Talent Is Everywhere, Opportunity Is Not

https://threadreaderapp.com/thread/1081619342377156608.html

by kebede • 8 years ago

339 254 8 years ago

zafka• 8 years ago

This article is dead on in my opinion. I feel that there is so much talent wasted because of social repression. I think in many cases it is just because of lack of awareness. The lower and middle layers of most bureaucracies are made up of people who are not looking for ways to boost the few highly talented new people who show up.

blakesterz• 8 years ago

"not looking for ways to boost the few highly talented new people who show up."

But isn't that incredibly hard to do? I totally agree with the article and you, but at the same time, aren't the middle layers of most bureaucracies super stretched already? Most of those people just don't have the time/energy/motivation to do that, do they? Their bosses probably don't care, so how could they? It seems like only the very best of them do that.

I so wish that wasn't true, but it may be.

neogodless2• 8 years ago

Can someone define D&I? I guess diversity and... I got nothing. It's too short to Google effectively!

ftio• 8 years ago

Diversity and Inclusion.

neogodless2• 8 years ago

Thanks, seems awfully intuitive in retrospect!

nxc18• 8 years ago

I think it's diversity and inclusion.

Barrin922• 8 years ago

Tom Mueller is a good example to pick and has had a great career path. The author I think is right that more focus should be put on hard working talent than on celebrity CEOs in culture. It might help more people from remote places to move up in the world.

That said it also is depressing how concentrated and closed up networking circles are, how important signalling from prestigious schools still is, and how little diversity there is in where capital goes. I can't remember the exact number, but almost all VC in the US goes to just a handful of counties.

It should be the task of all institutions, from government to business and think tanks, to open up these spaces to talent from all over the place.

hn_throwaway_99• 8 years ago

I can't remember the exact number, but almost all VC in the US goes to just a handful of counties.

Fair enough, but to play devil's advocate people from all over the world flock to these counties, and places like YC exist specifically as an entryway to this otherwise closed network. Musk himself has spoken at length of why he came to the US, and the Stripe cofounders have a similar story.

kanox3• 8 years ago

The word "celebrity" has negative connotations but Elon is famous for very good reasons: he gets results and he helps other people get results.

Tom Mueller and Gwynne Shotwell could have worked at other more traditional companies but it is thanks to Elon's leadership and aggressive business tactics that they achieved far more at SpaceX. This is not just Elon being rich: space history has plenty of well-capitalized failures.

The article presents a story of very successful vertical mobility from people who received relatively little outside help, it's not clear how this makes a case for various forms of affirmative action. If anything it shows the system works reasonably fine.

Barrin922• 8 years ago

The word "celebrity" has negative connotations but Elon is famous for very good reasons: he gets results and he helps other people get results.

I didn't want to deny that Elon is an exceptionally hard working individual as well, but I honestly think it would help both Elon and people like Tom Mueller if the attention was more evenly distributed.

We have seen the downsides of the media attention, drama and inflated egos that are produced by the focus on founders or CEOs.

yowlingcat6• 8 years ago

Fantastic thread. Identity politics flavored social justice warfare peeves me because it misses this grand overarching point: there is untapped potential here. When I hire an unorthodox candidate that is typically given short shrift for not matching a given profile, I am not hiring in order to foster diversity and inclusion. No, it's the other way around.

Building a diverse and inclusive team full of highly competent people is actually _how_ I successfully compete against firms with larger pockets than me. It lets us not just outrace them but out-strategize them. I'm getting not just an underpriced call option, but an underpriced put option as well. Along with a lack of bureaucracy, it's one of the few (but powerful) advantages I have over a larger firm. More than anything else (for me), at an early stage startup, hiring is arbitrage. If you find a passed over gem with an unorthodox background that don't fit the typical "pattern matching" that many tech companies use to build a monoculture and yet executes well, you can easily generate six to seven figures of alpha for your company. Of course, the employee gets the opportunity to advance their career, but in order to do so, they generate value for your company first. It's a win-win.

I've seen this so many times during my career. It's the hungry person with the unorthodox background that laps the Ivy educated wonder kid who by all external indicators and pedigrees should not have been outproduced. And yet, not only did it happen, but when it did, those folks became absolute superstars. I've been that person before, and I've seen (and help coached) others to become that person. It's one of the most magical things I've experienced career-wise.

Hiring is about risks and rewards. If you find a risk with an asymmetric reward profile, you can build an organization that is seriously ahead of the curve -- in part because the competing opportunities are not, by definition.

40acres4• 8 years ago

Fantastic thread. Identity politics flavored social justice warfare peeves me because it misses this grand overarching point: there is untapped potential here.

I feel like you're just taking a shot at "SJWs" without realizing that your untapped potential comment is exactly what is at the core of most of these movements.

All politics is identity politics, and it's the identity politics of the past that has repressed millions in America and wasted potential. Potential was wasted when folks were slaves instead of being able to exercise their freedom and pursue their individual talents, potential was wasted when Black soldiers returning from home were denied the benefits of the GI bill. Affirmative Action is explicitly a mechanism to provide more opportunity, so is the modern D&I movement in corporate America. An untold amount of potential is being wasted right now due to America's inability and inaction when it comes to eliminating poverty and providing equal opportunity for all.

closeparen3• 8 years ago

Economic arguments (“treat people better so you can make more money”) are disgusting and morally bankrupt to a large chunk of the social justice community, particularly those who see all capitalist business and employment relationships as fundamentally exploitative. There’s a strong undercurrent of hatred for the corporate D&I ideology.

Viewing the world primarily through the lens of a struggle between oppressed and oppressor demographic groups isn’t uncommon, but other politics do exist.

yowlingcat6• 8 years ago

It's not really at the core of these movements, in part because there isn't really a core of these movements. They're loose confederations full of warring factions that don't agree with each other -- it's why purity spiraling is sadly so common. You'll find identitarians as much as you'll find eager acolytes of realpolitik, and everyone in between. But it's the radicals that are most effective at branding, perhaps in part because their most able to summon the punk rock, contrarian flavor and associate it with themselves. Sometimes, they really do walk the walk. But sometimes, it's talk.

lkdjjdjjjdskjd11• 8 years ago

Being a woman or black is not unorthodox, though. And priding yourself for hiring somebody black or female seems odd. It should be a normal thing - if the skills (or whatever unorthodox aspects you fancy) are a match.

weaksauce• 8 years ago

They never said that. They said unorthodox background that doesn’t fit the pattern matching at a big company. i.e. resume is a bit off but they have potential.

Kiro• 8 years ago

It should be normal but unfortunately it is not. I don't see the problem with applauding people who actually make a difference here. In the future it will be nothing noteworthy but right now, again unfortunately, it is.

yowlingcat6• 8 years ago

I agree with everything you said. I don't pride myself for hiring anybody based on their appearance. However, I dispassionately acknowledge that it is because other firms do not do the normal thing that if I do it, I'm at an advantage to them. It doesn't mean I'm a better person, or I have something to be proud of. It only means that I am more competent than folks who are incompetent.

skellera• 8 years ago

What do you look for to find these people? Also on the other side, what did you do to stand out and get the chance?

chasing• 8 years ago

Identity politics flavored social justice warfare peeves me because it misses this grand overarching point: there is untapped potential here.

That’s one of the points that gets repeated over and over as far as benefits of including people with diverse and/or unorthodox backgrounds. But you should also consider hiring for diversity simply because different sorts of people with different backgrounds and experiences likely have different world-views and approaches to thinking about and solving problems. A diverse culture will simply have more ideas on the table to work with than a monoculture.

yowlingcat6• 8 years ago

It gets repeated at face value, but it's at a surface level. That's parroting. It's not often utilized as a process and as a tool to achieve other goals. That's when it becomes application.

You're entirely correct that a diverse culture will simply have more ideas on the table than a monoculture -- and that's exactly why it's an advantage.

CM30• 8 years ago

The problem is that most companies boasting about diversity don't actually do that. They hire individuals from similar backgrounds based on surface level features. No, having more women from MIT or Harvard isn't really making the company more 'diverse' in any real way, since many of them have the same backgrounds and experiences as your male employees. It's tokenism. If X% of employees are female/from some minority but they're all educated in Ivy League/Oxbridge schools, all from fairly wealthy backgrounds, share political leanings and grew up in similar situations, does it really matter or make any real 'difference'?

Economic differences are basically ignored in a lot of modern 'identity politics'

SpicyLemonZest• 8 years ago

It's my experience that "hiring for diversity" advocates are very much in favor of a monoculture. For example, devout Christians are severely underrepresented in most professional fields, and I've never seen a diversity program targeted towards obtaining their wildly different worldviews.

L_Rahman• 8 years ago

Identity politics flavored social justice activists literally make the exact same claims as you.

acjohnson552• 8 years ago

Much of your comment I agree with but I do take issue with the concept of "identity politics flavored social justice warfare".

If you put yourself in the shoes of underrepresented people and our allies, you might understand that it's impossible to predict exactly what sort of political expression will jolt folks wielding power into doing right by us without making them feel like we're being too loud.

People very much thought of Dr. King as a social justice warrior in his time. He was deeply unpopular most of his life. And even he had difficulty making progress without having more aggressive folks as the alternative to dealing with him.

The fact is, very little gets done without the social justice warriors, and certainly not at scale.

fzeroracer5• 8 years ago

The thought of having to confront inequality or having to recognize that minorities are treated differently solely on the basis of their skin color, sexual orientation or gender is one that is unfortunately still deeply uncomfortable it seems. MLK's understanding of the white moderate still remains as pertinent today as it did when he wrote that letter.

yowlingcat6• 8 years ago

Thank you for that comment, I think you definitely do have a point. It's true that Dr. King was far more radical than people remember him being, and that's part of what I admired about him. But I don't think it's true that "even he had difficulty making progress without having more aggressive folks as the alternative to dealing with him." I used to think this was the case, but now I'm not so sure.

This may be naive of me, but I think what he was most successful for was not warfare but persuasion and oratorship. He was a cogent, persuasive speaker, and he won hearts. That's not warfare. That's diplomacy. Yes, he had radical views, and he had things to get done. But although he rightly criticized the white moderate, he did not demonize them. There are analogies to be drawn here. Lots of folks are laboring to build diversity, but there are just as many folks who are more interested in the warfare side of it than the achieving diversity side.

People just love a good spectacle, sadly.

the_other_guy2• 8 years ago

this website has been exploiting HN to get popular

simonbarker874• 8 years ago

I have a guy who’s worked on my assembly line for 3 years now. He can dismantle and rebuild anything, he can understand how complex mechanical things work with a quick glance and a short tinker, he knows the internal workings of a car engine as well as any formally trained mechanic and he has a wealth of practical electronics assembly that surprises me regularly. He should be a lead engineer at his age given his aptitude, not working on an assembly line for a fraction above minimum wage.

In his younger years someone should have given him some guidance, realised his ability and set him towards that path, instead he was missed by the school, his family were in no position to help him realize his potential and a couple of bad choices in his 20s has left him with a chaotic home life and unfulfilled potential that I don’t even think he realised he had.

I worked hard to do well in school but I had a supportive family, teachers to guide me and ultimately a personality (and background) that suited the education system in the 1990s and early 2000s. One size does not fit all and when I find myself surprised at another insight from this employee I wonder how many other people out there who fell through the cracks of the education system, through no fault of their own and how poorer our society is for it.

kaikai• 8 years ago

You say he's working on "your" assembly line- what are you doing to help him get the opportunity he missed earlier in life?

simonbarker874• 8 years ago

After a series of conversations and false starts on upskilling and broadening his skill set he said that the best thing I can do is be a refuge from his home life. He is a hard worker and he cares about what we do but getting to work on time more than 5 days in a row is an achievement with what he has going on, we have a long way to go.

justaguyhere• 8 years ago

In his younger years someone should have given him some guidance

I've had many jobs and these are all software development jobs. Even in a relatively privileged field like software, I never had any kind of mentorship, ever. The days of older folks mentoring and helping younger folks are gone, because most older folks themselves are struggling with their own careers/lives. Unless young people specifically seek and forge good relations, put effort into finding mentors - it isn't going to happen. By the time most young people (me included) realize this, it is too late. Some people get lucky with good teachers and parents, but many don't.

This is what happens in a system where profit is put above everything else, no-one has the time or interest to think about anything else other than this quarter's profits.

sokoloff3• 8 years ago

That seems odd to never gotten mentorship. I was at one time a very good coder. I obviously wasn't born that way, but became that after many years of working alongside [often much] better coders and, in one case, quitting a job when I was ~4 years out of school and realized I wasn't going to get any better at that particular job.

Did you never work with better coders? Did they never talk to you or never do a code review? If they did, that's mentorship.

commandlinefan• 8 years ago

the days of older folks mentoring and helping younger folks

I’m one of the older folks (mid-40’s) and I find myself increasingly surrounded by younger folks (20’s or so) who are looking for guidance and help - the problem with that is that the dominant corporate “prove you still deserve to have a job by closing as many tickets as possible and increasing your velocity and meeting impossible deadlines” ensures that any older folk (who, remember, are held to an even higher standard than the younger folk because they’re more expensive) who spend any amount of time trying to mentor younger folk will find themselves out of a job after a few months.

jacknews2• 8 years ago

I agree, too many talented people not reaching their potential, and not even having it nurtured. How many potential African engineers grew up to be illiterate cowherds because of a lack of education?

Also, why is Elon regarded as genius inventor, when it's clearly the people who work for him how are the geniuses. Why aren't they the multi-millionaires?

leesec• 8 years ago

Maybe they should risk everything and start their own companies.

jacknews2• 8 years ago

So, we should teach them how to apply for government grants.

gamblor956• 8 years ago

Risking other people's money now counts as risking everything?

hirundo• 8 years ago

Elon Musk's greatest talent may be as a talent scout. It's hard to think of a better core competence for a CEO.

mark-r• 8 years ago

I worked a few times for a guy like that. Unfortunately his talent for building great teams was only matched by his ineptitude at picking business partners.

the_other_guy2• 8 years ago

this website has been systematically exploiting HN and reddit to get popular, see https://news.ycombinator.com/from?site=threadreaderapp.com and https://old.reddit.com/domain/threadreaderapp.com/

EdgarVerona• 8 years ago

This quote within the article really drives the point home:

"The goal of inclusion work is not "More black folk!" Or "More women!" The lack of black folk and women is a symptom of the root cause: opportunity to succeed and thrive is not evenly distributed."

I agree entirely with this statement, and I have seen it happen in both poor white and latino communities that I have lived in during the course of my life. There's a lot of intelligent and capable people out there who aren't going to get their foot in the door: they're never even going to know where the door is.

microcolonel6• 8 years ago

Well, I'd argue that "the lack of ... women is a symptom of the root cause: opportunity to succeed ... is not evenly distributed" is jumping the gun. The author assumes that this outcome will change when "opportunity" is more "evenly distributed". If you look to cultures which are further along the trail of extending opportunities to women, but without the exact same types of ideological baggage, you'll generally find that there are fewer women in positions where the author would expect more.

I figure the moral legwork is to be done only in terms of "opportunity", whereas the outcome should be trusted as long as the opportunity is equal; and it is clear that the outcome (in a univariate, or primitive multivariate analysis) is a bad indicator of the opportunity.

DATACOMMANDER• 8 years ago

Many of those who claim to want only equality of opportunity are also committed to a rather extreme “blank slate” theory of individual potential. For these people, the only acceptable proof of equality of opportunity is equality of outcome.

fromMars3• 8 years ago

I found this article to be an enlightening analysis of the "Gender Equality Paradox".

https://www.thejournal.ie/gender-equality-countries-stem-gir...

In particular,

“Broader economic factors appear to contribute to the higher participation of women in STEM in countries with low gender equality and the lower participation in gender-equal countries.”

I agree that outcome as an indicator is not entirely reliable.

Most likely many factors, including cultural, genetic, and economic, also play large roles in these outcomes.

However, I think it is a reasonable policy to try and reduce differences in outcomes if a group has been historically denied opportunities, at least for some period of time.

petra• 8 years ago

Talent is everywhere.

Tom Mueller is a great Engineer, no doubt. But SpaceX would probably have existed without Tom Mueller.

Opportunity is not.

The opportunity to build a rocket company is rare. For it to exist, you need someone to bet Billions on a crazy idea.

Tom Mueller is poor. He can't bet that kind of money.

Elon Musk is rich. He's willing to make the bet, but in return he wants to feel important.

It seem like a pretty good trade, in my eyes.

As for diversity and inclusion - sure, that's a good thing.

zanny• 8 years ago

Every talent unrealized is a failure of society to provide opportunity.

The fact that nine billion of us can produce one billionaire investor to found one successful private rocket company in half a century of space travel is a mark against the species.

We would all be immortal digital consciousnesses traversing the stars at fractions of C by now if we had managed to capture an order of magnitude more talent in previous generations.

sethammons5• 8 years ago

It does not need to be "made a crazy company, or is a major player in that company" to be opportunity. For a rural or inner-city kid, opportunity could mean securing a career where they can save for retirement and raise a family. There are so many kinds of jobs out there, but many disadvantaged folks will never even realize they can do better than being a local lumberjack or working at a local retailer. They don't know the opportunity even exists.

I skipped out on about a decade of software development because it was not something someone did for real money in my locality, and the income it could command was very low the year I had briefly looked into it, and the rent in those areas where you could do programming was too high. I seriously considered working for the local lumberyard because I had trouble wrapping my head around other opportunities. You can find my path to software in another comment here. I think schools could do better than "career day" to expose kids to the opportunities out there.

lkdjjdjjjdskjd11• 8 years ago

Most people don't obsess about rockets. I would find the story more convincing if there were also examples of "talents" who didn't go anywhere. I find it rather likely that people with his talents would always find a way.

Of course there is always untapped potential, for the time being. That is why there are still startups and entrepreneurs, who try to release that potential. But it is not as simple as hiring diverse genders and races.

It is simply a hard problem to enable people to make the most out of their talents and potentials.

The Tom Mueller case seems to illustrate that well. What if there had been no SpaceX during his lifetime. Who would have been to blame? What would there have to be done? Perhaps Tom Mueller would have started his own Space company? Or maybe not. But whose duty would it supposedly be to provide a space company for people like him to work at?

Most people are not even sure how to enable their own children to make the most of their talents (or to develop some talents to begin with) - let alone some strangers. I think that also shows that it is not primarily an issue of diversity. We simply don't know enough about developing talents and making the most out of life yet. So we experiment - sometimes it works out, and sometimes it doesn't.

What exactly made Tom Mueller obsessed with rockets? If I want my kids to become rocket scientists, should I send them to lumber jack camps in the summer?

alexandercrohde• 8 years ago

Uh, I think the point is that we need to build fair systems that reward high-performers. This answers all of your questions.

> What if there had been no SpaceX during his lifetime.

We need a fair and level capitalist system that reduces barriers-to-entry for innovative companies and stops monopolistic practices. This will ensure that good ideas are profitable and make it in investors self-interest to build companies around the Muellers of the world.

> We simply don't know enough about developing talents and making the most out of life yet.

The point is, we need to build systems that enables geniuses to be discovered regardless of races, resume, age, skintone, college. By-and-large the software industry is already incredibly efficient at this relative to other industries.

Other industries (e.g. healthcare) should adapt or be eaten. Software should double-down on talent speaking for itself (e.g. blind interviews, open coding competitions for all)

lkdjjdjjjdskjd11• 8 years ago

"The point is, we need to build systems that enables geniuses to be discovered regardless of races, resume, age, skintone, college."

I was referring to that. It is a hard problem, not simply a matter of hiring more ethnically diverse people. If you just say "we need a better system", frankly I consider it a fluff article. There is no actionable information in it. It would be like saying "we need to create better cancer treatments" - yeah, sure, but HOW?

"We need a fair and level capitalist system that reduces barriers-to-entry for innovative companies and stops monopolistic practices."

I am not convinced our current system is unfair. At least the article doesn't provide any evidence for it, as I said. It seems to me all sorts of companies are trying to improve opportunities for everyone (YCombinator Startup School, MOOCs come to mind). The lack of opportunities for some people is not because of unfairness, but because we don't know how to do it better yet.

But who is "unfair" here? Again - if nobody would have created a space agency for Tom Mueller to work for, would it have been unfair? And who would have been to blame? I really don't think fairness is the dominant issue here.

wpietri10• 8 years ago

There's a contradiction between your two statements:

I would find the story more convincing if there were also examples of "talents" who didn't go anywhere.
I find it rather likely that people with his talents would always find a way.

The latter is basically the just world fallacy. [1] It assumes that the outcomes are correct. If you were offered examples of people who the writer said were talented but didn't go anywhere, I think you'd just just bring the just world fallacy to bear, believing that their bad outcome was proof that they weren't really talented.

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Just-world_hypothesis

lkdjjdjjjdskjd11• 8 years ago

I am not the one who wrote an article making claims, so why should the burden of proof be on me? I dnn't think your criticism of my comment is fair at all.

The author made a claim, so they should support it. That has nothing to do with just world hypothesis. Also, he actually provided an example of somebody prevailing against the odds.

The only evidence that talent might be wasted is our feelings that it may be so. That's not enough.

As for contradicting statements, it seems to me my statements both say the same thing. Both are a request for providing evidence of (unfairly) wasted talents.

Animats3• 8 years ago

Most people don't obsess about rockets.

Not any more. That was back in the Space Age, 1956-1973.

lkdjjdjjjdskjd11• 8 years ago

That Tom Mueller guy is building rockets right now, though.

The point is, there may simply not be that many people obsessing about some things to the point of becoming geniuses in their field.

dvt7• 8 years ago

Talent is everywhere. Opportunity is not.

The Valley is so disconnected from the "real" America. I hate using that term, but to anyone that's lived in more rural non-coastal areas will quickly realize that the issue is not racism or sexism (although these do play a part). Rather, it's a purely economic stratification. I'm a 1.5-generation American (moved here when I was 11) and attended HS in Georgia at a mediocre high school -- underfunded, understaffed, etc. Our valedictorian is the only one from my graduating class that went to an Ivy League school (and he could "only" manage to get accepted by Cornell). Just about everyone else went to a local school: either UGA (barely breaks the top-50), GSU (terribly ranked, like top-200; I went here my freshman year), or GA Tech (which was extremely competitive and hard to get into). Compare this to my sister's high school (which she graduated from after my family and I moved to Southern California): about 20% attended Ivy League schools, and a significant portion attended highly-ranked California institutions: Stanford, CalTech, UCLA, Berkeley, Harvey Mudd, etc.

It's hard to argue that these Californian students were that much smarter than my Georgia cohort, and yet fate threw these two different sets of youngsters on widely different life trajectories. Race, gender, religion all play a role -- but more importantly, it's economic segregation we need to watch out for.

toufiqbarhamov• 8 years ago

I don’t think anyone really disagrees that the core problem is socioeconomic, it’s just that there seems to be a connection between only getting basic civil rights within living memory, and economic segregation. It’s hard to blame people who want to draw the connection between them. It’s bad enough that redlining maps from years ago still mostly describes current situations. It’s bad enough that zip code is a useful indicator of race for an insurance company.

gammateam• 8 years ago

Are you implying that US ethnic groups that were prohibited from participating in the capital markets, the civil court systems, insurance coverage, housing markets, mortgage lending markets and higher education and the specialized workforce until the late 1960s before then being allowed to start from $0 have a difficult time being uncorrelated from lower socioeconomic classes?

40acres4• 8 years ago

Economic stratification is not simply a natural phenomenon. Especially at the current global levels of inequality. Policies and institutions had to be built to create and sustain this level of inequality. I'm not surprised that California in your opinion has done a better job of providing opportunities for it's high schoolers to get a better education compared to Georgia. For all of California's flaws I think if you look at the data you can see that it's clear that they invest more in providing equal opportunity for their residents than Georgia does.

dvt7• 8 years ago

For all of California's flaws I think if you look at the data you can see that it's clear that they invest more in providing equal opportunity for their residents than Georgia does.

I'm not sure I'd blame the state. It's pretty obvious that admissions committees don't take socioeconomic factors in mind. Some states are always going to be wealthier than others -- that's just a fact of life -- but why are universities punishing (poor) students by culling opportunity? After all, a poor black kid has more in common with a poor white kid than a black one-per-center.

skybrian4• 8 years ago

It wouldn't look the same, but I suspect economic stratification would still happen even without the institutions that reinforce it, because small advantages compound and power laws are a thing.

I'm reminded of how scientists have elaborate protocols for eliminating bias in experiments, because just wanting to do it right isn't enough. Fairness (however you define it) doesn't happen by default.

barry-cotter3• 8 years ago

Indeed economic stratification like that is profoundly unnatural. What’s natural is either universal poverty, if you look at the world before ~5,000 years ago, or nigh on universal poverty, if you look at the world before modern economic growth began in the -1800’s. There were places and periods that were better off before that but it never lasted. The population increased until the average person was on the brink of starvation and every 5-20 years over 10% of the population would die in a famine. And there was always a small class of patricians or tradespeople and an even smaller oligarchy or aristocracy who thought themselves rich but had no medicine worth the name, lived by candlelight when it was dark and travelled by horse, cart or ship.

You’re quite right that economic stratification is not a natural phenomenon. Economic growth is profoundly unnatural. In nature we’re a slightly more successful kind of ape.

cybersol• 8 years ago

I think increasing economic stratification is very natural and happens often in history. It's just that historically when it gets too extreme, the poor kill the rich and start it all over again.

sulam2• 8 years ago

I'm from the bottom of the barrel, socio-economically speaking. But I'm white and male, and I can point to multiple moments in my life where people gave me the benefit of the doubt and I honestly do not believe they would have done so if I didn't pattern match for them to "nerdy white boy, probably really smart."

Of course I had to take advantage of those opportunities, but I'm fairly sure they wouldn't have even been on offer to people who didn't have my racial/gender advantages.

nilkn4• 8 years ago

How much of this is just selection bias? I’m a white male who probably pattern matches the same way. A few months ago I was traveling and as a completely innocent mistake forgot to pay rent by a day. I was not given the benefit of the doubt at all — I was blocked from online payments and was given three days to vacate before a formal eviction suit would be filed against me, as if I were a criminal who couldn’t have just had a momentary lapse. The notice was unconditional, meaning the landlord could choose to continue eviction proceedings even if I paid — the most extreme option available to them, usually reserved for someone they want out no matter what.

In this case, I went in the next morning with a cashier’s check and they dropped it. But moments like this have led me to wonder if the common narrative of privilege actually applies to me in practice as much as is assumed.

muzani• 8 years ago

I used to be really active online on some programming forums. After years on those sites, some of us posted photos of ourselves.

Apparently people thought all the well spoken nerdy types were all skinny and pale. I was brown with hairy arms. Another guy was black with a heavy sheriff mustache.

Everyone seemed to find it really surprising, which I guess makes me wonder how deep stereotypes cut.

neeleshs2• 8 years ago

Err.. gatech college of computing is a top 10 institute, afaik.

dvt7• 8 years ago

GA Tech is ranked 35th nationally for undergraduate institutions[1]. Compare that with Stanford (#7), CalTech (#12), UCLA (#19), or Berkeley (#22).

[1] https://www.usnews.com/best-colleges/georgia-institute-of-te...

acjohnson552• 8 years ago

That situation exists on the coasts too, where most of our cities are. The thing about race and gender is that you see the phenomenon play out in wealthy communities too.

Avshalom3• 8 years ago

(Georgia is a coastal state)

sct202• 8 years ago

Some of that may be just from people preferring to go to a school that isn't that far from home, or to attend the school of their favorite college football team. UGA and GA Tech are solidly ranked schools and a lot of graduates from there have very good outcomes.

Xcelerate• 8 years ago

Some of that may be just from people preferring to go to a school that isn't that far from home

I would argue this is the reason for most people. My cousin and my wife's sister were both accepted to Harvard for undergrad, but they turned it down because they thought it was too far away. Personally, I don't understand this at all (I would happily move wherever for a good opportunity), but it wouldn't surprise me if most people refused a 2-3x salary increase if it required moving from a rural area to a big city a few hours away by plane.

ip26• 8 years ago

Is that not a difference in Opportunity? Californians are spoiled for choice, with 250-some in-state four year colleges to choose from. Georgia has 85. And, as you describe, Georgia does not have a lot of world-famous institutions. Out-of-state students pay much higher fees, so where you live can be a real influence on where you can afford to go to college.

I mean, I'd call it opportunity. Maybe economic opportunity, if you want.

dvt7• 8 years ago

Is that not a difference in Opportunity?

Definitely. I'm agreeing with the article, although I believe that race and gender are red herrings. The real problem is socioeconomic in nature (fwiw, I say this as a staunch capitalist).

Francute• 8 years ago

Now start thinking on people living on rural areas outside first world countries... Lot of wasted talents...

thatoneuser4• 8 years ago

I always wonder how much there actually is out there. It’s hard to say there’s such a thing as “raw potential” considering how much being successful depends on having parents who groom you for society.

I grew up around a lot of kids I personally believe were very smart or driven. But when your parents don’t instill a sense of working in a certain way or creating a career path with certain abstract goals - you just aren’t going to get optimal use for your potential.

otikik2• 8 years ago

Well, that's what extreme capitalism brings you. I'm not holding a hammer and a sickle here, but I'm convinced that the right to access a good education is more important than the right to sell it. Same goes for health services.

My personal experience: I went to a public University in my country. My parents paid around $800 per year (I had a 50% discount, because I have 3 younger siblings). I don't know how high it's ranked. It is honestly not something people ask. Most public schools are simply good enough.

We have some private schools, but a lot of students end up there because they don't want to put a lot of effort so their daddies pay them a title. And since the schools don't want to lose them they give them a pass, or dumb subjects down. So a lot of private schools are worse (in the sense that they require less effort) than public ones. To the point where some job offers started including the clause: "Any Student with the so-and-so degree, except those from this Particular Private School".

barry-cotter3• 8 years ago

Not having a hierarchy of good and bad universities is a deliberate policy decision. Before ~1968 Germany had elite universities, like Göttingen, Tübingen and Heidelberg among others, equivalent to the position of HYPS or Oxbridge, with other excellent universities in the rank below, like Columbia and Cal Tech or LSE and Imperial. After 1968 there was a deliberate effort to make that irrelevant. Now there are good departments and there are better and worse universities but the range is so small that which university you went to isn’t worth mentioning. Germany is still a research powerhouse but it’s all about different branches of the Max Planck Institute, not universities.

You think the US can deliberately reduce the funding and prestige of universities like that? They don’t even have a federal education system.

xhskdh2• 8 years ago

Same story. I’m from a rural area in the South. Attended a terrible high school. No one in my small graduating class attended an elite university. Most attended universities ranked outside the top 100. I only know of a few graduates from my high school that attended the flagship state school ranked in the top 30-40, but they were exceptions.

No one in the history of my high school attended an Ivy League school.

Those in the more well-funded areas of the state send a large percentage of their graduates to Ivy League institutions on a yearly basis.

The smartest people from my high school weren’t that different intelligence wise from those more well-funded high school graduates.

The difference is our school offered a limited number of upper division college ready classes and had terrible teachers.

I think the assumption in my high school were students would graduate and go into a trade. Not many were expected to do anything big in college.

muzz10• 8 years ago

Did those students simply not have any initiative? It's sad to see such a reliance on others. I'm also from the rural South from a high school where most of my classmates stayed within the same small town, but I took initiative and got accepted to MIT and other top universities.

eli_gottlieb3• 8 years ago

I wouldn't call Georgia realer than California, but people do seem to have some severe blinders to regional inequalities that don't map neatly onto a strictly demographic category.

muzz10• 8 years ago

OP seems to be using "real" as code for "white"

throwawayjava• 8 years ago

Similar.

I want to suggest that perhaps those students in CA really were that much better. Not in terms of raw talent, but in terms of the previous 10+ years of their life.

I learned a lot in PhD school, but the most important thing I learned was that others' high school experiences really did prepare them for academic rigor and business success in ways that mine decidedly didn't.

trjordan• 8 years ago

This is true, but one of the important inputs to socioeconomic asymmetry is race and gender.

It's hard for your parents to escape poverty if the police profile and arrest them. Or if your mom could have been promoted faster than your dad, but wasn't because of a bad company culture.

yellowbuilding• 8 years ago

If you’re interested in addressing this problem, you need to look at economics.

The reasons are not simple, but the bottom line is race and gender focuse equality efforts _always_ fail to help the lower class. Always. Statistically, gender and race gaps in economic equality have only grown since the 1970s.

cortesoft2• 8 years ago

A big part of that is the result of choices that Californians have made. We choose to be a high tax state, and we chose to invest heavily in higher education via the UC and CSU system. This has paid off, and California is reaping the benefits of a highly educated workforce.

I feel bad for Georgians, but they have chosen to have lower taxes and fewer services.

QML• 8 years ago

Don’t forget our community colleges, which are perhaps even more impactful. Even an average student can go to school and later transfer to a CSU or a UC. Beyond a standard 4 year degree, they also help with getting younger students ahead and older ones continuing their education.

kanox3• 8 years ago

It's not clear how the parent post blames this on "economic stratification" when siblings in highschool have the same economic status because of their parents.

His sister just went to a different better school.

muzz10• 8 years ago

Good point, and one which is seldom mentioned. States like Georgia could learn a lot from states like California

TomMckenny• 8 years ago

it's economic segregation we need to watch out for.

Absolutely. And if wages rose faster than returns on capital, every employee would benefit.

But note: race, gender, religious bigotry etc are wedges that prevents cooperation for reform among wage earners. And now there's a bit of inter generation hatred added to that wedge.

And the mechanisms are immensely complicated. Sometimes it is overt[0] but most of the time it's subtle broadcast choices, feed algorithms that select the most shocking story or subconscious habits that span generations. Somehow things like "merry Christmas" vs "happy holidays" far out play any discussion of wage theft or unlawful evictions. If we could just chill, understand that minorities are not taking over the country and move on to economic issues we'd all be far better off.

[0]https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lee_Atwater#%22Southern_strate...

maxerickson• 8 years ago

barely breaks the top-50

And then of course there is the stupid attitude that going to a mere top 50 school somehow isn't an accomplishment.

thatoneuser4• 8 years ago

And you know, if we framed it as economic segregation it could absolutely fix the racial/gender issues. I mean if we, say, ensured everyone had an equal starting point (more or less) at 18, we would dramatically have had to reduce down those other issues. But what’s better is we will not have left opposite <race/gender> out of our consideration.

Race and gender are a problem but it seems like those two things get way too much attention given other paradigms that demonstrate a more wholistic approach to social fairness.

alanfranzoni• 8 years ago

About colleges... this was posted some days ago:

https://www.conradbastable.com/essays/the-uncharity-of-colle...

whack• 8 years ago

Let's add some real numbers to this discussion.

https://www.vox.com/policy-and-politics/2018/3/21/17139300/e...

"White children whose parents are in the top fifth of the income distribution have a 41.1 percent chance of staying there as adults... But for black children, it’s only 18 percent.

Among children who grew up in the bottom fifth of the distribution, 10.6 percent of whites make it into the top fifth ... and a tiny 2.5 percent of black children"

Ie, your odds of being in the upper middle class if you grew up:

White and rich: 40%

Black and rich: 20%

White and poor: 10%

Black and poor: 2.5%

Clearly parental income plays a big role, but so does race. We can crunch numbers all day and argue over who has it worse. But it seems far more productive to just acknowledge that they are both pretty bad, and to focus on fixing both problems.

HillaryBriss2• 8 years ago

I agree with the article's main points about the requirement for opportunity and for positive inspiration and nudges along the way. Absolutely.

But another thing strikes me as very mysterious: where does a Tom Mueller (or any high performing individual of any identity group in any field) get that drive, that energy, that interest in the first place? How and why do they keep on going? What inner mechanism fuels their passion? Why do they even have a passion?

phkahler• 8 years ago

I believe some folks get that drive to dive deep because they are not "included". When someone doesn't fit in well, perhaps they take refuge in working with things instead of people. Building stuff, learning to code, etc. Just a thought. They'd be hard to find for the same reasons they're good.

sethammons5• 8 years ago

Not sure why you are down voted. I think not is a fantastic question. I've seen raw intelligence in some high schoolers and near zero motivation. What about their lives and environment prevents them from stretching and self-motivating?

I think part of it is environment: they don't see others who they can emulate that they can relate to or others that support them in their peer group. Part of it is innate - and this is the part I relate to. For me, I did not know what I was going to do after, but I knew that school/university was the only way I would get there. I put my efforts towards that. My passion was to not be in the situation(s) my parents were in. That meant waking up at 4am in highschool to do homework or study to help get the eventual near-fullride scholarship to a university. Some of my cohort would rather just play videogames or do other things to escape their reality.

jondubois• 8 years ago

A big part of the problem is the belief that talent always gets noticed and is rewarded. This is very far from reality.

Talent very rarely gets noticed (especially in complex and innovative fields; managers simply don't have the necessary knowledge to be able to identify real talent). Even when noticed, talent is rarely rewarded because office politics get in the way.

andrewstuart• 8 years ago

I disagree - in a certain context.

When it comes to the programming context in particular, opportunity is just about as "everywhere" as it can be.

Anyone who can afford a computer and a connection to the Internet can learn to program, can contribute to global projects, can self-educate in programming and can do amazing things.

All you need is a computer, and Internet connection and commitment. It does not even take privilege - although it used to (Bill Gates for example was from a privileged family in Seattle and went to a school that bought a computer incredibly early - that was a direct outcome of the money of his family).

I always recommend against careers that "require the grace of others to practice your art/craft/career". What I mean by this is that to do your chosen job, you need someone else to give you the opportunity/permission/resources to do the work you want to do. Consider a guy I knew when I was much younger. He REALLY wanted to be a movie director, but back then you needed money, a crew/team, equipment and a whole bunch of other people helping - and to really succeed in that career you need high level industry connections. That's a huge barrier to being able to actually do the thing you want to do. You're much better to choose a career that does not require anyone else's permission/money/approval - such as programming, or drawing.

synthmeat• 8 years ago

I disagree with your disagreement in two ways.

First (anecdotal, and adjusted to regional variety, but stands to common sense) - all people who I personally know to have gotten rich off of software were all bar none rich to have access to top of the line hardware/software/services to begin with:

1. accounting software in early 90s (there were literally three or four PCs around in my city there at all. Even software they just cloned locally from some experience they acquired studying abroad in USA)

2. internet/security in mid 90s (guy had T1 while most of us didn't even know internet existed or were dreaming of owning US Robotics modem sometime in the next century)

3. games in late 90s/early 00s (when we all fappped to pictures of VoodooFX and Riva TNT, they had them)

4. web in early 00s (most of us just begged for some limited shared hosting account to even see what it's about)

5. iPhone gold rush (price of iPhone was about my yearly non-disposable income back then)

Secondly, and this is part where I partly agree - software development really is one of the more democratized areas - but when field is so approachable that anyone can make money, anyone does. And that means goalpost has shifted to other things - social network, privileged experiences, marketing investment, time allocated to project, being able to fail enough times to succeed, etc.

microcolonel6• 8 years ago

I will say that your anecdote is largely only applicable to obtaining a first-mover advantage on a whole platform, and specifically one which has not become a commodity yet. Today, commodity computers profit software developers the most, and the tools are more available and cheaper than ever before. A person with a second hand Chromebook and some library internet can research, build, test, market, and sell an Android application, if they know to try.

It is incomparably easier to become a useful professional software developer than a licensed electrician (provided you're of a sufficiently-suitable mindset), at least where I've been (though, the one time I was flown out to interview at a company in Silicon Valley, I was straight-up told by one of the interviewers that “Here in the valley, we place a high premium on education”, so maybe it's different there and probably some other places).

Now, I will say I was very lucky to be able to fail a little bit later, and very lucky to have met somebody in grade school who would basically win me my first full time job while I was still a teenager, I was not in any particular luck when it came to access to computers or really much else.

beams_of_light• 8 years ago

It'd be really interesting to see the results of an income survey of 30 to 40-somethings with a simple question: Did you have the ability to play Doom in your house?

sonnyblarney2• 8 years ago

Yeah, not quite, there's a reason that most of the big software cos are in the US, clustered in certain areas, and not in Kiev were so many geniuses are.

Networks, locality, these are important.

Elon Musk attended Queen's University in Kingston, Ontario, and I was going to Uni at the same time in Kingston. He transferred to the US. The Canadians in his cohort mostly did not. There is very little 'game' in Canada - though there are decent jobs, there are very few high flying startups, and very few leading big-corps to make all the necessary acquisitions to keep the system going. If Elon were to have remained in Canada, we'd have never heard of him.

So even in a relatively affluent country like Canada, there is a massive dearth of special, great opportunity: the ecosystems are mostly not in place for it.

There are very major and affluent US cities with tons of talent where one could say the same as well.

There's a reason people move to the Valley and it's not just the weather.

This is changing a bit, but not existentially.

kanox3• 8 years ago

This is changing a bit, but not existentially.

Clusters exist in all fields because they have major advantages. This is particularly true for startups but opportunity exists in other areas as well.

The software industry is still more spread out than others and companies headquartered in the Valley have major operations in many other places (including the likes of Kiev).

analog31• 8 years ago

But here's the rub: Where does the commitment come from? I could be the person you're describing, since I learned to program on my own, except for three tiny details:

1. My brother, four years older than me, was studying programming in college, and talking about it when he came home on breaks

2. My mom, realizing her teaching job was in jeopardy due to layoffs, learned programming, and a couple years later was teaching it for an adult education program organized by a nearby university

3. I did take one high school course in programming, which forced me to get past the familiar conceptual hurdles faced by beginners

From these relatively minor circumstances: I knew enough about what programming was, its value, the fact that it could be learned by a mere mortal like myself, how long it would take to bring myself up to an employable level, and where to find decent learning resources. I had a supply of motivation and encouragement to get past obstacles that might have seemed insurmountable to someone who is under social pressure to undervalue their own potential.

I had a ready supply of mental energy thanks to living under comfortable circumstances. In fact, an oversupply. Learning to program was not at the expense of other necessary activities such as earning money, supporting other family members, etc.

If a person comes from an underprivileged background, everything they lack in the list of things I just described, is equivalent to an obstacle, and the obstacles are multiplicative effects. If this is an exaggeration, I don't think it's all that much of one.

goatlover2• 8 years ago

There's still a huge difference between being in the rural area and being in a large city as far as job opportunities or meetups go.

goatlover2• 8 years ago

There's still a huge difference between living in a rural area and being in a large city as far as job opportunities, funding or meetups go.

Animats3• 8 years ago

He REALLY wanted to be a movie director

Like half of Hollywood.

buboard• 8 years ago

opportunity to succeed and thrive is not evenly distributed

That needs a discussion about how to distribute it not so much evenly to all people, but to all the right people. The approach of e.g. throwing more money to all underprivileged students has failed in the past (I believe it the Gates foundation ran such experiment). Perhaps it is lazy to handwave a problem away by giving everyone a little more opportunity. It is much more painstaking to find the gifted ones and give them a lot more opportunity. Another thing that is not often discussed is that privileged people also groom their average performers consistently until they rise above average, something that never happens for hte underprivileged.

thinkr• 8 years ago

Your proposed approach could very well be the right way to distribute opportunity, but on some level it’s hard for me to fully buy in to it. To me, it would come down to using data to decide who gets a helping hand and even though it’s the logical/practical approach, it just feels a bit icky (personal opinion of course). And does that mean we ignore a group of individuals because the data points tell us so? We would miss out on outliers or late bloomers.

So yes, you’re right that it’s painstainking, and just an outright difficult problem to solve.

kaveh_h• 8 years ago

The teachers or other sets of people who recognize talent must in themselves have a certain ability or “talent” for spotting talents in others. So if talent was abundantly everywhere why aren’t there enough of these talented teachers/mentors/parents who can nudge all the other talents so they can reach their potential?

The answer could be that talent is not well distributed over life time. For instance it would be safe to assume the bulk of the best teachers/mentors do not voluntarily work in places which pay them bad wages (usually poor areas) and so often opt to move to richer areas. And thus many of those talented kids from rural places grow up with much less chance of getting noticed and more importantly good “nudges” as a result.

If this is true and if society wanted to maximize utliziation of talent there’s perhaps no clear simple way, but a strategy might be to artificially redistribute this kind of talent for instance by giving poorer areas more funding for education.

sethammons5• 8 years ago

In school, usually the only talent noticed is "they do well in (some part of) my class." And the only real advice most teachers can give at that point is "you should go to college (and most likely study this same subject)." Most teachers are not aware of even a fraction of the opportunities that would transcend that kid to a better life. Given the adversities some kids face, the advice to even go to college could fall on deaf ears.

mohankumar246• 8 years ago

This is an universal truth. It is an individual's choice to do what he/she wants. This is one instance of where a person was guided and he took the advice. There will 100's of youth who won't accept advice, they will just be happy with what they are doing. If at all a person will listen more to his peer's words than a teacher's. I grew up in a small town in India, I had asked my friends to move to bigger city for college - many of them didn't want to move..I did. And i would say my career has so far been better than theirs. There will also other factors which affect a person's decision on career location - family pressure/bonding- most often to pursue a career of your choice you will have to travel long distance/relocate, many people wouldn't want to do that..People who go that extra length do succeed.

sethammons5• 8 years ago

This is one of the best reads I've seen on HN in a long while. The D&I presented in a way that is the true spirit of it.

I grew up poor, white, male, and in a mountain community in SoCal. I honestly had no clue how to achieve success as an adult. I had literally zero role models for success, just a series of examples of what not to do. The only thing I could lean on was "do good in school, go to a decent college, get a job." Add to that that I became a parent at 15.

I got a near full ride due to grades plus economic status to a decent university. But I could not be part of that community; I had a kid to raise and that meant my wife and I had work (and she skipped college entirely). I never learned that I was supposed to be networking at that time. Today, I don't know one person from college.

I got a business degree because a friend's dad said it was the way to go. I minored in CS because I liked it and it was an easy A. At the time, programmers made like $30k usd if they could get a job (and there were no jobs like that within two hours of home). So I went for an insurance gig. Did slightly better than the $30k. Tried investments advisor; that was a bad choice for me. Those who can, do. Those who can't, teach. So I did construction and substitute teaching while I got my teaching credential in math. Did that for a few years.

All the while, I tinkered with programming. Built a few projects for folks. When it was time to leave teaching (man, inner city schools are hard), I had enough of a portfolio for programming that a recruiter reached out. I went on a few interviews and landed a real programming job! $70k a year! Nearly double what I made as a teacher! From there, I worked with really talented folks. I learned so much. I finally had access nto real advice and real role models. I quickly became mid level, then senior, now a principal developer at a unicorn. It took about a decade to reach the same level of success that some kids get right out of school. I don't really regret it. My journey makes me "me." It would have been nice to have earned better for that decade.

I really understand the value of opportunity and how it is unfairly distributed. I appreciate the story the article presents and it resonates with me deeply. Crafting more access to opportunity is so vital.

syndacks• 8 years ago

What exactly do you mean by "those who can do, those who can't teach"?

Assuming you mean teachers are failures at other fields, I fundamentally disagree. There are plenty of people who go into teaching to help others. To help underprivileged people like yourself. You had a CS minor, no? Do you consider your CS teachers to have been "those who can't"? At the very least they gave you a foundation and an interest in something that elevated your career.

sethammons5• 8 years ago

It is a saying, usually given as as a disparaging joke. It is not to be taken literally.

SamReidHughes• 8 years ago

Speaking of SpaceX -- Musk himself is African. He had to go to America in order to have a chance to do this.

sudeepj• 8 years ago

In Idaho, a lumberjack had a son, who he hoped would also become a lumberjack. But this kid liked rockets...

Reminds me of the movie "October Sky". Highly recommended.

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

cipriancaba• 8 years ago

First of all, why would you need a threadreader?? And secondly, if it wouldn't have been for Musk with his vision, Mueller wouldn't have had the chance to build the Merlin engine.. Point being, nobody succeeds by himself, everybody needs a team

techslave• 8 years ago

meh. opportunity is everywhere, as demonstrated by the protagonist of this story.

in the US anyway.

ok not exactly everywhere, but at least in the lumberjack backwoods of Idaho (as portrayed). we can do better, but you know what? i’ll take it.

how can he argue opportunity is lacking when his example is the son of a lumberjack, discouraged from being other than a lumberjack, is designing the rocket to go to mars?

ken• 8 years ago

In high school, he wanted to be an aviation mechanic, a big step up from lumberjack for a kid that likes rockets. His geomoetry teacher recognized the under-matching, and asked him: ‘Do you want to be the guy who fixes the plane or the guy who designs the plane?’

Good for them, maybe, but ... I also hate this. It's set up to make it sound like being a mechanic is somehow inferior to being a design engineer. Your plane won't fly without plenty of both people.

Having worked both kinds of jobs, I much prefer fixing to designing. And I'm the last person you would have expected to say this, back in high school! I never even considered this type of work before I was 35.

Alternative phrasing: "Do you want to deal with office politics for the rest of your life, or hit things with a hammer?"

Talent Is Everywhere, Opportunity Is Not

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