> some people from underrepresented backgrounds have said they continue to feel unwelcome in the tech industry, and they also remain high in demand elsewhere as companies compete to increase diversity.
This is dangerous territory to comment on perhaps, but it seems like many policies which seek to boost individual company population ratios to be significantly higher than the comparable tech-industry ratios are prone to this problem.
Competing for talent and working hard to ensure that underrepresented group members have a fair shot? Should be standard practice and a baseline of ethical corporate and human behavior.
Competing specifically for underrepresented group members with a metrics-driven goal to boost ratios at one specific company above the relevant benchmark? Not obviously good to me.
We do have a diversity problem in tech, no doubt. That’s observable from the industry-wide figures. Moving an underrepresented group member from industry company A to industry company B doesn’t change that industry-wide measure at all, which should be obvious but seems to escape mention.
A problem I have heard female friends speculate about is with promoting women in higher positions.
If the female population is too low, and you try to get them into higher positions, two effects occur according to this theory.
First of all, with a low female population there probably aren't enough proven and qualified women to fill the desired number of slots. This leads to imposter syndrome / worry about people thinking "she only has this position because of gender". It also leads to these women sometimes doing poorer jobs, just because there aren't enough qualified women in the company to fill those positions.
Secondly, you drain the lower rungs of the company from women. This leads to under-representation in the lower rungs. Meaning fewer women getting the training time one needs to properly move up the ladder. It also means a dearth of female perspective on the lower rungs. Hurting both diversity of views, and the culture. That second point makes the company less attractive to women trying to enter the company, which perpetuates the problem.
Women were well represented in the early days of computing. The gender imbalance only started in about 1984. Some researchers think that was because home computers started to become affordable at about that time and were mainly marketed to men.
Women are also currently well-represented in computing in Eastern Europe, Iran, China, and somewhat in Russia.
None of these regions particularly care about "women in tech", and most of them are certifiably more patriarchal than any of the Western countries currently suffering from under-representation of women.
One can conclude from facts on the ground that neither gender equality nor pro-diversity movements correlate with desirable representation outcomes. Yet, those appear to be the only approaches attempted here in the West.
We're not serious about tackling the problem. We are, however, quite good at grifting off the problem with proposals we know don't work.
According to an article in the Atlantic, https://www.theatlantic.com/science/archive/2018/02/the-more..., "nations that have traditionally less gender equality [tend] to have more women in science and technology than their gender-progressive counterparts do".
There's a plot of % women STEM graduates vs. a measure of opportunities for women. Algeria has the highest percentage of women STEM graduates on the chart. The Nordic countries have some of the lowest.
> We're not serious about tackling the problem. We are, however, quite good at grifting off the problem with proposals we know don't work.
Could it be that women tend to care about stuff like a healthy work-life balance, and things like the 996.ICU working week can discourage them from applying? Whoops no, we've been told that's sexist wrongthink.
Could it be that computers are boring af and most of these people who genuinely care about computing are somewhere on the autism spectrum (which is mostly populated by males)
Your comment is great and more observant than most everything in this thread. The answer is freedom, when women have lots of choices they don't choose to play with things as often as men.
Women's representation peaked at around 1/3rd in the mid 1980s. While higher than present days, it was never close to parity. The narrative that personal computers were marked to boys is criticized: a significant market segment was secretarial work, which was predominantly made up of women.
The drop in women's representation in computing corresponds to the elimination of overtly sexist policies in other fields. E.g. medical schools removed gender quotas (maximum not minimum quotas, sometimes as low as 10%). Mary Ann Wilkes initially wanted to be a lawyer, but changed to computing when she encountered explicit sexism in law firms. After the expansion of women's right, women in her position were able to pursue their original passions.
I doubt it boils down to any one cause, but I think it's crucial not to ignore women's agency in making career decisions.
I know quite a few female programmers. Almost all of them wanted to be something else, and only became programmers as a second choice.
Another thought: compared to other technical careers, programming careers are uncredentialed. No legal or even social prerequisites other than skill.
If you want to be a doctor, you must apply to college, be accepted to college, matriculate, graduate with a degree in sciences. Then you must take the MCAT, apply to medical schools, be accepted to a medical school, graduate, apply to a residency, complete the residency, and become board certified.
And then you are an entry level doctor, licensed to practice in a single state, with no job, no patients, no practice, and no insurance network contracts.
If any of those steps are sexist/racist, a woman or minority is less likely to make it past that step.
Programming doesn’t have as many gatekeepers. That’s good for people who have been kept out of things.
Any history of the industry needs to address what analysts did vs. what programmers did. “Programming” was clerical work, converting flowcharts or pseudocode into machine code on cards or tape. That role was obsoleted when computer time became cheap enough to spend running compilers and linkers, which enabled analysts to write code by themselves in a higher-level language.
It wasn’t until later that obsessed nerds could teach ourselves from scratch at home.
You assume that all applicants are of equal attainment, ability, and motivation.
However, women have to fight an in-built discrimination. While men are more forced into work because our gender role expects it of us.
Thus, women who are candidates for promotion are likely to be more motivated and more ambitious than their male counterparts - they've had to fight harder against more obstacles to get to that point.
I see this in the gender balance of programmers. Female programmers have had to fight against a constant discouragement from pretty much everyone in their lives, while male programmers have had nothing but encouragement. So it's not surprising that female programmers tend (on average) to be better; they're more motivated, they really want this, and that's usually because they're good at it (if they weren't they'd have given up earlier).
> I see this in the gender balance of programmers. Female programmers have had to fight against a constant discouragement from pretty much everyone in their lives, while male programmers have had nothing but encouragement.
As a male growing up in the 80ies and 90ies in Europe I must say this must be somewhere else.
If this was the case then there would be some merit to the idea of "male privilege".
From what I saw encouragement came in two forms:
- generally for everyone
- and in addition, specifically for girls
I.e. I've seen activities for "kids who code" or "girls who code" but never for "boys who code".
I also have some personal experience regarding encouragement: from I was a young boy and until I had almost finished my Bachelors degree I was more than once discouraged from IT and encouraged to get a "real job" so either I was very special or the idea that boys get "nothing but encouragement" is plain false
> while male programmers have had nothing but encouragement
I really hate this stereotype as growing up in 80s "liking computers" was this thing only "nerds" liked in my area. Getting called a nerd was not at all positive and a derogatory slur. I loved computers at my own (social) peril.
Yep. In elementary school I was called a computer nerd every day. Want to know who usually flung that insult? Girls. Typically ones that would say "ew, math is gross."
Now they're the ones posting the 70 cents on the dollar misinformation to their FB feed.
Exactly. The narrative changed when iPhone / Smartphone took over the world. Now everyone knows what is an "App". And somehow Silicon Valley took over the world. Mainstream Media has all sort of Tech reporting in their front page. Stock investment are also dominated by tech. All of a sudden software programming is cool and you get some sort of social status with it.
But in the 80s/ 90s picking up a Pascal or Delphi book was about the dumbest thing you do in social circle.
I get that. But talk to a female colleague about her experience with it. They get not only the "nerd" label but also the whole "choose something that's feminine, no boy wants to marry a girl smarter than him" thing. It's fucked up.
In the UK there is an often-repeated statistic: the 20% of girls who take A-level physics outperform the 40% of boys who take it.
And of course they do! It's like saying a team comprised of footballers from the top division will beat a team comprised of footballers from the top two divisions.
The few women who go into tech or board rooms or whatever will typically be the women who are good at it, and they will typically outperform the larger cohort of (necessarily) more average men.
You don't need tales of struggle or diversity to explain this. Minority groups will tend to perform better.
You say you don't need discrimination to explain it, but your explanation assumes discrimination ie. you have to be really damn good in order to even have a chance as a woman. There is another explanation, the distribution of IQ between men and women:
> Another factor affecting perception may be distribution of IQ ... Although [men and women] are on average the same, the people at the very top and the very bottom of the IQ bell curve are more likely to be men. That is a pattern that we see in the university setting, with men either being at the very top of the class or at the bottom.
You also see a similar situation with "places in society". The majority of billionaires are men, but the majority of people in prison are men too. Women in general seem to have a more "stable" place in society compared to men. It seems harder for them to climb higher but also harder for them to fall completly at the bottom. If I wanted to sum it up, it would be something like "the glass ceiling comes with a glass floor". This is just my speculation though, and not in any way a judgment of value.
An important point here is that this glass ceiling or glass floor is only relevant to talk about on the level of all women. It has no bearing on an individual.
I'm not attempting to explain the under-representation of minorities. I'm explaining why minorities in teams will naturally perform better than average.
> However, women have to fight an in-built discrimination. While men are more forced into work because our gender role expects it of us.
I’m very skeptical about this. Firstly, the popular studies that purport to show bias against females are variously flawed (including using old data from other fields) but also because women have done very well in other fields at other times which were much more hostile to them (medicine and law, for example) than tech. Similarly, women do well in tech in countries that have much more gender inequality than we have in the West (indeed, there’s an inverse correlation between a country’s gender equality and its female representation in technology). All of this suggests that discrimination isn’t responsible for as much of the gender gap in tech as we suspect.
> Thus, women who are candidates for promotion are likely to be more motivated and more ambitious than their male counterparts - they've had to fight harder against more obstacles to get to that point.
This is very much the case if promotions are done without considering gender diversity. This can be compensated for by considering gender diversity when looking at applicants. However, that compensation can overshoot. This is especially likely if, for internal promotions, a goal of diversity is set that is too high compared to the total number of women already in the company.
That specific overshoot, caused by having diversity goals that are too ambitious given the number of women in the company, is what my comment was about. I raised the issue because women have raised it to me. Specifically when discussing blanket boardroom diversity quotas that were being considered by politicians in the Netherlands. Such quotas are more likely to cause this specific scenario, because they are made without consideration for the fraction of women working in the company, or even industry.
Yes, this bothers me as well. If 40% of all graduates in a particular field (like engineering) are women, and a company wants to have 50% female employees, that would mean they are overrepresented, since the employment pool isn't the general population. Same thing for all kinds of groups, like disability, race, ethnicity, etc. Everyone should feel comfortable and welcome, but we shouldn't aim for certain gender or racial ratios as the measurement to optimize.
> We do have a diversity problem in tech, no doubt
What is the correct racial / gender / sex breakdown for a tech industry with no diversity problems?
I’m not sure how we can say we have a problem if we don’t know what the correct breakdowns are. We’re implementing all these solutions with no metric to measure success. That seems like a perfect system to create more discrimination.
I think this is a complicated question to answer, but I'll give it a shot:
Within the tech industry, the correct proportion of minorities should be representative of your hiring pool (which is why I think they ask you to self report), or maybe even proportionally to "all qualified potential candidates", not sure how you'd measure that out.
The problem is even within qualified potential candidates, many minorities are still under-represented. This is a societal problem outside of the tech industry, but one that leaks into it.
More opportunities for these minorities to get a leg up to enter the field would bring the proportions closer to normal, stuff like affirmative action for schools.
It's a tough answer and nobody wants anyone in the chain to take responsibility for lifting up those that have been put down, it's definitely a flawed approach but I'm glad to see businesses attempt it.
I don't think it's fair to assume that genders and ethnicities should match either the general population or the hiring pool. Geography plays a huge role: if you have a company in a city with a substantially higher asian population (like Seattle or the Bay Area) that geographic distribution is going to have a significant influence. Likewise, a product used primarily by women might have higher representation of women because of the userbase. Pinterest is a good example here.
I think the solution is to realize that it's wrong to pick outcomes a priori, that we shouldn't trying to find the "correct proportion". Instead, focus on eliminating discrimination and biases in the hiring pipeline. Anonymize the gender and ethnicity of applicants. Use voice altering software to prevent the ability to discern between genders when interviewing. If the goal is to eliminate discrimination on the basis of protected characteristics, create a hiring process that isn't able to distinguish between these characteristics in the first place. Then, whatever proportion that results is the "correct proportion".
> Within the tech industry, the correct proportion of minorities should be representative of your hiring pool
How do you know all your hiring pools should produce evenly like that? There’s a lot of factors (cultural, genetic) that need to be understood. It would be very strange for interest in any industry to be even across racial groups.
> We do have a diversity problem in tech, no doubt.
We should be a bit more exact. We do not have a underrepresentation problem in tech, but a misrepresentation problem.
There’s a lot of minorities that are well-, even over-represented - e.g. Asians, Russian immigrants, autists, people without formal education, … I’m guessing it’s one of the most welcoming and meritocratic industries!
But those aren’t the “right” minorities, and it’s not politically expedient to point them out.
> I’m guessing it’s one of the most welcoming and meritocratic industries!
And I’m guessing you’re not one of the affected minorities. Otherwise you might see that “the system works for this subset of people so it must be working for everyone” is a flawed and untrue argument, at least in tech.
People pushing for more equal treatment of certain minorities didn’t happen out of the blue. There’s a long history of certain subgroups getting passed up during interviews, underpaid, getting passed up for promotions, etc. As an example an ex-colleague had a really hard time landing his first job in the industry. No one would call him back. He wondered whether his Hispanic sounding name was hurting his chances, so he anglicized it and tried again. He said it was like night and day. He found a job soon after. Perhaps you haven’t witnessed something like this first or second hand.
I think many companies are butchering their diversity recruiting efforts. They try to “fix” the issue with superficial and inefficient policies. But the problem they’re attempting to address is very real.
>Otherwise you might see that “the system works for this subset of people so it must be working for everyone” is a flawed and untrue argument, at least in tech. //
I interpreted their argument as "people who want to can get on in tech". Being non-discriminatory doesn't lead to representative demographics (unless everyone likes/wants the same things equally, which is clearly not true).
a good example of this is the disabled. any of those same brilliant tech workers could acquire a disability at any time - they come from the same group of people, but we seem quite under-represented. and the developer tools themselves tend not to be accessible (I can find literally nothing online, or even internally, about using Visual Studio with Dragon NaturallySpeaking.)
> I can find literally nothing online, or even internally, about using Visual Studio with Dragon NaturallySpeaking
My Talon project is capable of voice controlling Visual Studio, both at the interface level and at the code insertion/editing level. It can use Dragon as a speech engine, or my own engine. It has an existing Visual Studio integration, and Talon makes it easy to write your own context specific app commands or integrations.
It is, but honestly I don't think I could comprehend code that was read out to me. It's very much something I do with the visual parts of my brain in terms of following the logic, etc.
I'm not saying that it's impossible, and I don't know what kind of difference something like braille would make. Idk, are there any blind programmers that you know of ? Surely there must be some programmers who have gone blind, I wonder if they just decide to switch careers idk.
I know of blind programmers but don't know any personally. But I was actually talking about the reverse: dictation. I'm losing use of my arms, and even ergonomic keyboards aren't cutting it. Rehab set me up with a copy of Dragon so I can dictate, but even Microsoft Teams isn't really accessible with it, much less Visual Studio or any kind of terminal. I can see the code just fine, I just can't dictate it.
I am sorry for your health problem. I don't know if anything like that exists, but could you use your legs/feet to drive a mouse-like device? When I was a child, a teacher told us of a woman who learned to type on a typewriter (it was before computers became popular) using her toes. I wish you luck with figuring out what works for you.
thanks. that's a good thought. unfortunately my condition affects my whole body (my joints constantly dislocate and I have various nerve problems), so my legs aren't much better.. but something like a foot pedal could work. honestly I'm hoping for something like Neuralink to succeed, and that voice typing will tide me over.
Can you dictate to plaintext (notepad?) and use an oral markup - if punctuation is the problem - like saying "bang" for "!". Then parse your input, cut-paste into the IDE.
It seems very niche, which is why I'm not surprised not to see mention of it in the docs?
Why did you see it as particularly curious that VS and Dragon weren't setup for interoperability?
I think my best option is to write Python scripts with Dragonfly [0] to make a Visual Studio or VS Code extension that gives me accessibility, and/or a neovim plugin to let me say vim commands efficiently.
Dictating plaintext and copy/pasting works for writing code, but navigating through VS menus and code files and e.g. running unit tests is still a nightmare. Maybe an accessible mouse would help.
It sounds niche, but Visual Studio is perhaps the most popular IDE, and Dragon is the only real option for voice access on PCs. Any programmer without use of her hands would need this. It suggests that none of the programmers on the Dragon team have really dogfooded their product, at least for accessibility.
What I find truly heinous though is the Chrome plugin. It has two stars and thousands of reviews, and either doesn't work at all or breaks minutes in. When it works it's great, but it almost never does.
Maybe learn to use a large trackball with your feet?
Something like X-Keys L-Trac (Formerly CST2545-5w)
I've developed carpal tunnel, and to mitigate my problems I now use a mouse at work and trackball at home (strain different muscles). The clicking of the mouse bothered me for awhile, so for that I tried two mice. Right hand would control position and left hand would do the clicking. A foot pedal for the clicks would have been so much less awkward.
People who are deaf, legally (but not totally) blind, on dialysis, or with a slew of other disabilities are not visually distinguishable from people who do not have a disability.
People with disabilities are the most neglected of any demographic because they are not easily exploited for political gain.
And it really irks me that most diversity initiatives don't even mention persons with disabilities. One exception is Microsoft, which will always have my respect for considering disabilities in both product design and hiring.
> There’s a lot of minorities that are well-, even over-represented - e.g. Asians, Russian immigrants, autists, people without formal education, … I’m guessing it’s one of the most welcoming and meritocratic industries!
How do you get to your conclusion from your statement? Simply having some minority groups overrepresented doesn't mean that the industry is welcoming. It may mean its welcoming to those groups.
And people w/o formal education isn't really a minority group. Any more than PhDs in computer science is a minority group that is overrepresented in the tech industry.
> But those aren’t the “right” minorities, and it’s not politically expedient to point them out.
This isn't about political expedience, but its about understanding the context of the discussion. Either you're new to the US or simply are ignorant to the issues of the post.
> And people w/o formal education isn't really a minority group.
They’re a minority / highly underrepresented in other highly paid professions (law, medicine, finance). That’s something that IMO makes tech a truly exceptional industry!
The problem being described is an identifiable group feels like they are unwelcome or an otherwise hindered group within the industry. They use the population ratio as a mere point of evidence to argue it’s not just anecdotal.
Pointing out what groups _aren’t_ underrepresented is like saying “Yeah, we’ll, all lives matter” in response to “Black lives matter”.
If someone wants to express a complex and nuanced opinion, they should actually explicitly state the nuanced bit. Being generous and giving people the benefit of the doubt at best perpetuates a bad habit which people who are not acting in good faith take advantage of. If you wouldn't feel comfortable expressing an opinion clearly and unambiguously, you probably shouldn't express the opinion at all.
> Being generous and giving people the benefit of the doubt at best perpetuates a bad habit
It's actually a great habit that helps facilitate polite discussions. It's called the principle of charity and unless I'm mistaken it's actually one of the rules of this site.
I was referring to not communicating clearly as the bad habit. By simply assuming a meaning instead of calling it out, the person who initially spoke ambiguously gets no feedback that their statement was unclear.
And the principle of charity or charitable interpretation requires interpreting a speaker's statements in the most rational way possible and, in the case of any argument, considering its best, strongest possible interpretation. It means that if a statement could be read in an irrational way or in a rational way, you choose the latter. So if for example I said "sheep are white" you could interpret that to be the obviously false claim that 100% of sheep are white with no exceptions, or as the much more reasonable statement that sheep are typically white, where the principle of charity would be assuming the second interpretation. It has nothing to do with bending over backwards to make a statement palatable.
The hacker news guideline you are thinking of is "Please respond to the strongest plausible interpretation of what someone says, not a weaker one that's easier to criticize."
Saying "We do have plenty of representation of some minorities" is not a refutation of "we have a diversity problem in tech".
In fact, it is exactly these kinds of attitudes that directly contribute to perpetuating the diversity problem in tech.
And if you think you "have to dance around [a] topic to be PC", then chances are, what you're struggling with is either internalized bias (racism, sexism, homophobia, transphobia, etc)—or the fact that you're just a bigot yourself who's upset that their bigotry is no longer socially acceptable.
> Saying "We do have plenty of representation of some minorities" is not a refutation of "we have a diversity problem in tech".
Nobody is trying to refute anything. Your knee jerk reaction is to attack anyone who doesn't 100% agree with you. _You_ are turning a nuanced discussion into an argument.
> And if you think you "have to dance around [a] topic to be PC", then chances are, what you're struggling with is either internalized bias (racism, sexism, homophobia, transphobia, etc)—or the fact that you're just a bigot yourself who's upset that their bigotry is no longer socially acceptable.
Again, there is no reason for you to go full offence here. You are deliberately choosing the least charitable interpretation in order to make me the enemy.
I was referring to OP's own statement:
> This is dangerous territory to comment on perhaps
I was giving a reason why OP's comment was a little generalized.
That's a good point. I think part of it (at least in tech) is due to the fact that big tech companies focused on hiring the best people from all over the world, which reduces even more the chances of local unfavored minorities. I'm from France and stories of people going to the USA to work at companies like that are common. I don't think I would feel underrepresented as a French if I worked at Google or Facebook or an equivalent. This allows the USA to do a brain drain of global talent, which helps a lot at being the best in the world. On the other hand, that means that the local people are compared against a global market, which makes things harder from them.
> There’s a lot of minorities that are well-, even over-represented - e.g. Asians, Russian immigrants, autists, people without formal education, … I’m guessing it’s one of the most welcoming and meritocratic industries!
I don't know if there's a name for this, but as a Russian immigrant this sentence reminds me of how in Russia, because everyone is generally white, people are stereotyped by region. E.g. there are specific stereotypes for Muscovites, people from Siberia, Ukrainians (it was the USSR at the time), etc.
The point being that dividing people into arbitrary groups is a fractal process. You can zoom in on a demographic and then subdivide it again and again on various criteria until you come up with a small group of people you can call a minority. But doing so says nothing about why a sizeable demographic like PoC (30% of US population or so) is underrepresented in tech. There are certainly PoC immigrants, "autists", and people without formal education. Why aren't more of them in our "meritocratic" industry?
> Similar Nigerian success is reflected in the UK, where many in a highly-educated diaspora work in financial services, IT, and the legal and medical professions.
Admittedly I couldn’t find information about their representation specifically in the US tech industry, so if you do, that would be a strong indicator that the tech industry is racist (which would go against my priors and therefore change my mind), but they’re overrepresented e.g. in medicine, so ... well... for the time being, I’ll keep my prior.
> a sizeable demographic like PoC (30% of US population or so) is underrepresented in tech
Is this true? My understanding is that PoC overall are overrepresented in tech, and certainly so in individual companies like Google. The attempt to elide minorities from a vast swathe of Asia containing a massive chunk of the world's population seems to fit your description of motivated-reasoning slicing-and-dicing description much more than the example you used. Hence the promotion of the term BIPOC, so that square achievement gap pegs can be forced into the round hole of "white supremacy" by brazenly ignoring immigrants from half the world's population to make due to their inconvenient success.
> The point being that dividing people into arbitrary groups is a fractal process. You can zoom in on a demographic and then subdivide it again and again
Or, zooming out, "me against my brothers. Me and my brothers against my cousins. Me and my brothers and my cousins against the stranger".
That's an odd way to write, "modern educations for gifted people so fancy that their brand comes from their status at the world's biggest corporations instead of universities, but have nothing in common with the experiences of a typical person who did not receive a formal education.
> Competing specifically for underrepresented group members with a metrics-driven goal to boost ratios at one specific company above the relevant benchmark? Not obviously good to me.
I've been trying to call this out for years, to no avail.
Trying to boost the diversity metric scores without actually working to remedy the underlying structural problems boils down to a very simple goal: "We need to poach the diverse talent from out competitors, while making sure they fail to poach ours."
> I've been trying to call this out for years, to no avail
I think a sizable chunk of the industry feels this way. But the incentives of PR are driven more by the baying of influential parts of the public than by rational consideration of and conversation about what's just.
To be clear, I'm not suggesting that the "metrics diversity" folks are definitely wrong. Just that the environment has long been one that responds to good-faith questions about the effectiveness of its approach with screeching instead of thoughtfulness.
I still remember, early in my career, when Google held a diversity-focused TGIF (internal all-hands). There were obvious, gaping holes between the approach and its stated goals, and I care about representation and especially about identity-driven discrimination, so I was chatting with teammates about it afterwards.
I pretty quickly picked up on the fact that everybody thoughtful that I knew considered diversity efforts to be little more than theatre, designed to appease the loud and dumb and corrupt, and that breaking the kayfabe in the name of actual social justice was professionally costly.
I don't hold quite as cynical a view as this (see a couple paras up), but the degree to which the process is widely considered to be a jobs program for useless HR people was really striking, and a formative moment in my professional life.
True. Underrepresentation should be something addressed at a higher level.
Anytime an organization treats one group of people differently it creates at least two problems: others in the organization resent the preferential treatment and more importantly the targeted group does not get proper credit for their accomplishments, since they and others feel like their accomplishments were due to the advantages conferred to them by the organization.
This is a retort I see online a lot, and it is not a good one.
When people say how its dangerous to voice opinions nowadays, they aren't using medieval Europe as a reference point (where it was also very dangerous to voice unpopular opinions). The reference point people use is their own experiences online from ~10 years ago.
People used to be able to say whatever they wanted online, and now doing so is dangerous. You may think that is a good thing, but it is still unequivocally true that voicing unpopular opinions online is more dangerous than it used to be.
Making some snide remark about history is completely missing the point.
I feel quite confident there are unpopular opinions from 10 years ago that would land you in trouble. "People used to say whatever they wanted" is hyperbole.
The person upthread claimed nothing was controversial/ unpopular 10 years ago, the internet was some sort of free speech utopia.
I'm not sure how bringing up anti LGBT crowds typing things like "it's Adam and Eve not Adam and Steve" 20 years ago shows there was no controversy on the internet 10 or 20 years ago.
If you are correct that typing things like that was not controversial, it sounds like identifying as gay or LGBT was indeed controversial, putting false the claim that the internet was a free speech utopia where you could type anything and nobody would care.
I used the word "dangerous", not "controversial". In the past, you could have a controversial opinion online without risking your livelyhood and safety. No longer.
The conservative cancellation of Dixie Chicks in 2003 would seem to suggest otherwise. From wikipedia "At a 2003 performance in London, Natalie Maines of the American country band the Dixie Chicks, now known as the Chicks, made a statement criticizing President George W. Bush and the imminent Allied invasion of Iraq. The criticism led to backlash from country listeners, who were mostly right-wing and supported the war. The Dixie Chicks were blacklisted by thousands of country radio stations, and the band members received death threats."
That's a gross underestimate of the number of transgender people. And given that we haven't been recognized as legitimate until very recently, historical statistics are extremely shoddy. I personally knew two people who identified as transgender in the late 90s, in my high school class of ~450. They didn't transition until much later in life, so wouldn't be counted in stats.
"it is still unequivocally true that voicing unpopular opinions online is more dangerous than it used to be."
This is because the online audience is much larger than it used to be. I could say something on usenet in 1994 and the reach was pretty limited.
To be clear, stating unpopular opinions has always been dangerous if the wrong people hear them. Now its just that they're much more likely to hear it online.
In the communities I participated in in the 90's, although most of them were left-leaning politically, people with different opinions were welcomed. People wanted to hear counter arguments and they wanted to hear the other side of the story.
As far as I can tell, that is all gone now. People with unpopular opinions just get banned immediately. Sometimes it is the same exact people in the exact same communities who 20 years ago would have wanted to hear that unpopular opinion. I don't know if the cause is that they have been trolled one too many times, they just got older and changed, something in the culture, who knows. The big sort keeps getting bigger though.
Meh ... saying it is dangerous doesn't make it so.
By saying it, you both get to piss on the 'woke' (which I assume this person is not), plus, if you happen to say any of the quiet parts out loud, you are somewhat protected.
> Competing specifically for underrepresented group members with a metrics-driven goal to boost ratios at one specific company above the relevant benchmark? Not obviously good to me.
This depends on other factors. For example, are there high numbers of qualified underrepresented candidates that often get no job offers and are left to leave the industry? If so, this can help absorb those qualified candidates.
But if it is just simply shuffling the deck then I agree with your take.
I do have some doubts that there are high numbers of these cases, given how much overall excess demand there is for qualified candidates. It is surely possible and worthy of examination, though.
> Competing for talent and working hard to ensure that underrepresented group members have a fair shot? Should be standard practice and a baseline of ethical corporate and human behavior.
> Competing specifically for underrepresented group members with a metrics-driven goal to boost ratios at one specific company above the relevant benchmark? Not obviously good to me.
How about competing for underrepresented groups, then targeting resources to ensure their success? The industry has created an environment that either is or appears to be hostile to these underrepresented groups. Perhaps they should take responsibility to change that in meaningful ways. Meaningful ways means more than filling quotas.
Isn't this the free market at work? How would all the companies collude to collectively bring in more marginalized people? It's like saying "I want higher wages but I don't think one company raising wages will achieve that". The companies are competing because that's the system they exist in - some of that competition will be zero-sum, but according to arch capitalists some of it will be a net positive
> How would all the companies collude to collectively bring in more marginalized people?
Supporting pipeline programs (middle and high school education, summer programs, internship programs, bootcamps and other career-change programs, etc.) seems to be the obvious paths for companies to exert lasting positive influence on the industry and world.
Sure, there's some fringe backlash when some company supports a program that is targeted at underrepresented groups, but I think that's the way to create lasting change.
Unfortunately, it doesn't move the needle on D&I OKRs this quarter or next. Poaching from someone else is the fastest way to move a key result metric.
"Show me the incentives and I'll show you the outcome."
>>Sure, there's some fringe backlash when some company supports a program that is targeted at underrepresented groups, but I think that's the way to create lasting change.
It's not "fringe backlash". It's a recognition that success in the job market isn't determined by skill despite what's claimed but by quota. The companies partaking in these diversity and inclusion ventures however don't want to admit the full depths of their assessment regarding the "underrepresented" but still try to keep the PR benefits that come with it.
>>Unfortunately, it doesn't move the needle on hiring OKRs this quarter or next. Poaching from someone else is the fastest way to move a key result metric.
"Show me the incentives and I'll show you the outcome."
Yes. Because any sensible business would take the least risk needed to produce highest payoff. Showing proof of success at a major competitor is a great indicator of that and that also works wonders for employees in the form of massive pay raises.
By fringe backlash, I meant to reference programs like "Girls who code", "Black Girls Code", internship programs for under-represented groups, and the like.
I'm 100% supportive of these programs, while being opposed to quota-based hiring models.
Aren't discriminatory programs insulting to the intelligence the youth? And communicates to them that cultural stereotypes aren't just stereotypes, they're truths that need intervention programs to fix? Isn't it a put-down to tell the targeted group that they need the extra help the program is meant to deliver? Isn't it a disrespect to someone who wants the thing a program aims to deliver, but isn't part of the target population?
These are fringe concerns?
Fuck me then I guess.
Just wondering though: Are we assuming that the youth are too stupid to notice what we're doing? Or are we assuming they already know the score well enough to bite their tongues when we deliberately foist more of their parents culture war into their faces?
I think it depends. If there's some cultural or expectations bias that is self-reinforcing to reduce the number of women who consider tech (to include their peers thinking that tech isn't cool/is nerdy/whatever), I think these programs are a fantastic way to interrupt that cycle. I don't see it as insulting to their intelligence in any way, but maybe I'm not understanding your concern properly.
>I don't see it as insulting to their intelligence in any way
Were you not exposed to hamfisted intervention programs growing up?
They say that you never notice the propaganda that works, and I think there are lots of programs that are just outright good that even a cynic can't cut down, but I remember lots of insulting messaging baked into "lets fix X" initiatives too.
This is dangerous territory to comment on perhaps, but it seems like many policies which seek to boost individual company population ratios to be significantly higher than the comparable tech-industry ratios are prone to this problem.
Competing for talent and working hard to ensure that underrepresented group members have a fair shot? Should be standard practice and a baseline of ethical corporate and human behavior.
Competing specifically for underrepresented group members with a metrics-driven goal to boost ratios at one specific company above the relevant benchmark? Not obviously good to me.
We do have a diversity problem in tech, no doubt. That’s observable from the industry-wide figures. Moving an underrepresented group member from industry company A to industry company B doesn’t change that industry-wide measure at all, which should be obvious but seems to escape mention.