/6/61/Juggernaut_test_2014.jpg
Looks unmatched couples are unstable and the better looking partner is at elevated risk of monkey branching.
- before, religion and morals were preventing sleeping around, which was effectively doing "sexual socialism" for the "poor" of the sexual market. this led to everyone having 1 partner as a pareto optimum. (even if in many cases paople were sleeping out of marriage)
- with sexual liberation (both of men and women), top performers get all the spoils, as it is with monopoly and businesses, and the lower perfomer gets... what's left.
Conclusion : be a top performer. Equality is always only a social construct
Those numbers are so horrendous that you'd be better off going to a bar and hitting on every single woman. You could get shot down 50 times in a row, yet as long as you want to 3 bars in a week w/at least 20 approachable women each, you'd still have a date within a week, which is already 1/3 of the success the guy in your example had in a tiny fraction of the time.
And of course, bars are pretty much the bottom of the barrel, as unpleasant as it gets. This is hard mode. Try any other setting - a meetup, a birding club, whatever - and things will be easier.
You're treating it here like this is no issue, but do you actually know anyone that can take that many rejections in a row and not have it impact their mental state? Even if you know it's not a judgement on you etc. etc., it is hard for any human to continue in the face of so many rejections. It's not just about dating -- successful entrepreneurs are often those people that can take rejection after rejection and continue going. But it's very hard and very rare.
In general I am on the same side -- you can get much better success approaching in real life vs. on the apps. But what the apps abstract away is that rejection which you feel very intimately when in person.
Treating relationships as an equation to be optimized might be the real hindrance.
But you can choose the system that gets you what you want, faster.
So, in choosing the lesser of two evils, choose the bar. Choose anything other than Tinder. Because pretty much any dating alternative to Tinder is better than Tinder.
You certainly could say that, but you have no idea how the variables will react. That sets people up for disappointment when they think they’ve “optimized” human relationships.
The only good thing about online dating apps is the anonymous liking feature, you get match when you mutually like each other - so on paper there is less rejection. However as this thread states - it has other downfalls.
This issue really got to me few years ago and I set out to build an app that would allow you to have this anonymously liking but at events, bars etc So it's hyper localised, you check-in to an event/bar and you see other singles that are there. If you match, you can then 'warm' approach them.
I always just saw this app as an ice breaker app - it was received well by my peers. Unfortunately due to flaky business partners and covid, i'm only now at a point where i'm ready to release. Pending Apple app store approval which has been an absolute pain.
It will be a slow roll out, initially in Bali, Indonesia. Pending response and funding.
if anyone is interested, its called SeeMe http://www.seemeapp.net/
Which means several things. As you say, for heterosexual individuals, it's much more difficult for a typical male to be matched with a typical female. It also means if you're a male looking for a long-term mate, then you'll do better with the old-fashioned approach of getting out and being social.
> All 3 dates did not materialize into anything long term.
As an outsider whose exposure to Tinder is largely hearsay, my understanding is that long-term relationships are not really the goal of most users on this particular app.
Of course it's still brutal. Good candidates get out of the pool quickly and so the remaining ones tend to have issues :/
When there is a disproportionate number of males competing for chance at mating, females become very selective. I guess the apps are just going with the data.
I'm that guy (6.5/10). I've never done numbers close to that bad. I could understand if someone was trying to date out of their socio-economic and age ranges (although you can always date up in age, for men).
In southern california, more like 200 swipes, 2 conversations, 1 date. Out of 5 dates, at least 1 overnight.
Tinder, however, was a total wasteland. Zero responses to anything. I think it just wasn't my scene.
My wife works as a dating coach, with both men and women. Men are very reluctant to listen or even try the advice, so I'm not going to try to convince you guys that you can make it work. It's not that hard actually, but most men already made up their mind on the whole dating thing. I'm sure there's plenty of "experts" here that can tell you all about how it can never work.
One specific example I can give you: Women find it important that you have clean, well-groomed hands. This is not intuitive or obvious to men at all, unless you know.
But I think the main problem is not necessarily the lack of information, but a more a mentality change. A lot of the men think "She has to accept me for who I am". That might be true, but it's not really relevant. You have to show what you can offer in a relationship. A woman doesn't start a relationship with you just because she all of a sudden loves you. No, she starts a relationship because somehow she gets some benefit out of that relationship. So you have to show what you have to offer. You like traveling? Maybe she wants to travel. You like a certain kind of music? Maybe she likes that music and likes to go to concerts. Or whatever.
Answering the question "Why would a woman start a relationship with you? What's in it for her?" seems a question that some men don't want to answer. I don't mean that they don't know the answer, I mean they have a problem with the question itself.
The TL;DR is to improve yourself, work on your insecurities, be emotionally open, and become genuinely not-needy. He provides a lot of specific helpful tactics.
I have a friend who ABSOLUTELY do not fit the stereotype of attractive men (1.70m / software engineer and he does climbing but with a small belly) and he f** like 60 girls in 8 months when he discovered the tinder magic.
I've done my time too, but at a lower scale, but since I'm slightly attractive that would not make my point. In general the biggest fuckboys Ive met were really not considered nice looking at best.
I'm in the top 5% of attractiveness IRL and tinder was bizarre to try and use. It was this weird self referential world where you needed a completely new set of skills to be noticed. I was reminded of trying to learn how to write an effective resume after university.
When I had a woman make my tinder profile attractive to other women I just deleted it: the type of woman who would find that appealing is not the type of woman I would find appealing.
The results clearly showed that being taller increase men chances of getting a yes - no matter how tall you are, and no matter what the woman initially stated as their max ideal height!
Scroll through the charts below. The entire article is worth reading due to the solid methodology that removed most biases involved in these studies.
https://www.researchgate.net/figure/The-effect-of-male-and-f...
https://citeseerx.ist.psu.edu/viewdoc/summary?doi=10.1.1.61....
Whereas it is an easy lifehack for a less visually attractive man (5.4), or simply shorter man (5.5) to be selected by a woman, if they make more.
I don't get the impression anything has changed since that study in 2006. I don't even think the same study could be done now given how broken online dating services have become now.
A corollary of this, more related to this forum, is that this is a greater aspect of workplace gender and earning inequality than readjusting the workplace for women. Greater displacement of workers would occur if women were interested in having a lower earning man in subsidy, because many men would leave the workplace for that option. The option of unpaid household and emotional labor that is overrepresented by, and a predictable option for, women. The people interested in that role are probably a more even distribution across society.
> Really what we want to do is observe people’s choices directly which is why dating websites are so useful to us. Here’s an example. What if I have a hypothesis that when choosing a mate, men care more about their potential partner’s appearance than her income and women care more about her potential partner’s income than his appearance. Imagine the following experiment. A woman/man can choose between communicating with two people. One earns $60,000 a year and is more attractive than 9 out of 10 people on the market. The other earns X dollars per year and is less attractive than 9 out of 10 people on the market. Every other observable characteristic about these two people is identical. We can use the information that tells us who individuals choose to communicate with to determine what X would have to be in order to make a woman/man prefer the less attractive person.
> Researchers have done this and find that for men there is no amount of income that the woman in the bottom ten percent in terms of appearance can earn to make men prefer her over women in the top 10 percent. That is, looks really matter to men relative to income. For women though, if the man in the bottom ten percent in terms of looks earns more than $248,500, they will prefer him over the more attractive guy earning $60,000. My students often interpret this result as saying that women really care about money, but that is not what it says at all—$186,000 is a huge difference in income. If women didn’t care about looks and only cared about money, the figure would be much, much lower. This says that despite the impression that on the marriage market women really care about income, the evidence suggest that they also care about looks. They just care about income too.
the intimidatingly attractive woman has the same social anxieties as the woman in the bottom ten percent. the person that's beautiful on the outside, is also beautiful on the inside, despite many woman in the bottom ten percent relying on the "inner beauty" becoming their whole identity and sales pitch. the income isn't interesting and barely a factor at all, the marketable skills to potentially generate income aren't that interesting (but a common interest might be), the education to potentially generate income isn't that interesting serving only to change the social circle to meet potentially stable partners with economic prowess. so its deduces to men continuing to just try for the more visually/sexually attractive person.
I assume at 7 feet or so you start getting more yeses just because of the novelty.
What could possibly go wrong? /s
Genuinely curious: has someone here gone through the procedure and care to share your experience? I'd imagine the 3 months must be hell, but won't it keep hurting even after when walking, running, or doing sports?
Bone is dynamic and living. It remodels (and fortifies) itself according to forces exerted on it!
I imagine some physical therapy and you're all good - the nerves can stretch just fine.
Plus, if you know the risks, and you want to be taller - go for it. One life, spend it how you wish.
This is life in general. There is an awful lot of privilege associated for completely arbitrary characteristics over which individuals have absolutely no control. Work, dating, whatever. This applies to both men and women . The article doesn't really go into why people are seeking this procedure. It would be illuminating to see quantitatve data on this. Is it because of dating opportunities? Work? Something else?
Hiring practices are notoriously superficial. Ageism, sexism, racism (eg [1]), etc. Often these things are masked as "culture fit". HR will put lots of processes in place ostensibly to counteract bias but the net effect is really to shield the company with plausible deniability when it comes to bias against protected classes from individual interviewers and hiring managers.
It would be interesting to see how height fits into this. Height seems to be a mixed blessing in acting, for example. There are certainly some very successful shorter actors (eg Tom Cruise is 5'7").
I imagine there is some of in software engineering too. Height goes to confidence and confidence will sway interviewers more than any technical competence will.
[1]: https://www.wbur.org/hereandnow/2021/08/18/name-discriminati...
'if you walk into any Big Tech company and want to figure out who the manager is, just look for the tallest, best-dressed man and you'll be right 90% of the time.'
whereas 'the managers' of some of the most successful big tech companies are short relative to people of similar backgrounds, let alone the tallest.
If you had said they were unlikely to be the tallest person in the room, I would have wholeheartedly agreed. If you had said they were short by white male american standards I would have also agreed. If you had said they were short by standards of U.S. tech workers, I would have half-heartedly agreed (since there is good Asian representation in that demographic but men are overrepresented).
C-suite and owners is a much more mixed bag.
Buffet and Gates are both 5’ 10”.
(Musk is 6’ 1.5” which is hilarious as I’d have pegged him as shorter than Gates for some reason)
I doubt we will see another lead “hero” actor of Tom Cruise’s height.
Many legendary scenes in cinematic history has been filmed with actors standing on platforms.
I'm pretty short, but I'd much rather be 6'2" than 6'4".
It is rare that being super tall - or super strong - provides a significant advantage. We have engineering for that.
But being slightly above average (like everyone thinks they are) can be handy enough for day-to-day without any real drawbacks.
I guess getting ripped is too mainstream in the bro-tech spheres.
There's, as far as I know, no such analogous singular deal-breaker trait for women.
I'm 5'3" and haven't needed to take 'drastic measures' to find women interested in me, both in real life and online. I would say that the majority of women 5'4" or under don't consider my height a dealbreaker, even if it's a disadvantage (which it definitely is). Yes, taller women are another story, but the average height of a woman in the US is 5'4".
So why does my experience differ with the conclusion you've drawn? My guess: I have a pretty good looking face, a reasonably fit body, and I'm a musician. In other words, height excluded, I'm above-average in attractiveness. And that's evidently enough to take away the whole dealbreaker thing, if it existed in the first place.
I know it's an n=1, but your statement is so profoundly certain that an n=1 is enough weaken it.
I would much rather be a physically unattractive guy than a physically unattractive woman. Women consider so many different traits that it's easier for guys to work on becoming attractive for women.
But again - should we use something that is innately genetic and unchangeable as a means for “compensating”?
You’re not even ripped. You just say reasonably fit - so I assume something barely above skinny fat. Your face (genetics) are doing you favors here a lot.
It also depends a lot on where you are and where you’re pulling women from. Personally - there’s not a single woman I know who would date a man who is 5’3”. Heck - most don’t even want to date a man under 5’10” and will only do such when someone in person sweeps them off their feet. (Relying on repeated forced interaction - they’ll never go on a date with them from OLD)
Certainly in a speed dating or o stranger dating (e. g., online dating) environment, but maybe that's not your best game if that's what you are working with.
Did a tall person write this? This is horse shit. If you're unfortunate enough to find yourself in a bubble where this fallacy actually applies, get out quickly. Or if this is you, and you're under average height, I'd legitimately suggest seeking counseling to try and overcome the short supply of confidence, perhaps discover the reason why you're projecting this onto yourself. There is an immense supply of people and an incredible variety of tastes.
https://www.researchgate.net/figure/The-effect-of-male-and-f...
There's a large amount of incredibly shallow men based on all the guys I've become friends or acquaintances with over the years, and I can only assume that women are just as capable of being shallow.
>There's, as far as I know, no such analogous singular deal-breaker trait for women.
Obesity, smell, creepiness, being disfigured, in a wheelchair.
Age.
https://www.theatlantic.com/science/archive/2018/08/online-d... (control-f "How Age Affects Online-Dating Desirability Among Heterosexual Men and Women")
https://cdn.theatlantic.com/thumbor/ElYAU3S0hhWWdqoxqv-4DRi1...
https://archive.ph/Bhwhe (https://theblog.okcupid.com/the-case-for-an-older-woman-99d8...)
https://archive.ph/dHvWf (https://www.nytimes.com/2018/08/15/style/dating-apps-online-...)
https://archive.ph/HqHNr (https://advances.sciencemag.org/content/advances/4/8/eaap981...)
Race and ethnicity in shambles.
That does not sound easier than spending the same 3 months with ~4 hours of workouts a week (which is enough to get most untrained people into pretty solid shape lifting), never mind the other health benefits.
I don't really think efficiency is a particularly good argument here :P
they did, by grinding 1000s of leetcode problems, to get a SV job, to get money, to pay for leg surgery!
In general, women like taller men.
Ergo… some guys with the means are gonna try to get taller.
However they will be sorely disappointed as to get with the ladies one has to have a lot more going for him than height.
Kind, well rounded, able to gather resources, confident, attractive and respected by his peers and society. Also tall.
A sign of lack of confidence is not being comfortable and accepting of your limitations so you can work around them.
Heck, this is the same as a lady getting a boob job or bbl. And we know how men feel about those fake things already.
Men don't run away screaming from surgically modified boobs.
Don’t be dramatic.
https://medcraze.com/wp-content/uploads/2020/10/NuVasive-PRE...
Would not recommend.
Why? Trying to change the steel to yellow in color?
P.S. I did catch the Mythical Man Month reference
The problem is that ceteris paribus, tall people do have an advantage in the aggregate, and "short king energy" is about having the requisite physical traits (ex. facial hair, body hair, muscles), confidence, and compelling personality to make the cetera not be paria.
I also think part of the problem is A) that dating, especially on apps, places physical appearance front and center when it comes to getting your foot in the door to talk to people, and B) a lot of other people are instinctively judgmental about certain dynamics in heterosexual dating, especially when shorter/younger/less successful/less dominant men date taller/older/more successful/more dominant women, and homosexual dating is comparatively a blank slate in terms of how your friend group/family will perceive it.
You'll get back your $75k in only 32 short years! (Or are those tall years?)
[0] https://www.theguardian.com/money/shortcuts/2015/apr/29/do-t...
One of the tack-on benefits of remote work is that at least it gets rid of height discrimination for fully-remote positions
Men who are 5 feet 6 inches need to make an additional $175,000 annually to be as desirable as men who are almost 6 feet. The number increases with shorter heights, with men who are 5 feet, for example, needing to make an additional $317,000 in income.
This was in 2006 dollars.
Not worth it for better tinder matches. Also I very very much doubt that the effect of height on income is causal.
https://www.buzzfeednews.com/article/elaminabdelmahmoud/limb...
I hope this is a joke. I'm a thin short man. I bet many women can beat me up if they wanted to. Yet, no one in my long working career remarked about my height.
You'd think tech wouldn't have these "old school" type of attitudes as part of the company culture, but you'd be wrong. I will say though, tech companies tend to have it concentrated more at the Exec level than the Engineer level.
Presumably MS has particularly high standing desks.
6 feet = 182 cm.
https://www.wsj.com/articles/online-dating-investing-match-t...
But counter-anecdote: I visited an ex-gf the other day to borrow something from her new partner, and she actually commented "I forget how tall you are". And it wasn't a positive thing, it was quite explicitly "new boyfriend is my height and it's great". Albeit that's 1.5m vs 1.8m so it's quite a difference.
Maybe we need a rule like "half your age plus 7"... "no more than 10% height difference?"
In Australia we have several ethnic communities where the stats for stuff like height diverge noticeably from the national stats. So "immigrated from The Netherlands" as a category will be taller by a few percent, "immigrated from China" will be shorter and have greater sexual dimorphism.
https://www.gigacalculator.com/calculators/height-percentile...
There are so many assumptions being made here. I want to know what the conditions in this hypothetical world are. It sounds fascinating.
Tech bros need money to get height gainz -> must pass tech interviews/bring a product to market -> intelligence
But also there is probably a correlation between height and wealth as well. Either way I don't think that it's anyone's place to determine who should reproduce.
Not by much, maybe an inch or two (exceptions exist though). I am taller than my taller parent (dad) by an inch. My dad is taller than his dad (the taller parent) by about 3 inches.
Given that such a surgery adds up to 3 inches in height, things could work out just fine. It isn't like this surgery tranforms 5'1 people into 6'1 people.