I went to pick up a book at the circulation desk at my uni close to the first day of classes and of the people in front of me and in back of me there were 9 girls and 0 boys in line.
If the class were gender-balanced the odds of that would be 1/512; I have no idea what it means ("girls are much more interested in using the library?") but I think it's significant.
> If the class were gender-balanced the odds of that would be 1/512
If each arrival at the desk were an independent draw from the full class, then, sure, the chance of any given set of 9 arrivals having 9 women would be 1/512. (Though the chance of the sequence of 10 including 9 women and 1 man is 10/1024, or about 5 times more likely; by cherry-picking the set of arrivals to consider, you are añready making the set around you seem more unlikely than it is.)
Of course, if they were where independent the case, there’d also be a non-negligible case of a repeat in that set of arrivals; the fact that you chose a set in line at the same time demonstrates that they aren't a set of independent events. So the whole basis of your 1/512 even on the cherry-picked set is invalid.
There are probably 512 people in this thread right now that have had that same experience you did but didn't reject the null hypothesis so they're not commenting.
I play the game of assessing the gender balance of groups a lot.
Some of it is wondering where society is going, some of it is just trying to avoid sausage parties. Trans people don't give me any trouble because they want to be assigned a certain gender, non-binaries might force me to learn the multinomial distribution but those seem to turn up at the 1/256 - 1/512 level if that.
I stopped going to Yoga classes in my ZIP code because they attract a lot of middle-aged and older men who, I think, are there to look at women without doing anything too strenuous.
It is interesting; disregarding nitpicking about the calculation there could be multiple potential reasons that all are connected to the heart of the matter:
- women more likely to study and solve logistical study problems together
- men more likely to pirate books
- men less likely to be out during normal hours
- men less likely to choose majors requiring library books
- and of course, higher college enrollment by women
I am not saying any of these were necessarily in play in your situation, but some probably are and colleges and employers should be thinking about them.
I'd say seeing a 9-0 ratio is an outlier for sure, and maybe we don't need much deeper thought than that. I do, suspect, however, that women are more likely to go to the library than men. My assumption on this is the higher grades that female students earn on average.
Getting into debt to get a piece of paper that only lets you begin to enter the job market after gathering enough credentials by either working for free or talking to others and hopefully trying your luck even though there are 100s for a single internship... College is a scam unless you're paying close attention and don't get into debt in the first place.
Those who manage to jump through all of the hoops don't realize that there is a secondary scam waiting for them: working for a wage without significant stock options while someone makes millions sitting around doing nothing off of their effort. We've had movies made about this for many years and still it's so strange how it's not acknowledged.
Also: who is friend or foe? The lines have blurred significantly, which is a driving force in WANTING to change things in the first place. There's even loss of solidarity between family members, next generations.
There's no incentive to try. If I were the same age as these young men, I wouldn't bother either.
To spoil a little, this book considers a group of low-income whites and a group of low-income blacks.
As teenagers the whites have a pessimistic attitude about success but the blacks are more optimistic. Barriers to the success of both groups are looming.
The first edition of the book stops there: one is left with the feeling that the plight of the two groups is not that different (e.g. "systemic racism" is a real thing but doesn't seem salient when you are know "white people with black problems") Somehow, however, the blacks believe that "they can overcome".
In a follow-up study a decade later both groups are doing poorly, but the blacks in particular have had their hopes dashed by poverty, problems with the law, problems with work, etc.
> Those who manage to jump through all of the hoops don't realize that there is a secondary scam waiting for them: working for a wage without significant stock options while someone makes millions sitting around doing nothing off of their effort.
I know this is the thing in US and shouldn't surprise me but I'm based in central Europe and honestly the thought of this still feels so abstract to me. I'd love to have an option of choosing jobs that offer stock options.
Europe is behind of America in this regards, Europeans are submissive, timid, and desperate. Want to know where are your stock options? Travel south to the Mediterranean and watch - mansions, palaces, yachts, butiques, luxurious hotels, hostesses and models, German limousines and supercars. There they are.
I'm a Northern European and just buy stock on the market. My union is pretty strong, and I enjoy healthcare and more than two weeks holiday I hear is typical in the states.
It's not altogether a good idea to have a lot invested in the company you work for, as if they go under, your stock is also not worth so much, and you might lose your income at the same time too.
Stock options and other scalable forms of compensation are a huge deal for our organization now.
The funny thing is we also don't give a shit about credentials anymore. We just want work ethic followed loosely by experience.
Willingness to endure difficult things and learn is all we are really going for in a new hire these days.
What is amazing to me is all of the business leaders who still insist on upholding these arbitrary gatekeepers. You are leaving a ton of talent on the table.
I think the answer for many is to focus harder on the business value equation and to just let the people be free. Running a business like a power fantasy is not going to get you there. The more you try to control people the harder it will be to make money with them in the long term.
>working for a wage without significant stock options while someone makes millions sitting around doing nothing off of their effort
This seems to characterise almost every single place I have worked for or interviewed at in different ways. I have interviewed at smaller businesses where the entire "management" team doesn't do anything, doesn't come into the office, and is just various family members of the original founder.
Then there are the larger businesses that have a network of people who all know each other and connected and occupy positions with "manager" in them, whose day consists of just telling people to do things that the person they are telling could figure out and do without their existence and better.
This is because in our society, it's more acceptable for men to drop out and get into some skilled trade, like plumbing or climbing telephone poles. People just won't accept that women can also do that. So there's a lot of pressure to make sure your female children go to college and get a degree.
I see. And there's no non-college educated professions where women are prevalent? It's plumbing or bust?
Of course clearly when women were under-represented in college, that was due to misogyny. And now that they are over-represented, it's also due to misogyny. No matter what the facts are, the conclusion is the same.
Do you think that when women were under-represented it was because they were plumbers or climbing telephone poles? Because that's the only way your suggestion makes sense.
That is not actually true. The all women are stay at home thing was never true. Society always had women who worked, because they are unmarried, husband is alcoholic, husband died, husband does not earn all that much.
"At the administrative level, 30 percent of human resources assistants had an associate degree as of 2013, 26 percent had a high school diploma and 21 percent had at least one year of college experience" - https://work.chron.com/education-requirements-human-resource...
People have to keep in mind that the trades have generally been pretty sexist and not all that professionally run. I would not want my daughters to go into most trades because of this.
It's a lot easier for men to find a decent paying job that doesn't require a college degree and where you won't get regularly harassed.
> like plumbing or climbing telephone poles. People just won't accept that women can also do that.
You sure about that? Or is it that the majority of women don't see themselves unclogging toilets for a living? I have never seen it, but I would suspect list of female applications to plumbing or electrician school is very very short.
I do not necessarily agree with the original post’s statement but this response seems confused to me.
Few female applicants to trade schools is consistent with the original statement. If it is societally unacceptable for a woman to be a plumber then I would expect women to act as any rational agent and factor this in when planning their future career.
"societal unacceptability" is only one factor. personal choice is another. there's no reason to assume that gender disparities in a given field or trade are solely the result of the existence of the former.
It's socially unacceptable for a lot of men to be in trades as well, especially if you factor in family background. Let me know what school promotes trades as a good alternative to traditional education? It's almost always looked at as the options for "stupid" people. I don't think your anecdote holds up at all. It seems fare more likely that women in general just do not want physical labor jobs.
I don’t know what anecdote you are referring to, I did not mention one. I did not even make a statement of agreement or disagreement with the original comment. I just pointed out that I did not see a logical inconsistency.
As for your claim that higher class males avoid trades: yes of course. That is actually a great example of what I mean. People factor in social norms in their decision making, be it male or female.
You’re just infantilizing women by blaming every outcome on “society”. I fully believe women are capable of making their own decisions and there’s no “cabal of men” holding them back from unclogging toilets.
I would argue that I’m neither infantilizing women nor blaming every outcome on society. I never mentioned a cabal of men. It seems you are reading in many themes that are not present in my comment.
I believe that norms shape behaviour, that is the extent of my claim.
You are sort of skimming over actual need for actual physical strength in those field. But yes, these are assumed to be boys occupation - including when presented to children.
But like, given they require physical strength, it is hard to make a big deal about it.
Mirrors my experience though, and probably many in eg finance as well. There is a clear, well publicized path from degree -> money that any middle class+ guy can walk.
Sad the article doesn’t go into specifics though, it’s all just “degrees”.
One thing I am starting to wonder about is if there is a systematic guidance counseling failing in high schools and colleges. There are so many well paying tech jobs that we just aren't getting that many candidates for. Forget not having a great gender ratio, it is often hard to find a lot of candidates for my openings. If I can't offer sponsorship, it can take awhile
There clearly seems to be a lot more knowledge in some countries about which jobs lead to high paying careers, and the U.S. still has an antiquated mindset about this.
You’ll actually find similar gender disparities in China and India. Maybe not as pronounced as the USA, but it’s still there. Somehow there is something going on throughout the industry that crosses cultural boundaries.
From a sample of 3 countries (two with very traditional gender roles), I’m not convinced. In Eastern Europe software engineering was a female dominated field.
It's a legacy of socialist regimes enforcing gender ratios. Gender disparity is usually proportional to freedom of choice. ie. countries where there's less pressure to choose a particular field are more disparate in their gender ratios across disciplines.
I'm not sure about that, i've hear Professor Emeritus Mallard talk about his youth in the genetical field and the first use of computers to assist geneticists, he told me that he basically never saw men doing computer work, and that changed in the 80s, along with the culture.
Were they 'into' it though, or did the nature of the secretarial work they were doing change? At least as I understand it, that was predominantly (of course there were exceptions, and female scientists, etc.!) the reason for the rise and fall of it.
I'm not arguing for or against '"Women don't really like this stuff"' - I'm just saying an example against it needs to be women liking this stuff, not merely doing this stuff.
> The story i've heard is that the olden days, operating a computer was seen as clerical work, just like being a secretary, so ideally suited to women.
The fact is that in the old days, there really was plenty of clerical work around computers that just disappeared. Like rewritting data to punched cards and swapping wheels with punched tapes. My grandmother worked in 'data-processing facility' in a communist country, the facility employed many women, but they were (from whay i heard) essentially clerical positions without much CS/EE knowledge.
Not true, at least not in Communist Poland. Jobless single men were sometimes prosecuted, but a stay-at-home-mom was something completely normal in families which could afford it (which there weren't that many of).
I was born in USSR and I don't recall any aspect there that would amount to "enforcing gender ratios". The way I recall the "gender politics" of the communist 1980s was that formally, gender was effectively ignored; in practice there were quite some prejudices; but the notion of discrimination wasn't even discussed much so anything similar to "affirmative action" or even caring about gender ratio would be quite alien to that regime.
And yes, there were proportionally quite many female engineers and computer scientists. I might guess that this perhaps was facilitated by prejudices/discrimination in the "more macho" fields of construction engineering and industrial engineering, so all the high school girls with good STEM results would go to math and computer science fields instead of all the programs with a focus on heavy industry - but even those had a decent proportion of female engineers.
That's the gender-equality paradox, STEM version: the more gender-equal a society, the more the genders self-segregate occupationally.
It's important that this is not about any absolute value, but about the sign of the correlation. The "blank slate" hypothesis would predict that the correlation is positive, i.e. the more gender equal a society, the more equal the distribution.
The opposite is actually the case, the correlation is negative.
This strongly suggests that the statistical differences in occupational preferences have an innate cause. That difference is moderated by societal influence, not caused by it. When societal pressure are lessened or removed, the innate differences manifest more strongly.
And of course, it needs to be stressed that these are statistical differences, not categorical ones, just like the outcomes are statistical and not categorical.
> From a sample of 3 countries (two with very traditional gender roles), I’m not convinced.
These are the three biggest countries (40% of the world population), and also the ones most represented in tech here in the USA, at least (because they are the biggest).
I'm not commenting on gender disparities in other countries, although I have seen first hand what you are saying about China and India. What I am saying is that when I hire for various tech jobs, I get a ton of non-American candidates. It can be hard to find good American candidates at times. The demand for the jobs is there, but it's clearly not be communicated to American high school and college kids enough.
I have come to realize that most people have no idea how much freaking money people are making in the corporate world...especially in tech. They simply have no exposure except to opportuities or jobs that take a decade or more to work up to the salary that barely-graduated college kids are being pushed to in tech.
We are talking about whole population segments that dream of one day making $75k. They know that tech pays well but have no idea how outlandish the pay is compared to their experiences and expectations. They think their counterpart is tech is making $10k more than them, when in fact they are probably making $50-100k more.
We pay well, but not Google or Apple well. Not being a huge tech shop, we don't have a lot of H1-B opportunities laying around, which means I mostly deal with domestic candidates. I'll get candidates, for sure, but it can take awhile to fill roles.
These are well paying jobs, but they do require a certain amount of skills. A lot of kids are getting college degrees, but coming out without enough skills to land a lot of in-demand jobs.
When I was studying software engineering, I met a girl who switched major after the first year.
I saw her again once in the lab, and I asked her why did you switch, she said, and I quote her exact words: "why would I sit and code all day when I've this a$$, pointing at her back."
I honestly didn't know what to say afterward. Our program had special scholarship for women, and we had only one woman (out of 30 or so) and that was more than 10 years ago.
Why the downvote? I don't share her opinion, I'm just sharing an encounter I had. I was really surprised by her response, coming from different culture to the west, both of my parents are engineers.
I met several great women developers in my career and I personally think the field will benefit a lot by having more diverse perspectives on the tools being created.
> I met several great women developers in my career
Why is the other one poster child for feminity? I met guys who dropped out of college, because they could not keep grades due to regular whole night gaming.
I met guys who switched out of CS, because they could not pass exams despite trying.
In both gender, you get some amount of irresponsible, disinterested, troublemakers or simply people with too many mental issues to finish any school.
But that incident stuck in my head because I expected many answers but not the one she gave! Anyway, it was a light hearted conversation not to be taken seriously.
It's also a failure on schools to prepare their top students for the useless signalling rituals necessary to get the job in the first place. Either it's a life skills class in high school teaching you how to fill out paper applications for a part-time job and an interview that will take anyone with a pulse who doesn't mouth off to the interviewer or it's a career development department that is optimized for getting business majors management internships but either clueless or 15 years old advice for getting started in STEM fields.
Good programs exist in this space, but they're the exception (and no single person can possibly create a properly comprehensive survey without resorting to opinion polling).
What does your job description say? What are your company reviews on Glassdoor? What does the whisper network say about what it's like to work as a woman in tech at your company?
Using a low estimate of 15% of CS degrees going to women, you'd get 750 women applying.
What are you doing to get so many women to give your company an immediate rejection and apply somewhere else?
> Using a low estimate of 15% of CS degrees going to women, you'd get 750 women applying.
There were three in my cohort of ~35; and that was much more dense on that programme that was a (more CS-oriented) subset of the EE department's variants - something like 15 of 400 in first year, higher ratio (i.e. fewer female drop-outs/more doing MEng) by the end I think though. Only a few years ago.
And even then, your conclusion is only valid for a graduate entry role - for something more senior you'd need to at least look at grad rates further back, if not what happens to people once in industry. (We've also assumed 100% grads - or even male/female anyway - do apply to industry at all, vs. not, or something else, or staying in academia, etc. I expect that's roughly true though.)
Indeed. What happens to people after they get a job is a relevant factor. It would be interesting to see both dropout rates over a career lifetime and if senior level women in tech are concentrated in a group of companies known to be good to work at via the whisper network.
Even age is a factor. Most folks don't stick with their CS job until retirement age, although some are smart enough to save and retire before that age. Age discrimination is not exactly rare though.
I have no idea where I'd get that kind of data or if it even exists, but maybe someone else does.
Given that kind of data, an industry with a constant deficit of qualified senior level candidates would do well to improve that situation by figuring out how to reduce the dropouts.
Perhaps frankbreetz works for a company that isn't very cool, making it people's third choice; and a disproportionate number of women got hired by their first or second choice employer.
Women really really like to study subjects related to people - even "homeland security, law enforcement and firefighting" is more popular among women than computer science.
According to the article women still believe the trade-off to be worth paying for and attending college since their application numbers are still holding steady.
Are most of them making a huge mistake? I guess it depends heavily in the credential(s), but I think there has to be a deeper reason for falling and unbalanced undergraduate enrollment amongst men.
All Ponzi schemes collapse, the growth colleges experienced in the past led them to be overly optimistic and make promises they can no longer meet. The falling debris from the collapse is already happening, as the wave of unbreakable and unpayable student debt imprisons a generation.
Women don’t earn less for the same work. Never married women with no kids actually out earn never married men with no kids.
Please read “why men earn more” by Warren Farrell or skim the table of contents for a list of some of the factors that influence earnings, such as working longer hours, in a different field, in unpleasant conditions, etc.
I always assumed no one give me benefit of doubt if I don't have something actually in hand. Which meant for me, I would expect the degree to be necessary for me to get the first job.
Anecdotal but I've noticed that for a lot of women, achieving the degree seems to be the end goal and status symbol, while for men the degree is just a path to better financial outcomes. If the calculation for the latter has changed to where degree is no longer worth it compared to alternatives, that could explain it.
This is just not borne out by the data. The gap between high school grads and college grads pay is getting wider and wider.
You shouldn't go to college if you aren't going to be a serious student and you'll be a legitimate risk for dropping out. But if you are willing to commit yourself and get decent grades, you'll be in much better shape than most people with just a high school diploma.
Your advice is also sounds really out of touch with what various jobs pay. The average new college grad makes like 60k or so.
I can only speak to my workplace and team, but we pay product designers with very little experience around 90k a year. I have no licenses and am not a professional engineer, and I make several times that.
The issue is that far too many people are going into debt for college degrees and not getting the degrees. That's the biggest. The secondary issue is that college is becoming more and more expensive, but it is still paying off for the majority of bachelor degree holders.
Software engineers with ~5 years of experience (and probably less) can earn $300k-$400k annually in the Bay Area or New York if working for a large tech company.
This is a tiny fraction of software engineers. The vast majority in the wider Western world earn less than an average tradesman. The higher end of salaries in the UK is £40-50k, most earning substantially less than that.
The much higher salaries paid by the major US companies are so anomalous that they may as well be discarded in any comparisons.
No it is the international investor effect. People do not invest locally. The money goes to a few proven places rather than circulating throughout the entire country.
You can call the investors kings and the workers are chasing the kings money.
The higher end in London is substantially more than that across banking, insurance and foreign tech companies and contracting day rates were really rather good. Admittedly I’ve been out of the U.K. for long enough to see what impact Brexit has had, especially on contracting day rates.
Still nothing like the US though, and the cost of living is not much different than New York City IME.
While most software engineers in the U.S. don't make 300-400k, you will make above 100k pretty quickly. You can make 150k-ish total comp at tons of places in the United States. These places will usually offer very good benefits too.
Human-computer interaction. I'm not in my 20s, and I'm not an individual contributor, so that skews my pay, but I also don't think I've come close to my ceiling yet.
There are plenty of degrees that are worth the effort. This idea that college doesn’t have a justifiable return seems to be pushed by people who already have degrees.
“Over the course of their working lives, American college graduates earn more than a million dollars beyond those with only a high-school diploma, and a university diploma is required for many jobs as well as most professions, technical work and positions of influence.”
From the article.
There are folks getting useless degrees and/or taking on too much debt, but getting a college degree on the whole is worthwhile.
Far too many variables to draw any clear conclusions, in my opinion. Have there been any of these studies that show the effect holding constant when controlling for high school GPA, SAT/ACT, and IQ?
"All of the largest programs in electrical and communications engineering, for instance, allowed most of their graduates to recoup their educational investment in five years or less. But many programs in some fields, like drama and dance, show no return on investment, the report found, meaning most of their graduates are earning less than a typical high school graduate."
So this study more or less backs claim that some degrees offer a positive ROI while others do not. As to whether or not a given degree is "worthwhile," I'd leave that as an exercise for the reader. :)
Not the parent commenter but I think they’re suggesting that the degree may not be the cause of the increase in earnings, but rather that the people who get college degrees have attributes (e.g. intelligence, work ethic, good K12 education, wealthy parents) that would lead them to out-earn their peers even without a degree.
To be clear, I don’t buy that argument. Obviously those factors explain some of the difference, but I think most of the highest-paying jobs in STEM and many of the highest-paying jobs in other fields (e.g. business/finance) require skills that would be hard to reliably obtain without a college degree or something similar.
Yes, that was my angle. And while I share your intuition to some extent, I maintain that it's difficult to get a scientifically sound conclusion without controlling for those variables.
Specifically, to refer to an average of $1,000,000 as a specific effect size, without controlling for the fact that many people with only a high school diploma would not earn more even if they had a college degree, seems suspect.
The proliferation of video games, especially online ones could also be a reason (besides the cost-benefit of attending college that is declining which other people already mentioned)
The thing that struck me right off the bat was that the lead photo of this story is of 18-year-old with a PS5 and pretty sweet setup in his bedroom. I don't have anything deep to add to this, but if you can sit at home in your childhood bedroom indefinitely playing video games and working menial jobs, maybe the allure is there.
I mean of the choice is between that and crippling debt and a useless degree, he's making the objectively smart move.
The fact that they were able to buy things while living at home just drives the point home even more- he would not have the disposable income to make those purchases for many years if he decides to go to college.
Wut? Are those the only choices? Is there nothing in between? Lay off the drama. I don't feel like my degree was useless (and I'm not even working in the field I got a degree in) and I certainly didn't graduate with crippling debt.
Claiming survivorship bias really makes it sound like we are talking about something much riskier than getting a college degree. I didn't survive, I planned. I got a two year degree from a local community college for a fraction of the price that those same credit hours would have cost at a university. I then went on to a modest in-state University to complete my four year degree. I can't put a sexy Ivy League college, or private college, or even a top-tier state university on my resume now but I didn't graduate with crippling debt. That was the trade off I made.
Starting your professional career in debt is nobody's definition of "crippling debt". Whether 39k is too much student loan debt really depends on what the expected future earning potential is for a given degree. A quick search turns up plenty of resources that can help somebody make decisions about how much student loan debt they can comfortably or safely take on. Here is a teacher's guide[1] (it's a PDF link) from the Consumer Finance Protection Bureau one could use as a starting point.
Oh I completely agree it can be done. But let's consider- did you have children? Were you able to love at home? Did you have to work full-time? Did you need financial aid? There are just a whole lot of variables here.
If you go to college broke, and come out in debt, and are then in debt for years after (I don't know offhand the average) then yes that's crippling debt. When figured against future earnings and actual take-home profit, how will those numbers work out for someone like that? Chances are, not well. Not everyone can just 'learn to program' to get a cushy 120k+/yr job. Also some people with families take longer than 2 years just for an associates degree. This is really survivorship bias wkth N=1.
He works as a landscaper in Minnesota, which I presume does not offer robust employment year round. Even if he could work all seasons doing landscaping, his pay would come out to $26,000 a year, assuming he takes no days off.
I am not sure this is a smart move. It seems like he is hoping his music career pans out, but we aren't given a lot of insight into his talent level there.
The lead image is there to direct the reader towards a specific way of thinking, similar in way that if the article has been about prison it would be an image of black young men dealing drugs. It is a narrative and implication that if "group X" did not choose to do that then the problem that group X has would not exist. The author could as easily chosen an lead imagine of the same person in a class room with a narrative that it is the school system that is failing to get the demographic to enroll, or an image of an college class photo to illustrate the lack of diversity and imply subtle blame on which ever demographic that would dominate the image.
"The author could as easily chosen an lead imagine of the same person in a class room"
Might vary where you live, but my understanding is that the author of a piece is not usually the one picking images and writing the headline. There are some instances where the writer and photographer are the same, but that's not the case here.
It's a story about males who aren't in college, so why would they have photos of males in school? Stats about "people considering not going to college" is not as compelling as this story with stronger stats about what people are actually doing, IMO.
Note that the focus of blame here is on the education system and then look at the image. The person in frame is the teacher, representing the Educational System, and the boy. The article mentions both college rates and high school dropout rates.
You are right that its generally not the author of the written text that chose the image, through the words I would describe if I was being a more technical correct about it would be authors of the article since an article rarely if ever now days has a single author. There is the author/s of the text, the editor, the proof readers, layout design, image selection, and each participated in creation the collaborated created work.
As you said, that's a different narrative with a different picture. OP's story is about individuals saying they feel lost, and then it shows them bumming around at home.
After I quit university and before I found my eventual career path back in the 90s, a relevant picture would've been me stuffing around on the computer as that's largely what I did (writing a book, playing Hextris, typing up things for my dad, seeing what a modem could do, etc).
That's what I immediately thought, "How convenient, a photo that suits article's the narrative: that all young men are NEETs (not in employment, education, or training). I suppose they couldn't have shown a productive young man as it would be antithetical to the author's thesis.",
We don't have a lot of details as to what "invests his money into crypto" means and how that is going. The article doesn't touch on his music and music production skills, both of which could be honed substantially with a further music education. They could also be honed a lot by playing in a band and committing to a lot of practice. People can be self taught, but it generally requires a lot of practice and purpose, and this article doesn't touch on whether or not he is doing that.
You can break into music production without a degree, of course, but it's going to be a challenge in the middle of nowhere Minnesota.
There's this unfortunately prevailing attitude that you aren't successful in America if you aren't living in New York or San Francisco. It's absolutely bonkers. There are many other great places in this country besides those two cities.
If you can make NYC/SF money and save/invest a portion of your income, you can retire and do significantly better elsewhere. You can't do the opposite.
If you can have a decent lifestyle in Ohio on 40k (big if, when you factor in retirement planning) you can still fundamentally never leave Ohio.
Assuming the rest of the world doesn't exist, though. Can't honestly say I'm targeting having more retirement money than needed to get by in some combination of Ukraine, Thailand, and Colombia.
Major life regret? Thinking other countries didn't exist when I was at the age to enter college and taking on massive loans to pay exorbitant US tuition for a school that wasn't anything special when I could have found overseas options at a fraction of the cost.
God forbid. Think of all the experiences you and your family will miss out on!
Lately all I want is to get as far away from people as possible. The internet has negated every advantage of these regions and of money broadly. You cannot buy a nuclear family.
The internet has not negated every advantage of regions, unfortunately (Employers are still making folks come to the office) and it still costs money to move elsewhere.
Folks in Ohio still have trouble leaving Ohio.
And you can, to an extent, buy a nuclear family. Mail order brides still exist (and the arrangement can be beneficial for both parties). You can do this with the expectation of children, which you will pay for in the US. Alternatively, you can check adoption as plenty of agencies will make you feel like you are buying a child. (20k upwards, plus travel).
also, and this is personal taste of course, it can get to be pretty soul-crushing working with and being around mostly people that don't value a nuclear family, when you yourself do. this was a major reason for moving away from the video game industry and greater Seattle area and returning home to South Dakota a few years ago. it took a lot of mental and emotional effort to kill the lifelong dream I worked toward since elementary school (I turned 30 this year) and "settle for" a local government programmer job... but so far it's been 10000% worth it, I'm much happier than I've ever been, I'm going to start a family very soon, and I'm surrounded by people who have the same core values as I do. nobody in the greater Seattle area wanted to hire a white male with no degree but a frankly ridiculous amount of self-driven personal project experience (plus some team project experience from a few contract positions and an unfinished (stopped halfway when the college fund ran out—best decision of my life) degree) in the fields of game and web development, but my hometown was overjoyed to get someone exactly like myself to write SQL and learn all the ins and outs of the public education system and how it interfaces with state and federal requirements. it's not my first choice of work by a longshot but without having money to either finish a degree (like all my friends did) or make my own gamedev startup (in an increasingly flooded market to the point of ridiculousness), I've finally found happiness, and, more importantly, a very direct path to achieving the actual lifelong goal I kind of always had but never knew it: starting a family. like you said, you can't put a price on something like that.
my best friend had a complicated career trajectory that began with a music education degree, until he found out he hated teaching music to middle schoolers, then he decided to get a two-year online CS degree. this put him in a fair bit of debt as he comes from a very poor upbringing. he got married and moved to the D.C. area a couple years ago to work for a CRM shop there and while he loves the work, he hates the crime and bullshit of the Big City Life, and while he and his wife have gone from enjoying it to tolerating it, they're moving back here to South Dakota at the end of this year before they have children.
I wonder if, going forward, with the advent of remote work and the like, we're going to see less and less people who come from rural/suburban/otherwise sub-100k-population cities choosing to either move back to areas like those they grew up in (if not where they grew up specifically) instead of migrating to The Big City to Make It Big, for these exact reasons. there just doesn't seem to be much to gain from moving to The Big City anymore, if starting a family is your ultimate goal in life.
> don't value a nuclear family, when you yourself do
When you say you value a 'nuclear family', instead of just 'family', the distinction means things like 'I do not want my parents to have more than a minimal role in their grandchildren's lives' and 'my siblings and their children are to be kept separate from my children'. That's what the 'nuclear' part means!
Mom died and now Dad's dropping hints about moving into your furnished basement? Sorry, we're a nuclear family. Going halves with your sister on a duplex with her and her family living next to you and yours so all the cousins can grow up together? Absolutely not nuclear.
On the contrary - I'm not sure of the exact definition, but the meaning of a nuclear family, at least to me, has morphed into a traditional family structure with an at home mother and working father.
If anything, a structure like this would facilitate and encourage visits from and to relatives. Seems like a much nicer life than a situation where both parents work.
The risk of being tied to a small corner of the country is real and something any Ohioan ought to be sensitive to. Most of Ohio has suffered 50 years of economic back sliding. A lot of people thought that they had realized their modest and reasonable middle class dreams of a good quiet life doing honest work. Major structural changes compromised all of that and a lot of people were stuck holding the bag in places like Toledo, Akron, Youngstown. (Not trying to pick on Ohio, just making a point about risk (though Toledo is the least nice corner of the state and they would have been better of foisting it off on Michigan back when they had the chance))
>God forbid. Think of all the experiences you and your family will miss out on!
This is a snide remark, but it is absolutely a factor. I grew up in Michigan, and the number of people who never venture beyond their almost-entirely-white small town to see what other communities and cultures are like is a huge contributing factor to the amount of prejudice and judgmental nature that makes me never want to move back.
Seeing people different from you and different places is broadening and gives you a much better perspective to be able to understand the world. This is important in life as well as in your career.
Until the city grows to encapsulate your neighbourhood, and you find yourself a 'boomer' who was so lucky to be able buy a house for 40k, whose children 'never will'?
Those aren't even that great of places so I think it's pretty regional on thinking that. But definitely there's an attitude of needing to be in a major city to be successful and it's not entirely false. The big difference is major urban area vs not.
Sure, NYC/SF are super expensive, but almost every urban area is when compared to other smaller cities or rural areas.
The issue is that for a lot of people they can only find an ok job in the major urban area, but it's not enough to live there so they get stuck in the suburban wastelands with 45+ minute drives just to go work 8 hours.
They make enough to get by, but not enough to save and move out to a more desirable living situation in a smaller city or rural area without a secure job lined up.
Like $20 an hour is good in Toledo, but it's probably not what most people are making. That's probably a job you have to work up to for years. At $20 an hour in Toledo you very likely can have a higher quality of life then people making far more in the much larger metro areas. But at $10 an hour ($8.80/$7.25) in Toledo area you're probably worse off due to a lack of public support and opportunities for advancement.
I know people in the Bay Area who spent two or three hours a day commuting before moving back out to the mid-west again for remote work. This is a typical commute from SF to Mountain View, for example.
Before I left Toledo (grew up there), I made about $18 driving busses with a lot of of overtime. Its not a terribly difficult place to make a living right up to the state median but almost everyone with potential leaves or works out of the city, simply because professional industry is incredibly lackluster.
This is beside your point but HN is such a coastal bubble that I always feel the need to chime in with perspective when someone mentions my hometown.
The great reshuffling that is happening in front on our eyes might very well push those not in the cognitive elite away from all those great places as well. I am seeing it happen around my area, where housing costs have shot up by 20% in one year, mostly driven by out of state arrivals. I see it in our own family's economic status which has improved several fold, thanks to the remote opportunities brought about by the pandemic. Maybe this is good, maybe it is bad, but there is a profound change coming.
These days, it's not enough to live in a world-class city, you need to have your own kitchen, living room, and bathroom that barely get used. The people I know who complain about high cost of living refuse to live with other people.
Everyone has to make trade offs. You want to live in the cultural capital of the world or place where the average income is over six figures, but everyone else does as well. There's limited space in these cities, so you need to bid top dollar if you want to keep a place for yourself.
Sorry man, I just don't buy it. Expensive housing is a solveable problem. Six figures isn't that much when you're still spending half your paycheck on rent.
As for the cultural capital of the world? New York used to have a thriving art scene when it was cheap to live in. Now it just has an expensive art scene.
I agree that housing policy is broken and has a lot of room for improvement. There's no way around supply and demand though. At best you'll have a situation like Singapore where housing is expensive, but still attainable.
I think the issue is more when people are still having roommates when they're in their 30s and older. it's hard to have families when you still can only a afford a bedroom, driven mostly by debt and low wages if I had to guess
That works great until you get married and start a family.
I mean, in theory there could be acceptable ways to let a couple with babies have roommates. But the design problems alone seem too complicated to attempt, let alone the cultural problems.
Also, keep in mind that a young couple with kids might have only one income earner. And that couple is in the same apartment hunt with singles willing to share multi-tenant residences. Sometimes three or four of them!
Point being, "get roommates" doesn't scale over time or over the entire population.
This is only even close to true if this compensation includes a significant employer contribution to a health insurance policy and/or short term disability coverage. If not, this guy will be one broken leg away from a credit card death spiral.
Are the houses in safe neighborhoods? If there are cheap houses in a city and nobody's buying, there's a good reason for that. Carefully taken pictures online may look okay, but people in many cities know to steer clear of specific areas.
And regarding repairs, I've been to houses that have decent photos online, but upon entering, they're clearly rotting out. It'd be cheaper to knock the house down and start again.
There’s a lot of anti-intellectualism that floats around in male culture, and a pernicious attitude that you can make it without a degree (despite the reality that a lack of credentials locks you out of most high paying or leadership roles).
Tech likes to pretend credentials don’t matter, but that’s entirely not true.
Not surprising that enrollment is down when too many men think learning things is for nerds.
Even people with degrees are locked out of those high paying or leadership roles. Meanwhile, others can make it just fine by learning a trade. As a junior engineer, I was making the same amount as my degree less counterparts working in the oil industry were.
I didn't go to college, and I'm one of the techs you're referring to. But techs also think on-job experience and self-motivated projects are equivalent to or better than college, and both of those are necessary.
There are tons of high paying jobs available to people who learn trades, either in trade schools or on the job. Much of tech is like a trade - as a software engineer, I certainly have more in common with a car mechanic working on custom builds than I do with an accountant, lawyer, doctor or CEO. A lot of Americans were sold the false idea that college would help them know what they wanted to do, and make money. But it's not a magic beansprout you just ride up to the heights of society... definitely not when everyone else is doing it and everyone else is in debt. You have to actually be motivated. And if you're motivated... well it's kike George Carlin said about self help books: You went to the bookstore to go find a self help book, you're motivated, what do you need the book for?
I don't have a degree and am from US as well. In most my jobs, I am usually the only one without it. In Europe, it's even more rare, (majority of colleagues have PhDs). When people find out I am not educated, they are not happy about it, initially.
People can be really mean, especially when you aren't "smart". I had to read a lot about a lot of things just so I could go to lunch and participate in the chatter with coworkers.
But, not getting a degree never blocked me from getting great money or any position, I just had to work hard for it, always had to prove myself, earn trust. It's life on hard mode for sure, but not a blocker.
I wonder if it could be because masculinity is being challenged on campus in the current era. Why would a male who has issues with women want to go to a place where he will be challenged to change his views in sensitivty and toxic masculinity courses? Conversely, why would a male who does not have issues with women go to a place where he will be labeled as having toxic masculinity? It's not like these issues haven't been all over the press for years.
#MeToo Is Making Colleges Teach Toxic Masculinity 101
I don't know anyone who believes this. Words mean what they're intended to mean and interpreted to mean, and that's how it's used in practice. Claiming otherwise is just a bald-faced "nuh-uh" when people who use the term are confronted with the double standard.
If there wasn't at least a little bit of complicity in it being interpreted as a general diss on masculinity, the term would never have caught on, or a different term would have been chosen in the first place. In the face of repeated misunderstandings, people using the term would pick a new one. They haven't done that. Why? It seems to me that they are quite happy to be "misunderstood" 95% of the time.
The gender swapped equivalent seems to be "internalised misogyny". Do you think I could get away with calling it "toxic femininity" instead? Nobody would let that pass. Do you think I could get away with calling any obviously bad behaviour associated with femininity, "toxic femininity", at all? I don't think I could.
It's widely considered by men to be an insulting term, and if people who use it don't want to insult people, they should pick another one. They don't though, which is telling.
Anyone who actually knows what adjectives are and how they work believes this.
Or people familiar enough with the substance of the discussion to know it includes discussion of what healthy masculinity is. Here's an easy-to-digest example:
> Oh, yes. Nobody would dare talk use the phrase toxic femininity. /s
I think people certainly use the phrase "toxic femininity", but such examples are from the long-tail.
In institutions, it is no-where near as discussed as much as "toxic masculinity", and probably discussing it would be be frowned upon.
You can see mentions of "toxic masculinity" amongst United Nations literature, for example, which can't be said for "toxic femininity". For example, the expectation of being the breadwinner of the family is said to be one of the things that is "rooted in a patriarchal culture, creat[ing] toxic masculinity". [1]
What isn't said, is that the expectation to become a competent man who is tries to support his family can also be a positive example of masculinity (and indeed is desirable to women), in addition to being the traditional one.
If this expectation is cast only being a "toxic" one, then that is a confusing message for young men, and leaves them without what was one of the traditional motivation for going to college, and improving yourself, so that you can get a good job and better shoulder responsibility when you want to start a family.
The discourse around these kinds of topics comes almost entirely from feminists at least the part that is constructive. That inevitably leads to some problems being ignored as they are not so interesting to feminists. I don't think you can fault them for that.
Gender norms that are criticised by feminists are in real life frequently re-enforced by women for example. Even feminists like much of the political left are also fragmented and have differing opinions. This lack of a consensus combined with an expectation to behave in a specific way and a group that can be somewhat trigger happy in going from "statistically this group of people is privileged" to "this person from this group is privileged" is I think deeply problematic and challenging to navigate as a men. I also think it's incredibly stupid from political standpoint.
Unfortunately it's difficult to engage in such discussions in a constructive way because they are very attractive to people who see feminists as an enemy.
I usually try and avoid the discussion online, as it is polarising.
One area I do think is interesting, is the issue of uncollected child maintenance payments (at least in the UK). [1] This has not had a campaign behind it, in the same way as the "Gender pay gap" has had, yet just also affects the material circumstances of many women.
I imagine it could be one issue where there might be agreement on, between those who lean towards "traditional gender roles" and some feminist organisations.
Nobody is attacking competence as toxic, or support of family as toxic.
What is actually critiqued is a normalization of social violence, commenting on bullying or assault with "oh, boys will be boys," dismissal of feelings with "walk it off," the idea that real men don't go to therapy or turn to people for emotional help, etc etc.
One can only think of that as a general attack on masculinity if... that's what you think masculinity is. Which sounds bona fide toxic to me.
> Forbes and Psychology Today are long-tail low-relevance now?
The publications are not, their discussion of "toxic femininity" is. Discussions of "toxic masculinity" have long been the hegemony.
> Nobody is attacking competence as toxic
I see this happening a lot. Particularly, that men who are in positions of power (might own their own company, or run other companies) have only reached where they are, because they benefit from a corrupt patriarchy, not because of their competency and willingness to work.
> What is actually critiqued is a normalization of social violence, commenting on bullying or assault with "oh, boys will be boys," dismissal of feelings with "walk it off," the idea that real men don't go to therapy or turn to people for emotional help, etc etc.
Why is this called "toxic masculinity"? To flip it around, could you imagine "toxic femininity" being used to a describe a woman not wanting to pursue engineering because she thinks it isn't what women typically are seen to do? Why would you say it is "toxic masculinity" when a man doesn't want to talk about his feelings, because it isn't what men typically are seen to do?
The critique is accompanied with the idea that masculinity is itself a social construct, and if only boys/men could be freed from this social construct, then they will be free from "toxic" aspects of masculinity.
However arguably this isn't the case, and leads you to worse outcomes for men and boys. For example, to "stop bullying" a headteacher in the UK banned (typically boys) from playing football at break times. [1] I don't believe masculinity is entirely a social construct, and here boys are being deprived of ways to positively express their masculinity, through competition and team building. I also think there is a difference in how men and women typically bond, with men tending to bond more through activities.
Male bonding through shared activities is something that has declined a lot in the US (see the book "Bowling Alone"). If men are finding it more difficult today dealing with emotional issues, the answer may not be that they need to deal with their "toxic masculinity" by "speaking more", but they are actually suffering from their lack of ability to identify with other men through shared activities.
It isn't, in other words, their own fault, but rather a shift in society, which in this individual example, would rather ban a game that involves competition and winners, in case there are losers, or exclusion. "Toxic masculinity" isn't therefore the issue, rather it would be a lack of ability to express masculinity.
All pejorative has a literal interpretation that is not pejorative. The question generally lies in how it will get interpreted and what implied message it carries. In most cases there exist a non-pejorative word that can used as a substitute which does not carry the same disrespectful connotation and hostility. As the pejoration of the word occurs, the assumptions that occurs is that continued usage has the intention of hostility.
> All pejorative has a literal interpretation that is not pejorative.
Even assuming that's true, it doesn't follow that every literal interpretation should be or is understood as pejorative, which leads to the question of why this one should be understood that way.
Given that toxic masculinity has specific definitions and specific criticisms to offer that distinguish critically targeted behavior AND also has associated discussion affirming desirable masculine behavior, it makes much more sense to treat it as a specific technique than a general attack on masculinity.
Unless, of course, you think that things like bullying or other forms of social violence for the purpose of establishing personal dominance or personal entertainment is part and parcel with masculinity. Which sounds kindof, I don't know... poisonous or something to me.
Pejoration is not prevented by a specific definition, and there is many examples of perfectly fine words being turned into a pejorative. As an example there is a very nice defined alternative word for happiness that was commonly used in songs which has no perfect modern substitute, and yet because of a different interpretation this word can't be used because those hearing it will interpret a disrespectful connotation and hostility.
> bullying or other forms of social violence for the purpose of establishing personal dominance or personal entertainment is part and parcel with masculinity
For those who think neither of those has anything to do with masculinity, using the word masculinity to describe it would be wrong. One could be a bit colorful to call it a poisonous use of words, ie injecting an harmful substance into the language.
A few decades ago researchers looked at how language get used in conflicts, and they had a major discover. The most effective way to enable people to attack other people is to describe other human being as being less than human. Toxic waste. Insects. Poison. Garbage. Language that dehumanizing groups of people and dehumanizing their behavior is almost a requirement in order for human on human violence.
Yet, as there is only the narrative of "toxic masculinity" and not also discussion of "toxic femininity", the term implies masculinity can turn toxic in a way femininity can't.
My first impulse is to agree but thinking about it more what positives are there to take away from masculinity. Is any feature of being masculine that is really desirable? I guess I think the whole idea of trying to be masculine to be kind of lame...
There are plenty of positive traits that are associated with Masculinity: Bravery, Boldness, Self-Sufficiency, Discipline, Self-Assured, Skilled, Strong, etc.
Of course this does not mean that these traits are somehow exclusive to or owned by Masculinity.
> Standards of manliness or masculinity vary across different cultures and historical periods. Traits traditionally viewed as masculine in Western society include strength, courage, independence, leadership, and assertiveness.
Much of that sounds positive to me. I think the toxicity primarily comes from people caring primarily about appearance. For example by trying to avoid being seen as weak or by trying to appear strong relative to other people by making them appear to be weak.
That might be the "theory" (a word which does some heavy lifting in venues infected by "critical theory") but in practice it comes down to straight males and traditional male virtues being "toxic".
I'm unaware of any social circles use the term "toxic masculinity" and are not using it to smear men. People outside of those bubbles do not use the term at all, probably because its pretty offensive to males.
This is another very good example of a ‘motte-and-bailey’ term. The term means whatever you want it to mean, at any given moment. When the term is attacked, it retreats to mean only the toxic parts of masculinity. When not attacked, it means the inherent toxicity of all masculinity.
This just in, people who have to spend the vast majority of their time studying don't enjoy being around raging douchebags in the bit of free time they have not studying
More news at 11
Also, your insinuation that males without issues with women equates to "toxic masculinity" is hilariously indicative of your personality.
Go outside and touch grass and talk to people, yeesh
Exactly. Universities have become a sink of misandrist neomarxist thought.
It has led to an atmosphere of intellectual immaturity and victim-mentality-agrandizement. Universities now feel more like a coddled highschool experience than adulthood.
Don't expect intelligent, strong-minded, strong-willed men to accept such silly, degenerate distractions from the supposed goal of these universities (to provide "education", skills, network, etc.).
A lot of this is driven by narratives—A narrative that college isn’t worth it anymore. A narrative that (white) men are uniformly privileged and life is just easy for them. And a narrative that those men aren’t wanted by society any more.
I’m not convinced that all those men need to go to college, but they clearly need something. They need to feel like they’re part of society. Nothing good can come of an entire generation that feels lost, without purpose, and unwanted.
I had enough EE in college to change a light switch without burning the house down.
However, that book-learnin' fell apart when confronted with troubleshooting a strangely wired room, and I got very polite while asking him over to bail me out.
These fellows eschewing the ivory tower, where being of European extraction and bearing a Y-chromosome on the college campus is an indictment, are going to trade schools and will make fat piles of cash repairing plumbing.
Hopefully, they are gracious with all the Grievance Studies majors who are standing by to condescend in their direction.
I am a certified EE and have a MA of fine Arts (film). Living in Europe where I had to pay 350 Euros per semester (which included a public transport ticket for the whole province), I didn't have to make a choice between the two. I did both because I was interested in both.
After university I was well equiped to do freelancer work in my field and earned well.
I don't think this "you have to be hard or else you won't survive"-mentality in the US is very beneficial to its society as a whole. Ideally you want to live in a society where everybody is well educated, healthy, happy, friendly and so on. Maybe it is a naive idea, but I think this is more achievable if there is collective investment into those goals rather than internal economical warfare where everybody is a army of one, except for the big corporations who will happily milk a atomized, divided population.
Yet I am constantly amazed by how much some of you guys endure. I just wish you wouldn't have to.
> "you have to be hard or else you won't survive"-mentality
Europeans often have this opinion but I don't think it's an accurate reading of the issue. The issue is not that Americans work too hard, it's that this hard work is no longer actually amounting to anything. In the past, you could pay for college by working summers at the local restaurant. Today the average debt is $30K and you still won't get a decent job.
The article (and others) just show that American men are starting to put their efforts into places that do reward them; namely, the trades and entrepreneurship.
> The article (and others) just show that American men are starting to put their efforts into places that do reward them; namely, the trades and entrepreneurship.
Good point. I did not intend to argue otherwise. To go into trade is not an irrational reaction on an individual level — quite the opposite in fact. What I did argue however, was that making it hard for people to get a higher education is not a good thing for a society. Not good in the short term, because educated societes will make more informed decisions, and at the same time not a sustainable strategy for any western society that wants to play any role in the next century.
Having an educated society should be in the national interest just like having public roads or drinkable water is.
> accurate reading of the issue. The issue is not that Americans work too hard, it's that this hard work is no longer actually amounting to anything.
That was the American dream. This is a nice model to keep big numbers of people playing the lottery and bear a ton of stress, because they have the hope that one day they might win and then everything will pay off.
But even of you are one of the few lucky ones that wins you still live in a society where 90% are struggling and crushed. There may be people that enjoy being on top while everybody else suffers, but I personally would prefer being middle class in a society where nobody is poor over being a billionaire in a society where everybody is crushed. Maybe this is empathy, but maybe it is also just egoistic: I like to walk through my city and not see suffering, I like to walk through my country without having to fear being robbed, shot or angrily screamed at. I simply prefer living in a healthy, happy society where people help each other over living in one where everybody has to kick down to stay on top.
Not that that any nation achieved that goal, but there are certainly observable differences in tone between the industrial nations.
You have still missed my point. The American dream was an effective, real thing for a long period of time. Most Americans today are descendants of poor immigrants that worked hard and gave their children a better quality of life. This wasn’t “a lottery” and your characterization of it as such is both historically misinformed and just ideological in nature.
As I said, the issue is that this hard work no longer results in progress. The system has become broken. This is easily observable via a bevy of statistical measures like inequality and college costs.
I'm an American and agree completely. My concern is that this '90% struggling' is considered by too many to be a default, the desired state of things. This pops up over and over again in so many ways.
I think it leads to people drawing their distinctions, around who is superior and who is inferior, and then it leads to those people making an unnecessary logical jump and deciding that those inferior people need to be HURT or REMOVED… and we've seen all this before.
And they go from there to decide that anyone arguing, wishes to crown those inferior people as the kings, and hurt the superior ones, because that's the only way they can perceive anything anymore… and they just get hostile and paranoid we've seen all that before too.
I don't know how to convince them that seeking a civilized environment for all the people (without it being conditional on performance) produces the best societal result, through the widest possible range for SOME person of whatever description to excel.
It seems like there are a lot of people for whom, they're more than happy to throw away overall system performance because they're mad that anything lower-performing can even exist. They are PC builders so mad that RAM can't run as fast as L2 cache that they're all CPU and refuse to have any RAM installed. It's stark madness from my point of view.
People are not components in an engineered system. When you work with statistics it might appear that way, but people have a way of creating conflict and chaos when least expected. It is a fallacy to think that one need only set up the right societal structures and this problem will magically vanish.
Define 'problem' and why anybody would think the requirement was that it would magically vanish, else society does not count.
Society functions THROUGH conflict and chaos. It's like brownian motion, noise in circuitry: if you're trying to define an ideology where there's no more conflict, the most direct way is to define an enemy and then rally everyone to destroy it. And that is said to work for a thousand years but actually blows up within ten, leaving enormous wreckage and shame.
Better to design the fault-tolerant system that runs through conflict and chaos.
I hope you are not talking about people. We break bones, bump our heads, or lose too much blood and we are out of commission.
What you are talking about is a war-based society, a fault-tolerant system, with lots of redundancy, that runs through conflict and chaos. The last two decades were an experiment in that one.
To clarify a bit...
42% of students graduate (undergraduate studies) without any debt.
And 78% of graduates have less than $30k in debt.
The numbers aren't great, but the majority of students finish with either zero debt or a very manageable amount of debt. There is a small fraction of students taking massive loans that skew the overall picture.
And bachelor degree holders continue to earn, on average, $1 million more than high school graduates over their career.
All that said, I agree college should be affordable without loans. Summer jobs, co-ops/internships, etc.
> The article (and others) just show that American men are starting to put their efforts into places that do reward them; namely, the trades and entrepreneurship.
Call it toxic or not, there's a male drive toward autonomy. Joining corporations that are run by HR just isn't as attractive.
If you are a certified EE, you almost certainly paid for your own MA with your own taxes.
So I don't have a problem with the MA, but the framing of "life is wonderful in Europe" is missing the fact that the only theoretical upside is you had less choice.
How do exactly do you get from "I could afford to go to college for a STEM professional degree and an arts MA without any debt or financial stress" to "Less choice"?
If he? hadn't consumed the resources necessary to get the MA, he would still have paid the same amount of taxes - most of which will be subsidising other people.
But if paying the full cost, there would be a choice where down one path there is more money because less resources were consumed, and one that would be roughly equivalent.
I just want to point out that a MA in film was extremely cheap at one time. A friend of mine got one at a state school for about $5 grand in the early 1990s. The issue is that inflation and rising costs in the US have wildly diverged from real wages. People aren't going to college in the US because it isn't economically feasible. Meanwhile, all my European friends have PhDs which were subsidized by their native countries. The fact of the matter is that the US is not taking care of their citizens, and has failed an entire generation.
I determined I didn’t want to continue school around 17/18 for a variety of reasons. Some out of my own arrogance and some I still hold to this day. Because of this of course, I didn’t “set myself up” for school so to speak. Didn’t bother with managing good grades, taking standardized tests or building my portfolio with any of the academic or non academic line items schools typically look at.
Flash forward and I start to rethink the decision. I want to go back now, but I’ve attempted multiple times to investigate it and the numbers never work. Because I didn’t play my HS years correctly, the bureaucracy will not let me in, regardless of the things I’ve accomplished in the years since. Additionally the price is just so prohibitive, combined with the fact that I would get next to no aid and even a standard State school would be ridiculously expensive. These are just a handful of the issues though. Let’s not even bring up how I would need a simultaneously drop out of the workforce, suddenly turning the financial burden into Tuition/Books/Fees + everything needed to survive.
I’m really convinced that universities in the US do not want non traditional students at all. Obviously there are some programs that target them, but are often limited. I.e. you have to be part of the right demographic, be limited in the areas you can study. A notable state university near me offers over a dozen online Bachelors programs, but not a single “useful” degree, they’re all BA’s in subjects that people in HN mock. Other seem to cobble together “made up” degrees, which are bachelors that don’t have a traditional or on-campus equivalent and seem to be not particularly useful for employment in attempt to scam poorer, non-credentialed people out of their money.
I could still probably go back, but since I can not hack my way out of the bureaucracy or financial cost, majority of the value proposition would be completely dead by the time o could manage it.
Start with community college part time, get grades and take prerequisites, then apply to other programs. Spending two years at community college and then transferring to a 4 year college is pretty common as well if you want to attend full time, but part time is going to be easier.
I don’t know where you live or what you want to study, but if you focus on taking the coursework you need it becomes a lot easier. I’d suggest calling admissions departments as well, not trying to piece everything together yourself online. Feel free to email me if you want to share more information and I can give more specific and better researched suggestions.
The problem with part time is it adds significantly to the time cost. The attractiveness of a degree to me declined significantly if I won’t be able to complete it till my 30s. I can stomach the lost wages if education could be completes in a mostly standard time, but otherwise there’s already a very good case to be made for staying with what I do now.
Yeah, bit I am willing to pay more taxes if it benefits my environment. Because this is what I think it means to be part of a society. They made it possible for me to choose more or less free of economic pressure what I want to study, so me supporting them is only good and fair.
I mean, what is the goal of a good live? Extract as many resources from your surroundings as possible, kicking your competition down and then die in an slightly above average house? I want to live a good live and leave my environment in a better shape than I entered it in, because the two are not a contradiction.
There are upsides to living in a society where the average person is more well off, especially when those who have it hardest also have to struggle less. We are social animals living in a complex society, and no man is an island.
Edit: Of course, if you’re very well off and live somewhere that’s relatively stable, large gaps in equality might benefit you. That’s for a select few though.
having a degree is no guarantee that you possess employable skills.
Germany is much better at shunting people away from university who are not qualified to be there. Generally, they go to trade schools and apprenticeships.
Agreed, there should be a threshold where people can get the minimum to live a normal life. Basic healthcare, a job with liveable wage, easy access to education etc...
However, there should be a playground for innovation as well.
Europe makes it so damn hard to innovate because of it's many laws. Ambitious people inevitably move to the US.
EE programs tend to focus on electronics, not electrical systems. But learning how house wiring works is a simple book away. But be careful - unlike electronics, house electrics can kill you.
On the other hand, electricians have weird gaps in their knowledge. If I ask them to do something slightly out of the ordinary, this becomes apparent. For example, none of them understand inductive coupling, or even know what it is. When I ask them to do certain things to avoid inductive coupling, they give me this indulgent smile, and do what I ask, although it's clear they don't understand why.
I eventually wound up doing the low voltage wiring myself, because I simply couldn't explain to them why you don't run low voltage wires through the same holes as the A/C wires. One of them tried to run a 12VDC wire in 25 feet of conduit with a 120VAC wire.
They also simply did not understand how generators worked, and botched up the wiring for mine.
It's the same with roofers. They have no idea what galvanic corrosion is, and will invariably use the wrong nails for anything metal.
That's the thing with vocationals skills - they make you really good at understanding how something works or how to fix something without breaking something else, but beyond that range of problems and solutions, you need to talk to an engineer.
Not that vocational jobs are not important - clearly they add value and create employment.
I’m not saying that most people aren’t formula pluggers (and that’s a big problem) but, my first impression of that kind of card would be that’s it’s meant to be branding, not a tool. Someone is carrying around a piece of what they love.
Just out of curiosity (I don’t mean this to be a dig and don’t carry either cards), why are Maxwell’s Equations good but Ohm’s Law is an instant no-hire? How I remember the story is that, when Ohm published his equation, it came as a huge shock because no one was expecting it to be so simple. There’s a lot of beauty in that simplicity. Maxwell’s equations aren’t that complex but they aren’t exactly _linear_. Valuing complexity is an interesting hiring tactic but would probably be a great filter on younger engineers?
1. Ohm's Law is taught the first day of 4 years of an EE degree. Ohm's Law should be part of your soul, not something a cheat sheet is needed for.
2. The 3 versions of the formula are obvious to anyone who remembers high school freshman math. It's barely even algebra.
Carrying that cheat sheet signals you know neither electronics nor the most basic algebra.
Maxwell's Equations, however, get introduced in 2nd or 3rd year in college. You'll need a year (probably two) of calculus to even understand the notation. The equations unify the theories of electric fields and magnetic fields.
Only people who have studied Maxwell's Equations will even recognize them, so by putting them on a t-shirt you're signalling that you are an educated EE to other educated EEs. Other people won't even know what they are.
Then a smug physicist will walk by with either the the equations of quantum electrodynamics or Maxwell's equations in terms of differential forms on their t-shirt
Besides, EEs usually cheat by assuming a sinusoidal solution anyway.
I find this with everything. You have to become an expert at everything if you want it done right. Maybe it's because the truly expert help is generally too expensive.
Examples:
- Taxes/Pensions - if you just rely on your accountant then they'll do the bare minimum and you'll miss out
- Energy company - we're rolling out smart gas/elec meters in the UK. There is an old type (smets1) and a new type (smets2). You don't want to be stuck with the old type but the company had no idea which type they were installing. (I ended up with the old type)
- Lawyers - We're constantly having to chase ours and highlight things to them to make progress
- Doctors - If I haven't done my research then they invariably try to fob me off (maybe this is a UK nationalised healthcare thing)
I could go on but the crux is that the average professional does the bare minimum to move you along. I'm not old enough to say if it's always been like this but it has been my observation over my decade of adulthood. If it's a new thing then maybe it is partly to blame for the anti-vax and lack of faith in experts.
If you're spending that much time doing all those things then maybe truly expert help is just expensive rather than too expensive.
There is no doubt though that people do better work when supervised and knowing what questions to ask an expert helps sets expectations about what level of work you will settle for.
This is an interesting observation and matches with my experience. I'd add:
1) There's a race to the bottom with services in terms of pricing. For example, NHS GPs have strict time limits within which to provide a particular service. These time limits have reduced over the years and so individual doctors are capable of providing a better service but are can't given the constraints. People rarely are willing to pay more for a service unless they know that the quality level will be higher. With services, it is not clear that a higher price will translate to higher quality.
2) Most services are not chosen based on quality. They are chosen based on perception, brand, reviews, pricing and a whole host of other things. Often the most profitable services are the ones who can manipulate these variables best rather than the ones who actually provide a great service. If there is a sole accountant who is fantastic at accounting but poor at marketing and review collection then they are going to struggle and may end up joining a firm who constrains their time such that can only provide the minimum viable service.
I agree totally agree on both points. I also think though there is an opacity element, If you can’t see/will know if these service providers did a good “quality” job corners are habitually cut.
E.g. if I have a new button that’s been sewn on a jacket, or have my house painted, I can easily see if the right button was used, or if spots were missed while painting. However if I take my car in for an oil change, I don’t really know if the right grade of oil and an OEM filter was used, nor do I really care to recheck my accountants work on my taxes (as long is it roughly pencils to what I expected).
I blame the extreme penetration of capitalism everywhere. We've created a culture where everyone thinks like a business and looks to do the minimal effort for the maximal compensation. If you don't do this, "you're dumb" (and, unfortunately, maybe there's some truth to this).
In a culture obsessed with looking for exploitation opportunities at every corner, what do we expect? Everyone is running so "lean" and "efficiently" that anything beyond the lowest cost options can hinder you. Are you getting ROI, or diminishing returns and if you are getting diminishing returns, then that's now viewed as waste and a poor path to choose.
Capitalism has been great at motivating people to innovate and create but the current state of capitalistic systems, I say, isn't healthy for humanity. We need to acknowledge this and fix perverse incentive structures across the board (that doesn't mean destroying the system, simply fixing it). Much of what you're seeing these days used to be used in arguments for capitalistic systems against socialist systems--what really seems to have happened is that we've just traded who we want to give power to. Instead of those who tower over government systems in an authoritarian manner in socialist systems, we seek business leadership who... tower over us in an authoritarian manner.
One reason the US had been so fantastic is that we had a government and economic system that forced capitalistic ideals to compete with socialistic ideals. We had government services inspired by socialist systems that kept capitalistic drivers from going off the rails into too competitive of states with social safety nets to protect us. Meanwhile, to avoid the stagnant systems you see in prior socialist systems, we had capitalism provide incentives to motivate people to work, to do better for themselves and improve their lives and therefor those around them. Now, we seem to have mostly swept away socialist ideals (competition in policy simply isn't there anymore), capitalistic policy has won, and we're witnessing what unconstrained capitalism looks like. It's less value creation and more wealth extraction.
If you're a capital holder, it looks pretty good. My investments that I simply threw money at have grown beyond belief--without any sort of effort on my behalf--it's astounding to think how much money I earned doing nothing. It's an interesting situation because I still work and get paid fairly well, but when I look at my investment portfolio I can't help but think I'm cheating because asset growth well beyond inflation just appear in my accounts, meanwhile, at my day job, everything has grown more and more demanding without equal compensation.
It's an interesting time and I hope we course correct this nonsense before I get too old.
Looked at another way, capitalism has commoditized services that were historically unobtainable by certain classes for all intents and purposes. So now you have mediocre servicing at prices everyone can afford. You can still get expert services if you can truly pay for it, and that hasn't changed.
Making something a "human right" doesn't make it immune to the rules of scarcity. Expert services are scarce, which is why they cost more, even in socialist/communist countries. Communism is, after all, just state-owned capitalism. :) People still get rich in communist countries, experts still get outsized reward, it's just that the opportunities to get rich are constrained to the bureaucrats, and the outsized reward will either come from the system or be facilitated by a black market.
Personal story: moved into a EU country and tried to import my car tax-free as personal property. Went to a customs agency because apparently you don't talk to customs directly, you go through one of those. They had me collect all sorts of documents, which took me months before it became evident that this type of car cannot be imported tax-free in the first place.
The stress from expecting people to take their responsibilities seriously has cost me many meaningful interpersonal relationships, not to mention innumerable brain cells. On the other hand, the work to achieve more self-sufficiency is alienating in its own right, and, depending on starting conditions, can twist a person into an unlikable mess.
Well put. When you become medium-level at all areas where you like tinkering, it’s hard not to get bitter about people who aren’t doing it correctly for you…
It's closer in meaning to "no one really knows what they're doing". Half-assing implies lack of effort. This expression implies lack of insight or direction.
This feels so true to me. I think this is the biggest reason that things feel so unfair to many average people. because the resources required to get good service in almost every meaningful endeavor are just totally unobtainable to people so you either make yourself an expert in everything or get screwed left and right.
This is starting to push me in the direction of off grid/ sustainable living just to minimize these dependencies
The AC voltage will induce noise onto the low voltage wire. That noise can be of a higher voltage then the low voltage and damage the equipment behind it.
In practice home LV wiring is rarely shielded, maybe with CAT6 as an exception. Things like speaker wire, doorbells, vacuum control wires, etc are not typically shielded.
Also the shield needs a low impedance return path to be effective.
Electric fields are easy to shield against with a Faraday cage, but magnetic fields are a royal pain. You can use mu-metal shielding, but that's rather expensive and only reduces the magnetic field. Technically, if you wanted to entirely shield from magnetic fields, you'd need to surround the wire with a superconductor, but that requires liquid nitrogen/helium cooling that is out of the scope of most residential work.
This isn't the main reason running low and high voltage through the same conduit is not code compliant though.
The reason you don't mix low/high in the same raceway is because if exposed low/high voltage conductors come in contact with each other, the low voltage cable has a much higher chance of catching fire.
If you run, say, the telephone wires through the same holes, they'll pick up a maddening 60 Hz hummmmmmmmmmm. You're screwed because when this is discovered, the house is finished, and it gets very very expensive to rewrite it.
The closer the low voltage wires are to the high voltage ones, and the longer the distance, the more hmmmmmmm they'll pick up.
This isn't the main reason running low and high voltage through the same conduit is not code compliant though.
The reason you don't mix low/high in the same raceway is because if exposed low/high voltage conductors come in contact with each other, the low voltage cable has a much higher chance of catching fire.
The same thing happened the next state over. At least this time, the electrician allowed me to explain it, and then did the low voltage wiring correctly.
I built my house with union labor (union shop) and found the level of competence higher than was typical with jo the random contractor (of course there are exceptions, and for some jobs it doesn’t matter).
Likewise with the machine shop a few jobs ago: although we weren’t a union shop, for some jobs we hired contractors in for the union members produced better work, especially for the safety critical stuff.
I have no experience with unions outside the skilled trades — certainly there are many horror stories.
> built my house with union labor (union shop) and found the level of competence higher than was typical with jo the random contractor
So you built two homes, one with a well researched union labor group and one with a well researched contractor? Or is this just some BS elaboration based on comparing contractors you hired for small time shit with the big house job?
Excellent epistemic inquiry. I’ve owned homes for over 30 years, and have experience with hiring contractors for remodels. Also hired non-union contractors to do building work on offices over the years. And the company that had a machine shop? One of our channels was home construction and overall I was not impressed with the kind of work I encountered.
But to really get to your question: I started my 3-year home construction odyssey with a non-union contractor who had to be fired due to poor execution. The replacement was a union shop. That’s about as much A/B testing as one can get.
Don't you have codes and license requirements for electricians and roofers? In my country, most of what makes electricianing harder than electronicsing is the rules. There are rules about how close you can put mains and low voltage wires, which your guy should have followed even if he didn't know why, rules about what parts of the house you can fix them to, or if they can be laid loosely or must be stapled to the framing, the spacing between the staples, how to pull a wire through a hole, where you can drill holes for wires, using a wrong colored wire with a sleeve on the end, etc. All the understanding of electrical engineering in the world won't have you knowing those rules.
And then you have old houses with all sorts of weird wiring and constraints and the contractor/electrician works around those and does things mostly to current code the best they can.
The small subset of codes in my area that I personally looked at were significantly out of date and it was unlikely that they would be updated anytime soon. There are state codes which were out of date for a long time but they just recently updated. However there are also local codes which are not up to date. When they're not in direct conflict you need to follow both, if they are then technically the state should take precedence, but if you look into it then you'll find that the locality doesn't care and will fine you and it's up to you to defend it which will be expensive and you could still lose. The codes are only as good as the people maintaining them and it seems that the maintenance is not a priority. This was not for electrical - perhaps that one is given more attention.
Your observation about gaps in knowledge is true for all trades, and is at least conceptually what separates trades or job skills training university education.
A good university program teaches very few hard skills, but you learn to reason about your field essentially from first principles. On the other hand, to do a mechanical job, you really need just the job skills, and the connection to cause and effect is almost irrelevant.
This is typically why university education is held up as a better key to long term career prospects, because of the adaptability rather than rote memorization.
University is supposed to teach you fundamental ideas that help you think about the world not hard skills. That’s why it’s called a university and not a boot camp.
I find this is why the trades work best under a competent contractor who, while not an expert in all fields, brings together the necessary skills and experience to avoid gap defects.
Here in the US, the NEC specifies a one-foot separation for low voltage unless crossing at a perpendicular angle. Low voltage is generally a specialty, so a lot of electricians don’t know.
The bigger issue is that there are tons of electricians that never went through apprenticeships and who never picked up and read a copy of the code (which has major changes every three years). The result is a lot of cargo cult installation which may or may not actually be correct.
I remember a conversation with a plumber in Cambridge, UK a few years ago. He was helping me pick out plastic pipes for a project. I asked "What material are these - are they HDPE? He gave me a weird look, and told me "They're plastic pipe!".
> It's the same with roofers. They have no idea what galvanic corrosion is, and will invariably use the wrong nails for anything metal.
Maybe, they don't need to? These trades should have cheatsheets where they can check for certain scenarios - like the 2 described, and it would provide Do's and Don'ts?
The piles of cash come at the expense of physical health. I can’t imagine being a labourer at 55.
I’m a registered nurse which is a weird hybrid of university-level knowledge (understanding pharm and patho) but also it is a physical trade (turning patients, providing personal cares, mental resilience). It has roots in being vocational with a push in the last 50 years to provide an academic background to turn it into a profession.
Floor nursing is the bread and butter of the profession, but it burns you quick. Older nurses, particularly in medical-surgical nursing, tend to take on less stressful 8 hour day shifts, end up as spinsters, or have a terrible home life that they’ve resigned into accepting.
I moved into a desk position in my mid 30s and can’t possibly imagine going back to the physicality of it all.
I can’t imagine it can be better for you physically or mentally to hunch over a desk for 8 hours a day in dead silence vs being on your feet, walking and talking to people.
There is a trade-off indeed. My overall quality of life improved.
I wore a fitness tracker then and now. I averaged about 10 km in a given shift, where as my daily total now is now closer to 5 or 6. However, now I have time and energy at the end of the day to do an actual physical activity instead of coming home like a limp noodle and taking the next day to recover.
Mentally, there is comradery that I absolutely miss. This is something really hard to explain unless you’re in it. When things got tough, the dark humour got us through. We took care of each others’ loved ones (at their family’s request). We demanded excellence from each other, and (rightfully) called out unsafe practice and supported staff as needed.
However, my home life suffered. It was fine at first as my partner is also a nurse so there was a mutual understanding. However, it started to wear on me when I had kids. I’d come home and my kids would be asleep/at school/daycare, so I’d have missed out on a day’s interaction. I realized that they’re only little once and no job in the world is worth missing out on them.
A colleague of mine had a physics degree and decided to become an electrician. Took very little time to learn.
That's not to condescend on electricians, they clearly have a useful skill. And being able to certify a house pays a good few hundred pounds a day, nothing to sniff at.
But if you're used to looking at physical models, learning a few conventions and adding another model won't be terribly difficult.
I think a lot of people are actually better off doing that kind of work. There's a tangible output that is much easier to connect to purposefulness than if your job is mainly in the ideas realm. A cousin of mine that I grew up with is a carpenter and seems to cheerful all the time, now that he knows what his thing is. I grew up with him and it wasn't always so.
Get in early. Get in a union. 25-30 years to retirement in most unions. You don't want to be 60, and still in construction.
The test is easy, but figure 1000-2000 guys are taking the test too, so you need to get most of the questions right to get in. An oral interview counts for 1/2 the hiring process.
Just say you love working with your hands--love unions, but understand the needs of the contractors too.
Remember it's construction. You're around guys all day long. It's brainless work, and you will never have to act cheery when the owner's spoiled kid comes to work.
I do not recommend non-union construction at all.
Then again---hide in school for a long time. I loved college. It was cheaper 25 years ago though, and not that fun, but much better than any job I've had.
> I got very polite while asking him over to bail me out.
> all the Grievance Studies majors
So you're polite to those you find useful and insulting to people majoring in something you presumably disagree with? And assuming they will all be condescending to a plumber or electrician for some reason?
Perhaps you don't have to look quite so far away if you're looking to reduce the amount of condescending happening in the room you're standing in?
> However, that book-learnin' fell apart when confronted with troubleshooting a strangely wired room, and I got very polite while asking him over to bail me out.
This feels very much like the "astronomy/telescope" argument.
Area, ethnic, cultural, gender, and group studies (I'm assuming "Grievance Studies" falls under this category), at least in the US, have been in steady decline since 2008, and even at their peak only accounted for 0.5% of majors (now just 0.3%). Even if you want to add in humanities in general that has gone from 3% to just above 2%
The idea that college campuses are ever more filled with people studying "useless" majors is a fiction. The largest areas of major concentration are business, biology, health professions, and engineering and all of these have been more or less growing for years.
There is this pervasive myth that most students in undergrad are having trouble transitioning to industry because they wasted their time studying their non-practical passion, but the data[0] clearly shows that the trends for the last decade have been increasing focus on career oriented practical majors.
I really appreciate this kind of discussion: data driven, narrative free. I'm very sad to see that giving up facts for narratives accelerates the decline of the US.
I don't see where in your source the data paints that picture? Social sciences and history is 8%, family and human sciences is another few percent, journalism is also listed out separately, as is liberal arts and humanities... Maybe there are better sources that break things down per major so we can see the growth?
No way. Being white is definitely a leg up. Well, at least for me, a white guy, no college degree. Life is much easier. I don't think there is any support missing for us, that actually sounds hilarious. We need to work on lifting others up.
Yeah. I think its really difficult (impossible?) to know what its like for the other gender/other ethnicities - even if there is more cultural outputs/conversations out there about different groups its still really hard/impossible to know what its like for others.
Having said that working class (poor) white males are known to have amongst the worst educational performance in the UK. This is different from employment.
If I had my time back I would seriously consider not going to uni/get a masters and just become a plumber/electrician. I reckon I would be as happy/if not happier then doing an office job.
Based on the number of "affirmative-action" initiatives that I see all over the US, in many tech-companies (I don't know about other fields), I'd say that being a women, or black, is definitely a huge plus to get your foot through the door, with many recruitment programs blatantly saying they are only for minorities, which sounds to me like pretty much segregation in reverse, but that indeed seems to be the agenda of some leftists.
It is illegal, but that doesn't stop people from doing it. In the US, things like this have to go to court to actually be struck down, and there haven't been any sympathetic plaintiffs suing over these laws yet.
When "positive discrimination" makes it before a judge, it usually gets stuck down.
Yea, but we got no problem getting to that door. Minorities might get pulled over and get a knee on the neck. Women might get assaulted on their way. Being a white dude, I'll get a taxi there, no problem. So if I have to try harder to get the position, pretty understandable, since I got the head start.
Not saying life is easy for anyone, saying it's so much easier being a white dude with a nice hair cut. You know I used to be so broke I had to "beg" for gas money at a gas station to get to my first day at a new job, first person I asked gave me a $20. Life. is. easier.
You've been reading too much news. That doesn't happen to normal people in real life. Blacks have a huge disadvantage of poor upbringing by their own family and community and women have a huge "disadvantage" of not wanting to be a computer programmer.
No, I just get outdoors and live with real people, and see it myself. I've been pulled over in a car with two other dudes, and watched the darkest skin guy get the crap kicked out of him because they thought he is a gangster, while we had to sit on a curb and watch. Where I went to school, counselors tried to get me to take AP classes, which I didn't want, while my friends with darker skin, and better grades, had to go on the wait list. I lived in an area where 13 year old pregnancies were regular. Guys raping chicks while they are passed out drunk in high school was regular. Jumping the gay kids were regular. I got to watch it, empathize with my friends, but I never had to bear the burden. My burden was folks like you, denying there are any problems because you are so safe, can't fathom life being different, even when it's across the street.
> normal people
Point exactly, when you say normal, you are thinking of white dude America. And yes, this does not happen to them.
> the darkest skin guy get the crap kicked out of him
On his way to a job interview? And also for many of your other darker skinned friends on their way to job interviews? And your female friends on their way to theirs? I'm not denying it happened in some isolated cases, but that it causes normal people to not get to "the door". It didn't even happen to normal people among your "dark-skinned" friends.
I think "to the door" might be a metaphor for going through life up to that point, but I like you literal interpretation better, like everyone in those stories specifically faces atrocities ONLY on the way to an interview. Because if you get shitbagged on a Tuesday and have the interview Wednesday, then really, it's an equal playing field.
Again, with the normal, who are you talking about? People are complex, all people, normal is your perception of others, check yourself.
This is what the science actually says. Black disfunction is attributed to culture spread from adults to children. Black mothers, for example, criticize their children more often than they praise them, but the reverse is true for white mothers. That's just an example of the kind of cultural effect that can be included - I'm not sure if that one specifically has been shown to be causative of lifelong disadvantage.
You want researchers to not attempt to identify the causes of black social problems? Why's that? So you can promote your own ideologically motivated causes without any bothersome science getting in the way?
Women have the disadvantage that if they reveal their gender online, they're barraged with sexual harassment and even death threats for nothing but being a woman. Do you suppose this treatment encourages curiosity in computing?
I'm a white guy and I bootstrapped my career with no degree and little college (dropped out of community college) by simply padded my resume doing some basic contracting gigs for friends and their professional networks and parlayed that into full-time work. I'm now an engineering manager at a unicorn.
I will also say that for all this talk about how easy Blacks and women have it, I don't buy it, and I think people spinning tales about how "My company only hires Blacks and women" aren't involved in technical hiring. We are desperate for experienced talent and are under tremendous pressure to build an effective team. We don't have the luxury to be picky about demographics. And my team isn't unique: It's the same story from my peers both inside and outside my company. Likewise, the pipeline itself doesn't have very many women or Black candidates from what I can see, so even these people got automatic interviews I doubt it would change team demographics significantly. And finally: if this is indeed "segregation in reverse" (which it's not: it would just be segregation with the roles reversed), where are these tech companies where the majority of their engineers aren't White or Asian men?
This. Everywhere I have been as a team lead has had issues hiring. I don't remember ever having two desirable candidates in the pipeline at the same time and getting one felt like striking gold. We didn't give two shits what your gender or race was.
You must not have a lot of women friends in tech to say this, all of my women friends in tech have had one hell of a bad time breaking in. The default attitude of recruiters and interviewers when they interview a women is to assume they know nothing.
Can you hear yourself though? Can you put yourself in the shoes of a young white man? They are recipients of this message on a regular basis. When many of them end up having a difficult time despite being told how easy they have it, and how if they received help that would just be resources being taken away from less privileged people, it's easy for them to think something's wrong with themselves, to feel unwanted, depressed, and to end up taking the route outlined by the article.
I was young once, and I am white. Yea sure, I understand it. And this is no way new, I had plenty of other white people feeling sorry for me because, "the country is being taken from the white man". That is ooooold, old, old. Fear based racism been around.
But to your weak sauce point, some folks are just going to have a hard go at life, but is it easier being white through life, no matter what? Yea, for sure. No one says it's an easy life, but it is easier being light skinned.
> unwanted, depressed
I think there used to be some organizations that helped with that. Specifically white men. You know, the kind that would give them a purpose, make them feel wanted. You got a hood and everything.
My observations are not racist, or rooted in fear. They are, however, rooted in compassion for my fellow human beings who find themselves in the crosshairs of reactionary political ideologies, even if they wear labels like "progressive", "feminist", or "anti-racist".
I'm mixed so I can generally wriggle out of such accusations by playing the race card. The only situation I ever feel good about doing so are ones like this.
haha not so much, feeling sorry for someone that can afford a Ferrari and then complains about the car insurance would be ridiculous. Similar to feeling sorry for white guys having to deal with politics, its warranted, not serious, and does not deserve more attention that many other REAL issues. But anyways, have a good day.
That's not the point that person was making. But (figuratively) its very true not many people at all can own such a car. Imagine owning one, you got well over $100k of f-off-money, but then tell your barista "life is rough with these car insurance prices on Ferraris". It's perspective.
The examples in the article tell a different story. Mr. Briles could easily go to college if he wanted to. It's just that he would rather stay at home and "invest" in cryptocurrencies and make music, and his parents fund it. That is a very privileged position to be in.
"Narrative" makes it sound like there's nothing behind. The extreme cost of college - and living in general, rents/home ownership, etc - and the decreasing edge it gives to owners of degrees isn't a fabrication by any stretch.
It's easier to think people are being misled than to think people are taking different decisions because their reality is actually different.
> A narrative that (white) men are uniformly privileged and life is just easy for them.
This is very perspective dependent. I’m a black college student now and every conversation with friends back home includes some mention of dropping out because it’s not for us as well. When you see people with equivalent resumes already coasting by in the job market because they could get their last names and LinkedIn photos past the screening and into an interview it’s hard to believe that’ll change post-graduation. And most of us are already in planning on entrepreneurship because we know we’re not what companies are looking for even with fancy CS degrees. It’s like if I’ll have to sell sneakers to make ends meet after college anyways I might as well drop out and use that money bootstrapping this inventory SaaS. Innovation out of desperation, I guess.
It’s no way to live. But I think we’re approaching an inflection point.
You must have bad information because FAANG companies compete over hiring black software engineers. They want to get their numbers up and there aren’t many to hire.
A charitable (and, I think, reasonable) reading would be that the poster used FAANG as a representation of the overall trend in tech. FAANG are what the rest of the industry aspires to be, after all.
How many CS jobs are even in the "the industry" though? Home Depot, Walmart, and Nestle are examples of massive companies that do not aspire to be Facebook or anything like it, but who hire lots of software engineers. Most companies are not tech companies, although a handful of tech giants have done very well.
What's "tech?" Large VC funded B2C companies get a lot of press and are most well known but I'd imagine most software engineering jobs are either at "non-tech" companies or companies that provide B2B services.
The top 5 have recruited over a million people between 2000 and 2018. That's an average of about 50,000 new recruits per year. Not all of those are in engineering of course, and those are global numbers, but still they hire tens of thousands of engineers every year. Here in the UK local software companies constantly complain that the cream of every year's CS grads emigrate to the US.
Doing the rough math, Google employs about 80,000 engineers today. Generously assuming the other FAANGs employ as many engineers, you get about 400,000 engineers. There are about 26 million software engineers in the world.
So that's 1.5% of all engineers. And that's being very generous. The real number is surely below 1%. No surprise that the most desirable companies hire the top 1%.
(Happy for someone to correct my numbers and the resulting percentage - it's based on a few Google searches).
Unless my numbers are way off, it's safe to say that over 99% of engineers in the world are not working at a FAANG. I stand by my claim that we should not be using what happens at FAANGs as reliable anecdotal evidence of the interview experience for most candidates.
Yep. I've converted myself to a member of the native ethnicity because my government has a policy of preferentially buying from native-owned businesses but failed to define nativeness using any immutable or objective characteristics. I just have to remember my new ethnicity on any future forms that ask for it. It may also entitle me to enhanced healthcare services.
It's not as extrem for me, but I was told by HR that all female/non-white applicants had to move automatically to the phone screen step, regardless of the resume.
Our application form has a required field for LinkedIn profile, so we use the picture/name. If there is no way to make a guess we just treat it as a normal application and review the resume.
I personally do count them as "non-white" when reviewing applications. Our DE&I group only reports "white vs non-white" and "males vs females" ratios, so I assume they are considered "asians" and lumped into "non-white".
That really makes no sense if the goal is to increase “minority” representation. In my experience at BigTech Indian and Chinese applicants outnumbered white by at least 2:1.
Both can be true. The number you really need is what percentage of black people with a CS degree end up actually getting a job offer.
And highly publicized diversity efforts by tech giants does not necessarily reflect what the average company in Ohio is doing. The news is not the data, so yeah, you really do need more evidence than "it's what I heard".
>what percentage of black people with a CS degree end up actually getting a job offer.
So, the next step after forcing universities to give out degrees, is to force companies to hire minorities just to produce statistics that would please liberals ?
Really starts to sound like Communist countries declaring what the unemployment figures should be, by law.
I'm sorry, I'm black and this is not my experience. I will not bother posting evidence either, because why does evidence matter when you already know something to be true, right?
Dropping out of a fancy Computer Science program that you're already in would seem like an extraordinarily bad idea.
If someone's trying to talk you into quitting and giving up because no one wants you because you're black, well.. that doesn't sound like a good friend to me.
Don't get me wrong -- a few tech-billionaires dropped out of college, and apparently it worked out for some. So if you want to try that out, then that'd seem like a different issue. But dropping out because you're black sounds crazy.
All that said, if you want to feel out the waters, why not apply for an internship? Internships can be awesome! -- you can get experience and money while still being a student, plus it can be fun!
> Dropping out of a fancy Computer Science program that you're already in would seem like an extraordinarily bad idea
Of course haha the name brand and few cool professors are keeping me at this point. But I never expected to go from the highest ranking/gpa/scores to having leaving academia even at the edge of the table.
> But dropping out because you're black sounds crazy.
It’s more like “if I can make X amount anyways today, why do it Y way when I’ll be behind anyways? Might as well gain the experience and be in the same position 4-5 years from now?” if that makes sense but I understand it sounding rash through text.
> why not apply for an internship?
It seems we all have the same issue of never getting responses online. It’s very odd considering we’ve done incredibly well when the interview is direct with the person hiring (as in this is the person that makes the final decision), but situations like that are limited.
Apologies if this is obvious, but if you're not getting callbacks, usually the issue is with your resume or application. If you haven't already, I would look for groups that review resumes and applications (especially groups that involve people who are already working or have experience hiring.) You could also try posting on the /r/cscareerquestions subreddit to have people critique your resume.
> usually the issue is with your resume or application
The parent commentor stated that their cohort has seen evidence of systematic rejection of their resumes. It is a well-documented fact that this happens all the time for female-sounding, black-sounding etc names and pictures.
Suggesting that "no, it's probably just some missing fine tuning on your resume" doesn't really seem like the right response here...
Do you mean by "we know we’re not what companies are looking for even with fancy CS degrees", simply that they're looking for identically qualified people that aren't black? If so, I'm extremely sorry to hear this, and disgusted that its happening. I can't actually think of anyone I worked with who'd knowingly treat or value a black colleague or interview candidate any differently, but maybe that's white blindness on my part, maybe its been going on and I didn't notice. In case this is helpful info, I know that Capital One tech has robust D&I policies and seeks to redress the balance. They sponsor an organisation called "Blacks in Tech". Their senior management seem to say it makes good business sense and provides competitive edge, to reward talented people who happen to be black, whom other employers are too stupid/racist to consider hiring and/or promoting quick enough once hired. so, if I were a black American looking for a job in tech I'd look at Capital One if struggling to get anywhere with other employers.
>that they're looking for identically qualified people that aren't black?
You see this here on HN all the time, articles about "how we do hiring" that start out with "I would only hire someone who I'd want to get coffee with." Which, to me at least, makes it sound like the person is looking to hire friends/drinking buddies that also have technical skills, not employees. It's a signal that the person is looking for "their type of people."
It's so acceptable to hire this way that people feel comfortable opening publishing that, under their own name, as something they are proud of.
I'm not even black (but I am a woman, I grew up poor, and I'm on the older side) and constantly reading about hiring procedures like that makes me feel like I'm very much not welcome.
Seems to me 100% their loss, if they don't want you! I'm white and male, but the wrong side of 40. Occasionally I've faced ageist "humour". But anywhere that's unfriendly to older people, women, non-white people, would IMHO suck to work even if you were young, white, male etc. Wouldn't wanna work with prejudiced people even if they think I'm "like them". Working in a diverse inclusive team is far more joyful, as well as more productive. BTW in my current workplace, there's a lady who's both older and black. She's awesome at her job, has a unique set of skills built up over many years. IMHO she's irreplaceable as well as a fun nice person to work with. So thank goodness we don't have something that'd have made her feel unwelcome....
Capital One is a great place to work. When it comes to corporate behemoths it doesn't have much competition that I know of. Very supportive culture that is obsessively focused on improving teams, the culture, and processes.
>It’s like if I’ll have to sell sneakers to make ends meet after college anyways
Just for what it's worth, I (not black, but from a different group that is not looked upon kindly by HR types) took the route of EEE Degree -> PhD (dropped out) -> Software Engineer at Relatively Elite company (not FAANG, but about as good as we have in Melbourne, AU) -> running eCommerce businesses from home (selling used video games on eBay as well as a USB oscilloscope I designed as a student, mostly through Amazon).
If you're smart and skilled, you can make an absolute killing doing something that stoners or less intelligent people do to "get by", and at the same time spend massive amounts of quality time with your (probably at this stage future) wife and kids.
If you want to have a chat about it, feel free to shoot us an email (see profile). But long story short, even if you're locked out of the traditional job market it doesn't mean you should give up on developing your skills or give up hope. Capitalism provides, man.
This doesn't match up with my experience as an interviewer at several FAANGs.
HR typically wants their diversity numbers up badly so if you're gay, a woman, and/or black they are already incredibly inclined to hire you, as long as you pass the interviews.
It's not a walk in the park, but you have this going for you and it's a big advantage imo.
Aren't these are known to be extremely difficult interviews compared to most tech interviews? What percentage of candidates who apply get hired? I would imagine the numbers are quite low?
My opinion is that generalist interviews are difficult but not 'extremely'. For example, here is a problem I came up with at one company:
Given a list of chapters in a video course, and a list of user bookmarks, write a function that groups the bookmarks by chapter. Chapters and bookmarks are defined as millisecond offsets from 0 (the start of the video file).
I'd specify the data structures for junior devs and let the more senior people work those out.
Your average developer that gets hired can solve and unit test the solution in less than 35 minutes. Those who don't might be having an off day, or I didn't do a good job at explaining the problem and details, or they didn't ask the right questions or who knows. The point is, a thousand things can go wrong, but the problem itself isn't that difficult. A few loops and a hashmap gets you an acceptable solution.
This and the other problems in the interview question databases at FAANGs are typical of what's in the Cracking the Coding Interview book. Whether someone's ability to solve these types of problems quickly is indicative of their skill level is a hot topic of debate, but if one wants to join these companies, then hacking the process by learning to solve algorithm and data structure problems is acceptable and not a particularly complex process. It's high overhead for the candidate, but at the very least it proves that they can learn, and learning the custom tools and code quickly is about half the skillet required to be successful at a FAANG.
> then hacking the process by learning to solve algorithm and data structure problems is acceptable
Have you considered that underrepresented candidates might not have the free time outside of university, family, and job responsibilities in order to compete with those whose families can support them to focus on only university and preparing for interviews?
If HR wants their diversity numbers up, maybe HR needs to consider having some diversity in the interview process itself? I wouldn't expect a cookie cutter process to result in much diversity of background or thought.
> Whether someone's ability to solve these types of problems quickly is indicative of their skill level is a hot topic of debate
One of the best interviewing tips I learned that has served me extremely well is to try disprove my impression of the candidate. It seems like this process entirely fails at that.
The problem is that companies also want an objective hiring process, because otherwise employee bias will seep in. The fact that these two issues are in opposition (plus the general recruiting pipeline issues) are why this is such a difficult problem to solve.
> The problem is that companies also want an objective hiring process
Usually only at a very superficial level. Enough to comply with the law. And to be fair, some companies do have good intentions with a little extra effort and money put into diversity efforts.
A truly objective hiring process would take into account that Joe and Charley who both got the same results on the coding test are not equally qualified if Joe grew up poor, with parents who never graduated high school, paid his own way through university by working full-time, and along with raising a child as a single parent. While Charley comes from a wealthy family and focused only on studying and job interview prep. With his parents passing along some of their own higher education to him as needed, connecting him to their large network for job opportunities, etc.
Joe is obviously a better candidate. His starting line was far behind Charley's and yet he crossed the finish line at the same time. Joe would be a better candidate even if he passed the finish line a little after Charley. If you want a truly objective hiring process you need to look at starting lines, not just finish lines.
Most companies are doing almost the opposite and only looking at the finish line. They want to look only at the skills and exclude the actual person in a misguided effort to be objective.
All that really does it amplify existing societal bias and privilege by rewarding those who got the most breaks in life.
> this is such a difficult problem to solve.
Agreed. And it would be more expensive. Part of why the status quo is so hard to change. You've got to spend the money and do the work. Or take shortcuts and discriminate on one side or the other.
But looking at what a candidate can do is objective. Trying to compare how tough each one had it is extremely subjective. Is being a woman harder than a minority? Is having a low iq harder than being poor? Being a single parent harder than being addicted to alcohol?
Maybe Charley had depression and anxiety and never made any friends while Joe is outgoing and did allowing him to form study groups easier. Maybe Charley's parents insisted he become a lawyer and he never touched code until college. Maybe Charley has a speech impediment, maybe he is ugly, maybe he is on the spectrum, maybe, maybe, maybe.
We are here to judge how someone can do the job, not go through their life history trying to judge how much harder or easier they had it than someone else.
> We are here to judge how someone can do the job.
You missed the most important part of my point. Someone who crosses the finish line at the same time as someone else, but started from further back is almost always better at doing the job.
I already said it's very difficult to objectively measure. But any improvement in doing so will give you a competitive advantage in finding the best candidates.
I can't agree with your generalization that people who faced more challenges are likely to be better at doing the job. It seems possible those early life difficulties could be traumatizing, leaving those folks less resilient.
The US military used to think successful soldiers with childhood trauma, had coping skills that protected them in deployment. When they ran the studies, they found they were completely wrong - people with childhood trauma, regardless of their military success, were multiple times (4-6x odds ratios) more likely to develop PTSD, (re-)start smoking, or misuse substances.
It's a neat narrative: go through hardship + come out the other side = better coping skills / more productivity. However, humans are complex and often fragile.
I accept the argument that a person who has experienced more hardships has accomplished more to reach that same point. That could be justified if your hiring principles are "who has earned this spot more". It doesn't necessary follow that their trajectory has a steeper slope from the point of hiring.
Clearly the person is not less resilient in the stories I gave. They made it to the finish line. They have already demonstrated years of resilience and dedication to a goal. Why would you expect that to change so suddenly?
You've also created a strawman. I never mentioned childhood trauma or much at all of early life aside from growing up poor. Whatever trauma that may have caused certainly did not interfere with their accomplishments to date.
> The US military used to think successful soldiers with childhood trauma...
This is not war nor the battlefield. Let's see studies about people and their career success.
> Usually only at a very superficial level. Enough to comply with the law
Any objective evidence to support this? My experience has been the opposite - people care deeply about being objective, in order to make better hiring decisions.
Here is a meta-analysis of "every available field experiment of hiring discrimination against African Americans or Latinos".
Just a simple name change on a resume can result in discrimination. Lots of it.
"On average, white applicants receive 36% more callbacks than equally qualified African Americans (95% confidence interval of 25–47% more), based on random-effects meta-analysis of data since 1989, representing a substantial degree of direct discrimination"
> people care deeply about being objective, in order to make better hiring decisions.
They really don't. It costs a lot of money to care deeply. Most companies optimize for rejecting too many candidates, looking for red flags as a time saver. This has been common practice for decades. They do it because there are usually a lot of applicants, and it's a cheap way to reduce the numbers quickly.
But it's even worse now. It's has been codified into job candidate filtering software. "Applicant Tracking System software is used by 75% of US employers to help filter job candidates".
"If an applicant's work history has a gap of more than six months, the resume is automatically screened out"
That's the opposite of caring deeply about being objective for who is the best candidate. You are making decisions based on very superficial information.
It does seem objective at first. Because it is objectively looking at one factor and making a yes or no decision. But that's exactly what I meant when I said at only a superficial level. You aren't objectively screening for the best candidates. Instead you are objectively screening for a signal, and not even a good signal. You need to screen humans, not signals.
The study suggests there is discrimination, it does not speak to anyone's intent. You are doing a lot of psychological projection on a large, diverse group of people whom you have never met nor spoken to about what they care about.
You are judging intention based on results. Those are not the same thing.
If you are discriminating that early in the process and with such high numbers, and with no improvement, you can't be said to care deeply. That's called lip service.
You said that they care deeply. You are doing a lot of psychological projection on a large group of diverse people. I proved the results are concerning. Prove they simultaneously care but have somehow managed to make no improvements in decades in the results. Lacking proof on your side, we'll have to judge based on results.
There are a lot more people of color trying to break into the field than there are companies willing to hire them. There is a big difference between what they are saying and what they are implementing and I can say with absolute confidence that diversity is just lip service. FAANGs primarily recruit from other FAANGs. If none of those companies are diverse how are they going to diversify their recruitment?
Take Apple for example, out of the 600+ jobs posted on their career website only 19 even mention students. And some of those are actual student jobs: student outreach, student recruiters. If they have a different pipeline for recruiting students I'm not aware of it. If new graduate positions are only recruited at campus job fairs that has a greater potential to be worse. FAANGs haven't been recruiting from majority minority schhols or HBCUs.
There was actually a big twitter thread by a black recruiter at Google (now cut) who out and out said that Google's interviewing engineers looked down on black seniors and ranked them universally lower than white seniors, particularly black seniors from historically black universities. She had to fight tooth and nail to accomplish getting the first black entry-level-from-college hire in all of Google's history.
And it was specifically about hiring from HBU's vs other elite institutions, not about hiring black applicants in general which is how you described it.
Why attribute malice to people at these companies when it is possible that all the challenges and disadvantages minorities and women have to surpass, in the end, result in those groups not coming up at the top, with the ultimate sorting function being the hiring process?
I see getting hired as the last stage in the pipeline, with the first stages being your family, then your education and then employment.
The more things go wrong in the first stages, the less likely it is for one to succeed at getting to the top of the next stage.
If people from underprivileged families can only afford to go to the 50% best school in the state, then to the 75% best college, then by the time they enter the job search page, they won't be at the top of the list (again, on average).
I'll use myself as an example: I had the privilege of coding for entire weekends when I was young, while my peers had to work the land. This gave me a distinct advantage early on, which I capitalized on, so at an interview with a company I am more likely to get hired than if those same peers had hypothetically applied, again because it wouldn't make sense for a company to pass on the best candidate when they are all competing for talent, regardless of race, gender, height or other ways of splitting people into groups.
I think everyone agrees that the current situation when it comes to diversity in the workplace is not acceptable, and we should definitely fix it, but in my opinion, if companies are competing fairly for talent, then that part of the pipeline doesn't really need fixing. We can instead use it as a test to see if the attempts at fixing the earlier stages result in better numbers.
P.S. This a difficult subject and I don't intend to offend anyone. Despite my relative privilege above, compared to my peers in the US, I still grew up in a poor and underprivileged family and am behind my current peers both financially and socially, so it's a topic that hits home for me.
It's not offensive per ae but it is a worn-out canard that has been plied by the likes of Richard Rodriguez and apologists for segregated systems for decades. "I'm all in favor for equality but you're too late when it comes to [job applications, college admissions etc] because the damage is already done."
Truly qualified people on the margins are still getting shut out at every level, every age and stage. Mediocrity is still pushing the center ahead of everyone else. The fact that wsj/economist/HN has turned anti-woke doesn't change the facts.
Wait wait wait let's get back to how white dudes are dropping out because of woke tyranny! Nobody wants to hear about failing DEI efforts. Sure whites still dominate the workforce but it just isn't fun anymore!
Which is demonstrably true; they're not hiring from the general population they're hiring largely from universities, and you can look at those universities and see there's already an imbalance in demographics of the available job candidates.
40 applications and 2 resume consultations later and no interview even offered. Meanwhile, some guy you run circles around in real world programming/business experience is 8 for 10. My white classmates noticed this before I did because I’ve just accepted it as part of life.
Your experience does not match research on the job market generally. Multiple studies show increased responses to resumes with "whitened" names. This is, of course, at odds with the white victimhood narrative that unqualified minorities are taking jobs, when it is in fact the opposite which is occurring.
It's a sort of interesting read but nothing too dramatic and whether it's evidence of racism is subject to interpretation. What isn't subject to interpretation is the claim that the study shows that "whitened" names increase callbacks. On the contrary whitening names has no effect on callbacks as indicated on page 31:
"Whitening the name only (versus not whitening at all) did
not make a statistically significant difference for black applicants"
The actual study shows that removing racial indicators from experience is what results in a gap in callbacks. So someone who represents themselves as the leader of their campus' "Black Student Business Association" is less likely to get a call back than someone who represented themselves as the leader of their campus' "Student Business Association". They refer to the removal of racial indicators as whitening but I think that's prematurely jumping to conclusions. The name aspect is certainly a form of whitening, since black names are being changed to white names. But it's premature to refer to the removal of racial indicators and making the experience racially neutral as a form of whitening.
Other forms of experience that explicitly mention race result in less callbacks than when that same experience doesn't mention race. Whether this is racism or not can not be concluded strictly based off of the study's parameters. For example, if I were presented with one candidate who was in charge of the university's "Law Society" I would probably pick that person over someone who was in charge of that university's "Black Law Society", and I don't think I would be racist for doing so. I would consider being in charge of an organization that is open to all races or is independent of race as a more prestigious accomplishment than being in charge of an organization that is race specific.
To test whether I was racist in my decision making, I would need to pick someone who was not in charge of anything over someone who was in charge of the "Black Law Society", with all else being equal. The study did not do this comparison and unfortunately the study does not present the raw data so there's no way for me to do this analysis myself.
I could bicker about some of the methodological issues as well which are not exactly rigorous, as well as the fact that this study is not exactly pertinent to this conversation as they only looked at internships for jobs that are not technical in nature, with the bulk of them being sales and marketing, and customer service jobs, instead of engineering, computer science, law, or professional jobs.
Ultimately no study is going to be perfect but one should not read too much into many of these studies. They are not nearly as rigorous or definitive as one would expect and furthermore they don't tend to generalize.
You are assuming that FAANGs are representative of the general job market. The parent was referring to CS degrees specifically.
Imagine you having always bought tasty tomatoes from your local farm, and someone steps in to show you studies that determined that the generally tomatoes in the US are tasteless.
I'm also not arguing that tasty tomatoes are taking shelf space away from other fruit.
I explicitly said the general job market, I made no claims about the behavior of FAANGs. Indeed, I think there is little value in considering the behavior of FAANGs in a discussion of the general job market. I was responding to head off the generalizing of the white victimhood narrative which often happens in these discussions.
> HR typically wants their diversity numbers up badly so if you're gay
You're right, I always fail that interview question where they ask me what my sexual preference is and I say women... ...Seriously? you are just making stuff up now.
"I’m a black college student now and every conversation with friends back home includes some mention of dropping out because it’s not for us as well."
I can only recommend that you have to base life decisions on your own experience, because it can differ dramatically.
I have an experience from which I have drawn some conclusions - I am an immigrant and many of my co-immigrants are convinced that the locals dislike them, they feel they are being treated unfairly, etc.
I was unable to square my experience with their's: surely they can't be imagining things, but at the same time I cannot be just magically lucky. Some of them are older generation, maybe things were different back then. Maybe, when they face difficulties they are more likely to attribute it to discrimination. Maybe some behavioural stereotyoes play a role - I don't know.
For a while I wanted to try a 'secret shopper' experiment, create two fake Linkedin profiles, identical except background- try applying for jobs with them. Never got round to it.
A study has been made with your experiment here in Canada. The result was that the white-sounding profiles got more interviews based solely on last name, no picture needed.
> For a while I wanted to try a 'secret shopper' experiment
We did something like this! But we swapped slightly reworded resumes and the response ratio leaned even further in the white classmate’s favor. We just laughed, as if we couldn’t believe that what we half-joked about actually happened. I’m long past the point of being sad. I guess that’s life.
As far as I can tell, Big Tech has terrible numbers for diversity and they are tripping over themselves trying to bring the numbers up. I really, truly believe that non-white, non-male candidates are not going to suffer if they can get the resume on the table.
> I’m a black college student now and every conversation
> with friends back home includes some mention of
> dropping out because it’s not for us as well.
Naive question, I don't live where you live. But who is the "us" that your friends speak of? Black people? Black Americans? Black people from a specific subculture?
And finally, what determines that college is not for the "us" your friend refers to? Culture? Post-graduation job prospects? At least from his perspective.
> “We know we’re not what companies are looking for”
Why do you say that? Because I can tell you as an employee of a FAANG company that you are exactly what these companies are looking for. They’ve got serious diversity issues - especially among Black men (not assuming a gender here just facts) - and they are desperate to balance themselves out.
I mean that as an encouraging statement. You ARE who is being looked for. Be confident in that and use it to your advantage.
Where are you and your friends getting your information from? If you're in the US or Europe, IMO the market for programmers has never been better. It may be a struggle to get the first job but if you persevere, it will get easier.
I can't speak for your personal experience, but at least on paper, companies are begging for more diverse hires, even blatantly admitting to breaking the Civil Rights act to do so.
>students who are a member of a group that is historically underrepresented in the technology industry will receive priority in the selection process. This group includes women, ethnic minorities and students with disabilities.
Unfortunately, once you’re giving “priority” to such a broad group of people (e.g. every permutation of gender, whatever you consider ethnic, and ability minorities) it becomes easy to say one thing and continue doing another.
The companies that have to virtue-signal do so because you wouldn’t notice if they didn’t tell you. I’d prefer they skip that and hire who they want without the pretense, and if that’s not me, fine, but please be honest.
I think your comment, and the responses to it help advance my point: there are a bunch of narratives out there that are not wholly rooted in reality (or out of date in your case). These can have detrimental effects.
There are certainly black individuals who would pursue a career in tech, if not for the (perhaps earned) perception that tech is hostile towards black people. Things have changed, but the narrative hasn’t, and that is doing real damage.
I’m trying to say the same sort of thing applies to white men and college—just there being a perception of college campuses being hostile to them is going to prevent many of them from going. And people will be hurt by that, in one way or another.
> some mention of dropping out because it’s not for us as well
That is cultural transition & stereotype threat first-generation college attendees face, regardless of race.
> When you see people with equivalent resumes already coasting by in the job market because they could get their last names and LinkedIn photos past the screening and into an interview it’s hard to believe that’ll change post-graduation
If anything, they are probably getting introductions/doors opened for them by friends & family. It sounds like you are probably applying for some of the most competitive positions in the world, Google and many other places have less than 1% acceptance rate for interns. Harvard is an order of magnitude less selective. It sucks, but don't let struggling to get an internship get you down.
One of the things everyone hears from some cousin, uncle, aunt, brother, sister, parent, or friend when they don’t get selected for something these days is some form of, “oh you didn’t get it because you are insert [black, white, latinx, male, female, young, old, etc].” This comment is about them not you.
Avoid this line of thinking. It may be true, or it may not be. You will probably never know. What I do know is this is an unhelpful and defeatist line of thinking. Instead prove the haters wrong.
I can't speak to hiring practices at larger companies, but if my experience working at smaller companies is any indication I think things might be shifting. At my last job, they were focused on hiring for diversity to create a more desireable workplace and improve retention. I think this mindset is starting to become more commonplace, so you may find that you're no longer in such a bad position once you graduate.
I wonder how woman feel reading such comments. Men dominated better paying jobs and positions of power since forever. It took 50+ years between equal rights before the law to equal opportunities in the labour market and education.
Men still have every opportunity a woman has. In addition, they are still recognized more for leading positions. They also dominate about every trade related job.
Yet, they are 'left without a purpose', when all they need it to do is do whatever they want.
Women didn't and don't need well paying jobs to start a family.
What "equal right" do you mean, that "equaled opportunities in the labor market and education"?
Also you seem to miss on the fact that men get worse grades in school (which some say is because of discrimination), which makes it harder for them to enter university.
That's not what their argument is about at all. Don't change the context to argue in bad faith.
Women don't have the same financial expectations as men do. This is true even today, despite all the push for equal pay and equal rights. Often, that's prior to even getting into a relationship. If you seek an indication, ask a bunch of guys if they would settle for a girl still living at home and then ask the inverse, both groups aged in their 20s.
Given how men are increasingly "giving up on society" because of these standards being harder to achieve every day, GP's argument isn't that improbable at all.
I'm not changing context or attempting to argue in bad faith. The statement is just asinine and delusional with regards to American culture at least.
You sound like you have some preconceived notion of you or your friends being wronged by women or something that I'm not going to be able to shake or have a reasonable discussion about.
I will however say, in words that may appease your ideology - it's honestly never been easier to get a banging hot girlfriend than in the current climate. You literally just have to not be completely fucking weird, have a hint of how to dress in something that compliments your figure, have the smallest standards of 21st century developed country hygiene, and one ever so slightly interesting hobby. Seriously, women will throw themselves at you.
But keep telling yourself what you want to think and reinforcing your views. I've honestly felt nothing but bad for women in STEM lately after an internship as a MechE in a fairly large and well known company. The older men acted fucking disgustingly towards the female interns, when all they're trying to do is make a career in STEM.
First you kneejerk towards "who says women want X?" when the argument was clearly "men often need this to be perceived as a partner, to get X". How you fail to see the leap there is beyond me.
Second, please keep your preconceived notions of me to yourself. They do not add to the discussion at all.
As for what's left worth responding to. Look up the rise of male sexlessness compared to female sexlessness if you seek further evidence of what's happening. The massive filtering and selection criteria happening in online dating. Considering your American-based view, surely you aren't blind to the increasing rates of gymgoers and even steroid use, and the men's grooming industry growing ever more. If anything, that doesn't signify a lack of men trying to maintain themselves, yet it still contradicts your idea of "just take a shower, go buy some clothes and get a girlfriend bro".
>But keep telling yourself what you want to think and reinforcing your views. I've honestly felt nothing but bad for women in STEM lately after an internship as a MechE in a fairly large and well known company.
As an aside, how can you in the same breath accuse me of wanting to form an echo chamber when you immediately cite your own anecdote as a reason to push your own view, despite the fact your anecdote does not invalidate the concerns of men at all? Surely you do not lack the capacity to feel for both the struggles of men and women, regardless of the cause? Men and women have their own troubles, and this incessant need to trivialize one over the other is exactly why we're not getting any further.
Lots of people want to start families. It's not something I invented or "default to". There is nothing wrong with wanting to start families, either. Some may find that nothing in the big as cool world is as cool as having children.
Nobody says you have to do that, but if some men and women want to do it, it will show up in the statistics.
Also even if you don't want a family and just want to explore the world alone, you don't need that much money. What exactly, do you want all the money for, that a high end career would give you? Also working 60 hour weeks would also prevent you from exploring the world, wouldn't it?
No one ever stopped women from pursuing career in high-frequency trading or anything else. No one ever stopped women from inventing Amazon or Microsoft from their garage.
No one ever stopped women from choosing to graduated in science, maths, finance, rather than art, litterature, or "gender studies".
This famous hoax has been debunked many times. For a start, the countries where women pursue IT and science the most, are the most patriarchists (Turkey, Iran, Algeria, Middle-east, etc...). The more relaxed are gender-roles, the more women choose to study arts and litterature, or "gender studies", the same who then complain that there are not enough women building trains.
Second, as many in the west have seen here, we were all pushed towards studying, pursuing masters, etc. This was the policy in most of the western countries (some may say this was silly but this is another debate). I have seen first hand our teachers (mostly female, by the ways) pushing us to apply to Science curriculums, and my fellow female students do everything they could to avoid it.
As someone who has experience with the educational systems of the middle east, I find it amusing how you are misinterpreting the situation.
It's extremely hard for women in these countries to get good careers in any field other than teaching or medicine especially since they are often forced to marry and leave the work force (they can't work without their husbands' permission and they almost always handle all child care). It is the norm for women to marry right after graduating from college and not doing so is seen as abnormal.
The combination of this results in women going to college and studying what they actually _like_ in their final years of "freedom." They choose STEM because they like it.
In the west, women are probably as inherently interested in STEM as in these other countries, but they also know that they need to get a job and they often choose career paths that would give them less pain due to harassment or discrimination.
Your reasoning is that in brutally sexist societies women choose to study completely male-dominated fields because they don't have to make a living after it, whereas in the most egalitarian societies in the entire world sexism pushes them towards traditionally female fields to escape discrimination?
So, that makes you reach the following conclusion: "the more a society is egalitarian - say, Scandinavian countries, the more it forces women to do painting and arts".
Are you saying that "egalitarian" societies are in fact sexist, and that teaching schools/staff (largely populated by progressive left-wing women), are in fact preventing little girls from doing maths and learning C in their bedroom ?
A common hypothesis is that there are genetic and social/economic aspects that push people towards one field or another. If you make an effort to remove all social forces, and succeed, then the only forces left are the inborn ones- so their effects maximize. So, if there are any inborn differences in the distribution of interest in e.g. engineering between men and women, you would expect to see their effects most keenly in the most low-pressure countries. Inegalitarianism adds pressure that money is useful for dealing with.
The point is, in middle eastern societies, the realities of working in STEM don't impact the choices women make for their college majors as much. Most of them go to college before marriage with the expectation of not having a long term career in what they study (public colleges are almost always free there, btw). They decide what to do considering different sets of pressures in comparison to women in the west.
Women in more egalitarian societies make their choices under different pressures. They need more of a long-term plan for their career choice and they don't have as many children or marry or leave the workforce as early nor as often as women in the middle east.
Do note though that as more women get into STEM, the experienced and perceived discrimination levels drop dramatically and even more women make the switch. Also, I think it's useful to note that there has been a systemic reduction in what I call the level of "generational misogyny." I can confirm from my own experience that there is a huge difference in how older vs younger (<40yo) men interact with women.
Younger folks are way more egalitarian and some of them assume that they all get the same treatment from older folks but that is just not true. A 30 years old male researcher could have entirely pleasant and productive working relationships with both female researchers in his generation and male researchers in their 60s. He might not expect or understand the degree of hostility or discrimination his female colleagues face when dealing with these very same older researchers. I believe that as time passes and the egalitarian culture actually gets to the "top of the food chain," we will see a distribution that is more representative of male and female preferences without the added discriminatory pressure.
But time has already passed since greater sexism and males and females have already gravitated in two consistent directions - men working with things and women working with people, even when it defies traditional gender roles, such as computers and business. You expect that trend to change direction after some tipping point of sufficiently little sexism?
So: "women choose a career that would give them less pain".
You can flip it any way you want, you will always end up with the following conclusion which demolishes your feminists dogmas: that women and men have inherently different interests, which, big news, is not surprising, given that they are different.
?? It's entirely reasonable for two populations to make statistically different choices when they are under different pressures. It is exactly what is happening with what is being discussed in this thread: white men skipping college because they have face pressures to earn money, feel college is not for them, etc. Women face different levels of these pressures and also pressure to skip STEM and go into "feminine" majors.
The different pressures are sufficient to explain much of the different major choices, especially when considering the changing distribution in other countries with different sets of pressures.
There are indeed differences between men and women -- cis-men can't give birth, for instance. However, other than the statistical population differences, an average man and an average women with equitable socioeconomic settings are incredibly similar in many areas. Perhaps even in an ideal world there would be more female biologists and more male IT workers. That would be fine. What matters is that a human who is interested in something would have a fighting chance to get there.
Right now, cultural and societal factors are tipping different scales in different ways. For future generation, we would do well to reduce the imbalance -- encourage and support minorities, women, and, yes, white men. People face different battles and helping some does not mean others have to be ignored.
You speak like someone or something is forcefully preventing a girl from studying IT if she wants to. I like how feminists make it sound like they live under the Taliban. Give me one actual example of a girl that was prevented from doing what she wanted.... it's the opposite. Women are freer than ever to do whatever they want. Bad luck for feminist dogmas: it produces the opposite result of what they hoped for, and confirms the gender bias.
Yeah, I have seen this about Eastern Europe (Russia) and all it convinced me about what that the author dont understand neither Eastern Europe nor sexism. It counted fiends considered non-technical in Eastern Europe as technical. It counted school of basic administration as technical economy too.
It also assumed that sexism is straight line. In fact, while easter europe is overall more sexist, there are many aspects in which it is less sexist. Some aspects of American sexism are present much less.
The confusion is effectively from American assuming that every single aspect of their country must be superior.
The more relaxed gender roles a society has, the more men aspire to be musicians, philosophers, comedians, sports journalists, filmmakers, poets, or motivational speakers instead of studying for a useful STEM career.
As recently as 1970 women in the US weren't allowed to open checking accounts or get loans from a bank by themselves, but tell me more about how no one _ever_ stopped women from doing what they want.
I fail to see how a women being unable to open a bank account in the 60s, explains why a girl born in 2000, would not want to spend her time geeking on her computer trying to build a website, in 2012. But i'm all ears.
> would not want to spend her time geeking on her computer
Well, based on studies I have seen, if the family had only one computer, it waay often in boys room rather then in girls room. PC was assumed to be boys toy.
The culture emerges from there.
Anecdotally, that is patter I do see around. Parents of young girls are way more often enforcing "no screen till this or that age" while parents of young boys almost brag about boys playing games on them.
Yes, out of the blue, in all countries, and all cultures, on all continents, parents spontaneously put computers and screen, engines, motors, in kids rooms. What a weird collective behavior ! I'm sure it has nothing to do with the many experiments carried out on children, from the youngest of age, showing that even 2 days after birth, boys and girls had different attractions to moving objecs, or human faces for instance !
I've never known a family with a family computer put it anywhere but a common area. I'm sure they're out there but I've never seen it.
Maybe boys get more screen time in families like that because they're more interested in computers? Maybe it's assumed to be a boys toy because boys show more interest in it?
And in 1970 direct deposit did not exist, everyone was paid by check and could go cash it at the issuing bank, which was always local. Man or woman. Whether you had an account or not.
i.e, the banking situation you mention was not a barrier to employment whatsoever.
They literally have. That's exactly what nearly all of history has been. Women face an entire pipeline of people trying to stop them from pursuing anything beyond a family. My wife, in high school, was directly told never to take any math in college because girls can't do math. From the moment they are born, most women were told they can't do things boys can do. Yes, these days a fair amount of girls are finally told they can do things, but they still face discrimination. A man fails at something and they'll be told to stand back up and keep trying. A woman fails, and they get told, "well, nice try, you did your best! Go ahead and start a family!"
As another anecdote, I have friends that are married and both in the same science field in academia. Both work at the same university. The woman was told that she needed to prove that she wasn't just hired because of her husband. The man was not told the same.
"all they need it to do is do whatever they want" sounds like a very middle class take on things.
People from working class rust belt towns in the UK, for example, can't just do what they want, since there are no opportunities. But they are told that they are privileged and can do what they want, and then people wonder why support for labour/leftism has plummeted in working class communities.
Is it a "narrative" that college isn't it worth it anymore or is that largely based in fact in the US? Especially when it comes to specific degrees that don't have a demand in the workplace. The cost of higher education in the US has financially crippled millions. And trade jobs pay well for far less education costs. Doing a cost / benefit analysis would seem the wisest choice.
The bigger problem to me is that with such a high cost for university education, our future electricians won't have one. Whereas in Europe they very possibly might. I know which society I prefer to live in and it's not the one where people are less educated.
What narrative about uniform privilege? Can you give some sources?
I've also never heard privilege explained as making life "just easy". I've heard just for example that life can still be hard but your skin color is not one of the things making your life hard.
I'd be interested in reading these narratives that are so different from the narratives I've read about privilege.
I don't know. I think living in a society where most people don't do any meaningful work and are exposed to just theoretical academic style education till they are 24-25 isn't good either. I don't think it's a good use of anyone's time to sit in a chair and look at the whiteboard for 15-16 best years of your life.
Is it entirely false though? What benefit does a college degree in sociology does to a person (and even broader society) when the person will likely be in over 100k+ debt?
The right question is - why does it have to cost so much when it's possible to teach the same exact thing for ~3k USD in eastern Europe :) And then these developers come to USA or western Europe and it doesn't seem that they are performing badly :)
I’m not convinced that all those men need to go to college, but they clearly need something.
This. We are seeing the results of what was reported in the book Boys Adrift.
My older son just graduated high school. He has no interest in college at the moment, and has shown a gift for working with his hands. He is currently doing a carpentry apprenticeship with an acquaintance that runs a renovation and design company. He loves the work, loves the people he works with[0], and comes home and wants to build more stuff. He's making pretty decent money as an 18 year old, and is part of something that very much embodied.
[0] His crew is run by Swedish woman who was trained as a metal worker, so it isn't just a bunch of dudes, which is also great.
I very much struggled with discipline and motivation at university and eventually dropped out. It was not until I started working when I became a highly motivated self-driven learner. Now I love studying and learning (and teaching), but I do it at my own pace and I choose the things that matter for my work or are just plain fun.
Looking back a decade later, it would have been very beneficial if I didn't go to university but instead did an apprenticeship and developed from there, built up confidence and independence incrementally and forming my path iteratively.
Most of my friends and family actually went (are going) on such a path, from apprenticeship/trade-school to working and eventually advanced training or university later in life.
In Switzerland this model is widely appreciated and seems to be the default (I didn't look at numbers). Newly the (first) apprenticeship is called "Erstausbildung" (initial education), implying that it is the first of many steps in our education, revisited/expanded at later stages in life.
In many other (OECD) countries this seems not to be the case and college/university is regarded as the default or thing to aspire to for everyone. I personally don't agree with that notion and have become more and more convinced of a more continuous and flexible education that isn't necessarily tied to academics.
I hope some of the implicit stigma around older undergrads goes away too.
Not everyone is motivated or gifted enough at 18 to grind through 4 years while maximizing social interactions and general happiness.
I really do believe university education is very beneficial to most people but at different stages of their lives and one solution fits all is not good.
it is a lot easier to be motivated to learn when you're doing something you want to do and filling in the gaps your knowledge as-needed as opposed to grinding gen-eds because they'll be on the test... that gates your placement into another set of gen-eds.
My dad used to quote somebody in saying, "Education is wasted on the young".
My experience sounds similar to yours. Though, when I tried to go back to school to dive in again, I found the 'system' was highly oriented towards parenting 18yo kids in all the worst ways imaginable. It was nauseating and unbearable being in that environment, and even going through the application/acceptance process (filling out pledges for conduct, right-thinking, etc). Much has changed with online learning, but I still feel the B&M universities are a very ill-fit for independently-minded adult learners.
Structuring and _deciding_ your own learning, materials, books, projects etc. is time consuming, but it makes everything more pragmatic, focused and tailored. And over time we can leverage that skill in of itself to teach others:
Learning for people who have work experience is really different. We have context, clear goals and so on. Teaching other 'adult' students is really fun, because we get to figure out what suits them instead of trying to hit measurements predefined by some committee. Ultimately it is just about giving guidance and ideas, kind of like consulting to learn, what to learn and so on.
"Education is wasted on the young" - this was exactly my experience. I didn't know it then, but I first needed to build up confidence, make 'real' mistakes and learn from them. I was also completely unfit for the type of scheduled and predetermined learning that happens at universities. My mind wanders too much and I'm driven by answering my own questions that I feel matter or are interesting. Also a reason why I don't work in large/streamlined orgs.
I have a 20 year old (21 in 2 days, god help me) son in college now, and one of his friends and our neighbor the same age dropped out and started welding school. As far as I know he loves it.
As a son of a blue collar mechanic, I am all for this; we need more tradespeople in the US, and I suspect he'll be well on his way to financial security at least as early if not earlier than my son (if he takes care of his finances).
> [0] His crew is run by Swedish woman who was trained as a metal worker, so it isn't just a bunch of dudes, which is also great.
I find it fascinating you needed to drop this comment in order to justify your son's work environment, implying that all male environments are inherently toxic. It's very rare to find people suggesting that an all female work environment is inherently bad.
I'm not justifying his work environment, merely pointing out that it is more diverse than the usual construction site. I simply appreciate that as an 18 year old, he is getting a unique experience.
I thought the same. It gets a little tiresome the very narrow railroad tracks of thought we are now expected to adhere to on any given topic.
Any minor diversion always require some statement to imply "hey Im still on the railroad tracks..."
My belief is that time will prove this to be an excellent strategy. Knowing how to make things of high quality with your hands is the new college degree in many ways in the sense of being a high value minority in the labor market.
It's more accurate to say that Universities and Colleges are extinct so the story should be what is taking its place and what are the consequences...
Its just like the Ed loan program..
Many don't realize its a teaching goal tool, those that get that they need to form a business around their brand to pay off the loan win and those that do not lose and society loses.
We should not bet on society losing this time around such as the elites did in the US!
> A narrative that (white) men are uniformly privileged and life is just easy for them.
I doubt this has anything to do with it. What is the argument here? They hear this and believe it so they don't think they need school?
I grew up in a white, working class community, and in my experience nobody paid attention to liberals on Twitter calling them privelaged. Certainly not enough to decide not to go to college over it.
...an entire generation that feels lost, without purpose, and unwanted. I'd argue that it is largely up to the parents to instill a feeling of worth and help kids/young adults find intrinsic motivation, not the educational system.
It isn't necessarily just the educational system that's leaving this impression, it is a culture at large, for example on social media, and in various fields including the arts. Parents can influence all they want but the outside world needs to support these influences to an extent or they fall flat.
I think that's exactly how racism works right? You segregate people by how they look like and you make them believe that because how they look like and their origins they are less important then the others. Kind of funny how we humans think: "let's correct a mistake repeating it over and over again".
When one of progressives guiding philosophies is “The only remedy to past discrimination is present discrimination. The only remedy to present discrimination is future discrimination.” then this is exactly the plan. It’s all in their texts and one only has to read them to see plainly the type of policy they work towards.
Read “How to be an Anti-Raciat” by Ibram X Kendi. It was a top selling book last year and he is a leading figure of the progressive left. His academic work is cited heavily in other progressive academic literature.
There's an interesting dynamic here where imo the silent majority of progressives don't buy his approach and think it's counterproductive, but any lone soul who says so is called out, which side are you on here anyways.
So this guy gets to represent himself as a spokesman for the movement and nobody really wants to contradict it under their real name.
He isn't a lone wolf or something though. Critical Theory covers not only race (as in this case) but gender, sexuality, disability and fat studies, and all types of "social justice" scholarship. They all come from Postcolonial Theory (essentially deconstructing Western thought and Western Liberalism) which has had a massive influence on all of these as they have adapted them.
From bell hooks and Kimberle Crenshaw (intersectionality) into leading theories on feminist and racial thought - this is the progressive and academic left. It is the leading thought in every elite university. And you can't run away from it and say "us silent majority progressives...." - a progressive is either this or they aren't progressive by today's standard. It is a social force that is trying to get inside of everything it can, from unrelated academic scholarship (look at what's in modern STEM curricula) as well as corporate America and now elite high schools.
My advice is to choose Liberalism without identity politics and reject this school of thought as illiberal, totalitarian, and harmful.
(For what it's worth, the entire scholarship of critical theory isn't all awful. There's good things in there and the identification of many societal problems is probably right. However, it isn't unique to them and their solutions for these problems are awful and regressive.)
Really, from what I can see all of current progressivism is compatible with his approach.
The silent majority of people who would have called themselves progressives a decade ago are silent because they are silenced and called racists or just right-wing if they question the new orthodoxy.
Ergo, the people you are referring to as a silent majority are no longer included as progressives.
If all of my policy preferences code as progressive but I think Kendi and the white fragility lady are jackasses, what does that make me then under your definition?
Charitably, cognitively dissonant and more harshly, a useful idiot some would say. I’d assume an egalitarian person who means well and has started to become suspicious of the more illiberal aspects of progressive motivations.
“Useful idiot” is a term coined back in the day to describe people who unwittingly spread the propaganda of communists without really understanding the ultimate goals. In this case being a progressive while disagreeing with the leading ideas of the movement.
And no it doesn’t mean a vote for Trump. It means not supporting candidates that parrot this type of rhetoric and to not support causes/movements that are a part of it. FWIW Trump did ban critical race theory from being brought into federal offices and Biden quickly reinstated it under the guise of “learning to be nice to each other” - which it isn’t. Biden, in this case, I believe is a useful idiot for propagating their propaganda, mistaking it for harmless “diversity training”. There’s a big difference!
I think that the issue goes both ways. Modern conservatives have adopted a strategy of ignoring or exploiting discrimination and inequality. So if someone cares about addressing those issues, then the current progressives are the only game in town.
> So if someone cares about addressing those issues, then the current progressives are the only game in town.
If you believe in the approach of Kendi and DiAngelo, they are the only game in town.
If you believe Kendi and DiAngelo’s approach is counterproductive then supporting modern progressives is acting against the very issues you care about.
You don’t have to make a choice of which foot to shoot yourself in. You can simply not fire.
There are plenty of more moderate political voices, even within the parties. You can support them and you can denounce the groups whose policies you dislike.
Modern progressives are only in the ‘game’ because people support them. If you don’t like what they represent, you can stop.
> Modern conservatives have adopted a strategy of ignoring or exploiting discrimination and inequality
Are you saying that conservatives today are more likely to engage in "exploiting discrimination and inequality" than conservatives yesterday? Or what did you mean by "modern"?
Perhaps, but I think it’s often less a matter of being afraid of calling extremists out, and more of what I heard someone once refer to as “sane-washing”. Progressives hear extremist views and say “when they say X, what they really are saying is Y. No one actually wants X”, when in reality that’s exactly what extremists want and it gives them cover to continue to push the Overton window until it’s no longer an extremist view. The above exchange is a perfect example.
I think it's pretty clear from the full text that he's not advocating for racism against past racists or their offspring (which, intentional or not, is what your use of the quote makes it sound like).
He's advocating for "anti-racism" which claims there is no such thing as "not racist" policy, only racist policy and anti-racist policy. But he jumps through hoops to redefine racism so that it can suit his argument that "not racist" doesn't exist. That if you don't consider race in literally everything then you are racist, by his definition. This is in direct opposition to the Civil Rights act of 1964:
"Since the 1960s, racist power has commandeered the term “racial discrimination,” transforming the act of discriminating on the basis of race into an inherently racist act. But if racial discrimination is defined as treating, considering, or making a distinction in favor or against an individual based on that person’s race, then racial discrimination is not inherently racist. The defining question is whether the discrimination is creating equity or inequity."
I think the redefining racism you mention is simply pointing out, at a high level, that one law does not erase injustice ingrained into power systems that were instructed by racism for literally hundreds of years, or the effects those systems have had on the targets of this racism and their offspring (things like generational wealth accumulation), and everyone else subject to those systems.
The other thing is the idea that, for those of us growing up in various segments of society that are affected by the above, our very mechanism of thought was generated by this system, and that affects how we think about and perceive these systems (and everything else).
I believe he's simply advocating for being conscious of the above two facts, when examining these systems and reforming them (and of course when teaching the history of these systems). To ignore race and racism as if it never happened is to allow all of that ingrained racism to perpetuate (of systems and of thought). All of this sounds pretty reasonable to me, but that may be due to my particular experience.
That said - I'm no expert, I've only read the linked passage so far, though I've now ordered the book and will start reading it tonight. I'll refrain from commenting further here (I think we're pretty off-topic already). Thanks for the discussion!
In the linked article, for lower income groups white men trail black men for college admissions. (Let alone black women.)
You can't always unequivocally state that white people are privileged over non-whites in every circumstance. Obviously it's going to be true in many cases, but it can't always be just assumed.
It's not as off-topic as you might think as critical theory covers a wide range of things.
One of the biggest issues with Kendi and similar works (of which there are many in the academic world) are they paint a false dichotomy and they frame themselves as the only legitimate response to historical racism, etc. That is, anti-racism is the only way to combat "white supremacy". It's illiberal in this regard (and in fact, the entire body of critical theory is not only skeptical to western liberalism but actively attacks it as "the tools of the oppressor") and I hope you find his remedies as totalitarian and insane as I do. For instance, I don't think a "Department of Anti-Racism" which is staffed by "formally trained anti-racists" and not appointed by elected officials with the authority to "clear" all local, state, and federal policies to ensure they are "anti-racist" is a good idea. And to be equipped with "disciplinary tools" to punish non-compliance...
Just so you know, chalk me up as an 'anti-woke' leftist. Which might mean "Economist(TM) centrist".
I can be in support of anti-systemic-racism actions that do not act on an individual level. I can support universal healthcare, higher income equality and whatnot, without the binary race worldview that Kendi puts out.
Yes you can - you'd be a "Western Liberal", or "Liberal Scientist" or whatever else we want to name the philosophy of thought that began with the Enlightenment. And being a "leftist" in that is 100% consistent with that.
We tend to refer to "liberals" as people on the left but in general a liberal is anyone who is consistent with liberal beliefs which include a fair amount of "conservatism" as well. However, there's quite a few folks on the right that are as illiberal as the progressives are on the left.
Before any of that, I’d blame the disappearance of the sense of service. One’s general mindset should be on what one can contribute, and the rest will follow.
I would like to bring up a point often missed with blue collar housing work (plumber, electrician, dry wall, etc). It is EASY to start your own thing. Once you are licensed and bonded you can quickly buy your own truck, hire an apprentice, setup yelp, setup an online receptionist and be overbooked. Right now plumbers are hard to get and electricians are months out. The plumbers I work with cannot keep up with the work and make over $80 per hour (no where florida). If "Bobs orlando plumbing" runs out of work, they just park the truck. There is NO overhead.
If you contrast to an attorney or doctor -- those firms/practices are extremely challenging to start and operate on your own. The salaries of your employees are high at best, marketing is extremely expensive, and insurance can wipe out a firm/practice.
Not withstanding restrictive licensing systems that require you to put in X years working crap jobs for crap pay under someone who already has the license to ensure that you've "paid enough dues" you're not gonna go around undercutting everyone once you get your license.
They need options. I feel our current school system isn't set up for young men at all. A lot would prefer hands on work as opposed to classroom learning. Promotion of trades schools as alternatives that aren't "lesser" would help a lot.
Being a white male, anecdotally there is more peer and cultural pressure to care about sports, cars, tv, eating tons of meat, and drinking then there is to succeed at school. And for a few decades now a major political party has been bolstering anti-science and anti college messages.
It is unsurprising less men are finishing college in the face of that culture.
While there’s going to be many causes, the aforementioned seem more important than a message of privilege.
> A narrative that (white) men are uniformly privileged and life is just easy for them. And a narrative that those men aren’t wanted by society any more.
As a brown person I think the former is definitely still true. The latter is definitely not true, at least looking at the average white man's number of tinder matches compared to mine.
I am definitely glad to be gay. I think it allows me to see things from outside the bubble of "get a wife, be a defender, raise your children, stay strong and never cry, man up and if you can't provide, you're useless, you can't cry because men don't cry." that heterosexuality seems to favour (both men and women perpetuate this).
Men who fail to provide or "fit in" to their "role" in society become depressed, and then they kill themselves. :/
1. White-Males had the lowest college-enrollment-rates across all categories. They got the lowest in the two lowest income-brackets; basically a three-way tie in the next income-bracket; and just a little higher than Hispanic-Males in the highest income-bracket.
2. Asians had the highest enrollment-rates across all income-brackets.
3. Asians were relatively constant in their enrollment-rates, regardless of income or gender, always above 70%. (Always above ~83%, if excluding the lowest income-bracket.) The gender-gap still leaned toward Asian-Females over Asian-Males, but not by much.
4. Blacks varied heavily by income. Blacks had pretty low enrollment-rates in the lowest income-bracket, but got some of the highest enrollment-rates in the higher income-brackets (after Asians).
5. Black-Females had an odd pattern-deviation: like Black-Males, their enrollment-rates increased dramatically with family-income, getting the highest non-Asian enrollment-rate by the second-highest income-bracket. But then, oddly, their enrollment-rate fell by ~8% from the second-highest to the highest income-bracket.
6. Hispanics were pretty consistent with Whites, especially for Males. For Females, Whites had higher rates in the lowest income-bracket, while Hispanics had somewhat higher rates in all other income-brackets.
7. Ignoring race, enrollment-rates increased significantly with family-income.
8. Ignoring race, enrollment-rates were much higher for Females than Males across all income-brackets.
>Once barriers to female careers were lowered and their access to higher education was expanded, two key factors may have played a role in the female college advantage: relatively greater economic benefits of
college for females and relatively higher effort costs of college going and prepara-
tion for males. (girls exceeded boys in secondary school performance
and attainment)
I can understand this. I think my parents never questioned the usefulness of a formal education. But I am starting to.
My brother tried several different educational paths, pushed by my parents. In the end he got a sort of burnout. After years now he is picking up some work, mainly helping elderly still living alone on any tasks (from computer related to doing groceries). He seems happy, finally.
My other brother hated all his schools, got bullied a lot, he specialized in agriculture in the end. Now he's a truck driver (with one of those super big ones), he likes it. He can still give nice advice on what to plant in my garden, so there's that.
I see that my son is also really interested in many things, but school is not so much "his thing". Sitting still, listening, it's not making him happy. If he has any aspiration of building a life without formal schooling I'd support it. There is so much to learn online. He can be an entrepreneur and we can help him get there. In fact, I'd enjoy it.
Who knows with the insane cost of education, this generation of men may end up self-taught, happy and (in the US important) debt free. Maybe we should worry about the people missing out on this opportunity?
The article made mention of what the example males were doing and what they were earning. There was mention of the average graduate's earnings vs non-graduate, but otherwise they're judging a person skipping a first year of college while they would otherwise have been spending money in the equivalent year. As you and others have implied, these individuals could earn, buy modest property in a quiet state/town, then live a decent life debt free - there are far worse things to achieve.
My brother was a professional basketball player up until his mid-30s. I remember when he was about the same age as the males of the story, he was deciding between a four-year scholarship at an American college, or a four-year contract in the Australian professional league. The pitch from the college was that he could return to Australia in year five and earn x. The pitch from the local team was that he could earn x by year five, but have been earning for each of the first four years; the pro team offered university payments, car, and so on. Pros and cons either way.
He eventually got his degree studying remotely in the later years of his basketball career and transitioned to a desk job. There's always a sense of what might've been, but I think things worked out well enough.
COVID has accelerated this big time. Why spend $5,000 a semester to watch a Zoom lecture from an average professor when you can open YouTube in a new tab and see a world-class professor share the same information for free? It makes no rational sense.
The moment that a serious, legitimate credential system appears, every average university will disappear overnight. We'll be left with an oligarch class that attends the top ±30 universities and everyone else getting a AmaGoogBook certificate of completion.
> Why spend $5,000 a semester to watch a Zoom lecture from an average professor when you can open YouTube a new tab and see a world-class professor share the same information for free? It makes no rational sense.
Because there is much more possible value in college than just the education.
Socializing is a huge part of it. College is a good place to learn how to make friends, date, network, etc.
It's also nearly free at many schools, so I don't envision the future you're describing ever happening. Most 18-22 year olds couldn't think of a better place to be than on a campus almost exclusively filled with people in their age group.
It’s not “world class professors” on YouTube that people are watching instead of their own university’s zoom classes. They’re not paying for zoom classes because they want to learn on campus.
They still want to go to college, they just don’t want to learn online.
This reminds me of a passage from Bryan Caplan's book, "The Case Against Education." Paraphrasing, there is nothing stopping you from walking into a lecture at Harvard or MIT or any other renowned center of learning. No one will ask you for identification or lock you outside. You can buy or download the same textbook and fill out the same homework. (In the case of your "socialization" value, again, no one is stopping you from just walking into a campus and socializing with peers there)
No one does it because we intuitively understand that there is no real value in doing so; the purpose such institutions serve is credentialing, not education.
Well, I did it :-) I did 2 or 3 years of philosophy courses at Sydney Uni. I mean, I just turned up. At the beginning of each semester I'd start doing every possible course, then just keep doing the ones I liked, with interesting/good/admirable lecturers, which turned out to be a lot, 2 or 3 times the amount of lectures weekly than if I'd been enrolled. Also was on their mailing list so also went to special visiting lectures, a regular discussion group, etc etc. No exam stress! I had such a great time. But yeah, most (non-university) people I mentioned it to laughed as if it was crazy.
Most people don't have the time freedom to be able to do this. The opportunity cost would be too high, as they need to work to eat, and sitting in a class isn't work.
Socialization is a huge part of it - perhaps the biggest in terms of impact - because students who worked alongside each other during a similar stage of life, living within short walking distance of each other 24/7, working toward a similar goal, develop a bond which can be immensely valuable later on in networking for job opportunities.
Those students are much less likely to develop such a bond with some rando who just walked in off the street to check out what's going on. That person has zero investment in the experience other than expressed interest and would I'm certain be measurably less successful forming relationships with other students who could help their career in the future. They aren't in the same tribe.
It makes me sick to say it, but this can be even more important than the credentialing. There are multiple stories of students dropping out to start companies and still benefitting from their college peer network in ways that wouldn't happen for someone that wasn't actually a 'true peer'.
I think this is simply a biological tendency at the end of the day and don't see any easy way of changing it.
> Why spend $5,000 a semester to watch a Zoom lecture from an average professor when you can open YouTube in a new tab and see a world-class professor share the same information for free?
Because most employers will not even consider your application without a degree.
You don't pay for instruction or certification you pay for signaling. A student from Arizona State can be more competent than one from Harvard. Who do you think is going to have more doors opened for them?
> A student from Arizona State can be more competent than one from Harvard.
The relevant question from the perspective of those doing the hiring is what is the probability a student from Arizona State is more competent than one from Harvard?
Replace competent with well connected and/or otherwise useful.
Which in turn have massively devalued, given the majority of the job market in most Western countries is only interested in the unicorn willing to eat old bread.
While you are right, the question still stands. There is no value in the latter two. The only value is in the first, and that's not what you're paying for, so why pay at all?
> COVID has accelerated this big time. Why spend $5,000 a semester to watch a Zoom lecture from an average professor when you can open YouTube in a new tab and see a world-class professor share the same information for free? It makes no rational sense.
I don't get that line of thinking:
1. Education isn't a passive lecture-consumption activity. A "world-class professor" who put a lecture on youtube is going to have exactly zero time to talk to you as a student.
2. There's probably not that much difference between the teaching ability of a "world-class professor" and your "average" good professor. That's especially true for undergrad subjects.
I think you're assuming a false equivalency, akin to "why have parents when you can watch videos made by the best parents in the world on television?" The tech version may have many similarities, but it's not equivalent.
To people recommending trades, there's nothing wrong with trades, but you can get more out of college than only a job. You can actually learn things that you wouldn't have learned otherwise. The environment also naturally stimulates and values learning, gathering knowledge and understanding. You can learn how to become a better person and think more critically.
Seeing how many misinformation is going around and the people swallowing it, this seems more important than ever before.
I agree that college should be for education and not 'to get a job'. But until the cost of college in the US comes back down to reality, it's going to fail the cost-benefit analysis.
Some downsides of trades I have not seen mentioned yet are that many of them are hard on the body and/or somewhat risky. So you don't have as long a useful career as in most professions. My dad was a carpenter and I worked with him a few summers when I was young. He asked me how many 50-year-old roofers I had seen during those summers. A friend of his told me there is a reason you never see old welders and painters.
> Why do you need to pay someone to give you lists of books to read, rather than just buying and reading them yourself?
You don't. However, college isn't just a list of books to read, it also includes practical exercises and, most importantly, accountability mechanisms, and there is plenty of evidence that accountability mechanisms tend to improve performance.
Unless college has changed since I went (to a pretty average state school), you can do all that, but the default seemed to be to start off in a program that sounds cool, realize the science classes are too hard, change to an easier major a couple times, finish off your gen-eds with some random survey classes where you just have to write a couple short papers compatible with the professor's world-view, and stumble your way into a bachelor's degree.
The most interesting college classes I took tolerated non-majors reluctantly, if at all. The expectation was that people who were there to be "well-rounded humans" weren't going to take the course seriously.
From my time at college, any 'critical thinking' seemed to mostly be a way to spread the college's accepted narrative, which contains its own brand of disinformation.
I had a fantastic experience at college 25+ years ago. I went to a small liberal arts school, learned how to read and think well. I really appreciated that experience.
When I graduated with my degree in philosophy I went on to run a small climbing gym. I was able to jump into software development during the first internet bubble, where start-ups needed warm bodies who can learn quickly. Fortunately, I had scholarships and graduated with minimal debt. So...it all worked out pretty well. I'm not sure it's worth taking on crushing debt for that experience without a guarantee of a job.
That said, not every person is wired to go to college. There are plenty of trades that can foster the some sort of collegial experiences, if you find the right the person to train you. There are very thoughtful craftspeople out there.
More folks should be given the option for vocational training in blue collar roles that pay really really well. Ever had a decent electrician or plumber come to your house to fix something? They make bank/hr. Or even a welder or carpenter etc etc not the whole world needs to be tech service workers, the economy is more nuanced than that.
But social stigma stemms from everything from dating to parents to friends etc if one does not complete a 4-year degree.
Most tech firms are lifitng the requirement for such a degree as in tech if you can do the work you can do the work and can (I'd say should) be hired. (In a sense, most coding/programming work is blue collar in that sense -- you don't need rocket science to center a div ;)
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[ 10.3 ms ] story [ 395 ms ] threadIf the class were gender-balanced the odds of that would be 1/512; I have no idea what it means ("girls are much more interested in using the library?") but I think it's significant.
There is zero significance to that observation.
If each arrival at the desk were an independent draw from the full class, then, sure, the chance of any given set of 9 arrivals having 9 women would be 1/512. (Though the chance of the sequence of 10 including 9 women and 1 man is 10/1024, or about 5 times more likely; by cherry-picking the set of arrivals to consider, you are añready making the set around you seem more unlikely than it is.)
Of course, if they were where independent the case, there’d also be a non-negligible case of a repeat in that set of arrivals; the fact that you chose a set in line at the same time demonstrates that they aren't a set of independent events. So the whole basis of your 1/512 even on the cherry-picked set is invalid.
There are probably 512 people in this thread right now that have had that same experience you did but didn't reject the null hypothesis so they're not commenting.
I play the game of assessing the gender balance of groups a lot.
Some of it is wondering where society is going, some of it is just trying to avoid sausage parties. Trans people don't give me any trouble because they want to be assigned a certain gender, non-binaries might force me to learn the multinomial distribution but those seem to turn up at the 1/256 - 1/512 level if that.
I stopped going to Yoga classes in my ZIP code because they attract a lot of middle-aged and older men who, I think, are there to look at women without doing anything too strenuous.
- women more likely to study and solve logistical study problems together
- men more likely to pirate books
- men less likely to be out during normal hours
- men less likely to choose majors requiring library books
- and of course, higher college enrollment by women
I am not saying any of these were necessarily in play in your situation, but some probably are and colleges and employers should be thinking about them.
Those who manage to jump through all of the hoops don't realize that there is a secondary scam waiting for them: working for a wage without significant stock options while someone makes millions sitting around doing nothing off of their effort. We've had movies made about this for many years and still it's so strange how it's not acknowledged.
Also: who is friend or foe? The lines have blurred significantly, which is a driving force in WANTING to change things in the first place. There's even loss of solidarity between family members, next generations.
There's no incentive to try. If I were the same age as these young men, I wouldn't bother either.
https://www.amazon.com/Aint-No-making-2nd-Second/dp/B002NAUW...
As teenagers the whites have a pessimistic attitude about success but the blacks are more optimistic. Barriers to the success of both groups are looming.
The first edition of the book stops there: one is left with the feeling that the plight of the two groups is not that different (e.g. "systemic racism" is a real thing but doesn't seem salient when you are know "white people with black problems") Somehow, however, the blacks believe that "they can overcome".
In a follow-up study a decade later both groups are doing poorly, but the blacks in particular have had their hopes dashed by poverty, problems with the law, problems with work, etc.
I know this is the thing in US and shouldn't surprise me but I'm based in central Europe and honestly the thought of this still feels so abstract to me. I'd love to have an option of choosing jobs that offer stock options.
It's not altogether a good idea to have a lot invested in the company you work for, as if they go under, your stock is also not worth so much, and you might lose your income at the same time too.
https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html
Edit: we've unfortunately had to ask you this kind of thing repeatedly already:
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=27224106 (May 2021)
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=26773557 (April 2021)
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=20954524 (Sept 2019)
If you do it again we will ban you, so no more of this, please.
The funny thing is we also don't give a shit about credentials anymore. We just want work ethic followed loosely by experience.
Willingness to endure difficult things and learn is all we are really going for in a new hire these days.
What is amazing to me is all of the business leaders who still insist on upholding these arbitrary gatekeepers. You are leaving a ton of talent on the table.
I think the answer for many is to focus harder on the business value equation and to just let the people be free. Running a business like a power fantasy is not going to get you there. The more you try to control people the harder it will be to make money with them in the long term.
This seems to characterise almost every single place I have worked for or interviewed at in different ways. I have interviewed at smaller businesses where the entire "management" team doesn't do anything, doesn't come into the office, and is just various family members of the original founder.
Then there are the larger businesses that have a network of people who all know each other and connected and occupy positions with "manager" in them, whose day consists of just telling people to do things that the person they are telling could figure out and do without their existence and better.
Of course clearly when women were under-represented in college, that was due to misogyny. And now that they are over-represented, it's also due to misogyny. No matter what the facts are, the conclusion is the same.
There's a word for that.
"The average Plumber salary in the United States is $58,659" - https://www.salary.com/research/salary/benchmark/plumber-sal...
"The national average salary for Human Resources is $65,314 per year in United States." - https://www.glassdoor.com/Salaries/human-resources-salary-SR...
"Forbes cited HR Manager as a “best paying job for women” in 2011, with over 70 percent of the profession dominated by females." - https://www.forbes.com/sites/theyec/2012/07/11/why-human-res...
"At the administrative level, 30 percent of human resources assistants had an associate degree as of 2013, 26 percent had a high school diploma and 21 percent had at least one year of college experience" - https://work.chron.com/education-requirements-human-resource...
It's a lot easier for men to find a decent paying job that doesn't require a college degree and where you won't get regularly harassed.
You sure about that? Or is it that the majority of women don't see themselves unclogging toilets for a living? I have never seen it, but I would suspect list of female applications to plumbing or electrician school is very very short.
Few female applicants to trade schools is consistent with the original statement. If it is societally unacceptable for a woman to be a plumber then I would expect women to act as any rational agent and factor this in when planning their future career.
As for your claim that higher class males avoid trades: yes of course. That is actually a great example of what I mean. People factor in social norms in their decision making, be it male or female.
I believe that norms shape behaviour, that is the extent of my claim.
But like, given they require physical strength, it is hard to make a big deal about it.
Most women just don't want to do that. I don't think it has much to do with acceptance. Women that want to become plumbers are few an far between.
5000 people applied for a single position and 15 of them were women. This was for a high paying tech job.
Mirrors my experience though, and probably many in eg finance as well. There is a clear, well publicized path from degree -> money that any middle class+ guy can walk.
Sad the article doesn’t go into specifics though, it’s all just “degrees”.
There clearly seems to be a lot more knowledge in some countries about which jobs lead to high paying careers, and the U.S. still has an antiquated mindset about this.
I'm not arguing for or against '"Women don't really like this stuff"' - I'm just saying an example against it needs to be women liking this stuff, not merely doing this stuff.
Then we got 8-bit microcomputers in every home, and operating a computer became a technical hobby, so ideally suited to boys.
The generation of boys growing up playing with computers, and girls not playing with computers, swamped any existing biases in the industry.
I wonder if the communist countries had the former phase, but because not so many homes had computers, not the latter.
The fact is that in the old days, there really was plenty of clerical work around computers that just disappeared. Like rewritting data to punched cards and swapping wheels with punched tapes. My grandmother worked in 'data-processing facility' in a communist country, the facility employed many women, but they were (from whay i heard) essentially clerical positions without much CS/EE knowledge.
And yes, there were proportionally quite many female engineers and computer scientists. I might guess that this perhaps was facilitated by prejudices/discrimination in the "more macho" fields of construction engineering and industrial engineering, so all the high school girls with good STEM results would go to math and computer science fields instead of all the programs with a focus on heavy industry - but even those had a decent proportion of female engineers.
It's important that this is not about any absolute value, but about the sign of the correlation. The "blank slate" hypothesis would predict that the correlation is positive, i.e. the more gender equal a society, the more equal the distribution.
The opposite is actually the case, the correlation is negative.
This strongly suggests that the statistical differences in occupational preferences have an innate cause. That difference is moderated by societal influence, not caused by it. When societal pressure are lessened or removed, the innate differences manifest more strongly.
And of course, it needs to be stressed that these are statistical differences, not categorical ones, just like the outcomes are statistical and not categorical.
These are the three biggest countries (40% of the world population), and also the ones most represented in tech here in the USA, at least (because they are the biggest).
We are talking about whole population segments that dream of one day making $75k. They know that tech pays well but have no idea how outlandish the pay is compared to their experiences and expectations. They think their counterpart is tech is making $10k more than them, when in fact they are probably making $50-100k more.
Is your company paying a reasonable rate? I know a few people looking for entry level jobs in tech and they have trouble getting callbacks
These are well paying jobs, but they do require a certain amount of skills. A lot of kids are getting college degrees, but coming out without enough skills to land a lot of in-demand jobs.
The knowledge is there and completely trivial to obtain. Google "starting salaries for XXXX major".
I saw her again once in the lab, and I asked her why did you switch, she said, and I quote her exact words: "why would I sit and code all day when I've this a$$, pointing at her back."
I honestly didn't know what to say afterward. Our program had special scholarship for women, and we had only one woman (out of 30 or so) and that was more than 10 years ago.
I met several great women developers in my career and I personally think the field will benefit a lot by having more diverse perspectives on the tools being created.
Why is the other one poster child for feminity? I met guys who dropped out of college, because they could not keep grades due to regular whole night gaming.
I met guys who switched out of CS, because they could not pass exams despite trying.
In both gender, you get some amount of irresponsible, disinterested, troublemakers or simply people with too many mental issues to finish any school.
But that incident stuck in my head because I expected many answers but not the one she gave! Anyway, it was a light hearted conversation not to be taken seriously.
Good programs exist in this space, but they're the exception (and no single person can possibly create a properly comprehensive survey without resorting to opinion polling).
Using a low estimate of 15% of CS degrees going to women, you'd get 750 women applying.
What are you doing to get so many women to give your company an immediate rejection and apply somewhere else?
High paying usually means senior, seniority is usually 5-10 years, so you would need 15% 10 years ago.
Here's one source that shows 10 years ago it would have been about 18%.
https://www.aps.org/programs/education/statistics/womenmajor...
There were three in my cohort of ~35; and that was much more dense on that programme that was a (more CS-oriented) subset of the EE department's variants - something like 15 of 400 in first year, higher ratio (i.e. fewer female drop-outs/more doing MEng) by the end I think though. Only a few years ago.
And even then, your conclusion is only valid for a graduate entry role - for something more senior you'd need to at least look at grad rates further back, if not what happens to people once in industry. (We've also assumed 100% grads - or even male/female anyway - do apply to industry at all, vs. not, or something else, or staying in academia, etc. I expect that's roughly true though.)
Sure. They have never dipped as low as 15% which is why I used it as very safe and generous number. Here's one source.
https://www.aps.org/programs/education/statistics/womenmajor...
> if not what happens to people once in industry
Indeed. What happens to people after they get a job is a relevant factor. It would be interesting to see both dropout rates over a career lifetime and if senior level women in tech are concentrated in a group of companies known to be good to work at via the whisper network.
Even age is a factor. Most folks don't stick with their CS job until retirement age, although some are smart enough to save and retire before that age. Age discrimination is not exactly rare though.
I have no idea where I'd get that kind of data or if it even exists, but maybe someone else does.
Given that kind of data, an industry with a constant deficit of qualified senior level candidates would do well to improve that situation by figuring out how to reduce the dropouts.
Still, doesn't that story also point to a surplus of engineers?
https://www.statista.com/statistics/967826/number-bachelors-...
Women really really like to study subjects related to people - even "homeland security, law enforcement and firefighting" is more popular among women than computer science.
Going deep into debt for a credential that doesn't have a reasonably large future value is a huge mistake many are pushed into making.
Are most of them making a huge mistake? I guess it depends heavily in the credential(s), but I think there has to be a deeper reason for falling and unbalanced undergraduate enrollment amongst men.
Will it work today? Probably. There are few women in the trades. If you can get a cheap degree, it is likely better than no degree.
Please read “why men earn more” by Warren Farrell or skim the table of contents for a list of some of the factors that influence earnings, such as working longer hours, in a different field, in unpleasant conditions, etc.
You shouldn't go to college if you aren't going to be a serious student and you'll be a legitimate risk for dropping out. But if you are willing to commit yourself and get decent grades, you'll be in much better shape than most people with just a high school diploma.
Your advice is also sounds really out of touch with what various jobs pay. The average new college grad makes like 60k or so.
I can only speak to my workplace and team, but we pay product designers with very little experience around 90k a year. I have no licenses and am not a professional engineer, and I make several times that.
The issue is that far too many people are going into debt for college degrees and not getting the degrees. That's the biggest. The secondary issue is that college is becoming more and more expensive, but it is still paying off for the majority of bachelor degree holders.
What degree do you have??
The much higher salaries paid by the major US companies are so anomalous that they may as well be discarded in any comparisons.
You can call the investors kings and the workers are chasing the kings money.
Still nothing like the US though, and the cost of living is not much different than New York City IME.
Took on around 50k at around 5% interest. Wouldn't change a thing in the world about it. Easily paid it off over a few years.
Engineering or bust just isn’t true.
From the article.
There are folks getting useless degrees and/or taking on too much debt, but getting a college degree on the whole is worthwhile.
What about just measuring the ROI of the degree? https://www.nytimes.com/2021/08/13/your-money/college-degree...
"All of the largest programs in electrical and communications engineering, for instance, allowed most of their graduates to recoup their educational investment in five years or less. But many programs in some fields, like drama and dance, show no return on investment, the report found, meaning most of their graduates are earning less than a typical high school graduate."
So this study more or less backs claim that some degrees offer a positive ROI while others do not. As to whether or not a given degree is "worthwhile," I'd leave that as an exercise for the reader. :)
To be clear, I don’t buy that argument. Obviously those factors explain some of the difference, but I think most of the highest-paying jobs in STEM and many of the highest-paying jobs in other fields (e.g. business/finance) require skills that would be hard to reliably obtain without a college degree or something similar.
Specifically, to refer to an average of $1,000,000 as a specific effect size, without controlling for the fact that many people with only a high school diploma would not earn more even if they had a college degree, seems suspect.
I think we can say it is in fact causal that on average a college degree earns more money than not having one just by this fact alone.
The fact that they were able to buy things while living at home just drives the point home even more- he would not have the disposable income to make those purchases for many years if he decides to go to college.
Why your personal story is pertinent here is beyond me, OP was talking about the person in the article.
It's not dramatic at all when we have 1.73[1] trillion in student loan debt, with an average of 39k each student.
Starting your professional career years in debt is the definition of crippling debt.
edit to add source
[1] https://educationdata.org/student-loan-debt-statistics
Starting your professional career in debt is nobody's definition of "crippling debt". Whether 39k is too much student loan debt really depends on what the expected future earning potential is for a given degree. A quick search turns up plenty of resources that can help somebody make decisions about how much student loan debt they can comfortably or safely take on. Here is a teacher's guide[1] (it's a PDF link) from the Consumer Finance Protection Bureau one could use as a starting point.
[1] https://files.consumerfinance.gov/f/documents/cfpb_building_...
If you go to college broke, and come out in debt, and are then in debt for years after (I don't know offhand the average) then yes that's crippling debt. When figured against future earnings and actual take-home profit, how will those numbers work out for someone like that? Chances are, not well. Not everyone can just 'learn to program' to get a cushy 120k+/yr job. Also some people with families take longer than 2 years just for an associates degree. This is really survivorship bias wkth N=1.
I am not sure this is a smart move. It seems like he is hoping his music career pans out, but we aren't given a lot of insight into his talent level there.
But a well-paying trade like Electrician, especially commercial pays better than many degrees.
We need a bootcamp for schools, there is just too much of a bullshit moat around degrees IMHO.
Plus that’s assuming your parents aren’t already old and can afford to feed and house you without seriously harming their own old age plans.
Might vary where you live, but my understanding is that the author of a piece is not usually the one picking images and writing the headline. There are some instances where the writer and photographer are the same, but that's not the case here.
It's a story about males who aren't in college, so why would they have photos of males in school? Stats about "people considering not going to college" is not as compelling as this story with stronger stats about what people are actually doing, IMO.
Here is an example of a article with a different narrative called: Why Boys Are Failing in an Educational System Stacked Against Them (https://www.huffpost.com/entry/why-boys-are-failing-in-a_b_8...)
Note that the focus of blame here is on the education system and then look at the image. The person in frame is the teacher, representing the Educational System, and the boy. The article mentions both college rates and high school dropout rates.
You are right that its generally not the author of the written text that chose the image, through the words I would describe if I was being a more technical correct about it would be authors of the article since an article rarely if ever now days has a single author. There is the author/s of the text, the editor, the proof readers, layout design, image selection, and each participated in creation the collaborated created work.
After I quit university and before I found my eventual career path back in the 90s, a relevant picture would've been me stuffing around on the computer as that's largely what I did (writing a book, playing Hextris, typing up things for my dad, seeing what a modem could do, etc).
What can university truly offer an 18 year old who already knows what they want to do and is already doing it without an expensive education.
Wish I was that on track when I was 18 and he'll probably be ahead of his peers who went to college by the time they graduate.
You can break into music production without a degree, of course, but it's going to be a challenge in the middle of nowhere Minnesota.
Zillow has a number of houses for sale in Toledo for under $40k. Like, they need some work, but a real house, under 40k.
I think that guy is doing fine, he should just keep doing exactly what he's doing.
If you can have a decent lifestyle in Ohio on 40k (big if, when you factor in retirement planning) you can still fundamentally never leave Ohio.
Major life regret? Thinking other countries didn't exist when I was at the age to enter college and taking on massive loans to pay exorbitant US tuition for a school that wasn't anything special when I could have found overseas options at a fraction of the cost.
God forbid. Think of all the experiences you and your family will miss out on!
Lately all I want is to get as far away from people as possible. The internet has negated every advantage of these regions and of money broadly. You cannot buy a nuclear family.
Folks in Ohio still have trouble leaving Ohio.
And you can, to an extent, buy a nuclear family. Mail order brides still exist (and the arrangement can be beneficial for both parties). You can do this with the expectation of children, which you will pay for in the US. Alternatively, you can check adoption as plenty of agencies will make you feel like you are buying a child. (20k upwards, plus travel).
my best friend had a complicated career trajectory that began with a music education degree, until he found out he hated teaching music to middle schoolers, then he decided to get a two-year online CS degree. this put him in a fair bit of debt as he comes from a very poor upbringing. he got married and moved to the D.C. area a couple years ago to work for a CRM shop there and while he loves the work, he hates the crime and bullshit of the Big City Life, and while he and his wife have gone from enjoying it to tolerating it, they're moving back here to South Dakota at the end of this year before they have children.
I wonder if, going forward, with the advent of remote work and the like, we're going to see less and less people who come from rural/suburban/otherwise sub-100k-population cities choosing to either move back to areas like those they grew up in (if not where they grew up specifically) instead of migrating to The Big City to Make It Big, for these exact reasons. there just doesn't seem to be much to gain from moving to The Big City anymore, if starting a family is your ultimate goal in life.
When you say you value a 'nuclear family', instead of just 'family', the distinction means things like 'I do not want my parents to have more than a minimal role in their grandchildren's lives' and 'my siblings and their children are to be kept separate from my children'. That's what the 'nuclear' part means!
Mom died and now Dad's dropping hints about moving into your furnished basement? Sorry, we're a nuclear family. Going halves with your sister on a duplex with her and her family living next to you and yours so all the cousins can grow up together? Absolutely not nuclear.
If anything, a structure like this would facilitate and encourage visits from and to relatives. Seems like a much nicer life than a situation where both parents work.
This snide irrelevant addition makes it look like you are indeed picking on Ohio...
My overall argument also includes other fine places such as Pittsburgh, Houston, and Cleveland (also in Ohio).
This is a snide remark, but it is absolutely a factor. I grew up in Michigan, and the number of people who never venture beyond their almost-entirely-white small town to see what other communities and cultures are like is a huge contributing factor to the amount of prejudice and judgmental nature that makes me never want to move back.
Seeing people different from you and different places is broadening and gives you a much better perspective to be able to understand the world. This is important in life as well as in your career.
Sure, NYC/SF are super expensive, but almost every urban area is when compared to other smaller cities or rural areas.
The issue is that for a lot of people they can only find an ok job in the major urban area, but it's not enough to live there so they get stuck in the suburban wastelands with 45+ minute drives just to go work 8 hours.
They make enough to get by, but not enough to save and move out to a more desirable living situation in a smaller city or rural area without a secure job lined up.
Like $20 an hour is good in Toledo, but it's probably not what most people are making. That's probably a job you have to work up to for years. At $20 an hour in Toledo you very likely can have a higher quality of life then people making far more in the much larger metro areas. But at $10 an hour ($8.80/$7.25) in Toledo area you're probably worse off due to a lack of public support and opportunities for advancement.
This is beside your point but HN is such a coastal bubble that I always feel the need to chime in with perspective when someone mentions my hometown.
Even more unfortunate is the widespread acceptance of the idea that you need to be successful to be happy/fulfilled.
No, just rent and share like a college student your whole life. That makes sense.
As for the cultural capital of the world? New York used to have a thriving art scene when it was cheap to live in. Now it just has an expensive art scene.
I mean, in theory there could be acceptable ways to let a couple with babies have roommates. But the design problems alone seem too complicated to attempt, let alone the cultural problems.
Also, keep in mind that a young couple with kids might have only one income earner. And that couple is in the same apartment hunt with singles willing to share multi-tenant residences. Sometimes three or four of them!
Point being, "get roommates" doesn't scale over time or over the entire population.
And regarding repairs, I've been to houses that have decent photos online, but upon entering, they're clearly rotting out. It'd be cheaper to knock the house down and start again.
Tech likes to pretend credentials don’t matter, but that’s entirely not true.
Not surprising that enrollment is down when too many men think learning things is for nerds.
Source: am an American male
There are tons of high paying jobs available to people who learn trades, either in trade schools or on the job. Much of tech is like a trade - as a software engineer, I certainly have more in common with a car mechanic working on custom builds than I do with an accountant, lawyer, doctor or CEO. A lot of Americans were sold the false idea that college would help them know what they wanted to do, and make money. But it's not a magic beansprout you just ride up to the heights of society... definitely not when everyone else is doing it and everyone else is in debt. You have to actually be motivated. And if you're motivated... well it's kike George Carlin said about self help books: You went to the bookstore to go find a self help book, you're motivated, what do you need the book for?
People can be really mean, especially when you aren't "smart". I had to read a lot about a lot of things just so I could go to lunch and participate in the chatter with coworkers.
But, not getting a degree never blocked me from getting great money or any position, I just had to work hard for it, always had to prove myself, earn trust. It's life on hard mode for sure, but not a blocker.
#MeToo Is Making Colleges Teach Toxic Masculinity 101
https://www.thedailybeast.com/metoo-is-making-colleges-teach...
Toxic Masculinity and Higher Education
https://www.higheredjobs.com/Articles/articleDisplay.cfm?ID=...
And so on. A quick search turns up 1000's of such links
If there wasn't at least a little bit of complicity in it being interpreted as a general diss on masculinity, the term would never have caught on, or a different term would have been chosen in the first place. In the face of repeated misunderstandings, people using the term would pick a new one. They haven't done that. Why? It seems to me that they are quite happy to be "misunderstood" 95% of the time.
The gender swapped equivalent seems to be "internalised misogyny". Do you think I could get away with calling it "toxic femininity" instead? Nobody would let that pass. Do you think I could get away with calling any obviously bad behaviour associated with femininity, "toxic femininity", at all? I don't think I could.
It's widely considered by men to be an insulting term, and if people who use it don't want to insult people, they should pick another one. They don't though, which is telling.
Anyone who actually knows what adjectives are and how they work believes this.
Or people familiar enough with the substance of the discussion to know it includes discussion of what healthy masculinity is. Here's an easy-to-digest example:
https://ifunny.co/picture/if-you-ever-find-yourself-confused...
> Do you think I could get away with calling it "toxic femininity" instead? Nobody would let that pass.
Oh, yes. Nobody would dare talk use the phrase toxic femininity. /s
https://www.news18.com/news/buzz/women-vs-women-toxic-femini...
https://thoughtcatalog.com/january-nelson/2020/07/15-example...
https://www.psychologytoday.com/us/blog/sex-sexuality-and-ro...
https://www.forbes.com/sites/drnancydoyle/2021/07/13/we-need...
https://www.buzzfeed.com/ryanschocket2/toxic-femininity-exam...
https://www.yesweekly.com/opinion/toxic-femininity-the-under...
If you really think that femininity doesn't come under the microscope, then one can only assume you have no substantial familiarity with feminism.
I think people certainly use the phrase "toxic femininity", but such examples are from the long-tail.
In institutions, it is no-where near as discussed as much as "toxic masculinity", and probably discussing it would be be frowned upon.
You can see mentions of "toxic masculinity" amongst United Nations literature, for example, which can't be said for "toxic femininity". For example, the expectation of being the breadwinner of the family is said to be one of the things that is "rooted in a patriarchal culture, creat[ing] toxic masculinity". [1]
What isn't said, is that the expectation to become a competent man who is tries to support his family can also be a positive example of masculinity (and indeed is desirable to women), in addition to being the traditional one.
If this expectation is cast only being a "toxic" one, then that is a confusing message for young men, and leaves them without what was one of the traditional motivation for going to college, and improving yourself, so that you can get a good job and better shoulder responsibility when you want to start a family.
[1] https://www.unwomen.org/en/news/stories/2019/2/compilation-b...
Gender norms that are criticised by feminists are in real life frequently re-enforced by women for example. Even feminists like much of the political left are also fragmented and have differing opinions. This lack of a consensus combined with an expectation to behave in a specific way and a group that can be somewhat trigger happy in going from "statistically this group of people is privileged" to "this person from this group is privileged" is I think deeply problematic and challenging to navigate as a men. I also think it's incredibly stupid from political standpoint.
Unfortunately it's difficult to engage in such discussions in a constructive way because they are very attractive to people who see feminists as an enemy.
One area I do think is interesting, is the issue of uncollected child maintenance payments (at least in the UK). [1] This has not had a campaign behind it, in the same way as the "Gender pay gap" has had, yet just also affects the material circumstances of many women.
I imagine it could be one issue where there might be agreement on, between those who lean towards "traditional gender roles" and some feminist organisations.
[1] https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2016/jun/16/silenc...
Forbes and Psychology Today are long-tail low-relevance now?
> What isn't said, is that the expectation to become a competent man who is tries to support his family can also be a positive example of masculinity
Something along these lines is said in many substantial discussions of masculinity (including the one I pointed to in GP). You want other examples?
https://umatter.princeton.edu/respect-matters/healthy-mascul...
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=I2mzxeViCko
https://www.buzzfeed.com/sydrobinson1/examples-of-positive-m...
https://www.theatlantic.com/health/archive/2014/05/becoming-...
Nobody is attacking competence as toxic, or support of family as toxic.
What is actually critiqued is a normalization of social violence, commenting on bullying or assault with "oh, boys will be boys," dismissal of feelings with "walk it off," the idea that real men don't go to therapy or turn to people for emotional help, etc etc.
One can only think of that as a general attack on masculinity if... that's what you think masculinity is. Which sounds bona fide toxic to me.
The publications are not, their discussion of "toxic femininity" is. Discussions of "toxic masculinity" have long been the hegemony.
> Nobody is attacking competence as toxic
I see this happening a lot. Particularly, that men who are in positions of power (might own their own company, or run other companies) have only reached where they are, because they benefit from a corrupt patriarchy, not because of their competency and willingness to work.
> What is actually critiqued is a normalization of social violence, commenting on bullying or assault with "oh, boys will be boys," dismissal of feelings with "walk it off," the idea that real men don't go to therapy or turn to people for emotional help, etc etc.
Why is this called "toxic masculinity"? To flip it around, could you imagine "toxic femininity" being used to a describe a woman not wanting to pursue engineering because she thinks it isn't what women typically are seen to do? Why would you say it is "toxic masculinity" when a man doesn't want to talk about his feelings, because it isn't what men typically are seen to do?
The critique is accompanied with the idea that masculinity is itself a social construct, and if only boys/men could be freed from this social construct, then they will be free from "toxic" aspects of masculinity.
However arguably this isn't the case, and leads you to worse outcomes for men and boys. For example, to "stop bullying" a headteacher in the UK banned (typically boys) from playing football at break times. [1] I don't believe masculinity is entirely a social construct, and here boys are being deprived of ways to positively express their masculinity, through competition and team building. I also think there is a difference in how men and women typically bond, with men tending to bond more through activities.
Male bonding through shared activities is something that has declined a lot in the US (see the book "Bowling Alone"). If men are finding it more difficult today dealing with emotional issues, the answer may not be that they need to deal with their "toxic masculinity" by "speaking more", but they are actually suffering from their lack of ability to identify with other men through shared activities.
It isn't, in other words, their own fault, but rather a shift in society, which in this individual example, would rather ban a game that involves competition and winners, in case there are losers, or exclusion. "Toxic masculinity" isn't therefore the issue, rather it would be a lack of ability to express masculinity.
"Unstructured games can sometimes lead to nasty comments, aggressive behaviour or children feeling left out, she added." [1] https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/uk-england-london-56568473
Even assuming that's true, it doesn't follow that every literal interpretation should be or is understood as pejorative, which leads to the question of why this one should be understood that way.
Given that toxic masculinity has specific definitions and specific criticisms to offer that distinguish critically targeted behavior AND also has associated discussion affirming desirable masculine behavior, it makes much more sense to treat it as a specific technique than a general attack on masculinity.
Unless, of course, you think that things like bullying or other forms of social violence for the purpose of establishing personal dominance or personal entertainment is part and parcel with masculinity. Which sounds kindof, I don't know... poisonous or something to me.
> bullying or other forms of social violence for the purpose of establishing personal dominance or personal entertainment is part and parcel with masculinity
For those who think neither of those has anything to do with masculinity, using the word masculinity to describe it would be wrong. One could be a bit colorful to call it a poisonous use of words, ie injecting an harmful substance into the language.
A few decades ago researchers looked at how language get used in conflicts, and they had a major discover. The most effective way to enable people to attack other people is to describe other human being as being less than human. Toxic waste. Insects. Poison. Garbage. Language that dehumanizing groups of people and dehumanizing their behavior is almost a requirement in order for human on human violence.
There is a Wikipedia page on toxic masculinity, but not one on toxic femininity (it redirects to "Internalised sexism"). https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Internalized_sexism#%22Toxic...
Of course this does not mean that these traits are somehow exclusive to or owned by Masculinity.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Masculinity
Much of that sounds positive to me. I think the toxicity primarily comes from people caring primarily about appearance. For example by trying to avoid being seen as weak or by trying to appear strong relative to other people by making them appear to be weak.
I much the same way that “unusually large microbe” does not imply that microbes are generally unusually large.
The “‘toxic masculinity’ means masculinity is uniformly toxic” thing is a reading so tendentious as to be incompatible with good faith.
That's funny, really. I always only ever encounter it used by people who smear any and all masculinity as "toxic".
Do you have a link to a place "toxic masculinity" is used to describe a minority subset of the male population?
Sounds like you've managed to get yourself living in quite the bubble/echo chamber. Go explore the world dude.
I agree it was never intended to, but the reality is different. It should be dumped and a new term used.
More news at 11
Also, your insinuation that males without issues with women equates to "toxic masculinity" is hilariously indicative of your personality.
Go outside and touch grass and talk to people, yeesh
It has led to an atmosphere of intellectual immaturity and victim-mentality-agrandizement. Universities now feel more like a coddled highschool experience than adulthood.
Don't expect intelligent, strong-minded, strong-willed men to accept such silly, degenerate distractions from the supposed goal of these universities (to provide "education", skills, network, etc.).
I’m not convinced that all those men need to go to college, but they clearly need something. They need to feel like they’re part of society. Nothing good can come of an entire generation that feels lost, without purpose, and unwanted.
I had enough EE in college to change a light switch without burning the house down.
However, that book-learnin' fell apart when confronted with troubleshooting a strangely wired room, and I got very polite while asking him over to bail me out.
These fellows eschewing the ivory tower, where being of European extraction and bearing a Y-chromosome on the college campus is an indictment, are going to trade schools and will make fat piles of cash repairing plumbing.
Hopefully, they are gracious with all the Grievance Studies majors who are standing by to condescend in their direction.
After university I was well equiped to do freelancer work in my field and earned well.
I don't think this "you have to be hard or else you won't survive"-mentality in the US is very beneficial to its society as a whole. Ideally you want to live in a society where everybody is well educated, healthy, happy, friendly and so on. Maybe it is a naive idea, but I think this is more achievable if there is collective investment into those goals rather than internal economical warfare where everybody is a army of one, except for the big corporations who will happily milk a atomized, divided population.
Yet I am constantly amazed by how much some of you guys endure. I just wish you wouldn't have to.
Europeans often have this opinion but I don't think it's an accurate reading of the issue. The issue is not that Americans work too hard, it's that this hard work is no longer actually amounting to anything. In the past, you could pay for college by working summers at the local restaurant. Today the average debt is $30K and you still won't get a decent job.
The article (and others) just show that American men are starting to put their efforts into places that do reward them; namely, the trades and entrepreneurship.
Good point. I did not intend to argue otherwise. To go into trade is not an irrational reaction on an individual level — quite the opposite in fact. What I did argue however, was that making it hard for people to get a higher education is not a good thing for a society. Not good in the short term, because educated societes will make more informed decisions, and at the same time not a sustainable strategy for any western society that wants to play any role in the next century.
Having an educated society should be in the national interest just like having public roads or drinkable water is.
> accurate reading of the issue. The issue is not that Americans work too hard, it's that this hard work is no longer actually amounting to anything.
That was the American dream. This is a nice model to keep big numbers of people playing the lottery and bear a ton of stress, because they have the hope that one day they might win and then everything will pay off.
But even of you are one of the few lucky ones that wins you still live in a society where 90% are struggling and crushed. There may be people that enjoy being on top while everybody else suffers, but I personally would prefer being middle class in a society where nobody is poor over being a billionaire in a society where everybody is crushed. Maybe this is empathy, but maybe it is also just egoistic: I like to walk through my city and not see suffering, I like to walk through my country without having to fear being robbed, shot or angrily screamed at. I simply prefer living in a healthy, happy society where people help each other over living in one where everybody has to kick down to stay on top.
Not that that any nation achieved that goal, but there are certainly observable differences in tone between the industrial nations.
As I said, the issue is that this hard work no longer results in progress. The system has become broken. This is easily observable via a bevy of statistical measures like inequality and college costs.
I think it leads to people drawing their distinctions, around who is superior and who is inferior, and then it leads to those people making an unnecessary logical jump and deciding that those inferior people need to be HURT or REMOVED… and we've seen all this before.
And they go from there to decide that anyone arguing, wishes to crown those inferior people as the kings, and hurt the superior ones, because that's the only way they can perceive anything anymore… and they just get hostile and paranoid we've seen all that before too.
I don't know how to convince them that seeking a civilized environment for all the people (without it being conditional on performance) produces the best societal result, through the widest possible range for SOME person of whatever description to excel.
It seems like there are a lot of people for whom, they're more than happy to throw away overall system performance because they're mad that anything lower-performing can even exist. They are PC builders so mad that RAM can't run as fast as L2 cache that they're all CPU and refuse to have any RAM installed. It's stark madness from my point of view.
Society functions THROUGH conflict and chaos. It's like brownian motion, noise in circuitry: if you're trying to define an ideology where there's no more conflict, the most direct way is to define an enemy and then rally everyone to destroy it. And that is said to work for a thousand years but actually blows up within ten, leaving enormous wreckage and shame.
Better to design the fault-tolerant system that runs through conflict and chaos.
What you are talking about is a war-based society, a fault-tolerant system, with lots of redundancy, that runs through conflict and chaos. The last two decades were an experiment in that one.
The numbers aren't great, but the majority of students finish with either zero debt or a very manageable amount of debt. There is a small fraction of students taking massive loans that skew the overall picture.
And bachelor degree holders continue to earn, on average, $1 million more than high school graduates over their career.
All that said, I agree college should be affordable without loans. Summer jobs, co-ops/internships, etc.
https://www.aplu.org/projects-and-initiatives/college-costs-...
Many young 20's somethings don't complete college, but end up with debt as well.
If the question is whether is a difficult for society to maintain college as a necessity for success, they should be included in the review.
That sounds...reasonable. I can't speak for the rest of Europe but a $30k student loan would be perfectly normal after a 4-5 year of study in Sweden.
Back of the envelope, $30k for 4 years is $625 a month and that is not much for just food and rent.
Call it toxic or not, there's a male drive toward autonomy. Joining corporations that are run by HR just isn't as attractive.
So I don't have a problem with the MA, but the framing of "life is wonderful in Europe" is missing the fact that the only theoretical upside is you had less choice.
But if paying the full cost, there would be a choice where down one path there is more money because less resources were consumed, and one that would be roughly equivalent.
Flash forward and I start to rethink the decision. I want to go back now, but I’ve attempted multiple times to investigate it and the numbers never work. Because I didn’t play my HS years correctly, the bureaucracy will not let me in, regardless of the things I’ve accomplished in the years since. Additionally the price is just so prohibitive, combined with the fact that I would get next to no aid and even a standard State school would be ridiculously expensive. These are just a handful of the issues though. Let’s not even bring up how I would need a simultaneously drop out of the workforce, suddenly turning the financial burden into Tuition/Books/Fees + everything needed to survive.
I’m really convinced that universities in the US do not want non traditional students at all. Obviously there are some programs that target them, but are often limited. I.e. you have to be part of the right demographic, be limited in the areas you can study. A notable state university near me offers over a dozen online Bachelors programs, but not a single “useful” degree, they’re all BA’s in subjects that people in HN mock. Other seem to cobble together “made up” degrees, which are bachelors that don’t have a traditional or on-campus equivalent and seem to be not particularly useful for employment in attempt to scam poorer, non-credentialed people out of their money.
I could still probably go back, but since I can not hack my way out of the bureaucracy or financial cost, majority of the value proposition would be completely dead by the time o could manage it.
I don’t know where you live or what you want to study, but if you focus on taking the coursework you need it becomes a lot easier. I’d suggest calling admissions departments as well, not trying to piece everything together yourself online. Feel free to email me if you want to share more information and I can give more specific and better researched suggestions.
I mean, what is the goal of a good live? Extract as many resources from your surroundings as possible, kicking your competition down and then die in an slightly above average house? I want to live a good live and leave my environment in a better shape than I entered it in, because the two are not a contradiction.
This seems like a pretty good guiding principle in life.
Thanks cap, there is always this one commenter who thinks we in europe don't understand how taxes work.
Edit: Of course, if you’re very well off and live somewhere that’s relatively stable, large gaps in equality might benefit you. That’s for a select few though.
(ignore the headline and go to the actual numbers)
Germany is much better at shunting people away from university who are not qualified to be there. Generally, they go to trade schools and apprenticeships.
However, there should be a playground for innovation as well.
Europe makes it so damn hard to innovate because of it's many laws. Ambitious people inevitably move to the US.
OECD data seems to suggest so
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_countries_by_tertiar...
On the other hand, electricians have weird gaps in their knowledge. If I ask them to do something slightly out of the ordinary, this becomes apparent. For example, none of them understand inductive coupling, or even know what it is. When I ask them to do certain things to avoid inductive coupling, they give me this indulgent smile, and do what I ask, although it's clear they don't understand why.
I eventually wound up doing the low voltage wiring myself, because I simply couldn't explain to them why you don't run low voltage wires through the same holes as the A/C wires. One of them tried to run a 12VDC wire in 25 feet of conduit with a 120VAC wire.
They also simply did not understand how generators worked, and botched up the wiring for mine.
It's the same with roofers. They have no idea what galvanic corrosion is, and will invariably use the wrong nails for anything metal.
Not that vocational jobs are not important - clearly they add value and create employment.
BTW, if you ever see an EE with a card that has printed on it:
it's a sure sign he's a formula-plugger, and has no idea how it works. He doesn't even understand algebra.https://testguy.net/content/266-Ohm-s-Law-Watt-s-Law-Cheat-S...
A definite no-hire :-/
I had no idea there were EE's walking around who were rusty with basic electrical formulas.
Edit: Ah, come on! That's one of my best jokes and I got downvoted?!
https://generalatomic.com/teil1/B.html
Proper EEs don't need a cheat sheet for it.
P.S. Maxwell's Equations on a t-shirt are popular, I even sold one for a while.
2. The 3 versions of the formula are obvious to anyone who remembers high school freshman math. It's barely even algebra.
Carrying that cheat sheet signals you know neither electronics nor the most basic algebra.
Maxwell's Equations, however, get introduced in 2nd or 3rd year in college. You'll need a year (probably two) of calculus to even understand the notation. The equations unify the theories of electric fields and magnetic fields.
Only people who have studied Maxwell's Equations will even recognize them, so by putting them on a t-shirt you're signalling that you are an educated EE to other educated EEs. Other people won't even know what they are.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Maxwell%27s_equations
Besides, EEs usually cheat by assuming a sinusoidal solution anyway.
Physicists assume the pointless mass.
Examples:
- Taxes/Pensions - if you just rely on your accountant then they'll do the bare minimum and you'll miss out
- Energy company - we're rolling out smart gas/elec meters in the UK. There is an old type (smets1) and a new type (smets2). You don't want to be stuck with the old type but the company had no idea which type they were installing. (I ended up with the old type)
- Lawyers - We're constantly having to chase ours and highlight things to them to make progress
- Doctors - If I haven't done my research then they invariably try to fob me off (maybe this is a UK nationalised healthcare thing)
I could go on but the crux is that the average professional does the bare minimum to move you along. I'm not old enough to say if it's always been like this but it has been my observation over my decade of adulthood. If it's a new thing then maybe it is partly to blame for the anti-vax and lack of faith in experts.
There is no doubt though that people do better work when supervised and knowing what questions to ask an expert helps sets expectations about what level of work you will settle for.
1) There's a race to the bottom with services in terms of pricing. For example, NHS GPs have strict time limits within which to provide a particular service. These time limits have reduced over the years and so individual doctors are capable of providing a better service but are can't given the constraints. People rarely are willing to pay more for a service unless they know that the quality level will be higher. With services, it is not clear that a higher price will translate to higher quality.
2) Most services are not chosen based on quality. They are chosen based on perception, brand, reviews, pricing and a whole host of other things. Often the most profitable services are the ones who can manipulate these variables best rather than the ones who actually provide a great service. If there is a sole accountant who is fantastic at accounting but poor at marketing and review collection then they are going to struggle and may end up joining a firm who constrains their time such that can only provide the minimum viable service.
E.g. if I have a new button that’s been sewn on a jacket, or have my house painted, I can easily see if the right button was used, or if spots were missed while painting. However if I take my car in for an oil change, I don’t really know if the right grade of oil and an OEM filter was used, nor do I really care to recheck my accountants work on my taxes (as long is it roughly pencils to what I expected).
In a culture obsessed with looking for exploitation opportunities at every corner, what do we expect? Everyone is running so "lean" and "efficiently" that anything beyond the lowest cost options can hinder you. Are you getting ROI, or diminishing returns and if you are getting diminishing returns, then that's now viewed as waste and a poor path to choose.
Capitalism has been great at motivating people to innovate and create but the current state of capitalistic systems, I say, isn't healthy for humanity. We need to acknowledge this and fix perverse incentive structures across the board (that doesn't mean destroying the system, simply fixing it). Much of what you're seeing these days used to be used in arguments for capitalistic systems against socialist systems--what really seems to have happened is that we've just traded who we want to give power to. Instead of those who tower over government systems in an authoritarian manner in socialist systems, we seek business leadership who... tower over us in an authoritarian manner.
One reason the US had been so fantastic is that we had a government and economic system that forced capitalistic ideals to compete with socialistic ideals. We had government services inspired by socialist systems that kept capitalistic drivers from going off the rails into too competitive of states with social safety nets to protect us. Meanwhile, to avoid the stagnant systems you see in prior socialist systems, we had capitalism provide incentives to motivate people to work, to do better for themselves and improve their lives and therefor those around them. Now, we seem to have mostly swept away socialist ideals (competition in policy simply isn't there anymore), capitalistic policy has won, and we're witnessing what unconstrained capitalism looks like. It's less value creation and more wealth extraction.
If you're a capital holder, it looks pretty good. My investments that I simply threw money at have grown beyond belief--without any sort of effort on my behalf--it's astounding to think how much money I earned doing nothing. It's an interesting situation because I still work and get paid fairly well, but when I look at my investment portfolio I can't help but think I'm cheating because asset growth well beyond inflation just appear in my accounts, meanwhile, at my day job, everything has grown more and more demanding without equal compensation.
It's an interesting time and I hope we course correct this nonsense before I get too old.
Making something a "human right" doesn't make it immune to the rules of scarcity. Expert services are scarce, which is why they cost more, even in socialist/communist countries. Communism is, after all, just state-owned capitalism. :) People still get rich in communist countries, experts still get outsized reward, it's just that the opportunities to get rich are constrained to the bureaucrats, and the outsized reward will either come from the system or be facilitated by a black market.
Personal story: moved into a EU country and tried to import my car tax-free as personal property. Went to a customs agency because apparently you don't talk to customs directly, you go through one of those. They had me collect all sorts of documents, which took me months before it became evident that this type of car cannot be imported tax-free in the first place.
The stress from expecting people to take their responsibilities seriously has cost me many meaningful interpersonal relationships, not to mention innumerable brain cells. On the other hand, the work to achieve more self-sufficiency is alienating in its own right, and, depending on starting conditions, can twist a person into an unlikable mess.
It's vicious cycles all the way down.
Iedereen doet maar wat ( Dutch )
Loosely translated : Everybody just fucks around, wether it is car mechanics, doctors or laywers.
Would love to hear a more canonical term for the phenomenon.
edit: And if it is absolutely critical it is done right? Do it yourself.
Je doet maar wat ( You )
Ze doen maar wat ( They )
I understand good vocational training (for example certified plumbers) in a country pays itself back very much.
Information asymmetry is a real problem, particularly when people are selling information.
This is starting to push me in the direction of off grid/ sustainable living just to minimize these dependencies
See also https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Electromagnetic_induction
Also the shield needs a low impedance return path to be effective.
The reason you don't mix low/high in the same raceway is because if exposed low/high voltage conductors come in contact with each other, the low voltage cable has a much higher chance of catching fire.
But like everything else it depends. Is the DC feeding something like a lightbulb or a fan? Then it probably won't matter.
Does the DC feed something that has a good low pass filter or is it an expensive AC cable with good shielding? Then it might also not matter.
None of the above should be considered be professional advice and it's probably a good rule of thumb to never mix wires like that.
The closer the low voltage wires are to the high voltage ones, and the longer the distance, the more hmmmmmmm they'll pick up.
The reason you don't mix low/high in the same raceway is because if exposed low/high voltage conductors come in contact with each other, the low voltage cable has a much higher chance of catching fire.
These are decades apart in time, too.
Likewise with the machine shop a few jobs ago: although we weren’t a union shop, for some jobs we hired contractors in for the union members produced better work, especially for the safety critical stuff.
I have no experience with unions outside the skilled trades — certainly there are many horror stories.
So you built two homes, one with a well researched union labor group and one with a well researched contractor? Or is this just some BS elaboration based on comparing contractors you hired for small time shit with the big house job?
But to really get to your question: I started my 3-year home construction odyssey with a non-union contractor who had to be fired due to poor execution. The replacement was a union shop. That’s about as much A/B testing as one can get.
So I suspect it is not in the building codes. I don't think the codes say anything about about low voltage wires.
A good university program teaches very few hard skills, but you learn to reason about your field essentially from first principles. On the other hand, to do a mechanical job, you really need just the job skills, and the connection to cause and effect is almost irrelevant.
This is typically why university education is held up as a better key to long term career prospects, because of the adaptability rather than rote memorization.
In real life I realize it's a lot more messy.
The bigger issue is that there are tons of electricians that never went through apprenticeships and who never picked up and read a copy of the code (which has major changes every three years). The result is a lot of cargo cult installation which may or may not actually be correct.
Maybe, they don't need to? These trades should have cheatsheets where they can check for certain scenarios - like the 2 described, and it would provide Do's and Don'ts?
I’m a registered nurse which is a weird hybrid of university-level knowledge (understanding pharm and patho) but also it is a physical trade (turning patients, providing personal cares, mental resilience). It has roots in being vocational with a push in the last 50 years to provide an academic background to turn it into a profession.
Floor nursing is the bread and butter of the profession, but it burns you quick. Older nurses, particularly in medical-surgical nursing, tend to take on less stressful 8 hour day shifts, end up as spinsters, or have a terrible home life that they’ve resigned into accepting.
I moved into a desk position in my mid 30s and can’t possibly imagine going back to the physicality of it all.
I wore a fitness tracker then and now. I averaged about 10 km in a given shift, where as my daily total now is now closer to 5 or 6. However, now I have time and energy at the end of the day to do an actual physical activity instead of coming home like a limp noodle and taking the next day to recover.
Mentally, there is comradery that I absolutely miss. This is something really hard to explain unless you’re in it. When things got tough, the dark humour got us through. We took care of each others’ loved ones (at their family’s request). We demanded excellence from each other, and (rightfully) called out unsafe practice and supported staff as needed.
However, my home life suffered. It was fine at first as my partner is also a nurse so there was a mutual understanding. However, it started to wear on me when I had kids. I’d come home and my kids would be asleep/at school/daycare, so I’d have missed out on a day’s interaction. I realized that they’re only little once and no job in the world is worth missing out on them.
That's not to condescend on electricians, they clearly have a useful skill. And being able to certify a house pays a good few hundred pounds a day, nothing to sniff at.
But if you're used to looking at physical models, learning a few conventions and adding another model won't be terribly difficult.
I think a lot of people are actually better off doing that kind of work. There's a tangible output that is much easier to connect to purposefulness than if your job is mainly in the ideas realm. A cousin of mine that I grew up with is a carpenter and seems to cheerful all the time, now that he knows what his thing is. I grew up with him and it wasn't always so.
Get in early. Get in a union. 25-30 years to retirement in most unions. You don't want to be 60, and still in construction.
The test is easy, but figure 1000-2000 guys are taking the test too, so you need to get most of the questions right to get in. An oral interview counts for 1/2 the hiring process.
Just say you love working with your hands--love unions, but understand the needs of the contractors too.
Remember it's construction. You're around guys all day long. It's brainless work, and you will never have to act cheery when the owner's spoiled kid comes to work.
I do not recommend non-union construction at all.
Then again---hide in school for a long time. I loved college. It was cheaper 25 years ago though, and not that fun, but much better than any job I've had.
Your interest will change as you age.
I read somewhere that (ironocally) plumbing it the less likely thing to be "automated" via an AI or something.
I hate to have to mention this, but not all American men are white.
> all the Grievance Studies majors
So you're polite to those you find useful and insulting to people majoring in something you presumably disagree with? And assuming they will all be condescending to a plumber or electrician for some reason?
Perhaps you don't have to look quite so far away if you're looking to reduce the amount of condescending happening in the room you're standing in?
This feels very much like the "astronomy/telescope" argument.
Area, ethnic, cultural, gender, and group studies (I'm assuming "Grievance Studies" falls under this category), at least in the US, have been in steady decline since 2008, and even at their peak only accounted for 0.5% of majors (now just 0.3%). Even if you want to add in humanities in general that has gone from 3% to just above 2%
The idea that college campuses are ever more filled with people studying "useless" majors is a fiction. The largest areas of major concentration are business, biology, health professions, and engineering and all of these have been more or less growing for years.
There is this pervasive myth that most students in undergrad are having trouble transitioning to industry because they wasted their time studying their non-practical passion, but the data[0] clearly shows that the trends for the last decade have been increasing focus on career oriented practical majors.
[0] https://nces.ed.gov/programs/digest/d19/tables/dt19_322.10.a...
Its schrodingers privilege. the privilege was being so priveleged that you were pushed out of the traditional credentialing system.
Really? I understood that it was illegal to discriminate based on gender, race, etc in the US
This is an-ex Google engineer talking about one he saw and created a video about: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=pizXzR7ZQ8Q
When "positive discrimination" makes it before a judge, it usually gets stuck down.
Yea, but we got no problem getting to that door. Minorities might get pulled over and get a knee on the neck. Women might get assaulted on their way. Being a white dude, I'll get a taxi there, no problem. So if I have to try harder to get the position, pretty understandable, since I got the head start.
Not saying life is easy for anyone, saying it's so much easier being a white dude with a nice hair cut. You know I used to be so broke I had to "beg" for gas money at a gas station to get to my first day at a new job, first person I asked gave me a $20. Life. is. easier.
You've been reading too much news. That doesn't happen to normal people in real life. Blacks have a huge disadvantage of poor upbringing by their own family and community and women have a huge "disadvantage" of not wanting to be a computer programmer.
> normal people
Point exactly, when you say normal, you are thinking of white dude America. And yes, this does not happen to them.
On his way to a job interview? And also for many of your other darker skinned friends on their way to job interviews? And your female friends on their way to theirs? I'm not denying it happened in some isolated cases, but that it causes normal people to not get to "the door". It didn't even happen to normal people among your "dark-skinned" friends.
Again, with the normal, who are you talking about? People are complex, all people, normal is your perception of others, check yourself.
The actual issue is they have to interview with people holding the same ignorant assumptions you do.
And then "helping them" with public assistance programs that have rules that are purpose built to incentivize familial instability.
Leftists and their communists approach to the mere statistics....
Good to see you creepin in homes listening to black mothers not give enough praise to their kids, thats great research for the cause.
I will also say that for all this talk about how easy Blacks and women have it, I don't buy it, and I think people spinning tales about how "My company only hires Blacks and women" aren't involved in technical hiring. We are desperate for experienced talent and are under tremendous pressure to build an effective team. We don't have the luxury to be picky about demographics. And my team isn't unique: It's the same story from my peers both inside and outside my company. Likewise, the pipeline itself doesn't have very many women or Black candidates from what I can see, so even these people got automatic interviews I doubt it would change team demographics significantly. And finally: if this is indeed "segregation in reverse" (which it's not: it would just be segregation with the roles reversed), where are these tech companies where the majority of their engineers aren't White or Asian men?
But to your weak sauce point, some folks are just going to have a hard go at life, but is it easier being white through life, no matter what? Yea, for sure. No one says it's an easy life, but it is easier being light skinned.
> unwanted, depressed
I think there used to be some organizations that helped with that. Specifically white men. You know, the kind that would give them a purpose, make them feel wanted. You got a hood and everything.
I'm mixed so I can generally wriggle out of such accusations by playing the race card. The only situation I ever feel good about doing so are ones like this.
You feel sorry for young white men because they have to deal with politics? "Ferrari owners pay an unfair amount of car insurance."
It's easier to think people are being misled than to think people are taking different decisions because their reality is actually different.
This is very perspective dependent. I’m a black college student now and every conversation with friends back home includes some mention of dropping out because it’s not for us as well. When you see people with equivalent resumes already coasting by in the job market because they could get their last names and LinkedIn photos past the screening and into an interview it’s hard to believe that’ll change post-graduation. And most of us are already in planning on entrepreneurship because we know we’re not what companies are looking for even with fancy CS degrees. It’s like if I’ll have to sell sneakers to make ends meet after college anyways I might as well drop out and use that money bootstrapping this inventory SaaS. Innovation out of desperation, I guess.
It’s no way to live. But I think we’re approaching an inflection point.
Your sample size of five elite companies can't be taken as a serious attempt to describe the actual experience of black CS grads applying for jobs.
So that's 1.5% of all engineers. And that's being very generous. The real number is surely below 1%. No surprise that the most desirable companies hire the top 1%.
(Happy for someone to correct my numbers and the resulting percentage - it's based on a few Google searches).
Unless my numbers are way off, it's safe to say that over 99% of engineers in the world are not working at a FAANG. I stand by my claim that we should not be using what happens at FAANGs as reliable anecdotal evidence of the interview experience for most candidates.
This falls in the “earth is not flat” category in 2021, I will not bother posting evidence, as a litmus test of the HN crowd.
And highly publicized diversity efforts by tech giants does not necessarily reflect what the average company in Ohio is doing. The news is not the data, so yeah, you really do need more evidence than "it's what I heard".
So, the next step after forcing universities to give out degrees, is to force companies to hire minorities just to produce statistics that would please liberals ?
Really starts to sound like Communist countries declaring what the unemployment figures should be, by law.
It's the sound of your mind closing ...
If someone's trying to talk you into quitting and giving up because no one wants you because you're black, well.. that doesn't sound like a good friend to me.
Don't get me wrong -- a few tech-billionaires dropped out of college, and apparently it worked out for some. So if you want to try that out, then that'd seem like a different issue. But dropping out because you're black sounds crazy.
All that said, if you want to feel out the waters, why not apply for an internship? Internships can be awesome! -- you can get experience and money while still being a student, plus it can be fun!
Of course haha the name brand and few cool professors are keeping me at this point. But I never expected to go from the highest ranking/gpa/scores to having leaving academia even at the edge of the table.
> But dropping out because you're black sounds crazy.
It’s more like “if I can make X amount anyways today, why do it Y way when I’ll be behind anyways? Might as well gain the experience and be in the same position 4-5 years from now?” if that makes sense but I understand it sounding rash through text.
> why not apply for an internship?
It seems we all have the same issue of never getting responses online. It’s very odd considering we’ve done incredibly well when the interview is direct with the person hiring (as in this is the person that makes the final decision), but situations like that are limited.
The parent commentor stated that their cohort has seen evidence of systematic rejection of their resumes. It is a well-documented fact that this happens all the time for female-sounding, black-sounding etc names and pictures.
Suggesting that "no, it's probably just some missing fine tuning on your resume" doesn't really seem like the right response here...
You see this here on HN all the time, articles about "how we do hiring" that start out with "I would only hire someone who I'd want to get coffee with." Which, to me at least, makes it sound like the person is looking to hire friends/drinking buddies that also have technical skills, not employees. It's a signal that the person is looking for "their type of people."
It's so acceptable to hire this way that people feel comfortable opening publishing that, under their own name, as something they are proud of.
I'm not even black (but I am a woman, I grew up poor, and I'm on the older side) and constantly reading about hiring procedures like that makes me feel like I'm very much not welcome.
Just for what it's worth, I (not black, but from a different group that is not looked upon kindly by HR types) took the route of EEE Degree -> PhD (dropped out) -> Software Engineer at Relatively Elite company (not FAANG, but about as good as we have in Melbourne, AU) -> running eCommerce businesses from home (selling used video games on eBay as well as a USB oscilloscope I designed as a student, mostly through Amazon).
If you're smart and skilled, you can make an absolute killing doing something that stoners or less intelligent people do to "get by", and at the same time spend massive amounts of quality time with your (probably at this stage future) wife and kids.
If you want to have a chat about it, feel free to shoot us an email (see profile). But long story short, even if you're locked out of the traditional job market it doesn't mean you should give up on developing your skills or give up hope. Capitalism provides, man.
HR typically wants their diversity numbers up badly so if you're gay, a woman, and/or black they are already incredibly inclined to hire you, as long as you pass the interviews.
It's not a walk in the park, but you have this going for you and it's a big advantage imo.
Aren't these are known to be extremely difficult interviews compared to most tech interviews? What percentage of candidates who apply get hired? I would imagine the numbers are quite low?
Given a list of chapters in a video course, and a list of user bookmarks, write a function that groups the bookmarks by chapter. Chapters and bookmarks are defined as millisecond offsets from 0 (the start of the video file).
I'd specify the data structures for junior devs and let the more senior people work those out.
Your average developer that gets hired can solve and unit test the solution in less than 35 minutes. Those who don't might be having an off day, or I didn't do a good job at explaining the problem and details, or they didn't ask the right questions or who knows. The point is, a thousand things can go wrong, but the problem itself isn't that difficult. A few loops and a hashmap gets you an acceptable solution.
This and the other problems in the interview question databases at FAANGs are typical of what's in the Cracking the Coding Interview book. Whether someone's ability to solve these types of problems quickly is indicative of their skill level is a hot topic of debate, but if one wants to join these companies, then hacking the process by learning to solve algorithm and data structure problems is acceptable and not a particularly complex process. It's high overhead for the candidate, but at the very least it proves that they can learn, and learning the custom tools and code quickly is about half the skillet required to be successful at a FAANG.
Have you considered that underrepresented candidates might not have the free time outside of university, family, and job responsibilities in order to compete with those whose families can support them to focus on only university and preparing for interviews?
If HR wants their diversity numbers up, maybe HR needs to consider having some diversity in the interview process itself? I wouldn't expect a cookie cutter process to result in much diversity of background or thought.
> Whether someone's ability to solve these types of problems quickly is indicative of their skill level is a hot topic of debate
One of the best interviewing tips I learned that has served me extremely well is to try disprove my impression of the candidate. It seems like this process entirely fails at that.
Usually only at a very superficial level. Enough to comply with the law. And to be fair, some companies do have good intentions with a little extra effort and money put into diversity efforts.
A truly objective hiring process would take into account that Joe and Charley who both got the same results on the coding test are not equally qualified if Joe grew up poor, with parents who never graduated high school, paid his own way through university by working full-time, and along with raising a child as a single parent. While Charley comes from a wealthy family and focused only on studying and job interview prep. With his parents passing along some of their own higher education to him as needed, connecting him to their large network for job opportunities, etc.
Joe is obviously a better candidate. His starting line was far behind Charley's and yet he crossed the finish line at the same time. Joe would be a better candidate even if he passed the finish line a little after Charley. If you want a truly objective hiring process you need to look at starting lines, not just finish lines.
Most companies are doing almost the opposite and only looking at the finish line. They want to look only at the skills and exclude the actual person in a misguided effort to be objective.
All that really does it amplify existing societal bias and privilege by rewarding those who got the most breaks in life.
> this is such a difficult problem to solve.
Agreed. And it would be more expensive. Part of why the status quo is so hard to change. You've got to spend the money and do the work. Or take shortcuts and discriminate on one side or the other.
Maybe Charley had depression and anxiety and never made any friends while Joe is outgoing and did allowing him to form study groups easier. Maybe Charley's parents insisted he become a lawyer and he never touched code until college. Maybe Charley has a speech impediment, maybe he is ugly, maybe he is on the spectrum, maybe, maybe, maybe.
We are here to judge how someone can do the job, not go through their life history trying to judge how much harder or easier they had it than someone else.
You missed the most important part of my point. Someone who crosses the finish line at the same time as someone else, but started from further back is almost always better at doing the job.
I already said it's very difficult to objectively measure. But any improvement in doing so will give you a competitive advantage in finding the best candidates.
The US military used to think successful soldiers with childhood trauma, had coping skills that protected them in deployment. When they ran the studies, they found they were completely wrong - people with childhood trauma, regardless of their military success, were multiple times (4-6x odds ratios) more likely to develop PTSD, (re-)start smoking, or misuse substances.
It's a neat narrative: go through hardship + come out the other side = better coping skills / more productivity. However, humans are complex and often fragile.
I accept the argument that a person who has experienced more hardships has accomplished more to reach that same point. That could be justified if your hiring principles are "who has earned this spot more". It doesn't necessary follow that their trajectory has a steeper slope from the point of hiring.
You've also created a strawman. I never mentioned childhood trauma or much at all of early life aside from growing up poor. Whatever trauma that may have caused certainly did not interfere with their accomplishments to date.
> The US military used to think successful soldiers with childhood trauma...
This is not war nor the battlefield. Let's see studies about people and their career success.
Any objective evidence to support this? My experience has been the opposite - people care deeply about being objective, in order to make better hiring decisions.
Just a simple name change on a resume can result in discrimination. Lots of it.
"On average, white applicants receive 36% more callbacks than equally qualified African Americans (95% confidence interval of 25–47% more), based on random-effects meta-analysis of data since 1989, representing a substantial degree of direct discrimination"
https://www.pnas.org/content/114/41/10870.full
> people care deeply about being objective, in order to make better hiring decisions.
They really don't. It costs a lot of money to care deeply. Most companies optimize for rejecting too many candidates, looking for red flags as a time saver. This has been common practice for decades. They do it because there are usually a lot of applicants, and it's a cheap way to reduce the numbers quickly.
But it's even worse now. It's has been codified into job candidate filtering software. "Applicant Tracking System software is used by 75% of US employers to help filter job candidates".
"If an applicant's work history has a gap of more than six months, the resume is automatically screened out"
That's the opposite of caring deeply about being objective for who is the best candidate. You are making decisions based on very superficial information.
It does seem objective at first. Because it is objectively looking at one factor and making a yes or no decision. But that's exactly what I meant when I said at only a superficial level. You aren't objectively screening for the best candidates. Instead you are objectively screening for a signal, and not even a good signal. You need to screen humans, not signals.
https://www.cnet.com/tech/automated-hiring-software-rejects-...
You are judging intention based on results. Those are not the same thing.
You said that they care deeply. You are doing a lot of psychological projection on a large group of diverse people. I proved the results are concerning. Prove they simultaneously care but have somehow managed to make no improvements in decades in the results. Lacking proof on your side, we'll have to judge based on results.
How could that be? I was under the impression that a huge amount of new hires come in each year from fresh university graduates.
And it was specifically about hiring from HBU's vs other elite institutions, not about hiring black applicants in general which is how you described it.
I see getting hired as the last stage in the pipeline, with the first stages being your family, then your education and then employment.
The more things go wrong in the first stages, the less likely it is for one to succeed at getting to the top of the next stage.
If people from underprivileged families can only afford to go to the 50% best school in the state, then to the 75% best college, then by the time they enter the job search page, they won't be at the top of the list (again, on average).
I'll use myself as an example: I had the privilege of coding for entire weekends when I was young, while my peers had to work the land. This gave me a distinct advantage early on, which I capitalized on, so at an interview with a company I am more likely to get hired than if those same peers had hypothetically applied, again because it wouldn't make sense for a company to pass on the best candidate when they are all competing for talent, regardless of race, gender, height or other ways of splitting people into groups.
I think everyone agrees that the current situation when it comes to diversity in the workplace is not acceptable, and we should definitely fix it, but in my opinion, if companies are competing fairly for talent, then that part of the pipeline doesn't really need fixing. We can instead use it as a test to see if the attempts at fixing the earlier stages result in better numbers.
P.S. This a difficult subject and I don't intend to offend anyone. Despite my relative privilege above, compared to my peers in the US, I still grew up in a poor and underprivileged family and am behind my current peers both financially and socially, so it's a topic that hits home for me.
Truly qualified people on the margins are still getting shut out at every level, every age and stage. Mediocrity is still pushing the center ahead of everyone else. The fact that wsj/economist/HN has turned anti-woke doesn't change the facts.
This kind of implies that they don't actually hire diversely or the issue wouldn't be so dire ...
Which is demonstrably true; they're not hiring from the general population they're hiring largely from universities, and you can look at those universities and see there's already an imbalance in demographics of the available job candidates.
40 applications and 2 resume consultations later and no interview even offered. Meanwhile, some guy you run circles around in real world programming/business experience is 8 for 10. My white classmates noticed this before I did because I’ve just accepted it as part of life.
https://hbswk.hbs.edu/item/minorities-who-whiten-job-resumes...
http://www-2.rotman.utoronto.ca/facbios/file/Whitening%20MS%...
It's a sort of interesting read but nothing too dramatic and whether it's evidence of racism is subject to interpretation. What isn't subject to interpretation is the claim that the study shows that "whitened" names increase callbacks. On the contrary whitening names has no effect on callbacks as indicated on page 31:
"Whitening the name only (versus not whitening at all) did not make a statistically significant difference for black applicants"
The actual study shows that removing racial indicators from experience is what results in a gap in callbacks. So someone who represents themselves as the leader of their campus' "Black Student Business Association" is less likely to get a call back than someone who represented themselves as the leader of their campus' "Student Business Association". They refer to the removal of racial indicators as whitening but I think that's prematurely jumping to conclusions. The name aspect is certainly a form of whitening, since black names are being changed to white names. But it's premature to refer to the removal of racial indicators and making the experience racially neutral as a form of whitening.
Other forms of experience that explicitly mention race result in less callbacks than when that same experience doesn't mention race. Whether this is racism or not can not be concluded strictly based off of the study's parameters. For example, if I were presented with one candidate who was in charge of the university's "Law Society" I would probably pick that person over someone who was in charge of that university's "Black Law Society", and I don't think I would be racist for doing so. I would consider being in charge of an organization that is open to all races or is independent of race as a more prestigious accomplishment than being in charge of an organization that is race specific.
To test whether I was racist in my decision making, I would need to pick someone who was not in charge of anything over someone who was in charge of the "Black Law Society", with all else being equal. The study did not do this comparison and unfortunately the study does not present the raw data so there's no way for me to do this analysis myself.
I could bicker about some of the methodological issues as well which are not exactly rigorous, as well as the fact that this study is not exactly pertinent to this conversation as they only looked at internships for jobs that are not technical in nature, with the bulk of them being sales and marketing, and customer service jobs, instead of engineering, computer science, law, or professional jobs.
Ultimately no study is going to be perfect but one should not read too much into many of these studies. They are not nearly as rigorous or definitive as one would expect and furthermore they don't tend to generalize.
Good catch, I had been thinking of another study which looked specifically at only changing names on resumes. That's:
Are Emily and Greg More Employable than Lakisha and Jamal? A Field Experiment on Labor Market Discrimination
https://www.nber.org/papers/w9873
In any event, its not a single study that's looked at this. Have a look at this meta-analysis of 24 studies
https://www.pnas.org/content/114/41/10870.full
Imagine you having always bought tasty tomatoes from your local farm, and someone steps in to show you studies that determined that the generally tomatoes in the US are tasteless.
I'm also not arguing that tasty tomatoes are taking shelf space away from other fruit.
You're right, I always fail that interview question where they ask me what my sexual preference is and I say women... ...Seriously? you are just making stuff up now.
I can only recommend that you have to base life decisions on your own experience, because it can differ dramatically.
I have an experience from which I have drawn some conclusions - I am an immigrant and many of my co-immigrants are convinced that the locals dislike them, they feel they are being treated unfairly, etc.
I was unable to square my experience with their's: surely they can't be imagining things, but at the same time I cannot be just magically lucky. Some of them are older generation, maybe things were different back then. Maybe, when they face difficulties they are more likely to attribute it to discrimination. Maybe some behavioural stereotyoes play a role - I don't know.
For a while I wanted to try a 'secret shopper' experiment, create two fake Linkedin profiles, identical except background- try applying for jobs with them. Never got round to it.
[PDF, French]: https://www.cdpdj.qc.ca/Publications/etude_testing_discrimin...
We did something like this! But we swapped slightly reworded resumes and the response ratio leaned even further in the white classmate’s favor. We just laughed, as if we couldn’t believe that what we half-joked about actually happened. I’m long past the point of being sad. I guess that’s life.
As far as I can tell, Big Tech has terrible numbers for diversity and they are tripping over themselves trying to bring the numbers up. I really, truly believe that non-white, non-male candidates are not going to suffer if they can get the resume on the table.
Stay the course. Good things await.
And finally, what determines that college is not for the "us" your friend refers to? Culture? Post-graduation job prospects? At least from his perspective.
Why do you say that? Because I can tell you as an employee of a FAANG company that you are exactly what these companies are looking for. They’ve got serious diversity issues - especially among Black men (not assuming a gender here just facts) - and they are desperate to balance themselves out.
I mean that as an encouraging statement. You ARE who is being looked for. Be confident in that and use it to your advantage.
It's the only way to innovate imo.
https://www.sba.gov/business-guide/grow-your-business/minori...
> we’re not what companies are looking for even with fancy CS degrees.
You are exactly what the federal government is looking for. US contract procurement has a significant racial spoils system within it.
https://careers.google.com/jobs/results/132267679726609094-s...
>students who are a member of a group that is historically underrepresented in the technology industry will receive priority in the selection process. This group includes women, ethnic minorities and students with disabilities.
The companies that have to virtue-signal do so because you wouldn’t notice if they didn’t tell you. I’d prefer they skip that and hire who they want without the pretense, and if that’s not me, fine, but please be honest.
taway1343@gmail.com
There are certainly black individuals who would pursue a career in tech, if not for the (perhaps earned) perception that tech is hostile towards black people. Things have changed, but the narrative hasn’t, and that is doing real damage.
I’m trying to say the same sort of thing applies to white men and college—just there being a perception of college campuses being hostile to them is going to prevent many of them from going. And people will be hurt by that, in one way or another.
That is cultural transition & stereotype threat first-generation college attendees face, regardless of race.
> When you see people with equivalent resumes already coasting by in the job market because they could get their last names and LinkedIn photos past the screening and into an interview it’s hard to believe that’ll change post-graduation
If anything, they are probably getting introductions/doors opened for them by friends & family. It sounds like you are probably applying for some of the most competitive positions in the world, Google and many other places have less than 1% acceptance rate for interns. Harvard is an order of magnitude less selective. It sucks, but don't let struggling to get an internship get you down.
Avoid this line of thinking. It may be true, or it may not be. You will probably never know. What I do know is this is an unhelpful and defeatist line of thinking. Instead prove the haters wrong.
But there's more because I just started college and going to finish it.
Men still have every opportunity a woman has. In addition, they are still recognized more for leading positions. They also dominate about every trade related job.
Yet, they are 'left without a purpose', when all they need it to do is do whatever they want.
What "equal right" do you mean, that "equaled opportunities in the labor market and education"?
Also you seem to miss on the fact that men get worse grades in school (which some say is because of discrimination), which makes it harder for them to enter university.
It's a big ass cool world we have going on, and starting a family effectively ties you down from being able to explore it.
Good grief.
Women don't have the same financial expectations as men do. This is true even today, despite all the push for equal pay and equal rights. Often, that's prior to even getting into a relationship. If you seek an indication, ask a bunch of guys if they would settle for a girl still living at home and then ask the inverse, both groups aged in their 20s.
Given how men are increasingly "giving up on society" because of these standards being harder to achieve every day, GP's argument isn't that improbable at all.
You sound like you have some preconceived notion of you or your friends being wronged by women or something that I'm not going to be able to shake or have a reasonable discussion about.
I will however say, in words that may appease your ideology - it's honestly never been easier to get a banging hot girlfriend than in the current climate. You literally just have to not be completely fucking weird, have a hint of how to dress in something that compliments your figure, have the smallest standards of 21st century developed country hygiene, and one ever so slightly interesting hobby. Seriously, women will throw themselves at you.
But keep telling yourself what you want to think and reinforcing your views. I've honestly felt nothing but bad for women in STEM lately after an internship as a MechE in a fairly large and well known company. The older men acted fucking disgustingly towards the female interns, when all they're trying to do is make a career in STEM.
Second, please keep your preconceived notions of me to yourself. They do not add to the discussion at all.
As for what's left worth responding to. Look up the rise of male sexlessness compared to female sexlessness if you seek further evidence of what's happening. The massive filtering and selection criteria happening in online dating. Considering your American-based view, surely you aren't blind to the increasing rates of gymgoers and even steroid use, and the men's grooming industry growing ever more. If anything, that doesn't signify a lack of men trying to maintain themselves, yet it still contradicts your idea of "just take a shower, go buy some clothes and get a girlfriend bro".
>But keep telling yourself what you want to think and reinforcing your views. I've honestly felt nothing but bad for women in STEM lately after an internship as a MechE in a fairly large and well known company.
As an aside, how can you in the same breath accuse me of wanting to form an echo chamber when you immediately cite your own anecdote as a reason to push your own view, despite the fact your anecdote does not invalidate the concerns of men at all? Surely you do not lack the capacity to feel for both the struggles of men and women, regardless of the cause? Men and women have their own troubles, and this incessant need to trivialize one over the other is exactly why we're not getting any further.
Nobody says you have to do that, but if some men and women want to do it, it will show up in the statistics.
Also even if you don't want a family and just want to explore the world alone, you don't need that much money. What exactly, do you want all the money for, that a high end career would give you? Also working 60 hour weeks would also prevent you from exploring the world, wouldn't it?
Second, as many in the west have seen here, we were all pushed towards studying, pursuing masters, etc. This was the policy in most of the western countries (some may say this was silly but this is another debate). I have seen first hand our teachers (mostly female, by the ways) pushing us to apply to Science curriculums, and my fellow female students do everything they could to avoid it.
It's extremely hard for women in these countries to get good careers in any field other than teaching or medicine especially since they are often forced to marry and leave the work force (they can't work without their husbands' permission and they almost always handle all child care). It is the norm for women to marry right after graduating from college and not doing so is seen as abnormal.
The combination of this results in women going to college and studying what they actually _like_ in their final years of "freedom." They choose STEM because they like it.
In the west, women are probably as inherently interested in STEM as in these other countries, but they also know that they need to get a job and they often choose career paths that would give them less pain due to harassment or discrimination.
Your reasoning is that in brutally sexist societies women choose to study completely male-dominated fields because they don't have to make a living after it, whereas in the most egalitarian societies in the entire world sexism pushes them towards traditionally female fields to escape discrimination?
Are you saying that "egalitarian" societies are in fact sexist, and that teaching schools/staff (largely populated by progressive left-wing women), are in fact preventing little girls from doing maths and learning C in their bedroom ?
Women in more egalitarian societies make their choices under different pressures. They need more of a long-term plan for their career choice and they don't have as many children or marry or leave the workforce as early nor as often as women in the middle east.
Do note though that as more women get into STEM, the experienced and perceived discrimination levels drop dramatically and even more women make the switch. Also, I think it's useful to note that there has been a systemic reduction in what I call the level of "generational misogyny." I can confirm from my own experience that there is a huge difference in how older vs younger (<40yo) men interact with women.
Younger folks are way more egalitarian and some of them assume that they all get the same treatment from older folks but that is just not true. A 30 years old male researcher could have entirely pleasant and productive working relationships with both female researchers in his generation and male researchers in their 60s. He might not expect or understand the degree of hostility or discrimination his female colleagues face when dealing with these very same older researchers. I believe that as time passes and the egalitarian culture actually gets to the "top of the food chain," we will see a distribution that is more representative of male and female preferences without the added discriminatory pressure.
You can flip it any way you want, you will always end up with the following conclusion which demolishes your feminists dogmas: that women and men have inherently different interests, which, big news, is not surprising, given that they are different.
The different pressures are sufficient to explain much of the different major choices, especially when considering the changing distribution in other countries with different sets of pressures.
There are indeed differences between men and women -- cis-men can't give birth, for instance. However, other than the statistical population differences, an average man and an average women with equitable socioeconomic settings are incredibly similar in many areas. Perhaps even in an ideal world there would be more female biologists and more male IT workers. That would be fine. What matters is that a human who is interested in something would have a fighting chance to get there.
Right now, cultural and societal factors are tipping different scales in different ways. For future generation, we would do well to reduce the imbalance -- encourage and support minorities, women, and, yes, white men. People face different battles and helping some does not mean others have to be ignored.
It also assumed that sexism is straight line. In fact, while easter europe is overall more sexist, there are many aspects in which it is less sexist. Some aspects of American sexism are present much less.
The confusion is effectively from American assuming that every single aspect of their country must be superior.
https://www.thejournal.ie/gender-equality-countries-stem-gir...
Countries with lousy job prospects for women (to sum it up bluntly) see higher STEM participation from women.
Well, based on studies I have seen, if the family had only one computer, it waay often in boys room rather then in girls room. PC was assumed to be boys toy.
The culture emerges from there.
Anecdotally, that is patter I do see around. Parents of young girls are way more often enforcing "no screen till this or that age" while parents of young boys almost brag about boys playing games on them.
Maybe boys get more screen time in families like that because they're more interested in computers? Maybe it's assumed to be a boys toy because boys show more interest in it?
i.e, the banking situation you mention was not a barrier to employment whatsoever.
As another anecdote, I have friends that are married and both in the same science field in academia. Both work at the same university. The woman was told that she needed to prove that she wasn't just hired because of her husband. The man was not told the same.
People from working class rust belt towns in the UK, for example, can't just do what they want, since there are no opportunities. But they are told that they are privileged and can do what they want, and then people wonder why support for labour/leftism has plummeted in working class communities.
The bigger problem to me is that with such a high cost for university education, our future electricians won't have one. Whereas in Europe they very possibly might. I know which society I prefer to live in and it's not the one where people are less educated.
What narrative about uniform privilege? Can you give some sources?
I've also never heard privilege explained as making life "just easy". I've heard just for example that life can still be hard but your skin color is not one of the things making your life hard.
I'd be interested in reading these narratives that are so different from the narratives I've read about privilege.
It is. In France college is 400€ a year.
Is it entirely false though? What benefit does a college degree in sociology does to a person (and even broader society) when the person will likely be in over 100k+ debt?
You give three examples but only tie the last to the admissions issue. Could you expand on the others and how they might be relevant to this issue?
This. We are seeing the results of what was reported in the book Boys Adrift.
My older son just graduated high school. He has no interest in college at the moment, and has shown a gift for working with his hands. He is currently doing a carpentry apprenticeship with an acquaintance that runs a renovation and design company. He loves the work, loves the people he works with[0], and comes home and wants to build more stuff. He's making pretty decent money as an 18 year old, and is part of something that very much embodied.
[0] His crew is run by Swedish woman who was trained as a metal worker, so it isn't just a bunch of dudes, which is also great.
Looking back a decade later, it would have been very beneficial if I didn't go to university but instead did an apprenticeship and developed from there, built up confidence and independence incrementally and forming my path iteratively.
Most of my friends and family actually went (are going) on such a path, from apprenticeship/trade-school to working and eventually advanced training or university later in life.
In Switzerland this model is widely appreciated and seems to be the default (I didn't look at numbers). Newly the (first) apprenticeship is called "Erstausbildung" (initial education), implying that it is the first of many steps in our education, revisited/expanded at later stages in life.
In many other (OECD) countries this seems not to be the case and college/university is regarded as the default or thing to aspire to for everyone. I personally don't agree with that notion and have become more and more convinced of a more continuous and flexible education that isn't necessarily tied to academics.
I hope some of the implicit stigma around older undergrads goes away too.
Not everyone is motivated or gifted enough at 18 to grind through 4 years while maximizing social interactions and general happiness.
I really do believe university education is very beneficial to most people but at different stages of their lives and one solution fits all is not good.
My experience sounds similar to yours. Though, when I tried to go back to school to dive in again, I found the 'system' was highly oriented towards parenting 18yo kids in all the worst ways imaginable. It was nauseating and unbearable being in that environment, and even going through the application/acceptance process (filling out pledges for conduct, right-thinking, etc). Much has changed with online learning, but I still feel the B&M universities are a very ill-fit for independently-minded adult learners.
Learning for people who have work experience is really different. We have context, clear goals and so on. Teaching other 'adult' students is really fun, because we get to figure out what suits them instead of trying to hit measurements predefined by some committee. Ultimately it is just about giving guidance and ideas, kind of like consulting to learn, what to learn and so on.
"Education is wasted on the young" - this was exactly my experience. I didn't know it then, but I first needed to build up confidence, make 'real' mistakes and learn from them. I was also completely unfit for the type of scheduled and predetermined learning that happens at universities. My mind wanders too much and I'm driven by answering my own questions that I feel matter or are interesting. Also a reason why I don't work in large/streamlined orgs.
As a son of a blue collar mechanic, I am all for this; we need more tradespeople in the US, and I suspect he'll be well on his way to financial security at least as early if not earlier than my son (if he takes care of his finances).
There's this from the .uk perspective https://www.fixradio.co.uk/fix-feed/features/post/everybody-...
I find it fascinating you needed to drop this comment in order to justify your son's work environment, implying that all male environments are inherently toxic. It's very rare to find people suggesting that an all female work environment is inherently bad.
It is a small world and I am 98% sure that your son has been in my house recently.
Citation needed.
(Edit: I assume this is getting downvoted by men with self-esteem issues. There are ways you can work on that. Good luck).
For your delectation and learning:
https://www.google.com/search?hl=en&q=self%20esteem%20traini...
Its just like the Ed loan program..
Many don't realize its a teaching goal tool, those that get that they need to form a business around their brand to pay off the loan win and those that do not lose and society loses.
We should not bet on society losing this time around such as the elites did in the US!
I doubt this has anything to do with it. What is the argument here? They hear this and believe it so they don't think they need school?
I grew up in a white, working class community, and in my experience nobody paid attention to liberals on Twitter calling them privelaged. Certainly not enough to decide not to go to college over it.
Like the claim that all those people that joined the extreme right wing groups because the "libs said they were Nazis so why not".
So this guy gets to represent himself as a spokesman for the movement and nobody really wants to contradict it under their real name.
From bell hooks and Kimberle Crenshaw (intersectionality) into leading theories on feminist and racial thought - this is the progressive and academic left. It is the leading thought in every elite university. And you can't run away from it and say "us silent majority progressives...." - a progressive is either this or they aren't progressive by today's standard. It is a social force that is trying to get inside of everything it can, from unrelated academic scholarship (look at what's in modern STEM curricula) as well as corporate America and now elite high schools.
My advice is to choose Liberalism without identity politics and reject this school of thought as illiberal, totalitarian, and harmful.
(For what it's worth, the entire scholarship of critical theory isn't all awful. There's good things in there and the identification of many societal problems is probably right. However, it isn't unique to them and their solutions for these problems are awful and regressive.)
I identify as a cultural moderate for that reason. This stuff is all divorced from actual politics, economics or governing, it's purely cultural.
Really, from what I can see all of current progressivism is compatible with his approach.
The silent majority of people who would have called themselves progressives a decade ago are silent because they are silenced and called racists or just right-wing if they question the new orthodoxy.
Ergo, the people you are referring to as a silent majority are no longer included as progressives.
Why is that the implied option?
And no it doesn’t mean a vote for Trump. It means not supporting candidates that parrot this type of rhetoric and to not support causes/movements that are a part of it. FWIW Trump did ban critical race theory from being brought into federal offices and Biden quickly reinstated it under the guise of “learning to be nice to each other” - which it isn’t. Biden, in this case, I believe is a useful idiot for propagating their propaganda, mistaking it for harmless “diversity training”. There’s a big difference!
Prophets, or paranoid fools? Are we looking back and saying, gosh, we should have listened to them, that damn Jane Fonda ruined America.
If you believe in the approach of Kendi and DiAngelo, they are the only game in town.
If you believe Kendi and DiAngelo’s approach is counterproductive then supporting modern progressives is acting against the very issues you care about.
You don’t have to make a choice of which foot to shoot yourself in. You can simply not fire.
There are plenty of more moderate political voices, even within the parties. You can support them and you can denounce the groups whose policies you dislike.
Modern progressives are only in the ‘game’ because people support them. If you don’t like what they represent, you can stop.
Are you saying that conservatives today are more likely to engage in "exploiting discrimination and inequality" than conservatives yesterday? Or what did you mean by "modern"?
https://www.penguin.co.uk/articles/2020/june/ibram-x-kendi-d...
I think it's pretty clear from the full text that he's not advocating for racism against past racists or their offspring (which, intentional or not, is what your use of the quote makes it sound like).
"Since the 1960s, racist power has commandeered the term “racial discrimination,” transforming the act of discriminating on the basis of race into an inherently racist act. But if racial discrimination is defined as treating, considering, or making a distinction in favor or against an individual based on that person’s race, then racial discrimination is not inherently racist. The defining question is whether the discrimination is creating equity or inequity."
The other thing is the idea that, for those of us growing up in various segments of society that are affected by the above, our very mechanism of thought was generated by this system, and that affects how we think about and perceive these systems (and everything else).
I believe he's simply advocating for being conscious of the above two facts, when examining these systems and reforming them (and of course when teaching the history of these systems). To ignore race and racism as if it never happened is to allow all of that ingrained racism to perpetuate (of systems and of thought). All of this sounds pretty reasonable to me, but that may be due to my particular experience.
That said - I'm no expert, I've only read the linked passage so far, though I've now ordered the book and will start reading it tonight. I'll refrain from commenting further here (I think we're pretty off-topic already). Thanks for the discussion!
You can't always unequivocally state that white people are privileged over non-whites in every circumstance. Obviously it's going to be true in many cases, but it can't always be just assumed.
One of the biggest issues with Kendi and similar works (of which there are many in the academic world) are they paint a false dichotomy and they frame themselves as the only legitimate response to historical racism, etc. That is, anti-racism is the only way to combat "white supremacy". It's illiberal in this regard (and in fact, the entire body of critical theory is not only skeptical to western liberalism but actively attacks it as "the tools of the oppressor") and I hope you find his remedies as totalitarian and insane as I do. For instance, I don't think a "Department of Anti-Racism" which is staffed by "formally trained anti-racists" and not appointed by elected officials with the authority to "clear" all local, state, and federal policies to ensure they are "anti-racist" is a good idea. And to be equipped with "disciplinary tools" to punish non-compliance...
https://www.politico.com/interactives/2019/how-to-fix-politi...
Racial discrimination is inherently racist.
I can be in support of anti-systemic-racism actions that do not act on an individual level. I can support universal healthcare, higher income equality and whatnot, without the binary race worldview that Kendi puts out.
We tend to refer to "liberals" as people on the left but in general a liberal is anyone who is consistent with liberal beliefs which include a fair amount of "conservatism" as well. However, there's quite a few folks on the right that are as illiberal as the progressives are on the left.
If you contrast to an attorney or doctor -- those firms/practices are extremely challenging to start and operate on your own. The salaries of your employees are high at best, marketing is extremely expensive, and insurance can wipe out a firm/practice.
Not withstanding restrictive licensing systems that require you to put in X years working crap jobs for crap pay under someone who already has the license to ensure that you've "paid enough dues" you're not gonna go around undercutting everyone once you get your license.
It is unsurprising less men are finishing college in the face of that culture.
While there’s going to be many causes, the aforementioned seem more important than a message of privilege.
As a brown person I think the former is definitely still true. The latter is definitely not true, at least looking at the average white man's number of tinder matches compared to mine.
Men who fail to provide or "fit in" to their "role" in society become depressed, and then they kill themselves. :/
woke jane: liberal arts degree, 8$ per hour job at starbucks
there is nothing wrong with having an educated working class. nothing should restrict you from being a plumber with an history degree.
Observations (based on the figure alone):
1. White-Males had the lowest college-enrollment-rates across all categories. They got the lowest in the two lowest income-brackets; basically a three-way tie in the next income-bracket; and just a little higher than Hispanic-Males in the highest income-bracket.
2. Asians had the highest enrollment-rates across all income-brackets.
3. Asians were relatively constant in their enrollment-rates, regardless of income or gender, always above 70%. (Always above ~83%, if excluding the lowest income-bracket.) The gender-gap still leaned toward Asian-Females over Asian-Males, but not by much.
4. Blacks varied heavily by income. Blacks had pretty low enrollment-rates in the lowest income-bracket, but got some of the highest enrollment-rates in the higher income-brackets (after Asians).
5. Black-Females had an odd pattern-deviation: like Black-Males, their enrollment-rates increased dramatically with family-income, getting the highest non-Asian enrollment-rate by the second-highest income-bracket. But then, oddly, their enrollment-rate fell by ~8% from the second-highest to the highest income-bracket.
6. Hispanics were pretty consistent with Whites, especially for Males. For Females, Whites had higher rates in the lowest income-bracket, while Hispanics had somewhat higher rates in all other income-brackets.
7. Ignoring race, enrollment-rates increased significantly with family-income.
8. Ignoring race, enrollment-rates were much higher for Females than Males across all income-brackets.
https://scholar.harvard.edu/goldin/publications/homecoming-a...
>Once barriers to female careers were lowered and their access to higher education was expanded, two key factors may have played a role in the female college advantage: relatively greater economic benefits of college for females and relatively higher effort costs of college going and prepara- tion for males. (girls exceeded boys in secondary school performance and attainment)
My brother tried several different educational paths, pushed by my parents. In the end he got a sort of burnout. After years now he is picking up some work, mainly helping elderly still living alone on any tasks (from computer related to doing groceries). He seems happy, finally.
My other brother hated all his schools, got bullied a lot, he specialized in agriculture in the end. Now he's a truck driver (with one of those super big ones), he likes it. He can still give nice advice on what to plant in my garden, so there's that.
I see that my son is also really interested in many things, but school is not so much "his thing". Sitting still, listening, it's not making him happy. If he has any aspiration of building a life without formal schooling I'd support it. There is so much to learn online. He can be an entrepreneur and we can help him get there. In fact, I'd enjoy it.
Who knows with the insane cost of education, this generation of men may end up self-taught, happy and (in the US important) debt free. Maybe we should worry about the people missing out on this opportunity?
My brother was a professional basketball player up until his mid-30s. I remember when he was about the same age as the males of the story, he was deciding between a four-year scholarship at an American college, or a four-year contract in the Australian professional league. The pitch from the college was that he could return to Australia in year five and earn x. The pitch from the local team was that he could earn x by year five, but have been earning for each of the first four years; the pro team offered university payments, car, and so on. Pros and cons either way.
He eventually got his degree studying remotely in the later years of his basketball career and transitioned to a desk job. There's always a sense of what might've been, but I think things worked out well enough.
The moment that a serious, legitimate credential system appears, every average university will disappear overnight. We'll be left with an oligarch class that attends the top ±30 universities and everyone else getting a AmaGoogBook certificate of completion.
Because there is much more possible value in college than just the education.
Socializing is a huge part of it. College is a good place to learn how to make friends, date, network, etc.
It's also nearly free at many schools, so I don't envision the future you're describing ever happening. Most 18-22 year olds couldn't think of a better place to be than on a campus almost exclusively filled with people in their age group.
You should have.
It’s not “world class professors” on YouTube that people are watching instead of their own university’s zoom classes. They’re not paying for zoom classes because they want to learn on campus.
They still want to go to college, they just don’t want to learn online.
No one does it because we intuitively understand that there is no real value in doing so; the purpose such institutions serve is credentialing, not education.
(End paraphrase)
Well, I did it :-) I did 2 or 3 years of philosophy courses at Sydney Uni. I mean, I just turned up. At the beginning of each semester I'd start doing every possible course, then just keep doing the ones I liked, with interesting/good/admirable lecturers, which turned out to be a lot, 2 or 3 times the amount of lectures weekly than if I'd been enrolled. Also was on their mailing list so also went to special visiting lectures, a regular discussion group, etc etc. No exam stress! I had such a great time. But yeah, most (non-university) people I mentioned it to laughed as if it was crazy.
Those students are much less likely to develop such a bond with some rando who just walked in off the street to check out what's going on. That person has zero investment in the experience other than expressed interest and would I'm certain be measurably less successful forming relationships with other students who could help their career in the future. They aren't in the same tribe.
It makes me sick to say it, but this can be even more important than the credentialing. There are multiple stories of students dropping out to start companies and still benefitting from their college peer network in ways that wouldn't happen for someone that wasn't actually a 'true peer'.
I think this is simply a biological tendency at the end of the day and don't see any easy way of changing it.
Because most employers will not even consider your application without a degree.
The relevant question from the perspective of those doing the hiring is what is the probability a student from Arizona State is more competent than one from Harvard?
Replace competent with well connected and/or otherwise useful.
- Education
- Certification
- Network
That's what I spent a semester (total)... in the early 90's.
These days it is more like $5,000 a semester (per class)!
I don't get that line of thinking:
1. Education isn't a passive lecture-consumption activity. A "world-class professor" who put a lecture on youtube is going to have exactly zero time to talk to you as a student.
2. There's probably not that much difference between the teaching ability of a "world-class professor" and your "average" good professor. That's especially true for undergrad subjects.
I think you're assuming a false equivalency, akin to "why have parents when you can watch videos made by the best parents in the world on television?" The tech version may have many similarities, but it's not equivalent.
Seeing how many misinformation is going around and the people swallowing it, this seems more important than ever before.
I’m not so sure. Why do you need to pay someone to give you lists of books to read, rather than just buying and reading them yourself?
You don't. However, college isn't just a list of books to read, it also includes practical exercises and, most importantly, accountability mechanisms, and there is plenty of evidence that accountability mechanisms tend to improve performance.
I hear this line parroted all the time, and it just rings so hollow. I can't remember any optional classes that I took in undergrad.
The most interesting college classes I took tolerated non-majors reluctantly, if at all. The expectation was that people who were there to be "well-rounded humans" weren't going to take the course seriously.
When I graduated with my degree in philosophy I went on to run a small climbing gym. I was able to jump into software development during the first internet bubble, where start-ups needed warm bodies who can learn quickly. Fortunately, I had scholarships and graduated with minimal debt. So...it all worked out pretty well. I'm not sure it's worth taking on crushing debt for that experience without a guarantee of a job.
That said, not every person is wired to go to college. There are plenty of trades that can foster the some sort of collegial experiences, if you find the right the person to train you. There are very thoughtful craftspeople out there.
Clearly, this is not the case with paid education in US, UK and some other developed countries.
But social stigma stemms from everything from dating to parents to friends etc if one does not complete a 4-year degree.
Most tech firms are lifitng the requirement for such a degree as in tech if you can do the work you can do the work and can (I'd say should) be hired. (In a sense, most coding/programming work is blue collar in that sense -- you don't need rocket science to center a div ;)