It sucks, but what can you do? Wealthy peers do have their advantages, but that's the case in almost every field out there. This is not unique to tech.
The #1 thing I would do if you're doing unpaid internships, is get rid of unpaid internships, which should be illegal anyway. Unpaid internships mean that you will only get candidates who come from high-income backgrounds, because low-income candidates can't afford to work for free for any significant amount of time.
I also won't give money to nonprofits that use unpaid internships. If you won't help the people in your own house, that tells me you aren't fundamentally invested in helping people, and I'd argue that remains true no matter what the mission of your organization is.
"Big tech" internships are almost always paid, so the good news here is that they're well ahead of you.
With that said, the answer of hire lower-income candidates isn't particularly actionable if I'm a manager bringing on interns. What am I supposed to do, ask them if they're income-challenged and hire them if they say yes?
The story is tragic, painful, and heartbreaking to read. My heart and empathy go out to these struggling and ambitious people. Yet none of those make this an easy problem to solve.
With that said, the answer of hire lower-income candidates isn't particularly actionable if I'm a manager bringing on interns. What am I supposed to do, ask them if they're income-challenged and hire them if they say yes?
Yes.
Obviously that's not the only question you ask them: you still want to hire someone with the ability to perform the job.
Yet none of those make this an easy problem to solve.
Big tech is well known for only being interested in solving easy problems, which are the only problems worth solving. /s
I'm not a lawyer so I don't know what laws might apply here. Can you explain what you're talking about?
As far as I can tell, high-income people aren't a protected class anywhere in the US. There are many state laws preventing you from asking salary histories[1], but that's not everywhere, and where such laws exist, companies are already using loopholes to discriminate against low-income candidates. Many of these laws only say that you aren't allowed to use income history to determine pay: you're welcome to filter candidates by income history if your pay is stated up front.
Even under the most strict conditions, you could specify that certain positions are intended as an aid program for lower-income applicants (as defined by an income range) and it would take a special kind of douchebag to apply for such a position if they weren't low-income, even without you verifying their income. This strikes me as possibly the best solution anyway, because sometimes income doesn't tell the whole story: someone with prior high income might have massive medical debt, for example which decreases their effective income.
Given the tight association between income and race, I think it would almost inevitably look exactly like a clear racial preference of the sort that's illegal under common anti-discrimination language. This is the kind of thing that lands companies in court. Even if they win, it's a huge blow to PR and expensive.
Obviously you are allowed to look at income history in some manner, but a lot of the people concerned here won't have any significant income history. So what you're really doing is filtering by the economic status of a student's family. That's inevitably going to be fraught.
you could specify that certain positions are intended as an aid program for lower-income applicants (as defined by an income range) and it would take a special kind of douchebag to apply for such a position if they weren't low-income, even without you verifying their income
If you're looking at telling what feels like a little white lie to get a big boost to the next five to seven decades of your life, how easy is it going to be for you to pass on the chance? You personally are clearly willing to take the hit for the greater cause of justice, but I do not have faith that millions of people each year who know they are competing for a limited number of opportunities will share the strength of your conviction.
Ultimately, I think we're in a tough spot. At scale, there are enough people suffering that it's easy to find and tell stories about how bad it is for them. Yet solving these major hardships experienced by real people is far harder than tugging on heartstrings.
Given the tight association between income and race, I think it would almost inevitably look exactly like a clear racial preference of the sort that's illegal under common anti-discrimination language. This is the kind of thing that lands companies in court. Even if they win, it's a huge blow to PR and expensive.
Given the number of companies that blatantly use income to discriminate against underprivileged races and suffer zero consequences, I think your concern here is unfounded.
If you're looking at telling what feels like a little white lie to get a big boost to the next five to seven decades of your life, how easy is it going to be for you to pass on the chance? You personally are clearly willing to take the hit for the greater cause of justice, but I do not have faith that millions of people each year who know they are competing for a limited number of opportunities will share the strength of your conviction.
That's not a "little white lie", and having a moral compass that you're willing to follow over money isn't some sort of abnormal thing.
Your opinion fits with a general anti-pattern in aid programs where people spend more money trying to verify eligibility for aid than they would spend letting a few outliers game the system, meanwhile excluding people who are legitimately eligible because the verification process presents barriers.
While I'm not willing to accuse you of either of these things, I will say that this view often comes from people who assume everyone is as amoral as they are, or who are actively trying to undermine the aid programs so they can defund them.
Ultimately your opinion makes no sense. You're worried that some of the candidates might lie and you'd hire high-income candidates when you meant to hire low-income candidates. So you just throw up your hands, and say nothing can be done, and then hire high-income candidates because that's what happens when you make no effort to do otherwise. You literally don't even have to spend more money to try to hire lower-income candidates. It begins to sound like you're just not interested in solving the problem.
Ultimately, I think we're in a tough spot. At scale, there are enough people suffering that it's easy to find and tell stories about how bad it is for them. Yet solving these major hardships experienced by real people is far harder than tugging on heartstrings.
I'm not tugging on heartstrings. Nowhere have I mentioned any of the hardships which low-income people experience. I'm literally proposing solutions which you're shooting down with incredulity and this straw man argument.
If there's money to be made, Hacker News is all about solving hard problems. But suddenly when it involves taking some responsibility for a social problem, it's hard and that's it!
The subject of the article are internships which pay very well. Big tech internships are usually between $45-50/hr. Some people I know make more money at internships than their entire annual PhD stipend.
YCombinator is a startup incubator, so ostensibly a lot of people here aren't in big tech, and startups do often use unpaid interns. Programmers might not have the full impression of this, because programming internships are usually paid in my experience, even at small startups. But lots of internships in (for example) marketing or administration/HR are unpaid.
Well, the stipend is traditionally shit, but the graduate programs like to remind you about the generous tuition waiver. STEM students are so lucky. I have no idea how humanities students justify their situation to themselves.
yeah it's not like we don't know the majority root causes for most of society ills. being poor just perpetuates throughout every other part of a persons life in really nasty feedback loops. criminal justice, health, income, opportunities for advancement, etc.
Wait, if you can't argue logically or decently, just say so. It is understandable to get angry when confronted with logic.
Believe it or not, both you and the New York Times can both be doing the wrong thing.
I am not the king of Tech.
Here let me spell it out in an easy-to-digest manner:
If in other privileged industries rate of hiring poor folks is lower than that of tech, tech is actually doing good and not wrong. Is that clear?
You assume tech is in the wrong automatically without rationally analyzing it. The way to rationally analyze it is to compare with other rich industries.
Once again, we should stop moral aggrandizing and argue scientifically.
Who tf knows? Have they published an article on it?
Are you saying it’s an issue across all industries? Or?
I am not saying anything about that. All I am saying is this:
For a fair and logical/scientific comparison, the article should have included other rich and powerful industries that folks want to work in, but I guess NYT doesn't believe in fairness.
Comments
It sucks, but what can you do? Wealthy peers do have their advantages, but that's the case in almost every field out there. This is not unique to tech.
Hire lower-income candidates?
The #1 thing I would do if you're doing unpaid internships, is get rid of unpaid internships, which should be illegal anyway. Unpaid internships mean that you will only get candidates who come from high-income backgrounds, because low-income candidates can't afford to work for free for any significant amount of time.
I also won't give money to nonprofits that use unpaid internships. If you won't help the people in your own house, that tells me you aren't fundamentally invested in helping people, and I'd argue that remains true no matter what the mission of your organization is.
"Big tech" internships are almost always paid, so the good news here is that they're well ahead of you.
With that said, the answer of hire lower-income candidates isn't particularly actionable if I'm a manager bringing on interns. What am I supposed to do, ask them if they're income-challenged and hire them if they say yes?
The story is tragic, painful, and heartbreaking to read. My heart and empathy go out to these struggling and ambitious people. Yet none of those make this an easy problem to solve.
Yes.
Obviously that's not the only question you ask them: you still want to hire someone with the ability to perform the job.
Big tech is well known for only being interested in solving easy problems, which are the only problems worth solving. /s
If you find a way to set that up that doesn't run flagrantly afoul of anti-discrimination laws, I think a lot of people would be very interested.
I'm not a lawyer so I don't know what laws might apply here. Can you explain what you're talking about?
As far as I can tell, high-income people aren't a protected class anywhere in the US. There are many state laws preventing you from asking salary histories[1], but that's not everywhere, and where such laws exist, companies are already using loopholes to discriminate against low-income candidates. Many of these laws only say that you aren't allowed to use income history to determine pay: you're welcome to filter candidates by income history if your pay is stated up front.
Even under the most strict conditions, you could specify that certain positions are intended as an aid program for lower-income applicants (as defined by an income range) and it would take a special kind of douchebag to apply for such a position if they weren't low-income, even without you verifying their income. This strikes me as possibly the best solution anyway, because sometimes income doesn't tell the whole story: someone with prior high income might have massive medical debt, for example which decreases their effective income.
[1] https://www.paycor.com/resource-center/articles/states-with-...
Given the tight association between income and race, I think it would almost inevitably look exactly like a clear racial preference of the sort that's illegal under common anti-discrimination language. This is the kind of thing that lands companies in court. Even if they win, it's a huge blow to PR and expensive.
Obviously you are allowed to look at income history in some manner, but a lot of the people concerned here won't have any significant income history. So what you're really doing is filtering by the economic status of a student's family. That's inevitably going to be fraught.
If you're looking at telling what feels like a little white lie to get a big boost to the next five to seven decades of your life, how easy is it going to be for you to pass on the chance? You personally are clearly willing to take the hit for the greater cause of justice, but I do not have faith that millions of people each year who know they are competing for a limited number of opportunities will share the strength of your conviction.
Ultimately, I think we're in a tough spot. At scale, there are enough people suffering that it's easy to find and tell stories about how bad it is for them. Yet solving these major hardships experienced by real people is far harder than tugging on heartstrings.
Given the number of companies that blatantly use income to discriminate against underprivileged races and suffer zero consequences, I think your concern here is unfounded.
That's not a "little white lie", and having a moral compass that you're willing to follow over money isn't some sort of abnormal thing.
Your opinion fits with a general anti-pattern in aid programs where people spend more money trying to verify eligibility for aid than they would spend letting a few outliers game the system, meanwhile excluding people who are legitimately eligible because the verification process presents barriers.
While I'm not willing to accuse you of either of these things, I will say that this view often comes from people who assume everyone is as amoral as they are, or who are actively trying to undermine the aid programs so they can defund them.
Ultimately your opinion makes no sense. You're worried that some of the candidates might lie and you'd hire high-income candidates when you meant to hire low-income candidates. So you just throw up your hands, and say nothing can be done, and then hire high-income candidates because that's what happens when you make no effort to do otherwise. You literally don't even have to spend more money to try to hire lower-income candidates. It begins to sound like you're just not interested in solving the problem.
I'm not tugging on heartstrings. Nowhere have I mentioned any of the hardships which low-income people experience. I'm literally proposing solutions which you're shooting down with incredulity and this straw man argument.
If there's money to be made, Hacker News is all about solving hard problems. But suddenly when it involves taking some responsibility for a social problem, it's hard and that's it!
The subject of the article are internships which pay very well. Big tech internships are usually between $45-50/hr. Some people I know make more money at internships than their entire annual PhD stipend.
Sure, I'm pointing out a separate problem.
YCombinator is a startup incubator, so ostensibly a lot of people here aren't in big tech, and startups do often use unpaid interns. Programmers might not have the full impression of this, because programming internships are usually paid in my experience, even at small startups. But lots of internships in (for example) marketing or administration/HR are unpaid.
Well, the stipend is traditionally shit, but the graduate programs like to remind you about the generous tuition waiver. STEM students are so lucky. I have no idea how humanities students justify their situation to themselves.
what can we do? maybe we could try to reduce wealth inequality, instead of just shrugging our shoulders.
yeah it's not like we don't know the majority root causes for most of society ills. being poor just perpetuates throughout every other part of a persons life in really nasty feedback loops. criminal justice, health, income, opportunities for advancement, etc.
Yep, would love to see a comparison to journalism internships at places like NYT.
Just because the NYT does the wrong thing, doesn't make it right for us to do.
Stop pointing the finger at other people and take responsibility for your own actions.
The NYT started pointing fingers and not taking actions.
Please stop the easy moralizing.
"They started it"? That's your defense? What grade are we in?
Believe it or not, both you and the New York Times can both be doing the wrong thing.
Wait, if you can't argue logically or decently, just say so. It is understandable to get angry when confronted with logic.
I am not the king of Tech.
Here let me spell it out in an easy-to-digest manner:
If in other privileged industries rate of hiring poor folks is lower than that of tech, tech is actually doing good and not wrong. Is that clear?
You assume tech is in the wrong automatically without rationally analyzing it. The way to rationally analyze it is to compare with other rich industries.
Once again, we should stop moral aggrandizing and argue scientifically.
Excuse me, I did misunderstand you. Let's try this again:
"What they are doing is worse"? That's your defense? What grade are we in?
Believe it or not, the New York Times can both be doing something worse than you, and you can still be doing the wrong thing.
The goal here is "treat people fairly" not "treat people less unfairly than somebody else so you can feel superior".
Just the defender of Tech.
What do you hypothesize that this would uncover?
If this is a tech specific issue.m
It is also a logical and scientific question to ask and NYT should support that.
Do they not support asking this question?
Are you saying it’s an issue across all industries? Or?
Who tf knows? Have they published an article on it?
I am not saying anything about that. All I am saying is this:
For a fair and logical/scientific comparison, the article should have included other rich and powerful industries that folks want to work in, but I guess NYT doesn't believe in fairness.
Business can :-
- ...sure they focus university reach out programs/recruitment teams on less wealthy universities.
- ...start 'apprenticeship' type programs to specifically target groups less represented in their current recruiting pipeline.
- ...ensure their current hiring practices don't have biases that might contribute more to this.
You're right, we should just let inequality fester and wealth disparity grow.
I'm glad that early doctors and engineers working on difficult problems didn't just shrug their shoulders while saying "what can you do?"