> 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. In such an environment, it is unsurprising that there is a severe lack of diversity.

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.)

When you are privileged you have no extra weight or leg up over someone else on standardized tests. That’s why it is the privileged elite who decry tests and call for “diversity.” Under the guise and mask of diversity they try to maintain and entrench their privilege while giving the occasional breadcrumbs to the truly historically disadvantaged.

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.

-

Diversity apparently includes fencing and rowing at most elite colleges. Just another filter with the benefit of virtue signaling and posturing.

Privileged white people who wants to preserve their privilege says that the poor white people are the problem and then kick those out in favor of black people. But the privileged white people are still there. And people wonder why poor white people don't like all of this "diversity" rethoric.

You may find that the black people they favor are also privileged. IE a Nigerian 1-percenter is just as black for affirmative action metrics as an African American from a broken family living in inner-city Baltimore, but the Nigerian is probably 1000x more likely to be accepted into an American college.

Yes exactly. That is why the diversity metric that would actually alleviate the situation of poor blacks like being income based is NOT used as that would also cripple the rich white elites.

I never understood this. Imo the moral justification behind affirmative action is that the upper echelons of society should represent the demographic makeup of society in general. Importing people who look like the people who you try to represent is the opposite of representation.

> When you are privileged you have no extra weight or leg up over someone else on standardized tests.

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.

This is an unscientific point. One, test prep doesn’t help that much. Two, it’s not that expensive: https://www.realclearinvestigations.com/articles/2018/06/21/...

> 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.

I'd think it's less about test prep than it is about a stable home and family environment, how well/poorly local schools are funded, access to public libraries and the leisure time required of both parent and child to able to use all of the above. All of which is a lot more than $650 and all of which favors wealthier people.

$650 is a lot of money for a lot of people

In a lot of places these days it's really easy to get a $15/hr job (I mean that's like entry-level fast food work, ubering, etc.) So $650 works out to slightly more than a week's work, be super conservative with taxes/expenses/benefits and let's say 2 weeks.

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.

I could afford private flights on my salary, for my example, and it’s true: “it’s just more hours.”

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…

Nobody is saying it’s nothing. But virtually nobody is so poor that saving up $650 per kid one time is beyond teach.

Money helps with any metric.

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.

Not really, for a one-time per kid expense. Asian immigrants are among the poorest people in NYC and they scrape it together.

Who is downvoting this?

> When you are privileged you have no extra weight or leg up over someone else on standardized tests

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...

You still have advantages in how the tests are written. The questions still privilege people who grow up speaking a specific version of English

I’m ESL and no they don’t. They privilege people who read a lot.

For sure. Although one thing that has baffled me is that all Swiss Germans do their school work in traditional German and NOT the language they speak. Swiss Germans understand Germans but the vice versa is not always true:

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.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Swiss_German

I generally agree but it’s definitely an advantage to have money, I got tutoring and practice tests from an early age. Someone poorer would have to work twice as hard

What do you think about the system on the subcontinent? I'm not sure how it's done in Bangladesh, but in India your higher education is basically decided by your score on a few objective measures which are orders of magnitude more difficult than the SAT.

It's actually mind-boggling how much harder IIT JEE math is compared to SAT math.

Chinese Gao Kao tests are similarly much harder than American tests; but at the end of the day I don’t think absolute difficulty matters too much as it’s a comparative test.

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

Not surprisingly, the population of STEM graduate programs is vastly dominated by foreign students. "81 percent of full-time graduate students in electrical and petroleum engineering programs at U.S. universities are international students, and 79 percent in computer science are."

https://www.insidehighered.com/quicktakes/2017/10/11/foreign...

That is more because a grad degree is a unnecessary expense for an American who wants an industry job, so the only Americans who go for grad degrees are people who want to be in academia. A masters contains a lot of repeated information from a bachelors, and many masters programs from "reputable" schools are now diploma mills that prey on international students willingness to pay large amounts of money an American degree.

Advanced degrees also make getting certain visas easier. The relative value for spending money and two years on a Masters or six years of your life on a PhD is much higher if it carries with it a ticket to stay in the U.S.

I was going to say the same thing. Immigration into the US is extremely difficult if you aren't already famous/wealthy/well-connected, that if you want a visa, coming in through education is your best bet. And getting a job with a company that will sponsor your visa (to say nothing of one that will sponsor your potential green card) is already difficult, but being a student and having a graduate degree is a good incentive.

It's not meritocratic. Almost 70% seats are reserved in IITs.

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.

https://academy.amazon.in/

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.

Recommend Netflix's Kota Factory that I happened to watch recently to anyone interested in this. (Not vouching for any accuracy, I'm British, (and it's a fictional drama series) but this comment reminded me of it since it does portray the sort of madness(?) described.)

> What do you think about ... how much harder IIT JEE math is

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.

I guess it depends on what you want out of the test; if you want something meritocratic, what we find is that testing ends up reinforcing existing social strata more often than not, because wealth often correlates to factors like quality of education, which in turn correlate to test scores. A stupid rich person will always be stupid, but a smart rich person will probably have access to better schools, private tutoring, and test preparation resources.

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 we’re trying to measure something (say strength), should we measure that thing as directly as we can, or should we add a bunch of adjustments to make things more “fair”? Do we want to know how strong someone is, or how surprising it is that they’re as strong as they are given their starting point?

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.

"less than 14% of the variance in SAT scores can be explained by SES in two massive and representative samples"

https://freddiedeboer.substack.com/p/please-think-critically...

What does SES stand for? Your link doesn’t appear to define it and I can’t find it defined anywhere else.

socioeconomic status

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Socioeconomic_status

> if you want something meritocratic, what we find is that testing ends up reinforcing existing social strata more often than not

Compared to what? It's not a criticism to simply state that standardized testing fails to be perfectly meritocratic.

The physics and chemistry aren't any easier. I'd say at-least Physics had the largest delta compared to SAT subject tests or even APs.

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.

That’s basically how law school admissions is done in the US. It’s 95% an index score combining LSAT and GPA. It works fine. I think people attribute the desperation and intensity of the Indian system to the tests, but it’s more the limited number opportunities compared to the population.

People hate on tech interviews, but it's honestly a lot more fair than traditional interviewing if done properly. You only gauge the candidate on their ability to solve and think through a problem. I also follow a trainer's pattern who doesn't read the candidate's resume before a technical screen to further reduce bias.

In the actual tech world, my view is that these critics are a loud minority who forget what the alternatives look like.

As an awkward autistic guy who often gets mistaken for hispanic, the tech interviews are a god-send.

There are better signals you could get of job success but they require a greater up front investment; I’ve had a good track record with a slightly lower bar on the technical screen and a 30 day probationary period.

Some friends of mine user a 2 week work trial for all candidates.

I can't imagine a high-quality candidate agreeing to either of those things in the current market. I certainly wouldn't.

But software engineering is very bimodal, so I'm sure it works.

The conditions certainly have to be right but it works for high quality candidates if your reputation is good and you engender enough trust.

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.

> 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.

> When I'm interviewing, I prefer interviewing with multiple companies while still earning an income

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.

That approach is new to me, I'm as I like planning my vacations ahead of time, and am more flexible on when I switch jobs.

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?

There are other factors other than time though. In current market it's important to get at least 2 or more offers for negotiation power. Otherwise you might(or will) get the minimum offer of the band, i.e getting lowballed. Therefore going through a few of interviews in the same time frame is very beneficial to the applicants.

He's asking somebody to quit the job they have now in exchange for a chance to get a new job... you might be able to get new college graduates or already unemployed to agree to that, but definitely nobody with any sort of options.

Every new hire is subject to a month-long probationary period, everywhere besides perhaps non-essential government positions. The only difference here is someone mentioned it.

I kinda agree. When I started in the early 2000s, the norm was a 1-2 hour battery of psychological tests that somehow tried to assess my intelligence before someone technical even spoke to me.

1-2 hours of leetcode, or a 5-6 hours take-home project is a godsend. Programming is my passion anyways.

>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"

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.

This hits the nail on the head. All of my friends who are in the process of becoming journalists have to spend tons of time working unpaid shitty internships just to get a low paying bottom rung job.

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 cause is pretty obvious: journalists and other humanities do not pay well. People are not willing to pay for the garbage modern journalists put out, so there is not much money in the field. The only people going into the field, therefore, are those who are independently rich (rich parents) and ideologically motivated (which further reduces the quality of modern journalism).

Journalism and the humanities can pay extremely well for insiders.

The humanities - especially law and some corners of academia - also have far more direct political leverage than tech does.

As a (former) lawyer, I wouldn’t clump together law and humanities for this purpose. Many law students and lawyers didn’t major in humanities subjects, and the earning power of lawyers is far greater than academics in the humanities.

Sounds like a problem with politicians as well, particularly beyond the local level.

> 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".

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."

It's also a large amount of psychological projection and intra elite jockeying.

Naval hit the nail on the head here: `The whole Social Justice Warrior-ing trend seems like a case of white-on-white violence.`

https://twitter.com/naval/status/1132170896817266688

> 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".

Software pays significantly more. Why push people into lower paying jobs?

You don't see narratives about how everyone should get into finance. That is certainly a good ol boys club.

Getting into tech and getting a great-paying job is achievable and realistic for anyone from any background, right now. It's completely unregulated, there's no gatekeeping outside of factual knowledge, and people are actively encouraging diverse applicants with non-traditional educational backgrounds. Even if the experience for these people is not always as good as it could be, the community is trying.

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.

The point being made is that finance is far more exclusionary and racist/sexist than tech, but tech gets all the articles written about it. The onus would be on those with power to change hiring in finance, much like the big tech companies are tasked with making tech more inclusive.

Finance has plenty of articles written about it but you don't see them because that's not a part of your media diet. Finance has made some pretty significant strides to diversify post 2008 due to public pressure.

Do you have any evidence from your media diet? I see recent articles over the past year that it isn't successful in diversifying.

Tech gets all the articles written about trying to change it, because it's easier and more impactful to change so that's what people are trying right now.

I think the point is the articles are often extremely derisive and therefore hypocritical when finance or <insert any other high-paying industry> companies don't receive the same attention if at all

I worked in finance, racial composition there is similar to tech these days. Hint: white is in the minority.

There's no desire to commodities finance work, but there is for tech

> 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".

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.

> 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.

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.

Coding is an accessible path to wealth which conceivably could support more. Nursing receives that in pulses and there are tons of organizations and outright unions for them. Nursing has boom and bust cycle

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

Isn’t the website you’re commenting on largely an initiative to promote #5?

Heh, touché, I probably should have specified CEO of major corporation. Since technically anyone with sufficent money and expertise could become CEO of a useless shell company that does nothing and lacks even a vague plan to develop a business model. (In the US at least.)

This may be an unpopular opinion:

> 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.

> Is tech really that different?

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.

Our experiences are fairly rare from what I've seen. Undoubtedly the door is open, but the weight of that door is still far too high and I would not give tech points in the category of meritocracy for that. Also worth mentioning that 300k is FAANG level compensation, and those salaries are fairly rare and not indicative of where most people with less-than-prestigious backgrounds end up (another commenter posted what I think is a fairly accurate average tale). Not to mention those salaries are often geo-centric.

> I would not give tech points in the category of meritocracy for that

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.

> 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?

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.

> so being better (or even drastically better) than other fields means very little.

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.

The push and pull of how you and I view these is intrinsic (in my view) to preventing the attitude of, "this is good enough".

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.

I read the parent/GP as simply saying that while tech doesn't have the same level of gatekeeping as white shoe law does or, for that matter, academia in general, if you have a decent GPA from Stanford things will be far easier than they will be for an equally skilled high school dropout with no connections.

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.

Graduating from Stanford with a decent GPA is itself a useful signal and unsurprisingly things are therefore easier.

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.

I agree with you for the most part, but one field has done better. Athletics. Getting a job as an athlete is more about merit and less about connections than even tech. This is because it is much easier to measure talent than almost any industry. For running you only need a stopwatch.

As a technicality the music industry might win out given the successes from the lows and highs of society (even if genre clustered). There are some who got into it by industry connections, some with a background of education, and others through a whole lot of practice to nurture their talent. A good seed alone does not make a bumper crop. The industry is also far more of a crapshoot however as luck, image, and zeitgeist play a role. You might recommend somebody very good at music to give it a try but not an across the board career recommendation.

I agree with you that it's definitely about who you know - if you go to Stanford, you can get better jobs out of college compared to someone with similar skills who didn't. But I worked at a FAANG (or whatever it's called now) company and many of the senior engineers we hired were from small/less prestigious companies. These were people with ~10 years of experience who had become great software engineers but had never considered themselves in a class to work in big tech. Then, when given a chance, they got an offer and often accepted it because it paid so much better than their old job. If there weren't such high demand for software engineers, the company would just have hired from other big tech companies since it's safer, but they were forced to try to find people in unexpected places.

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+.

Thanks for adding that and you're absolutely right from what I've seen.

> 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.

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.

People say "everyone should learn to code" because that's where the money is. It's well understood that becoming a journalist is a cause of, not a solution to, financial woes.

> "Everyone should learn to be a citizen journalist", or "Everyone should learn to be a copy editor".

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?

Also, for many of the prestigious publications, the way into the door is often via unpaid internships, and interns who do really well eventually get paying jobs. Only those whose families can support them well into their 20s can afford to do that.

> 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.

The term for this is "classism".

you got outdated info. "learn to code" gets people unpersoned on twitter now

>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.

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...

Thank you for the detailed response with your real-life experience and links; material like this is why I come here! Link 3 in particular sounds like a tailor-made companion piece to this article.

> 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...

> 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.

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...