home_boi

The root problem is that the government is insuring loans for low quality education in terms of college prestige/education and major choice.

I don't think the purpose of the bill was to address that concern. The US will award a constant number of H1Bs no matter what the salary requirements are.

I think that the main benefit is to have higher quality H1Bs. There are many talented temp stays who lose the lottery to less talented people and have to leave the US. Salary can be used as a heuristic for talent.

> Because I looked at the DE course he taught (18.03) and I completed harder math courses than that in my non-MIT education. I'm sure many other HN readers have too. I wonder if there is some test you can take to see if you are just as good as an MIT graduate?

My experience at an okay school was that all upper level classes were graded and taught to scale with the student's intelligence. I and many other students passed through the curve. Many of us would not have passed comparable (by name and subject matter) courses at the top schools with a different curve and more in depth material.

> They are matching the diversity of the schools' recruiting efforts.

I think many undergrad schools actually positively discriminate based on gender/race for underrepresented minorities.

I can see this being true if the people work at the same company (and already passed the same filter).

I doubt it would be true over the entire university CS populations. If the only thing you know about two applicants is their university, then the student from a top tier university will on average perform much better than the student from a low tier university.

> If it doesn't match your society or customer base, and you think those things are important (I do), then it's bad.

Mismatch between company demographics and society/customer demographics is common in all industries. It is not a unique phenomenon. Before asking what we can do to change the discrepancy at tech companies, we must first ask why this is a problem in the first place when tens of thousands of companies in different industries have the same problem.

That depends on what metrics you use for 'diverse'. Diversity is more than skin deep. The candidates are very culturally diverse.

Well this is scary. We should see more concentration on privacy/security at the mediocre tech companies (because engineer pay is a decent indicator of privacy standards and security strength), ISPs, health care companies and financial companies. They have very personal data and many of them actually sell the data (and apparently even unanonymized data).

I feel that all the talk of privacy at the big tech companies like Google, FB, etc. is unwarranted compared to the threat. They have solid security and don't actually sell data. Letting advertisers target viewers based on demographic data is different from providing anonymized data to people and they have policies that make sure that advertisers can't get too narrow with their targeting.

I don't like the conflation of time/effort with privilege.

That is the crux of meritocracy. The amount of time someone spends on a task should have a strong correlation, if not a strong causation, to their professional success.

And on the privilege side of the argument, not having the time to learn or to do work makes someone less efficient at their job. Signals for high involvement in programming tasks are most likely also signals for high involvement in programming related jobs. That's just how life works. There isn't any way around it.

Note that Windows Defender also uploads files on scans which is opt out.

> but, sure, advantages compared to other, say, people whose only prior language is Mandarin

I wouldn't understate the significant advantages.

> And, of course, a big disadvantage compared to immigrants who already speak English, even if it's not American English.

Not necessarily. A large percentage of children of immigrants speak with their family (nuclear and extended) mostly in their native language even if their parents can speak decent English. The English skills don't transfer much unless the parents are very active in their child's English education.

The most effective solution for this problem would be to encourage birth control and abortion for populations that are unfit to handle parenthood.

There are enough similarities to give them significant advantages compared to immigrants coming from other parts of the language tree. English and Spanish have thousands of cognates. Having almost exactly the same alphabet is also a huge advantage. Having already learned thousands of permutations of the same alphabet letters (words) will make memorizing and learning the next thousand permutations much easier.

I wouldn't throw out accusations of racism and make the discussion inflammatory when it's not particularly relevant. You can just mention the differences.

Knowing "African American English" still puts one at a severe advantage compared to immigrants who don't know English or American children who have immigrant parents who can barely speak English. There are noticeable and helpful similarities between the AAVE and standard English.

African Americans also have cultural advantages compared to immigrants and immigrant children because their parents and family all grew up in America. Knowing and understanding American cultural references helps them learn standard English vocabulary and concepts much quicker.

> they tend to become a terrible metric

Not exactly. When a test becomes study-able, it becomes a good metric for how hard people try and how much time/effort people put into their studies/career. And that is arguably what people making tests were trying to or would want to measure.

Even if they are immigrants, knowing Spanish makes them half-way native English speakers because of the similarities between English and Spanish.

Patriarchy is a model whose name alone understandably offends and antagonizes an entire gender. It is clear that the people backing the model will not be effective in helping men because they are either ignorant about or do not care about the feelings of men.

> There are unfortunately people who try to hijack this to push their agenda

Hypocritically, you're using the topic to push your own agenda here. Which further shows how adopting the patriachy model will not help.

That's funny although news outlets can have writers and reporters with different opinions

> Yes, a biased pipeline is absolutely something that needs to be solved.

No it doesn't. Bias isn't always bad or oppressive. It needs to be proven that the bias is "bad".

If rich kids are underrepresented in tech because their families have connections in finance and they tend to major in finance more often, is this a problem that needs to be solved?

Frat bros are underrepresented in engineering in tech atm.

HR, recruiting and hundreds of other job families and careers have "biased pipelines". Should resources be spent to solve all of them?

Why only tech?

> And of the ones that do, the women with autism have to deal with both the barriers introduced by their autism and the barriers of sexist treatment from their peers.

With the benefits of diversity hiring.

Did IBM pay well back in the day?

> we know it was historically very bad

For the people living in those historic eras. We don't know the effects it has on people living in the modern era.

And then you have to make the leap on why tech companies should be enacting social justice in the first place. They're not the guardians of society. Social justice is inflammatory and hiring is basically a zero sum game because "diversity" doesn't affect head count (other than for the liberal arts majors and recruiters who have made careers out of the diversity issue)

> The suggestion that men and women ARE different is taboo.

This is the assumption being made by diversity hiring and diversity advocates. That some races/genders have different perspectives and viewpoints than others.

It can quickly follow that some of these viewpoints may make a person more or less fit for certain careers.

The competition isn't much better. There are hundreds of these massive leaps of logic used to justify the use of race and gender in hiring. Basically every reason for why the demographics of tech is the way it is this oversight.

At the core of diversity hiring (which corporations have spent billions of dollars on), the benefits of racial and gender diversity in a workforce have never been proven.

From the utilitarian perspective, what is the point of financial privacy (from the government)? It looks like money laundering and purchases of illegal substances seem to be the biggest "benefits". Those are benefits that aren't beneficial to the government or the people that are governed.

But Seattle is not the Bay Area. Professionally, it simply doesn't have as many opportunities as the Bay Area. The weather is much worse, it has a similar homeless problem to SF, less culture (somewhat subjective), worse schools compared to South Bay, etc.

I think the no income taxes has been a huge draw for stingy engineers who want to save $20k+/yr.

If the income tax, however tiny, actually goes through, people will see this as the beginning of many income tax increases and will be less likely to settle down in the area.

I don't think so.

"Rich" refers to a lifestyle that cannot be afforded by just $250k.

An example would be:

- Private school

- Vacation home

- 3+ luxurious vacations a year

- Saving $50k+ per year

- Eating out at fancy restaurants weekly

- Seeing expensive shows weekly

- $1+ million dollar home ($3.5+ million if you're in the Bay Area)

The barrier to move and change jobs is much lower

There's a fine line between limiting the free speech of these personal information aggregators and violating the privacy of people. Right now, there seems to be a lawless and limitless environment for the aggregators. They freely present people's physical address history, phone numbers, relatives, date of birth, etc. to the open web.

I hope some reasonable restraints will be put in place. Something like aggregated address history can only be displayed on official government websites with rate limits.

They lowball you (or rather, their stock performance is garbage and they won't adjust RSUs to account for that).

Their SF headquarters is a standard silicon valley playground. I'm not sure why the author tried to differentiate Yelp from regular SF/Silicon Valley companies by only mentioning its drab satellite office