If you’re calling something a “real solution” it should have at least some chance of actually happening and solving the problem. Strong regulation from the government against union busting is both possible and effective (look at what FDR did if you want an example). Wishing individuals would live up to your standards of ethical behavior when they have no reason to (and may have personal/family reasons that make them feel they need the paycheck) will not ever change anything.

I think the best solution is to empower workers via unions or whatever else. It should be impossible for workers to get ground into dust by companies the way they do now.

But the overall point is that unions rely on solidarity, and any coder adding filters to an amazon chat app or whatever dystopian crap amazon is pulling next is displaying a massive lack of solidarity with their fellow humans

I can also see the ticket being written with examples of “disallow a dictionary of forbidden words”, with a sample dictionary of [“motherfucker”, “slut”, <list of racial epithets>] and then the dictionary function being used later to include “union” etc.

If I got a ticket to block the dictionary containing MF and racial epithets, I’d also think it was pointless, would point out it was easily able to be evaded, but would implement it and implementing it would not be obviously evil or showing a lack of solidarity.

So yeah, this specific case might have flown under the radar - and got implemented unwittingly - but unless a top level exec got in there and edited the dictionary file themselves, there was opportunities in this being implemented to show solidarity and throw some clogs into the machinery

What’s the level of dev who should show allegiance to fellow coworkers by refusing to implement that?

Then some non-dev employee realizes you can block these other words…

Actually we’re having problems with the whole filtering system, it turns out it relies on a library that has some security vulnerabilities and it’s no longer operational.

Or if you must, wait until it breaks on its own, and then refuse to fix it. “Suppressing labour organizing isn’t part of my job description”

I.e. Grow a spine and stand up for what’s right

(The exception would be, when the person who coded the API goes on-call. Still there's lots of checks and balances there and any such change would be quickly undone.)

I agree, in fact I would argue the total opposite. Has any industry/skill group in history put so much effort in to getting more people involved than the software industry has?

What worries me more than it happening is how many seem to either be blind or proud that they are.

Eventually, large corporations will feel comfortable lowering wages once they have a secure grip on the market, and the tools programmers today made will be used against the next generation. It’s no different from millennials resenting boomers for burning economic bridges behind them with outsourcing and so on just to save a few dollars on costs and pull in higher wages for themselves.

unless amazon is a monopoly employer, this isn't gonna happen. Or they can collude with other employers to lower wages (or indirectly, like no-poaching policy, or do what google+apple did with their wage collusion).

And if programming is valuable, why wouldn't these "low paid" programmers quit and take their skills elsewhere, including starting their own business selling their output?

You already provided a real world example of them doing it. So it does happen.

And most big companies are now in a phase of buying up disruptive tech companies and extinguishing any competition. That's only going to expand going further. The automotive industry in the US killed public transport to secure their market, they shipped their factories off to other countries, and they still steal subsidies from tax payers.

Tech companies are going to happily follow that path.

Now? I'm old and have heard that constantly my entire life. It still hasn't happened.

> The automotive industry in the US killed public transport to secure their market

I live in Seattle. The local politicians managed to do that all by themselves.

For example, there once was a car tunnel under the city. The city decided to build another tunnel. What to do with the dug out material, what to do ... I know! let's pack it into the existing tunnel! We spend billions and wind up where we started!

(The rationale was the old tunnel was, well, getting old. Nobody was able to explain why boring a new tunnel was cheaper than shoring up the old one.)

It's already happening. Various FAANGs have been found red handed signing anti-poaching agreements to lower salaries.

The idea that anyone can "learn to code" is a work of fiction. Nobody says that anyone can learn to do surgery, become a fighter pilot or become a barrister. I couldn't do those jobs. And lots of people couldn't do my job.

Telling people that effort is the only thing stopping them getting a 6 figure software engineering salary does real harm. Its notable that most people who say this aren't themselves programmers.

Its even true amongst programmers. I've struggled to learn modern deep learning. And lots of people here on HN struggle with "leetcode problems" - which is the exact sort of work I can't get enough of.

We aren't made the same. Software has been a highly in-demand skill for the last 2 decades, and I bet it'll stay that way for at least the rest of my life. Well, at least until AI gets good enough.

Programming is infinitely easier to get into than any other high paying field. There's no standardized exam or certification board keeping people out. The problem is people need time to study it, and a lot of big companies very much have old boys networks thriving within them. Look at how many people are handed money to make a startup a year or two into Stanford, then hire a bunch of people who also went to Stanford or MIT, then put up 8 stage interviews spread across weeks for anyone who tries joining the company later.

It's honestly weird how some programmers get uncomfortable when it's stated that, yes, loads of people are self-taught. HN has nearly daily blog posts about people who studied in middle school and started a small company in high school and did fine for life, or someone who did a coding boot camp at 30 and got a fine job in a couple months after having zero experience beforehand. I mean, HN even gets literal kids (14 year olds) posting their apps--and sometimes they're actually good.

Nobody is doing that with the medical field or flying. Not everyone is going to make a world-class search engine after a few weeks in their basement. But a low double digit percentage of people could do programming in a workplace setting with good management if they had the opportunity to study. I had friends who got straight Ds in high school who are doing just fine with programming. They won't top leetcode charts, but they can make stuff.

I think also if you could practice medicine without a license and call yourself "doctor", you'd see a LOT more self taught people doing that who have maybe the capacity of a medical assistant, the brighter ones perhaps performing as well as a junior PA.

Being an average programmer is indeed easy compared to many skilled jobs. In some areas people are called "senior" after doing a 6-months bootcamp and landing a job copypasting stack overflow for 3 years.

Being a good software engineer is a different thing and takes endless learning.

Computers are cheap enough for far more people, and you can learn without someone's allowing you to.

Having said that you do get the sense that some people will not be able to code regardless of access. I even hear about CS graduates who basically decide having learned a bit that it's not for them. This is somewhere between "can't be done" and "don't want to".

We can flood the world with more literature graduates than will ever be needed, but it's not the same for tech skills, somehow. I'm not sure it's intelligence, that seems to just punt the issue into "what is intelligence". But it's definitely the case that you get this sense that some people reach a point where they can dive into technical issues without limit (you see their hobby projects here every few days) and those who either can't or won't.

It's the same thing as how anyone can learn mathematics, algebra, biology and any of the typical subjects you learn at school. You struggle with deep learning only because it's a paradigm shift. It's too different from traditional programming so the initial learning curve makes it seem like you're incapable. Given enough time anyone can surpass the hump and become good at deep learning.

That is not to say that these skills are trivial. There must be a lot of training time to achieve these skills. But make no mistake... anyone can do it.

There are people whose IQ is so low they can't even be legally enlisted in the army (the ASVAB test the Army does correlates with IQ).

Some people won't have the same learning ability you have.

I also thought that everyone could learn to program and organised bootcamps and education for developers (for free) - it turned out only a fraction of the people I've met would actually manage to learn some basic programming and a fraction of those people would move on to become a programmer.

Most people I worked with struggled with something entirely different than the actual content they are trying or forced to learn. I am certain the biggest obsticles are stress, fear and and hopelessnes. And often not towards the methematics, but rather something entirely different. E.g. issues in the family, fear of the consequences of bad grades, and no hope regarding their own future, regardless of whether they learn or not.

I expierienced some challenges as ADHD and expierienced them as somewhat orthogonal. And definitely additionally challenging for me as a teacher. I also expierienced people who did struggle a lot, independent of anything I mentioned so far. So I am sure, there is differences among people (you may measure that in IQ or whatever, I prefer not to). But for most people I met they are not the problem.

Like many on HN I went to a top engineering school. there I saw about 2/3 of my colleagues drop out within the first two years. At least half of them worked tirelessly and efficiently to pursue their goal, and still failed. This was a large public school that will admit basically everyone with a pulse into engineering, with the expectation most will fail out as unfit and filter into some of the programs my college was less known for.

I did not have a particularly exceptional upbringing, and went to a middle of the road country school without any special preparations that would advantage myself over these other middle-class white people I saw. I'm not saying this to brag, because no doubt many of these people are far more successful than me in other fields (one I know went on to become a doctor for instance) but there is definitely something at play that different people are 'wired' for different tasks. I could almost sleep through much of the engineering curriculum and remain near the top while I saw many smarter people than me struggle tirelessly with engineering; something else was going on in our minds.

Also when I say anyone can do it, I mean anyone with around an average IQ or above. Obviously if you're mentally challenged it's a different story. Obviously new born babies don't have the IQ to learn programming.

I've went to schools where they admit anyone with a pulse and I've also been to actual top schools that are highly selective. I can tell you these programs that admit anyone feel significantly easier because they are. Doing well in one of these schools is not an achievement. I remember coming out top of the class at these schools simply studying for a test the night before.

But the reasoning as to why people fail in these "easy" schools is not what you think. It's exactly what the other replier said but more. Learning programming is not easy, and many people don't have the discipline or the study habits necessary to achieve it in a class room environment as well. They may look like they're studying hard... but a good number them aren't doing the necessary studying to succeed. They may not even be interested in programming. But make no mistake, if you make the curriculum longer and easier or if these people spend the time to grind, most people will succeed in learning programming.

Programming is what I did obsessively as a teenager. I didn't need any discipline or study habits. It was and still is exciting and creative. This is aptitude and interest, which obviously, few have.

Much less people have the aptitude for quantum physics which is way harder. Programming is so easy that even as a teenager you have sufficient background to learn it.

I assure you that as a teenager, it's very unlikely you had any aptitude for quantum physics or any of the hard mathematics required to understand general relativity.

I find doing advanced math relaxing and meditative during commutes. That's aptitude. It's probably much the same aptitude as finding programming enjoyable, but software is a much better career, so most of us end up there than in physics anymore.

Not many people have this aptitude, though. Most people would name hundreds of activities they'd rather do than either of them.

But let me put it this way. Much much much much much More people have done programming since they were teens but much less have done QM. You will find tons of examples of programmers and relatively few people who know QM or advanced mathematics.

That's the dichotomy I'm talking about. Programming is easy. QM requiring pre-requisite knowledge is part of what makes it so much harder.

You analogy is bad. But I get your point.

Let's put it this way. Something that is commonly done is LIKELY to be far more easier than something that is not commonly done. Full circle back to our other point on probable causes.

This is obvious. Your diving into technicalities of language, which is unnecessary.

My claim is that most of the population can achieve the average skill level held by an average developer.

I also wouldn't call it a "selectivity theory." It's more common sense. You select a group of people with a record of great past performance they are more likely going to have an easier time. It's actually your ideas about selectivity are counter-intuitive.

Lol K bro, I didn't say this to brag, I said it because of what I witnessed. I don't think being good at engineering school is an 'achievement' or a sign of superiority, I just think it means you may be wired differently than some other people -- that's it. The school in question I'm referring to is ranked in the top 10 of US engineering programs, with much lower grade inflation than many of the private schools, and no one takes you seriously when you say this school is 'easier.' I lived with several of these people who were trying, and they were doing everything right and taking the necessary steps, with full family support, and working tirelessly and still just couldn't cut it. One of them I spent time with daily ended up becoming a doctor instead; these were not dumb or undisciplined people.

Many of the more 'highly selective' private programs are actually easier because they milk you dry in tuition and they want to keep the dollars flowing, so they will coddle you along.

Believe it or not there are public schools that will take essentially anyone with a pulse into engineering, and a handful of the more challenging and highly ranked engineering programs are included. These are not 'easy' programs, and attrition rates far exceed other programs at the same university. Personally I approve of this approach because it allows anyone to try their hand rather than depending on BS criteria like standardized testing or high school performance, or other dumb factors like whether your parents had the strings to pull in a non-profit to make you look like mother teresa. The kind of person who succeeds at engineering is often not the kind who has an impressive background coming out of highschool.

>I remember coming out top of the class at these schools simply studying for a test the night before

The number of people who received, or would be able to receive, an ABET accredited engineering degree at the top of their class from any of say the top dozen engineering schools while simply 'studying for a test the night before' is a much rarer trait than you think. Either you're unaware of your exceptional aptitude or you were blind to your surroundings.

Bro, I went to a top 10 as well, and it's also not a private school. I'm telling you that it doesn't matter. Doing well in a school that has zero selectivity is not an achievement because you're competing with many people who don't even have the drive to succeed. Of course a huge number will be fodder for you to step on. Sure you're school is hard.. but that's a different kind of hard.

At a selective school, every student you're with has drive and has consistently placed number 1 at every previous school they've been at. The classes and challenge are normalized so that just being number one is now average or even below average. This is hard on another level.

>Many of the more 'highly selective' private programs are actually easier because they milk you dry in tuition and they want to keep the dollars flowing, so they will coddle you along.

Not true at all. Again, Selective programs normalize what is easy among top students. The curve becomes insanely steeper. Schools allow you to change majors to keep milking the dollars but they still fail you out of the class.

>Believe it or not there are public schools that will take essentially anyone with a pulse into engineering, and a handful of the more challenging and highly ranked engineering programs are included. These are not 'easy' programs, and attrition rates far exceed other programs at the same university. Personally I approve of this approach because it allows anyone to try their hand rather than depending on BS criteria like standardized testing or high school performance, or other dumb factors like whether your parents had the strings to pull in a non-profit to make you look like mother teresa. The kind of person who succeeds at engineering is often not the kind who has an impressive background coming out of highschool.

I never said it's easy. But it certainly is easier. Let's do a quantitative analysis then. Anyone with a pulse and let's say they fail out 75%. That's equivalent to a 25% pass rate. Then take a look at a selective school with a (in my case 20% failure rate and 10% acceptance). That's about 8% pass rate assuming anyone with a pulse applies (of course this is not the case, better performing students tend to apply).

By that number alone you know how much harder it is in a selective school. And the 20% failure rate is just a random guess, could be much higher than that as tons of kids switch majors after their first weeder class. Realistically I give it 50% failure rate if you count people who switch.

>The number of people who received, or would be able to receive, an ABET accredited engineering degree at the top of their class from any of say the top dozen engineering schools while simply 'studying for a test the night before' is a much rarer trait than you think. Either you're unaware of your exceptional aptitude or you were blind to your surroundings.

Let's caveat something here. I passed top of my class and studied the night before in a non-selective school. The other school I transferred to, (a top school) I could not do this. Also ABET is garbage, let's be clear about that. Many top engineering schools have certain programs that are ABET accredited, and many schools with ABET accredited programs are easy.

>By that number alone you know how much harder it is in a selective school.

You really don't. All you proved was that 80% (or whatever) of those who the school selected would pass. You know nothing of what percent of those who they didn't select would pass. You can't possibly make the assertion it would be lower than 25% example you gave for the "anyone with a pulse school."

I don't doubt you probably went to a more rigorous, challenging, and renowned school than me. I don't doubt you are more intelligent than myself or many who did well at my school. The fallacy comes when you conflate entrance selectivity with difficulty.

> I passed top of my class and studied the night before in a non-selective school.

Can you help explain to me why you went from a top non-selective public school to a different top selective school? In my experience after the first couple years everyone but the cream was filtered out, so by junior year it was effectively like I was in a 'selective' school. Or are you comparing a lower tier non-selective engineering school to a top selective school? My point of reference here is one of the handful of non-selective top-10 schools.

>Many top engineering schools have certain programs that are ABET accredited, and many schools with ABET accredited programs are easy.

Agreed. Was just providing some baseline for roughly the curriculum that was covered. You're right that ABET on its own doesn't speak thoroughly to the program, which is why I used a variety of other qualifiers beyond ABET.

Transfer. And change of major. I would say I went to an top 50 school initially, with average selectivity and the same amount of weeder classes in every engineering program. Then went to a top 10 public school with an even more selective engineering program.

The weeder classes for your school filtered everyone out but the people remaining are still only 25% of anyone with a pulse. I'd wager this school has an extremely low amount of high achievers joining, so while you're dealing with smart competition, it's nowhere near the level of what you'd be facing at a selective school.

At a selective school, you have the top 10% of kids from the entire nation, who again get weeded out by about 50%. Yes that's effectively the smartest kids in the country getting cut in half. Nothing here is statistically rigorous but you can't deny that this back of the napkin estimate says something about how hard these schools are.

>You really don't. All you proved was that 80% (or whatever) of those who the school selected would pass. You know nothing of what percent of those who they didn't select would pass.

The kids who were selected overall have a higher chance success and higher work ethic and higher intelligence then those not selected. There are definitely scenarios of people who are great at programming but can't do well in school but these are generally in the minority. Google for example doesn't hire people based off of school, but the majority of their hires have degrees from top schools. It correlates with IQ and general programming ability, but I would say google sort of over selects. They don't need people that strong.

>I don't doubt you probably went to a more rigorous, challenging, and renowned school than me. I don't doubt you are more intelligent than myself or many who did well at my school. The fallacy comes when you conflate entrance selectivity with difficulty.

Never claimed any of these things and who knows? Maybe you went to the better school. I simply stated my credentials to show you that I have anecdotal experience from both types of schools. The difference in hardness is palpable and can only really be truly known by someone who went to both types of schools.

In the first school I attended my mindset was like you. I thought I had a talent and that most people were stupid. That changed when I got into a top 10 highly selective school.

But we did kind of get side tracked here. My main point is that my experience with schooling is more extensive then yours. And from that experience I derive that anyone can learn programming. It wasn't mentioned before, but programming is much easier than school.

I should also mention that this experience is from both extensive experience in school AND work. School experience provides sort of a bubble, a partial picture but not the full thing..

I'm comparing a (my non-selective public) top 10 engineering to other top 10s [engineering]. Near peer selective to near peer non-selective. You compared a top 50 to a top 10 ranked engineering, far from peer schools. Starting with 10% says nothing about the difficulty of the program. You don't even know that they were the best 10% of engineering material, just that they were the top 10% of what the school thought were picks as candidates. Selectivity does not confer difficulty. High (50%+)success rate of your selective cohort does not confer low (25%-) success rate of the non-selected group.

> My main point is that my experience with schooling is more extensive then yours.

It seems we have the same amount of experience with top 10 schools, where N=1 for both. I have been to a 'lower tier' school but not for engineering so I didn't even bother to mention it, and yeah I agree it was a joke comparatively.

It does. Like I said the the smarter kids the tougher the courses. Because smarter kids normalize easiness. The difficulty of the program is set by the kids who attend. The school absolutely cannot fail the entire class, they have to set the hardness so that a certain amount pass. It is absolutely a factor especially if most schools grade on a curve. So if any Tom Dick or Jane can join the curve however steep it is, will reflect the quality of those who join.

"Best engineering material" is a misnomer. the smartest kids from other schools correlate with best engineering material. I already stated that sure you can have some miracle kid that succeeds at engineering but bombs at school, but this is rare. Kids who do well in school tend to do well in engineering. Any other thing you see is likely to be an anomaly.

You're basing your argument off the erroneous notion that engineering talent in school is completely separate from all other subjects and therefore selectivity is completely irrelevant. That doesn't make any sense. I'm saying it's not completely separate at all. There is a strong correlation that if you graduated top of the class in your high school you have a higher likelihood of better performance in engineering at a top school. It's not always the case but the correlation exists.

>It seems we have the same amount of experience with top 10 schools, where N=1 for both. I have been to a 'lower tier' school but not for engineering so I didn't even bother to mention it, and yeah I agree it was a joke comparatively.

Sure it's N=1. But read my paragraph above. That's a common sense figure. Person A gets all F's in your classes and Person B gets straight As and takes a bunch of AP courses... by probability person B will be the better engineer. Common sense. We can make a good estimate based off of common sense logic without the need for statistically rigorous data. So based off of that logic, my reasoning goes beyond a N=1 sample size as we can use common sense induction to arrive at a broader conclusion.

False. There is no requirement that the course be made easier, nor that the non-selective school refrain from creating a much harsher curve to reflect a like-achiever performing similarly to like-achiever at a different school.

>The school absolutely cannot fail the entire class, they have to set the hardness so that a certain amount pass.

They absolutely can, and in fact most of the courses I took REQUIRE the teacher to fail everyone who fails to achieve certain ABET designated criteria, regardless of what percent fails to master the material. Although in practical case, this means the non-selective school just fails a lot more people than the selective school at freshman/sophomore level.

>It is absolutely a factor especially if most schools grade on a curve. So if any Tom Dick or Jane can join the curve however steep it is, will reflect the quality of those who join.

Only on the basis of the fallacy that curves cannot vary from school to school.

>That doesn't make any sense. I'm saying it's not completely separate at all. There is a strong correlation that if you graduated top of the class in your high school you have a higher likelihood of better performance in engineering at a top school. It's not always the case but the correlation exists.

How the top 10% or whatever n% performs doesn't say anything about how the bottom 100-N% perform, (other than the top performed better). It merely provides a maximum, which in your example was 50% passing. We've been over this fallacious assertion many times now.

>You're basing your argument off the erroneous notion that engineering talent in school is completely separate from all other subjects and therefore selectivity is completely irrelevant

Selectivity DOESN'T CONFER DIFFICULTY. Say that in your head 10 more times. That 50% of your selective cohort passes doesn't prove that the non-selective cohort will be below say 25% of your baseline "only with a pulse" group. A t best it suggest that they won't exceed the 50% of the favored cohort. I didn't make an 'erroneous notion' about selectivity or talent because I never claimed selectivity increased nor decreased difficulty, in fact that was your 'erroneous notion.'

>Sure it's N=1. But read my paragraph above. That's a common sense figure. Person A gets all F's in your classes and Person B gets straight As and takes a bunch of AP courses... by probability person B will be the better engineer. Common sense. We can make a good estimate based off of common sense logic without the need for statistically rigorous data. So based off of that logic, my reasoning goes beyond a N=1 sample size as we can use common sense induction to arrive at a broader conclusion.

I see no reason why person A and B alike couldn't be held to similar standards regardless as whether they went to a selective vs non selective school.

Your selective program is not more difficult on that basis alone.

>They absolutely can, and in fact most of the courses I took REQUIRE the teacher to fail everyone who fails to achieve certain ABET designated criteria, regardless of what percent fails to master the material. Although in practical case, this means the non-selective school just fails a lot more people than the selective school at freshman/sophomore level.

Of course no official requirement exists. But all schools must do this. Failing an entire class or most of the class is grounds for a lawsuit. It's also extremely bad for business as schools are basically businesses.

The only thing schools can do is grade on a curve and this curve must let a percentage of people through. The quality of that percentage depends 100% on the quality of the group that is in that class. Thus selectivity effects difficulty. If every student scored 99%, then 99% is now a C grade. See the logic? Selectivity is causative to difficulty in classes with a curve AND that is a quantitative inductive conclusion which is incredibly hard to counter with qualitative anecdotes.

I also don't know why you're bringing up ABET when we agreed it's trash and irrelevant.

>Only on the basis of the fallacy that curves cannot vary from school to school.

Curves are different, so are the students going in. But when you look at the whole, by the law of large numbers (aka basic probability) a pattern emerges. Selective schools have smarter people and are therefore harder overall because of these curves. The generality is true despite exceptions that may exist. You can say on average, what I say is more likely to be true.

>How the top 10% or whatever n% performs doesn't say anything about how the bottom 100-N% perform, (other than the top performed better). It merely provides a maximum, which in your example was 50% passing. We've been over this fallacious assertion many times now.

It already does. The top 10% indicates that the bottom 90% failed to perform at the level of the top 10%. That is something right there. Failure to perform. If you fail to be part of the top 10% then you're more likely to fail at other things INCLUDING an engineering curriculum. Correlation and probability. Your assumption which imo is much more far fetched is stating that this correlation DOESN'T exist. Think about it. It's much more logical to assume high performers in high school are more likely to be high performers in university.

>Selectivity DOESN'T CONFER DIFFICULTY. Say that in your head 10 more times.

Say it as much as you want. I am literally telling you that IT DOES.

I said two things that by induction leads to higher difficulty. Literally. Selectivity leads to higher performers in a class. Higher performers effect the intrinsic curve EVERY school has. THEREFORE difficulty increases. As I stated before this hinges on the correlation between performance before entering the university with actual performance at the university in an engineering curriculum. That's the basis of my thesis right there. It is unreasonable to deny that correlation.

>I see no reason why person A and B alike couldn't be held to similar standards regardless as whether they went to a selective vs non selective school.

You hold the standard too high, then nobody passes the course. A certain percentage has to pass, therefore, for a non-selective school the curve MUST be lowered for more people to pass. As I stated before, although there's no official rule stating that schools can't fail everyone, it's pretty stupid for a school to fail everyone. Bad for business and various other things.

Thus by this logic a non-selective school MUST lower the bar or too many people will fail. Keep in mind, selective schools also have high attrition rates, so we can do the math on this if you have statistics about your school. I'm guessing something like Georgia Tech which is like 40% percent dropout rate (could very well be a BS statistic as I've only heard people regurgitate what the dean says) and 75% acceptance, versus my school which is 11 percent acceptance and dropout is 10% (highly inaccurate as this is the overall dropout rate of the entire school... Engineering is MUCH higher).

This leaves Georgia Tech with 45% and my school with 10% of the initial group of people that applied. Assuming that both schools have the same distribution of talented people applying, there's no logic that can justify Georgia Tech being easier than my school. More people of the same level of talent out of this distribution make it through Georgia Tech than they do at my school. Therefore my school is harder.

Of course it should also be noted that my school is prestigious enough that most mediocre students don't bother to apply. So my school weighted towards a group with greater talent.

I don't know which school you went to but Georgia Tech is the only top 10 CS school that I know of that has a reputation for letting "anyone with a pulse" into their online masters program, so I'm using that as my model.

>Your selective program is not more difficult on that basis alone.

Certainly there are exceptions aka Anomalies, but the generality is impossible not to be true. It's an axiom of probability. You could very well be a genius of unparalleled talent that came out of a non-selective program.

In fact by probability, it is actually highly unlikely for anomalies not to exist. Somebody eventually gets struck by lightning.

No I don't. The center of the curve ('C') doesn't need to be calibrated around the median. 'F' can be chosen as the median, or you can choose an objective scale (this did happen) rather than a subjective curve. I've seen 'qualitative anecdotes' that the curve isn't centered around 'C' and I reject the notion this anecdote is impossible. I don't know why you can't understand the curve can be adjusted so like-performers across schools get a similar grade, resulting in higher GPAs at selective schools and lower GPAs (initially) at non-selective ones.

>I also don't know why you're bringing up ABET when we agreed it's trash and irrelevant.

Because you made a false assertion everyone couldn't be failed, when in fact at least in the institution it was REQUIRED that everyone be failed if everyone fails to meet ABET designated criteria. It supports that your claim is specious.

>Curves are different, so are the students going in. But when you look at the whole, by the law of large numbers (aka basic probability) a pattern emerges. Selective schools have smarter people and are therefore harder overall because of these curves. The generality is true despite exceptions that may exist. You can say on average, what I say is more likely to be true.

False. Again you depend on the fallacy the curves can't be calibrated around something like 'the average student fails and the course follows the difficulty of <selective school>.' If I give an IQ test to a cohort to a group of lower intelligence people, the 'curve' looks bent and biased towards lower score. If I give it to people of upper intelligence, the curve 'looks' bent towards biased towards higher score. But in the end it is the curve that is objective across cohorts (schools), despite higher intelligence in one cohort ('school') than another. The difficulty is unchanged, even though selectivity is introduced.

>The top 10% indicates that the bottom 90% failed to perform at the level of the top 10%.

That only sets the ceiling. If the 'top 10%' have a 50% pass rate, that doesn't stop the bottom 90% from having a 49% one, well above your 25% threshold for 'anybody with a pulse.'

> Your assumption which imo is much more far fetched is stating that this correlation DOESN'T exist.

My assertion is that all we know is it's likely the top picks may tell us the ceiling for expection of the bottom, but not the floor. And it tells us little to nothing about how difficult the cirricula is, unless we compare to like-kind top picks at another cirriculum (which without selectivity, could be difficult to compare in practice.)

>You hold the standard too high, then nobody passes the course. A certain percentage has to pass, therefore, for a non-selective school the curve MUST be lowered for more people to pass. As I stated before, although there's no official rule stating that schools can't fail everyone, it's pretty stupid for a school to fail everyone. Bad for business and various other things.

> said two things that by induction leads to higher difficulty. Literally. Selectivity leads to higher performers in a class. Higher performers effect the intrinsic curve EVERY school has. THEREFORE difficulty increases. As I stated before this hinges on the correlation between performance before entering the university with actual performance at the university in an engineering curriculum. That's the basis of my thesis right there. It is unreasonable to deny that correlation.

Fallacious reasoning, the two schools could have the exact same cirricula, teacher, everything and merely different students and when graded against objective criteria, or appropriately calibrated (shifted down/up) shaped curves, they can have both equal difficulty and grade parity for performance. The university I went to is NOTORIOUS for having the least grade inflation, much lower than many 'selective' schools, which also helps fix the exact problem you are worried about.

>Thus by this logic a non-selective school MUST lower the bar or too many people will fail.

Not at all. They just didn't give a fuck. Engineering drop-out is their feeder program to the other programs; better to keep the rankings high to bait people in than make engineering easier resulting in lower rankings and lose the bait. Engineering drop-out commonly became successful engineering tech or even successful doctor, lawyer, etc via side-channeling of people who were baited into the university via engineering rankings. They would have happily failed out everyone from what I can tell, and if you didn't meet ABET designated objectives they were REQUIRED to fail you. You can't just wash this away with your vendetta not believing that this can be true -- I saw people with excellent performance fail merely for missing a single ABET criteria. Moreover recall at least one class where I believe the majority failed or dropped out, making the median an 'F' or 'D'. Apparently where you went, you implied the median was a 'C', so there's a difference already. This is a public school that couldn't give a flying fuck if most the undergrads failed out.

> Selectivity leads to higher performers in a class. Higher performers effect the intrinsic curve EVERY school has.

Having higher performers doesn't change the curriculum or necessary even the grading, it simply means those individuals may be better prepared to tackle equal difficulty found at both non-selective and selective schools. If I bring in the population at random to do 10 pull-ups each and seperately bring in a bunch of professional football players to do same, the difficulty is the same despite a massive change in selectivity.

>More people of the same level of talent out of this distribution make it through Georgia Tech than they do at my school.

I'm not terribly familiar with Georgia Tech or your school, and it's possible, I dare say probably even likely, your school was more challenging than both mine and Georgia Tech, but we can't say the delta in difficulty was BECAUSE of the selectivity. I'm guessing the university I attended didn't show up on your radar because you swapped us into the sciences (computer science) instead of engineering, and my university is not so remarkably ranked in computer science. In fact it would be impossible to gain a CS degree there without acceptance into an entirely different college of science (for which I have no basis for comparison).

> only top 10 CS school

I thought we were talking about engineering. I guess we can stop here. At the school I attended, CS is not engineering but rather science (which is in the name) so we don't even have a basis for comparison. It's a bit pedantic on face but it drastically changes everything to be in college of science instead of engineering from the bottom up where I went to university. Are you sure CS was in the college of engineering where you attended?

>Certainly there are exceptions aka Anomalies, but the generality is impossible not to be true. It's an axiom of probability. You could very well be a genius of unparalleled talent that came out of a non-selective program.

Having more qualified people attempt to complete the degree is not same as being more difficult. Moreover, attrition could be so high at the 'anybody with a pulse' institution that by the time junior year comes around the quality of cohort looks the same as at the selective school.

The curve isn't subjective. It's a probability distribution determined by scores from students. Nothing can be calibrated or adjusted here.

>Because you made a false assertion everyone couldn't be failed, when in fact at least in the institution it was REQUIRED that everyone be failed if everyone fails to meet ABET designated criteria. It supports that your claim is specious.

ABET requires it in name, but no institution does this. Think of ABET like the FDA. It has some oversight but there's also holes everywhere. School rarely fail an entire class. If a curriculum causes an entire class to fail the curriculum will be toned down otherwise students complain, launch lawsuits and eventually nobody attends the school. You need to work some common sense into your argument here, just because ABET has a stupid rule in name doesn't mean that rule is followed to the letter.

>False. Again you depend on the fallacy the curves can't be calibrated around something like 'the average student fails and the course follows the difficulty of <selective school>.' If I give an IQ test to a cohort to a group of lower intelligence people, the 'curve' looks bent and biased towards lower score. If I give it to people of upper intelligence, the curve 'looks' bent towards biased towards higher score. But in the end it is the curve that is objective across cohorts (schools), despite higher intelligence in one cohort ('school') than another. The difficulty is unchanged, even though selectivity is introduced.

First off the curve looks the same, it's not bent in anyway, it's usually symmetric, especially with student scores. The only difference is an offset of where the hump is.

Second your not understanding the argument. Imagine two groups of people. A high IQ group and a low IQ group. Both groups are given the exact same test. However both tests are graded differently based off a curve generated by the probability distribution of scores for each test.

The High IQ group has a mean score of 95. The low IQ group as a mean score of 50. So taking the same test among the high IQ group getting a 95 gets you a C taking the exact same test among the low IQ group and scoring the SAME score of 95 gets you an A. So by logic it's EASIER to get an A among a group of lower IQ people (aka a group of the same people from a less selective school). The test is harder among the high IQ group. This is definitive man.

>Fallacious reasoning, the two schools could have the exact same cirricula, teacher, everything and merely different students and when graded against objective criteria, or appropriately calibrated (shifted down/up) shaped curves, they can have both equal difficulty and grade parity for performance. The university I went to is NOTORIOUS for having the least grade inflation, much lower than many 'selective' schools, which also helps fix the exact problem you are worried about.

Fallacious reasoning my ass, your introducing qualitative speculation on specific attributes of your individual school and thinking that's enough data to generate a broad conclusion. That's the most fallacious style of reasoning in existence. I'm just axiomatically going off the law of averages. On average a less selective school will be easier. It's probability.

>Not at all. They just didn't give a fuck.

So they fail everyone in the class and the angry students take their outrage to the media? Then the parents come in and start a lawsuit which leads to a PR nightmare. Less students join the next year because nobody wants to be part of a school that failed an entire class.

Of course they give a fuck man. Don't be unreasonable. Schools are businesses and while they have to have a certain level of integrity when grading they ALSO need to be reasonable or they don't get business.

If this type of failing a majority of a class ever happens at all, it would be super rare. The subsequent class will for sure will be adjusted and the professor changed or reprimanded.

>Having higher performers doesn't change the curriculum or necessary even the grading,

You understand that curving a grade is based on average scores right? You realize that this is the topic and what I mean by easier? A curve. Higher performers score higher and influence the average making the curve higher. Basic math. The curriculum becomes harder because math works in this reality.

Here's some resources if you never dealt with this concept:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Normal_distribution https://michaelminn.net/tutorials/normal-curve-grading/index...

The difficulty rises not in the test itself, but in the grading of the test. To pass the class you need to perform much better.

So given your NFL player example. Let's say on average they do 20 pullups and regular people on average do 8. The grading for NFL players is much more strict as 20 pullups is an average score. So an NFL player who does 10 pullups which is above average for the normal crew fails because he's below average for the NFL crew.

>I'm not terribly familiar with Georgia Tech or your school, and it's possible, I dare say probably even likely, your school was more challenging than both mine and Georgia Tech, but we can't say the delta in difficulty was BECAUSE of the selectivity.

That's not the point. The point is on average, selectivity influences difficulty and by difficulty I mean grading on a curve. If all else is held exactly the same selectivity fucks up the curve by making it harder for everyone.

>I thought we were talking about engineering. I guess we can stop here. At the school I attended, CS is not engineering but rather science (which is in the name) so we don't even have a basis for comparison. It's a bit pedantic on face but it drastically changes everything to be in college of science instead of engineering from the bottom up where I went to university. Are you sure CS was in the college of engineering where you attended?

Doesn't matter. CS or engineering... the bell curve and the rules of probability don't change when you change majors. I thought we were talking about CS because my original post is saying "anyone can program."

>Having more qualified people attempt to complete the degree is not same as being more difficult.

It is if the school grades on a curve. Most schools do grade on a curve especially the harder schools. The curve makes sure that only a small percentage of people get an A and guarantees a percentage of people fail.

> Moreover, attrition could be so high at the 'anybody with a pulse' institution that by the time junior year comes around the quality of cohort looks the same as at the selective school.

Except I just did the math that shows this does not occur when comparing my school to Georgia Tech. Like I said assuming everything else is roughly the same, out of all the people who applied to my school, only 10% graduate. In Georgia Tech 45% of people who applied graduate.

This is assuming both groups that applied have the same talent distribution for engineering or CS or whatever. This means 35% of people of the SAME LEVEL of TALENT who would've graduated at Georgia Tech couldn't even get into UCLA.

Look even with the raw numbers there's a lot of fuzziness and leeway here. The story could go either way with a more detailed and well thought out measurement. But given the available quantitative data, this is the best possible estimation we have so far:

Selectivity influences difficulty. Period.

This is the source of your confusion.

Your whole argument about the curve centers around the flawed and bizarre presumption that the curve has to center around a C. It doesn't always work that way, I don't think you understand some curves are different including the median score possibly being an 'F'. You're depending on some standardized curve, when in fact there's no requirement that be the case (and it often isn't). In the example with the footballers, every footballer gets an 'A' and with the random population the average gets an 'F' because the curves are compensated so that effectively there is an objective-like standard to maintain parity across like-performers.

>It's a probability distribution determined by scores from students. Nothing can be calibrated or adjusted here.

Of course something can be adjusted. you can make 'A' top 1%, B next 1%, C next 1%, D Next 1%, and fail the bottom 96% for instance. Not everyone has to grade to make sure most people pass, which apparently was the case at your selective school. At non-selective school the whole point is to fail every unfit person possible; it's even better for the school because engineering program was mostly bait to get these people into broader programs within the university.

You can go to the media, sue, or whatever. In my case it would look like this in the media "middle-class white man slightly less successful after being held to high standards" -- yeah that'll sell great! A few foreign students committed suicide after failing out of engineering paid for with their families 3rd world life savings and even then no one cares. Good luck telling the judge that you didn't like the grade the professor gave you. Maybe your selective school mostly filthy-rich people with money to waste on lawsuits tying up the courts with cases that are meritless but wear down the college enough that they eventually relent.

>You understand that curving a grade is based on average scores right

Your curve may have been based around C being average. I have seen 'curves' where the average was F or D. I have seen courses where there is no curve as well, and isntead an objective system. A non-selective school can introduce a 'curve' where like performers get the same grade as in a selective school.

> The curve makes sure that only a small percentage of people get an A and guarantees a percentage of people fail.

Yeah our 'curves' weren't always like that. They were adjusted to compensate for non-selection present in our program. I.e. all people may fail or in a group of top performers no one may fail.

>Selectivity influences difficulty. Period.

Tell yourself your deranged and confused lie over and over, and tell me more about how you don't understand how different schools may grade differently (to objectively obtain same grade results as 'selective' school) even while maintaining SAME difficulty with a selective school.

> I thought we were talking about CS

Programming isn't equal to CS. Did you even study engineering or CS? Even chemical engineers program. These are all basic concepts you've missed, it's really hard to believe you have any experience at all in ABET accredited engineering program.

>ABET requires it in name, but no institution does this.

Maybe your institution acted fraudulently, but I saw people fail or incomplete a class for failing to meet ABET requirements. You're simply lying on this point to support your pathological obsession with denying selectivity does not confer difficulty.

>So they fail everyone in the class and the angry students take their outrage to the media? Then the parents come in and start a lawsuit which leads to a PR nightmare. Less students join the next year because nobody wants to be part of a school that failed an entire class.

No they fail almost everyone, the engineering rankings go up even further because any survivors are more impressive, and the rest filter into different programs. Everyone wins when almost everyone fails. The school uses engineering program as bait to draw people into other programs as much as anything. Failing almost everyone out is a win-win because it strengthens the bait and feeds money into other programs to broaden the school.

> The test is harder among the high IQ group. This is definitive man.

You have no understanding of an IQ test. It's meant to provide an objective outcome so that no matter the subset in a group taking the test, the measurement of the individual is the same. Taking the test with a group of fellow high-performers doesn't give you a lower IQ score. It's not harder no matter how selective you make the group taking the test. Universities can provide like feedback in grading. back to the analogy, the IQ score is the grade, get it?

>Selectivity influences difficulty. Period.

Selectivity doesn't confer difficulty. Period.

That's where they usually center the curve. This is where MOST schools set the average. It's not bizarre it's actually bizarre if a school doesn't do this. There is no requirement for this to be the case JUST LIKE there's no requirement to grade people off of A,B,C,D, or F grades. But people do it anyway because of culture and ubiquity.

If your school doesn't do this, then your school is clearly outside of what is normal. Any school that doesn't grade off of a curve tends to be an easier school, because these schools don't have an absolute requirement for a certain amount of people to fail.

>Of course something can be adjusted. you can make 'A' top 1%, B next 1%, C next 1%, D Next 1%, and fail the bottom 96% for instance.

No dude. A probability distribution is AN OBSERVATION. You cannot adjust data that's observed. You clearly were talking about the shape of the curve, but now you seem to think we're talking about the grading policy. Clearly I marked a delineation here.

>Good luck telling the judge that you didn't like the grade the professor gave you.

It's a jury. Not a judge. And telling the judge that the ENTIRE class failed is a valid argument bro. You don't even have to tell that to a judge. Tell it to the dean and the dean will have a talk with that professor. It's absolutely insane for a whole class to fail.

>Maybe your selective school mostly filthy-rich people with money to waste on lawsuits tying up the courts with cases that are meritless but wear down the college enough that they eventually relent.

I went to a public school buddy. None of BS affirmative action by race or money. So the school is loaded with Asians. Meritful to the point where it shows disparity among race. Asians rate highest in academic achievement and scoring, if your school isn't by population rated most heavily by Asians then your school is most likely performing meritless admissions.

>Your curve may have been based around C being average. I have seen 'curves' where the average was F or D.

Setting the average score to an F or a D is a one way ticket to retaliation. If it occurs at all it's fucking rare. I'm more inclined to believe you're lying here. But whatever.

>Yeah our 'curves' weren't always like that. They were adjusted to compensate for non-selection present in our program. I.e. all people may fail or in a group of top performers no one may fail.

Send me a link to your "curve" rules. Is it a standard or is it special to your school? If it's a standard methodology there should be some information or wiki on it somewhere.

>Tell yourself your deranged and confused lie over and over, and tell me more about how you don't understand how different schools may grade differently (to objectively obtain same grade results as 'selective' school) even while maintaining SAME difficulty with a selective school.

Of course schools grade differently. But there is a generality and a norm that schools tend to cluster around. That's the Bell curve normal distribution and A,B,C,D,F grading scale centered around the center of the curve. MOST schools do this and therefore you can make a GENERAL statement about all schools that says: "Selectivity influences difficulty. Period."

Any school that doesn't do this is outside of the norm. You're using outliers as your evidence.

>Programming isn't equal to CS. Did you even study engineering or CS? Even chemical engineers program. These are all basic concepts you've missed, it's really hard to believe you have any experience at all in ABET accredited engineering program.

This is just pedantic. You're getting knee deep into language issues. Nobody is even sure if CS should be engineering or even a science. It's clearly closest to math. But why get into this BS? It's off topic. Nobody cares bro. I don't want to argue about this shit. Stay on topic.

I don't need to study the intricacies of ABET. I don't even care about that garbage. My school was ABET accredited that's all they told me, I believe it, but I don't advertise it on my resume because the name of my school is more famous then ABET itself. Nobody puts ABET on their resume and nobody cares. We both agreed it's trash. I don't understand why you're bringing it up if YOU AGREED it's garbage.

>No they fail almost everyone, the engineering rankings go up even further because any survivors are more impressive, and the rest filter into different programs. Everyone wins when almost everyone fails. The school uses engineering program as bait to draw people into other programs as much as anything. Failing almost everyone out is a win-win because it strengthens the bait and feeds money into other programs to broaden the school.

https://www.reddit.com/r/college/comments/3t48ej/what_happen...

Nobody in that thread agrees with you. But fine. Keep your opinion. The way you talk about it almost seems like you didn't even go to university. I know you did though, but your opinion is so far out there that you would benefit in knowing that barely anyone else shares it.

>You have no understanding of an IQ test. It's meant to provide an objective outcome so that no matter the subset in a group taking the test, the measurement of the individual is the same. Taking the test with a group of fellow high-performers doesn't give you a lower IQ score. It's not harder no matter how selective you make the group taking the test. Universities can provide like feedback in grading. back to the analogy, the IQ score is the grade, get it?

Dude. This is just pedantic again. Replace IQ with whatever you want to indicate a higher performing group, or more intelligent group. I just used the word to indicate that the POPULATION of people that were applying was overall superior.

The detailed intricacies of an IQ test are irrelevant. I am well versed in what an IQ test is and what an IQ score means. BUT WE ARE NOT TALKING ABOUT IQ TESTS.

First off different universities do provide different hardness levels in tests. Most of them try to make it hard enough so that 75% is the average score. Failing to make that number the score is curved. Generally more selective universities DO HAVE more challenging tests, but this is anecdotal and is hard to objectively measure.

What can be measured is curving. ASSUMING all else is the same and we follow the STANDARD methodology not used by garbage outlier schools When all else is the same other then selectivity, selective schools are more difficult.

>Selectivity doesn't confer difficulty. Period.

You're just being stubborn. When you reach for outlier evidence that's how you know you're searching for evidence to support a premeditated conclusion rather than using evidence to construct a conclusion.

I never claimed such. I only know the hardness relative to another school I went too. That's as far as the anecdotal evidence goes for MY individual school. Still, we're not even talking about our respective schools anymore, I don't even care for that. I'm talking about a generality.

The numbers illustrate a generality that is axiomatically true. I'm not going to restate it, but I think you know already that it's true.

But you did. You specifically said that selectivity influences your program to be harder than non-selective programs.

I never mentioned that it was specific to my school. Thus with no specific mention the implied meaning is that it's applied to a generality.

I made no statement about my school or your school specifically in reference to how hard they are in general. We both did however use our schools as anecdotal supporting evidence for each of our respective opinions though.

But anecdotal evidence is worthless. That's why I moved to numbers. This is what the numbers say:

Selectivity is causal to difficulty in general.

Your school could be an exception and my school may be an exception as well. But given my statement above, by probability, it is highly unlikely.

In short, it's more probable that my school is harder than your school and this probability is only escapable if someone who attended both can give us a more accurate first hand comparison.

Where the hell are you getting that 99.9% number? I would think someone who went to a good school wouldn't pull random numbers out of thin air.

Selectivity is causal to difficulty. Period. But the causal connection like all things in reality is a connection built upon probability. Think of the luck stat in RPGs. On average the more selective the school the harder. If there's any school that breaks the model, that school is an exception and a minority. Your school might be an exception, but by probability it is most likely not and it is more likely you just think your school is harder.

>At least you finally admit you don't get to feel special about going through something more 'difficult' on account of whatever idea your school had of selectivity.

I never said my school was special or commented about how I feel. If you look at the initial posts, I was telling you that going to a non-selective school ISN'T anything special, because you were the one talking about it.

Personally I think you just have a chip on your shoulder thinking a selective program is generally more difficult than a non-selective program. Elitist arrogance.

>Where the hell are you getting that 99.9% number? I would think someone who went to a good school wouldn't pull random numbers out of thin air.

I said could be, because you decoupled by saying now that it merely COULD be that a selectivity influences difficulty, before backtracking to play your devious and treacherous claim you were never talking about the school from which your anecdotes came. YOU pulled the figures like 25% and 50% out of a hat, which is fine because we acknowledged they weren't hard numbers. Don't be a hypocrite.

>Selectivity is causal to difficulty. Period

Selectivity doesn't confer difficulty. Period.

Edit: here's a comment from a student at one non-selective school

"This leads to <<school>> feeling very impersonal for Freshman and Sophmores while the university treats you more or less like an experiment to see if you can handle the pressure. This can lead to people that would normal be denied to being accepted and excelling, but it can also lead to other students who shouldn't have been placed in such rigorous programs having to drop out, transfer, or graduate late. This is from a personal observation and 2 good friends transferring schools and another friend who dropped out his Junior year."

they note the university "Put them in extremely tough classes go start with and weed out those who can't handle the pressure."

This is how it tends to work in non-selective schools. They hold students to the 'selective' school standard freshman/sophomore year until by junior year you're effectively in a cohort that looks like the cohort at the selective school. The difficulty is still there, although it's an independent variable from the selectivity.

It does. Because selectivity effects the curve. If all schools had the same curve and the same curriculum and same everything except selectivity then, selectivity influences the curve. I've said it a thousand times. If you disagree you have to counter the logic of the curve which you haven't.

I'm also well aware that choice of a curve is a random variable. You've stated it multiple times. Therefore if it's a random variable then hold it the same when comparing mathematical models. Assume all random variables are the same and only adjust the relevant variable which in this case is selectivity. In this case selectivity is causal to difficulty.

>YOU pulled the figures like 25% and 50% out of a hat, which is fine because we acknowledged they weren't hard numbers. Don't be a hypocrite.

The context around those numbers make it clear that they're just really rough estimates. Additionally those numbers were not used in calculations, I simply stated that the numbers I found are inn-accurate because of several factors and gave a really rough estimate on what i thought the numbers could be (50% and 25%). The subsequent conclusion and calculation were based on the lower more inaccurate numbers which STILL show that selectivity is causal to difficulty.

99.9% is not a rough estimate. It's clearly a really exact number with a decimal point.

>Personally I think you just have a chip on your shoulder thinking a selective program is generally more difficult than a non-selective program. Elitist arrogance.

Well did I insult you in any way to the degree of calling you Elitest or arrogant? I'm just making a point. You're the one crossing the line with insults. I think you have a chip on your shoulder.

>I said could be, because you decoupled by saying now that it merely COULD be that a selectivity influences difficulty, before backtracking to play your devious and treacherous claim you were never talking about the school from which your anecdotes came.

In all of reality and all of science, especially the social sciences all causal connections are coupled with probable connections. Nothing is connected with pure logic. Logic only exists in math and logic games. If I said all men are stronger than women. Clearly the generality is true, but obviously there are exceptions and it is unnecessary to comment about those exceptions. But nonetheless, nobody talks in terms of probabilities. In common human parlance we communicate using absolute statements in reference to topics that are in truth generalities and we assume that the other party has the intelligence to know about the exceptions to the generalities.

I simply brought up the probability because I explicitly wanted you to know that YOUR school might be an exception. But by probability it is most likely not an exception. That is all.

>Edit: here's a comment from a student at one non-selective school

I'm more interested in the comment from a student who went to both a very selective school and a school that's not selective. Many students in an "easy" school think it's hard only because they don't have a point of comparison.

>This is how it tends to work in non-selective schools. They hold students to the 'selective' school standard freshman/sophomore year until by junior year you're effectively in a cohort that looks like the cohort at the selective school. The difficulty is still there, although it's an independent variable from the selectivity.

Again. The curve is not an independent variable from selectivity. Therefore selectivity is causal to difficulty. This is a literal numeric connection. I've said this multiple times. Anecdotal and qualitative evidence is worth considering but this causal quantitative connection far stronger.

Your best bet is to find someone who did undergrad stuff at both MIT and Georgia Tech. That persons anecdotal experience is far more accurate.

I already have. Different 'curves' for different school. Or even uniform objective standards so that cohort performance is irrelevant to grade outcome. You can create a 'virtual' objective standard by creating curves that are compensated -- i.e. the 'selective' school has a curve where the median score receives a C while the non-selective is curved such that like-performer parity is present and the median receives an F. In practice this is how the non-selective school manages to give F, D, or incomplete/drop-out to the majority of students in a course.

Again the school doesn't give a shit when people complain about this, there is a suicide by a 3rd world national who fails out almost every few years because the school will allow the parent to spend their last dime sending their kid to college and the kid ends up killing himself out of honor when they find out the non-selective university will actually take anyone and happily fail out most of them. The media doesn't give a shit, the judge doesn't give a shit, and the jury of your peers (in this city, basically working-class midwesterners who very well may relish putting a snobby complaining rich kid in his place) don't give a shit. The jury will probably laugh as they go home and have a toast to their wife that their competition for rental housing are falling after eliminating the competition.

>You're the one crossing the line with insults. I think you have a chip on your shoulder.

How original, you'd make a nice parrot.

>99.9% is not a rough estimate. It's clearly a really exact number with a decimal point.

You indicated that selectivity doesn't always mean that the school is more difficult. You failed to designated a bound other than your school wasn't included amongst those whom your were claiming were more difficult on basis of selectivity (in fact you go so far as to say you SPECIFICALLY did not include your school), so threw out a number that COULD be the case based on your own argument.

>Your best bet is to find someone who did undergrad stuff at both MIT and Georgia Tech. That persons anecdotal experience is far more accurate.

Pretty much agree except I would do UC Berkeley (#3) vs Purdue (#4) since those are the most near peer selective vs non-selective I could find on 2023 engineering top 10 rankings. MIT is #1 vs GIT at tie #7 is a bit wider. As number 1 MIT is probably a class of its own vs 2-10, since they have 'winner-take-all' advantage in anything where only number one will do.

>I already have. Different 'curves' for different school. Or even uniform objective standards so that cohort performance is irrelevant to grade outcome. You can create a 'virtual' objective standard by creating curves that are compensated -- i.e. the 'selective' school has a curve where the median score receives a C while the non-selective is curved such that like-performer parity is present and the median receives an F. In practice this is how the non-selective school manages to give F, D, or incomplete/drop-out to the majority of students in a course.

Was already countered with this:

>I'm also well aware that choice of a curve is a random variable. You've stated it multiple times. Therefore if it's a random variable then hold it the same when comparing mathematical models. Assume all random variables are the same and only adjust the relevant variable which in this case is selectivity. In this case selectivity is causal to difficulty.

Please respond to that rather than regurgitate an argument I already addressed.

>You indicated that selectivity doesn't always mean that the school is more difficult.

The curve argument addresses this. You'll need to address my counter argument to your argument against the curve.

>Pretty much agree except I would do UC Berkeley (#3) vs Purdue (#4) since those are the most near peer selective vs non-selective I could find on 2023 engineering top 10 rankings. MIT is #1 vs GIT at tie #7 is a bit wider. As number 1 MIT is probably a class of its own vs 2-10, since they have 'winner-take-all' advantage in anything where only number one will do.

Sure. Find someone. Idc if it's MIT vs GIT or UCB versus Purdue. Also another caveat to keep in mind... rankings aren't exactly a good indicator for difficulty as we aren't even sure about the criteria used to determine the ranking.

To really strengthen your side, multiple people from multiple schools should be used. But one person is enough for me to at least speculate on an alternative conclusion.

Until then, selectivity on average is causal to difficulty.

This isn't random. With higher selectivity, in practice, it seems likely and at very least not impossible that the variable is adjusted to make grades elevated vs median cohort member so that difficulty of passing is constant across selective vs non-selective. IDK how you could possibly assert the curve bias is random. And you've still completely ignored objective grading systems, which I have indeed seen used in core engineering classes to ensure cohort performance is completely irrelevant.

>Until then, selectivity on average is causal to difficulty.

You haven't proven this. It's a totally unsupported claim. There's zero evidence to indicate mere selectivity confers difficulty.

You're misunderstanding statistics. If you have 5000 humans and let them each choose a choice for a curve. Then you select a random human to see what choice he or he/she chose, that choice might as well be a random variable. If you try to find the mode of which curving methodology the person chose you'll find one that's the majority. That's a good value to freeze the choice around.

https://www.wikiwand.com/en/Probability_distribution

For the purposes of this argument ^^ the above is the definition you should center your research around. Deeper meanings into "random variable" become too pedantic.

>IDK how you could possibly assert the curve bias is random.

Random variables don't technically exist unless you study quantum mechanics. It's not even a provable notion whether they actually do exist. But typically in statistics you can treat all measurements as taking a sample of a random variable. When you shuffle a deck of cards, when you draw from a raffle... or when a random school chooses what curve methodology it uses. The language I'm using here "random variable" might have thrown you off, but it's common parlance in science and statistics. Try re-reading my previous response with this knowledge in mind.

>You haven't proven this. It's a totally unsupported claim. There's zero evidence to indicate mere selectivity confers difficulty.

Again, please understand the concept of a random variable, then re-read the response again. Then you will see, the evidence is quite strong.

I'll restate it here for clarity. Read carefully. We can test if selectivity influences difficulty in a mathematical model of schools. First treat all parameters that are part of a model of a school as random. Because those parameters are random we can just freeze all those values at some average and make it the same for everything, because it's not something we're trying to measure... and likely these parameters cluster around some average anyway.

SO, as a result, we have a bunch of mathematical models of schools that are all EXACTLY the same. Each school model takes in an ass load of parameters as inputs, and outputs some number that measures "difficulty" as an output. Since all models are identical all input parameters yield the same Output.

To test "selectivity" we just take two identical models and fiddle with the "selectivity" input parameter. If the "difficulty" output changes when you adjust "selectivity" then you have proven selectivity is causal to difficulty for that model.

I don't have to know exactly what this mathematical model is. Just pieces of it. I know grading policy influences difficulty, I know the curve influences grading policy, and I know the amount of smart people in the school influences the curve, and I know selectivity influences the amount of smart people in the school.

Thus I know when you fiddle with that selectivity parameter, difficulty increases.

Your argument is saying that you can't ignore the other input parameters that the choice of the curve matters. I agree. It matters, but we're not trying to measure that. We want to throw it out of the measurement equation and see if selectivity influences difficulty. So we freeze the curve methodology at some arbitrary option and ignore it. We measure selectivity so that's the only parameter we fiddle with.

Think of it like this. You have 20 switches labeled with numbers 1 - 20 and a single lightbulb. Each switch may or may not be connected to that lightbulb. I don't know, but I only care about switch 5 and I want to know if switch 5 turns on that light bulb. I don't care about switch 3, 4, 6, or 7. Only switch 5.

I test switch 5 by freezing all other switches at ON then flipping switch 5 on and off to test if it has a causal effect on the light bulb. Switch 5 in this analogy would be "selectivity" and switch 7 can be "the choice for the curve methodology"

This is the exact SAME proof I'm using to show that selectivity influences difficulty. Same concept but instead switches are the input parameters and the output parameter is the lightbulb.

I'm confident that if you took a super-rare race condition in a web service and set me to figuring it out in parallel with a team of a few dozen random web coders off Reddit, I'd figure it out first

With factors like that at play you really can't commoditize software engineering. If all the local companies decided to put the squeeze on workers, new companies would spring up, poach the best workers, and crush the old companies. It's happened before, it's happening now, and it'll happen again.

We have all seen the professionals in action…

There may be more people who can do it than one would instinctively think, but it doesn’t take long on a helpdesk or in any public facing role to conclude that many humans are maxed out with tasks that really aren’t that hard.

Not everyone can do everything, maybe due to lack of aptitude or interest.

So in essence, "anyone can do anything" is just an empty feel good mantra

I said anyone can master the subjects mentioned above. Including programming.

These subjects are so easy that anyone can do it.

If I said anyone can master chess and play it on the level of a grandmaster, I'd be wrong. But for just learning to be an adequate programmer or playing chess adequately... anyone can do it.

1) Self-taught isn't that relevant - where you learn something isn't the most important thing 2) There IS a large ability component to software, as well as education and motivation 3) With the exception that we're in a funny moment where web frontend is simultaneously easy and hard; the concepts are easy, but the proliferation of frameworks and ways of doing things makes skills scarce (though relatively easy to pick up). Once this is resolved, the numbers will drop, as current frameworks will replaced (or enhanced) with something more productive, but harder to use

Prognostication over!

Remember all of those failed multimillion dollar coding contracts? They were from factory style management trying to apply it to coding. Reality slapped the fools upside the head enough times via absolute fiascos. Even if we take conspiratorial economics as a given we already know how this will end. History indicates their hubris will bring themselves only ruin, just like the legacy rust belt manufacturers.

Also how the hell will programming tools used by programmers be used against them? That is a shallow appeal to horror. Even if machine learning became good enough to automate the low end of the programming market that would only raise their salaries even higher. It is not an easy machine learning problem to solve at all. Esoteric, obscure, and highly complex skills which can make businesses have never come cheaply.

I've organised bootcamps and learning spaces for wannabe developers and there are tons of people which can't get their head around programming. I'm not talking about being able to do algorithms challenge. I'm talking about simple function calling, stacks, for loops, etc

That said, I've interviewed several senior programmers with a career who can't program and managed to coast in companies which are not capable or willing to test performances.

So the number of "programmers" may increase, given the salaries we can command, but the amount of developers in FANGs or companies that are capable to deliver something effectively won't increase dramatically. FANGs are leaving a lot of good developers on the table with their ridiculous leetcode policies, but the population of effective developers is not as large as you think.

It's deeper than that: there are a large percentage of people that do not want to code. It would be as artless and soulless to them as perhaps we think pounding nails into boards all day would be. But to plenty of people "an honest day's work" consists of doing with your muscles, your labor — having accomplished something "physical" at the end of the day.

Define "large number". You can have millions of programmers and it still be a small fraction of the population at large. Sorry to say it, but a lot of people are never going to become coders - it's our own AI systems that will bring coders down to earth, not the public at large suddenly learning to code.

Most people are not very smart (comparatively), but that is what these types of jobs are looking for.

You're making me like C all over again.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=4JVJdKnbZu8

https://www.theglobeandmail.com/business/article-ottawa-loos...

People _are_ responsible for the choices they make _and_ the entities they choose to empower…

Anyhow… I’ve known engineers that have chosen community over themselves…

Regardless, you’re on HN, fortunately you don’t have to make that choice. Instead you can skip FAANG toxicity and join a startup “community” that aligns with your values. Even better you can start your own startup. The payout is also potentially far better than grinding at a soul sucking FAANG position for years.

if you consider financial pay out, i really can't agree that it's a better payout for the risk you're taking. A startup can be a lottery, and "winning" can be difficult and has a chance element. On average, i think the payout is lower than employment at the FAANGs, esp. if you do good salary negotiation and move often to ensure you're not missing out any uptick in the market rate.

Of course, a startup, like winning the lottery, pays out a lot more when successful, and some people prefer the high risk high reward - it's not a wrong choice. But that should be understood first.

No matter how many engineers quit or refuse to apply to Amazon they will always have a replacement. The solution for both climate change and Amazon is government intervention. Be it subsidies for Solar or regulatory fines for Amazon.

A clearer way to think of it is in terms of people who have the power to change the situation:

- Governments can issue fines, but this is unlikely to harm the corporate enough to make it change. It can win votes though, so it does happen.

- Governments can write regulations, but this is done sparingly because of all the unintended consequences of adding any regulations to any industry. Also, a common (intended, by the incumbents) consequence of regulations is adding ones that disadvantage new participants in a market.

- People can choose to change the company from the inside, or not work for the company. This can work quite well if changes are encouraged from various levels, but that's not common.

- People can choose to not use the company (e.g. not to shop at Amazon).

The second and fourth are the most powerful options, with the fourth being the very most powerful.

The people slaving for 50 cents over minimum wage and still being unable to pay rent don’t have much of a choice.

they are ethical, or altruistic, but certainly can't claim they are financially responsible.

If they don't have dependents (now or in the future), then they can remain financially irresponsible, because it will have little effect. But if they plan on having dependents such as children, they will need the funds to compete for scarce resources such as housing and school etc. They will also need to provide for their own retirement.

If they choose to take a lower paying job (when a higher paying one is definitely available), they are making a sacrifice on behalf of their dependents, who may or may not appreciate this choice being made for them.

I would hardly describe taking a salary that puts you in the top 5% of earners instead of the top 2% to be financially irresponsible.

The definition of financial responsibility should be clarified.

I’d argue that making as much money as possible while ignoring morals or ethics is not “financially responsible”, it actually fits into the definition of psychopathic behavior (https://www.webmd.com/mental-health/features/sociopath-psych...).

As another sibling comment mentions, making 180k vs 300k as an individual doesn’t lowers one’s quality of life that much; there’s still enough disposable income to take trips, save for retirement, etc.

The “I don’t worry about my next meal” threshold for a warehouse hourly worker ($18/hr * 40hr/week * 52weeks/year ~= $37.5k) can be drastically improved.

My man, with 180k you can comfortably afford a house by the time you're 30, have a quick million aside _and_ do lines a cocaine off a hooker's ass every week. 180k is a salary way past the bar of "fiscal responsibility".

A typical programming job is more than enough to provide for a family, a home, and early retirement. Burning down the next generation by empowering mega corporations just "for your kids" is the definition of selfish. Boomers did selfish things "for their kids" and now their kids are absolutely screwed with climate change and a worse off economic system.

But yes, they did certainly provide for their own retirement--at the cost of the whole world. FAANG developers are the same. Amazon and Apple can pay fat checks to their tech workers because they cut costs and shamelessly exploit everyone working in their lower level positions. Eventually they'll push everyone down to lower levels and have the technology to enforce it without human interference.

But hey, someone bought their kid a nice car and they retired to the Bahamas and got a few maids with that huge developer check. Got to look at the bright side.

We are still in a pandemic where one of the biggest reasons people could isolate for as long as they did was big tech.

The most important thing holding the world together was the people out there risking infection to deliver things to people staying at home. The biggest difference between the 90s and 2020s is that people are doing it by pressing a button on their phone instead of pressing a button on their computer or making a call on their phone, and loads more people are working in the package delivery industry for low wages.

Can you give some examples?

The rest of your analysis seems incomplete. Some examples:

Zoom, Slack Facebook and WhatsApp able to keep professional, personal and family relationships alive was essential to so much continuing to function, allowing a vast number of employees to shift to online working. One notable point (of thousands) here is that while healthcare waiting lists got longer, many consultations that could be done over video, a thing never thought feasible before, meaning more isolation possibilities for vulnerable patients (and clinical staff).

Having online shops able to update listings in seconds, rather than your example of the 90s where catalogues would be sent out every six months with new stock for you to phone up and buy, or rather, not be able to get through to, was also awesome. Modern logistics means packages and returns can be done incredibly easily and fitted into your day, rather than spending ages on the phone with a human operator.

Uber and derivatives meant that the increased load of shutting down public transport could be transferred onto a dynamic fleet of private citizens' cars, and the traditional taxi firms also didn't require scaling human operators to book, and Google Maps powered the routing for those drivers.

And the rise of cloud infrastructure has meant in general that many services, government and private, have sprung into being in record time.

And those are just the first examples that occur to me.

Is the value created for the customers of amazon.com less or more significant for society at large than people who can't get a better job than minimum wage, voluntarily working for minimum wage?

There is no moral right or wrong. I personally hate amazon and I would never work for them (even if I'm impressed by what Bezos achieved) but I don't judge people working for amazon. I judge way more people working for the IRS, that's a proper criminal enterprise.

https://mobile.twitter.com/benioff/status/549339156854214656

The line so is based on how far down the food chain you are. Blue Collar employees, the drivers, warehouse workers and so on, are not part of the problem. White collar employees, pretty much so. I say that as a former White Collar Amazonian. Amazon, so to be fair, is just among the more extreme manifestations of rampant, unregulated capitalism. And it's not that all the other logistics companies are treating their blue collar employees any better. On average, so there are always those exceptions of great employers and great managers everywhere. Unfortunately those are becoming rarer by the day.

There are plenty of folks that won't put personal enrichment above abhorrent labor practices.

Most people are selfish and act in their own self interest despite what virtue signaling on social media they may do.

You really think people are willing to risk their 6 figure salaries for some anonymous warehouse workers...

> Arendt found Eichmann an ordinary, rather bland, bureaucrat, who in her words, was ‘neither perverted nor sadistic’, but ‘terrifyingly normal’. He acted without any motive other than to diligently advance his career. Eichmann was not an amoral monster, she concluded in her study of the case. Instead, he performed evil deeds without evil intentions, a fact connected to his ‘thoughtlessness’, a disengagement from the reality of his evil acts. Eichmann ‘never realised what he was doing’ due to an ‘inability… to think from the standpoint of somebody else’. Lacking this particular cognitive ability, he ‘commit[ted] crimes under circumstances that made it well-nigh impossible for him to know or to feel that he [was] doing wrong’.

> Arendt dubbed these collective characteristics of Eichmann ‘the banality of evil’: he was not inherently evil, but merely shallow and clueless, a ‘joiner’, in the words of one contemporary interpreter of Arendt’s thesis: he was a man who drifted, in search of purpose and direction, not out of deep ideological belief.

[1] https://www.britannica.com/story/what-did-hannah-arendt-real...

Our intellect as a species is a blessing and a curse. We are self aware, but only to a certain extent. The blanks are filled in by wishful thinking and hopelessly logical rationalizations.

It's fine and serves its purpose well as something to strive for. But it significantly hampers our ability to understand and empathize toward those that for whatever reason goes against the ideal.

So i'm not sure how much of it is "natural" or "cultural", but as others have pointed out the vast majority of people are happy to cooperate and help one another... it's not an abstract ideal.

On the other hand, since we were kids starting at school, and across the media spectrum, we've been taught to crush others to move forward. That part is definitely not natural but cultural. If that's the "reality" you're talking about, we can do a great deal about it!

A good example is malicious actions by companies. You could probably follow the entire decision tree in a lot of cases and not find a single individual that was acting differently than the average person would in those same circumstances.

Systemic issues are becoming obfuscated because human nature is disregarded in favor of ideals. It's much easier to just nail someone to a cross than to empathize and find real solutions.

I'd have to read her responses to the criticism she got again, I believe she did walk back the extent of her claims, but could be wrong (and in saying this, I'm sure someone will correct me if I am misremembering ;))

You can probably see how option A is a propaganda win for Nazism (and fascism in general). 'See, you're not so different to us!'. Was it the German people who became Nazis overnight, or did the Nazi elites (such as Eichmann) instigate what amounted to major social engineering campaigns?

That's why seemingly democratic societies can turn into regimes almost overnight.

Well, yes it was, because it was engineered. The Nazis never won a majority in any election, but once they were in power they were famous for their social engineering and propaganda. They're a classic example of how a minority of people in a population can absolutely gain control over everyone else and bend the majority to their will using highly cynical but intelligent tactics.

That's a personal interpretation. In fact, in many ways it doesn't discount it but actually inspires them, asserting that without such efforts society is likely to backslide into fascism fairly easily. Which tbh, if you've lived in the US from 2001 to 2005, or today in Russia or Hungary, you've basically experienced already.

That does not mean that society carries all responsibility for the actions of this or that person, of course, that's never the case. What the banality of evil tells us is that society contains the conceptual germs for behaviour that can turn atrocious, when brought to extreme lengths by this or that individual.

Or consider your own personal experience with people you have worked with. You may have had colleagues who were incompetent, unintelligent or annoying, but how many of them would you describe as evil? Over twenty years of working in the industry I have only ever encountered one person who I would genuinely describe, not as “evil” per se, but as lacking in certain moral qualities that we tend to take for granted among the people we know (and we take them for granted because most people are good). And he wasn’t a developer!

I believe it is much more likely that people work for Amazon because they either genuinely believe it is a good company (after all, it is lauded by many) and/or because they are ignorant of the nature of what people in socioeconomic classes far below their own are experiencing in Amazon facilities. Just how aware are each of us of the reality on the ground at companies we support? Do you know what it is like to be a worker at every company whose stock you own? What about the companies who make the clothing you wear or the device you’re using to read this?

If not, does that you make evil? Or are you a participant in a system that hides this reality from you?

I’m not saying that owning stock or wearing apparel is the same thing as joining a company, by the way. People should be very discerning about who they work for. But I think there are more plausible and positive reasons for human behaviour than Machiavelli proposed.

Let’s not view each other as evil and thus write off each other and in doing so, our future. Let’s work to change the system instead.

Does the sin of making money wash away the virtue of creating a COVID-19 vaccine?

My observation is that why should we expect highly paid tech workers to conform to some higher ideal. They have more to lose.

Other than that, full agreement.

> You really think people are willing to risk their 6 figure salaries for some anonymous warehouse workers...

Also known as the doctrine of "the original sin".

As opposed to Rousseau's "noble savage".

It's supposed to be a system where you enrich your country that you live. So you see less homeless people. But, Walmart and Amazon executives have focused on selling you things made in other countries. China, mostly. It has just taken a long time to catch up but the system has nearly perfected moving money up and out.

Given that unions among tech workers are a non-factor; that leaves political action as the only thing left to call for.

For example I may lack the sway to affect political action on climate change but I can still change the way I live - solar power, consume less meat, etc.

The thing is, Amazon, Walmart and fellow profiteers set up shop precisely where people have not much other choice than to work for them - in short, they set up shop in areas with somewhat decent traffic infrastructure, cheap real estate and lots of unemployment (and the latter two often come together).

So yes, the answer to the problem that is exploitative labor practices is government regulation, as it has been for the last two centuries.

In governments without elected representatives, the responsibility lies entirely with the people enforcing the oppression against those weaker than them and protecting those above.

So yeah. People happily enforcing a massive wealth divide are responsible. They just don't want to accept personal responsibility because their pockets are fat. And I highly doubt they're out on the streets demanding reform to close the wealth gap and risk bringing their pay down so that those warehouse workers can live better.

  > In a government elected by the people, the people can't absolve themselves of guilt when they're willingly voting for corrupt officials.

Not entering; we are there. Microsoft/GitHub has among its clients in the USA an organization that runs literal concentration camps down in Texas.

Amazon built a custom airgapped datacenter at Langley for the CIA, who has been known to assassinate US citizens without trial.

And as hard as it may be, choose to buy from them

And while i am at it, LOL to the conferance culture, talk about collecting stars. Every framework needs a speaking circut so you can somehow bring the familiarty of university into your working life because you have never known anything more then this. Swallowed by the system, addicted to consuming, pushed forward by the prospect of making an impact, used and abused by capitalistic entity that courted you, young, impressionable, starry eyed.

Just like Twitter can ban Donald Trump for using certain phrases (Steal, Election), so can Amazon ban certain words. They’re both private corporate entities.

Exactly as you said, if you don’t like it, move elsewhere.