evangelista

I don’t think political correctness is the correct description of what he is trying to complain about.

The word he is looking for is “entitlement caused by excessive privilege.”

The reason people in China work that hard is that there are many people in poverty who would also like to work very hard for those jobs and very little safety net.

I should also mention once again: The United States is nowhere near as racist or sexist as these countries as mentioned above.

However the common opinion is that the United States is extremely racist and sexist. To people who genuinely believe this: You have no idea what the rest of the world is like, please travel.

The things I have seen folks from China openly saying and doing in business make the United States look very fair.

The only way to think like this is to have never left the US. Unfortunately, too many American grow up not having the exposure of how people speak in the rest of the world. Ever seen an entire soccer stadium erupt into monkey calls when a black player kicks a goal? You don’t know what a climate of racism is.

Americans think they are surrounded by racism, they have no idea what that actually means.

Hacker News is meant to be a sort of non-political oasis, which I apppreciate and which helps to greatly improve the quality of discussion and the content. Their moderation does a wonderful job killing stories where the discussion devolves into sewer.

Unfortunately, increasingly, politics are bleeding into tech in a way that is unavoidable and very, very questionable and upsetting.

What deeply concerns me about this particular story is it really looks a case of a consensual relationship ending under the standard circumstances that consensual relationships end.

People don’t want to have sex with each other, they start being less civil to one another. People get angry and break up after personal disputes. Someone doesn’t do the laundry and dishes as much as they should. Then people fight.

Are those people now “victims” and “abusers?” I am very not ok with this terminology being used this way.

This is not a good precedent. In the last three months, a friend of mine who I deeply love was falsely accused of sexist behavior because he nearly had a nervous breakdown from working with a member of the opposite sex and asked that she be removed from his project. She then turned around and filed a harassment complaint with HR when SHE was harassing HIM!

You are not a victim if your relationship ends under standard circumstances. I am sorry, you are not. That is an expected part of being in a relationship: People do not get along sometimes.

People should not get thrown out of their projects for this. Wrong, wrong, wrong.

I read Max’s statement, the tweets sent by his accuser and the community statement and didn’t see anything to the contrary.

Did he hit her? No. Did he rape her? No. Did he call her names? Didn’t see a mention of it. Where the police called? No. Restraining order? No. Racism? no. Sexism? no. Death threats? no.

So where is the beef here?

Just a vague accusation of “sexual controlling.” What the hell does that mean? He wanted to have sex with his girlfriend more than she felt comfortable with? That isn’t abuse, sorry. It’s grounds for ending a relationship, sure.

What this is doing is setting a precedent for hyper sensitivity and the weaponization of #MeToo in tech.

From the available evidence it looks like a standard relationship that didn’t work out.

Happy to change my opinion if more evidence comes out, right now this looks like a drive by reputation shooting.

“A lot of the ideas here will not actually get you ostracized from Silicon Valley society.”

Oh dude you have just not been paying attention.

Can you show me a single example of someone in tech who publicly expresses, at any point, any of the beliefs which are “not allowed?”

I’m looking for one.

Find me one person on Twitter in tech aside from John McAfee or Peter Theil who would dare. Sam Altman was good enough to step forward, I hope he won’t be the last. The complete and total castigation of the dude by every tech media outlet showed exactly what happens to anyone who isn’t rich enough not to care.

While Sam Altman can take a beating, a standard employee like James Damore can’t. Did we forget about him? Apparently we did!

Show me a single tech luminary staying that diversity is overrated and has numerous downsides (such as the degradation of communal trust which had swept the valley), that we don’t actually need additional codes of conduct to add protections that are already covered in the US legal code at every Meetup, that all gender bathrooms are lunacy or that most of the Millenials coming into the job market have an incredibly broken and fearful view of the world that is unwarranted by the available evidence.

Show me a single tech luminary willing to say that women should realize they have advantages and disadvantages and should take responsibility for guarding themselves st off-site social events to avoid being approached by men.

One! Show me one!

I can find these opinions on conservative podcasts but I have never seen anyone express them in tech. Ever!

I see a non-stop avalanche of one set of these opinions on every social media feed, internal company meeting and industry conference.

I have NEVER seen ANYONE notable in tech aside from Peter Thiel, who has been made untouchable st this point.

Why is that? It’s because they know it’s not good business and they will get to join Peter Theil in the excommunicated pile.

A great example is Scott Adams. Scott used to make hundreds of thousands of dollars per year giving paid speeches.

When he began writing about Trump, he was excommunicated and all of his speaking gigs were cancelled.

Another great example is the systematic and deliberate demonetization of conservative YouTube videos. People who are very balanced and fair like Dave Rubin have had their videos defunded for having conservative speakers as interview guests.

Twitter has been notorious for slowing down or “never getting around to” giving Blue Check Marks to conservative speakers - If I remember correctly, Scott Adams had to reach a simply insane number of followers before being given the check.

The hatred of conservatives and direct, persecutory and economic attacks on them is real, ongoing and getting worse.

Seriously - if you believe most of these opinions won’t harm your career if expressed publicly, you have really not been paying attention.

If you don’t believe me - Try it. Go on Twitter right now and say: “all gender bathrooms are stupid.”

Watch what happens.

Sam Altman was headed in the right direction but his point is completely malformed.

He shouldn’t have used the term “Political Correctness.” He also shouldn’t have provided the examples he used because they distracted from what he was trying to say.

I am sad that he took an opportunity to have this conversation (finally) and gave the people who are actually ruining Silicon Valley more ammunition to push their agenda.

What Sam is talking about is the insane level of unidirectional groupthink that has invaded Silicon Valley and turned everyone against one another under the guise of protecting minorities and other victims.

Proponents of this approach - which, frankly, overwhelmingly demonizes and targets white men - will point to the endless list of infractions that keep surfacing in the media.

They have a great point. There is abundant evidence that minorities and women are being unfairly treated in Silicon Valley.

Unfortunately, the constant warring against this unfairness has gutted Silicon Valley and now no one trusts one another. Everyone looks at white people as the enemy and the level of discourse has become so toxic that everyone is fleeing the state.

I have experienced this myself in interacting with my Bay Area colleagues. I feel that every word I say is being policed for content, that I have to walk on eggshells constantly with certain people or risk getting drawn and quartered on Twitter the next day.

So Liberals can have this version of safety. People focused on building things aren’t willing to live in a cultural police state.

The biggest problem in attempting to argue against this trend is that it is an argument of degree. These are the hardest Arguments to have because your opppnent automatically rounds everything up to the “nearest Hitler.”

Example:

You: Hey we shouldn’t focus so much attention on gender diversity.

Them: you hate women.

You: Maybe your theories on diversity and privilege re not entirely true or accurate.

Them: You hate minorities.

You: Maybe we shouldn’t excommunicate this person because he tried to hit on someone at a company party while drunk, men do stupid things and are motivated by sex genetically.

Them: You hate women. Don’t give bad men a pass, you are enabling rape culture.

You: I am really sick of having 80% of conferences focus exclusively on diversity topics, I can’t stand being lectured to constantly.

Them:You are Hitler.

So I don’t see a resolution. It is impossible to push back on what has happened to Silicon Valley’s culture without being labeled a bigot.

Arguments of degree are the hardest to have, and at this point I think only a severe economic downturn and reset is going to fix it.

The culture of the Bay Area is dead, it was caused by having the culture of our educational institutes teach these ways of viewing the world.

I have no hope that will change. We are living in the most privileged country in the world but we have taught all our kids that they are oppressed. It’s a lie.

I am still really puzzled over exactly why Peter Thiel so so hated. I believe the level of hatred is completely unwarranted. From my understanding, it boils down to this:

- He is remotely associated with Trump - He helped take down Gawker - ....something something something...but he backed Trump!

For the Gawker part:

Gawker outed him without his permission.

Outing a gay man is something the tabloids used to do in the darkest time period of the United States. Finding someone was gay and making that known publicly was a tool used by very, very unpleasant people to destroy careers and lives for years.

Given how Liberal the tech industry is, it is genuinely puzzling that people would rise to the defense of "Freedom of the Press" to use someone's sexual identity to try to discredit or embarrass them and destroy their career.

This is not freedom of the press, its bullying. If a media outlet did something to you personally and you had a few million dollars to spare to shut them down, you would do it too. Freedom of speech does not mean freedom from consequences.

So Peter Thiel helped shut down an abusive tabloid that outs gay men against their will and regresses the tech sector back to the 1970's and 80's. That doesn't seem sufficient to warrant the hatred.

Then he was associated with Trump. He dared so say things like: "Our middle class has been gutted by globalization and we are being eaten alive by China."

Bernie Sanders ran on this exact platform. Almost word-for-word, Bernie Sander's political platform economically had many things in common with what Thiel was promoting.

So that leaves one final option: The reason that people hate Thiel is because he made enemies in the Liberal press, they smeared him relentlessly and people internalized this without doing their own independent thinking or research.

I don't like that Y Combinator was expected to "Apologize" for not firing someone for holding political beliefs that align them with 42% of the United States population. I feel the tech industry is now a worse, less free place when demonization of this type has become so endemic.

If you are one of the people who wants to end "Fake News," you are also on board with ending Net Neutrality.

What do you think ending Fake News involves? The only way to do it is to have the government, Google, Facebook and probably these same ISPs you hate deciding what can and can't be put online.

You simply want to replace one giant beaurecratic gatekeeper with another one.

Anyone dumb enough to think Fake News resulted in the election results (please, show me the data) while rushing online to scream about Net Neutrality is a pawn in the game.

This is going to be somewhat long and heartbreaking but I promise it will converge on an intelligent point at the end.

Every time I visit San Francisco, the heart of America's tech economy, I walk down Market Street and view dozens of adult human beings, many with traumatic brain injuries and psychological problems, living like animals, sleeping in tents, defecating directly on the ground and begging for help.

In the richest country in the world, at the very heart of the tech industry...let me repeat this again, we have scores of people living in abject poverty...exactly like animals.

After multiple viewings of this situation, I stopped looking at the homeless people and I started noticing the people walking past these individuals: Staring down at their phones, the residents of Silicon Valley have trained themselves to wear blinders to the abject, deplorable poverty of their fellow men. They are Tweeting, Facebooking, Instagramming, SnapChatting their lunch.

Solving easy problems. Making easy statements. Liking the right comments and the right posts, retweeting the appropriate social messages. So simple and easy! Click! Like! Done!

As I stood in line at one bodega, I noted the professional and skilled manner in which a white collar worker like myself standing in line completely failed to look at, respond to or acknowledge the presence of a drug addict who was begging him for change.

What a wonderful technique, I thought to myself. I had been doing it all wrong previously by even remotely acknowledging the homeless whenever they hassled me on the street. After observing this man's behavior, I adopted it. I learned: Just pretend they don't exist and they will go away.

So back to my main point:

Silicon Valley is a corrupt, horrible place that has decided it's #1 problem to be solved is the gender imbalance in software engineering. Instead of focusing on solving the clear, heart rending, abject poverty around them, the entire tech industry has collectively jammed it's head deep, far into it's own anal cavity and decided that the optimal use of all of it's social justice time should be on ensuring that highly privileged women who have attended universities and received educations which fairly guarantee that they will achieve salaries that only .01% of the entire globe will ever achieve are the most pressing concern of the moment.

Every single day I see nothing but a relentless circular pounding on this topic. Women must learn to code! Women must learn to code! Women must learn to code!

The other half of the issue is just as fun: Our #1 issue as an industry is that women who are in the very upper 0.5% of the world must earn slightly more money. About 3%-5% more money. Yes, THAT is the issue we must harp on constantly all day, every single day online.

And the people living like animals on the streets we are ignoring? Yeah, fuck them, lets teach girls to code.

You know something? I have come around on my thinking on this topic.

There is a single central point where everyone on both sides of this debate are getting stuck and that is in the nature of the term "Sexism." What helped me to better understand what people mean when they say "Sexism" is to replace that word with the phrase: "Males Competing For Limited Resources With Females."

Once I made that mental shift I really was able to bridge to a place where I can sort of see what people from the Left are trying to say (but the problem is they are using a meaningless and overwrought phrase to get there and also attempting to jam insane ideas down people's throats using Orwellian tactics along the way while holding onto delusional optimistic views about reality). ahem

There are limited jobs at Google, very very high paying jobs which everyone in the entire world wants. There are people living in absolutely desperate circumstances all around America (let alone the entire globe!) who would basically kill for a job at Google. You see people lying in their own filth every day in downtown San Francisco who can't hold a job down and pay rent. The ones who can actually afford rent (barely) are sometimes not all that much better off.

If you think these people are going to be nice to one another once they get inside Google and are competing for the same promotions, you are hilariously wrong.

I have seen myself what men in large corporations are willing to do to one another in a closed environment with few promotions and resources: We are f*cking really mean to one another. We back-stab. We lie. We undermine. I have done it myself, it was fun when I was winning and awful when it was being done to me.

Large corporations spend a tremendous amount of money on PR and marketing to polish their images, but inside they are filled with men acting like rats trapped in a jar with dwindling food pellets: They eat each other sometimes. Maybe 15-35% of the time, but its enough.

Now add in a couple women to this environment: The experiment ends badly for them unless some structures are put into place. Men can and will tend to use whatever techniques they have at their disposal to get rid of or manipulate those around them. This includes being condescending and demeaning to reduce the influence of women.

However, no matter what you do. No matter how much you train your workforce, when you lift the lid you are going to find the following: Men competing with women and other men for few resources and promotions.

The problem is that corporations are built around making employees compete with one another. Thats how promotions work! Thats how money and stock are allocated: You did better than your peers or screwed them over so they failed.

The biggest lie companies like Google and Facebook tell the world is that they are lovely meritocracies ruled by fairness when they aren't. Google, Facebook, Microsoft, Amazon all share the same thing in common: People competing using whatever tools they have to get few resources.

All this SJW bullshit is simply an attempt to polish what is fundamentally a smiling bloodsport and always will be, its how corporations work.

I do not like this article or the author's approach to argumentation.

The author attempts to argue like this: "I am so right I do not have to argue why I am right and even if I did, you would be too dumb to understand it. waves hands around vaguely there is lots of science proving everything I think is true. I am too lazy to cite any of it or even indicate what arguments you made specifically are wrong, online people back me up on this please. Therefore: SEXIST! YOU ARE A SEXIST PIG AND HAVE HURT PEOPLE'S FEELINGS AND I WOULD HAVE YOU FIRED!" </end article>

This approach to arguing is exactly why I left the Democratic Party last year and won't be coming back until it changes. The behavior of the online mobs supporting Liberal causes (especially in high tech) turned me off so thoroughly I can never return. Stereotyping everything you disagree with as racist, sexist or the general category of "nazi" no longer impresses me.

YOU ARE GOING TO HAVE TO START ACTUALLY BACKING UP YOUR ASSERTIONS, THE BULLYING APPROACH HAS STOPPED WORKING.

Anyways, so lets spend a minute talking about the piles of imaginary science the author believes to exist for a moment.

Are you sitting down? Zero. There is zero science, anywhere, stating that 50% of women MUST be engineers. There is none. The idea that 50% of engineers MUST be women is a WANT. It is a GOAL. It is a DESIRE. At no point in history has 50% of engineering EVER been done by women, WHY must we all agree that this is a rational objective?

Where the tech industry gets it wrong is that it has decided to RAM this opinion down everyone's throats and force them to adhere to ever more stringent speech and behavioral codes and attempt to make everything in tech so bland, so PC, so placid, so devoid of argumentation or competition that perhaps we can vaguely tempt a woman or two into joining a bunch of sweaty engineers in a basement and chug Red Bull all night to push shitty code to a failing server on AWS.

Surely more training in micro-agressions is the problem keeping women away and not the disgusting pit stains. Right? After ten years of diversity summits, women who code, peer pressure, online mobs ranting...the net effect has been a completely imperceptible change in the number of women working at Facebook and Google. This approach and all the feel good antics and cheerleading surrounding it has failed.

Who needs imaginary science to show us that women don't really want to be engineers when we have reality?

Yet we are all supposed to buy completely into the notion that at some point in the future, if all sexism and other barriers are removed, that 50% of engineers WILL be women. Why must that be true?

What I think the goal SHOULD be is that 100% of women should have mentorship, access to education, representation, engineering peers and early tutelage. Of the women who have talent at engineering, they should all be able to find placements in engineering if they do the work necessary.

And why is it always engineering? Why not coal mining? Why not nuclear engineering? Pig farming? Deep sea fishing? Plumbing? Carpentry? Why the incessant, unrelenting insistance from all corners that 50% of engineers MUST be women and no other profession?

Every time I ask this question, I am informed that: "We have banned people from asking why 50% of nurses are not men."

Why have you banned people from asking this question? Have you banned them from asking this question because you are right? Or have you banned people from asking this question because the answer makes you uncomfortable and does not support your worldview?

You are completely correct, the people quibbling with you about statistics have not been paying attention to what is going on and are hopelessly naive about human nature and psychology. They are demonstrating exactly the bias thinking that caused the election results to be projected the way they were.

It wasn't just the New York Times, it was every single news outlet and every single poll. We have been running and studying elections for over 100 years, you would think, by now, that if we had any idea what we were doing, we would have long ago learned how to perform actual predictions using the data available to us.

When people break their legs, we can cure them 100% of the time because medicine has a strong answer for this problem based in thousands of years of medical science. Election polling and prediction is simply not in the category of "solved" problems.

If the statistics were really well understood...as some of the people arguing with you are claiming...WOULDN'T WE HAVE FIGURED THIS OUT BY NOW?

I have had these discussions about polls and statistics with my Liberal friends. Many of them are software engineers. Some of them even work in ML at large scale. They are utterly convinced that the data and statistics just need to be tweaked a little bit more and THEN they will be correct. To quote Donald Trump: WRONG!

There is a simple explanation for what happened that does not get into nit-picking statistical nuances. There is a simple explanation that does not allow people on the other side of the argument to bludgeon less educated opponents into silence by spewing technical jargon about polling data (which is really just a manipulation technique used to silence people by berating their intelligence).

The explanation is that the polling data was simply made up.

Or that many prediction models were created and only the ones favorable to the desired narrative were selected as being "Accurate" by people who are blinded by deep personal political bias.

This outcome scares people who prefer to see the world in a particular way.

People want to believe they aren't biased or that everything they read and see everyday is somehow "clean" or being presented by rational experts. That is a scary thought process...software engineers, in particular, cannot bear to believe that because it violates their underlying belief that the world operates in a logical way.

So instead of thinking like this, they crack open statistics textbooks and start reading chapter 4 at you. Its a defense mechanism to avoid reality.

There are direct financial rewards for telling people exactly what they want to hear. If Nate Silver and 538 consistently told people that Donald Trump would win, it is likely that their page-views would plummet into oblivion. Instead, the vast online hoards who like to be told whatever they want to hear and read news only to have their existing beliefs confirmed swarmed over Nate's websites, clicking on articles and gleefully watching the ads.

What is Nate Silver's punishment for being wrong over and over again? Nothing! There is no identifiable drop-off in his web traffic despite him and his team being wrong about everything this last election.

If what Nate Silver was doing was really "data journalism," shouldn't his following online have dropped off a cliff? It hasn't and it won't because what 538 is doing is not really backed by data and his readers and viewers are not discerning enough to care or believe that what they are reading is just opinion.

I am fairly disgusted by humanity at this point as a result.

Keep strong my brother, you are right. The people quibbling with you are living in an alternate reality where the media isn't incentivized by page views to gravitate towards narratives that result in more clicks. The media is dead.

I used to sort of laugh at this kind of thing. Ok, people who believe weird things are fighting with each other.

Then they relabeled every bathroom in California as being "All Gender." What does that even mean? There are two genders. Sometimes, people from one gender decide to identify with another gender. Fine. Men who believe they are women can go in the women's room and vice versa. No need to invent the concept of "all gender."

So now I no longer find this funny. I read about transracialism and now I am worried this is also going to become mainstream and I am going to get publicly persecuted for questioning that as well.

America has lost it's mind. Really.

When do we actually start pushing back against this and begin saying: "No, you can't be transracial, that is a dumb idea and this is an idiotic thing to even entertain and I am not going to allow you to pretend this is real science."

Now would be good.

This is an article about nothing. People used to fall for articles like this, not anymore.

Lets deconstruct it.

(a) Select for examples where white men (who the tech media has generally decided are evil and always are a problem) have failed in business (b) Now we will identify these people with a codeword (tech bro) because we can't actually say "aggressive white men" without being overtly racist (c) Now lets generalize and blame all the problems of the entire industry on these evil white privileged males who the media has decided to demonize (d) Conclusion: White men aka tech bros are the root of all problems in Silicon Valley and must be controlled and stopped because they are bad human beings, all of them!

Once you see through the superficial dressing the underlying logic is hilarious.

If you read a lot of media you start to see the patterns. Over and over again the urge is to blame the nearest convenient white male CEO for whatever problem just happened. Donald Trump got elected? Lets blame Zuckerberg for fake news. Then lets blame Peter Thiel and then Sam Altman. Note: All white men in positions of power.

In reality:

People get rich frequently in Silicon Valley by being assholes, taking other people's property, customers, business, employees. We call this system "capitalism."

YouTube grew enormous on the back of pirated content. Alibaba and Amazon profit tremendously from counterfeit products. Steve Jobs and Bill Gates spent their careers suing, back-stabbing and stealing ideas form one another and those around them.

Don't even get me started about Larry Ellison.

Capitalism is not really nice, get over it.

Engineering is, in many ways, a bad job. I was a software engineer for years and can assure you that it isn't an attractive profession. Many of the tech companies I worked for where ruthless body shops with very long hours, bad management and high turn over.

Nursing is also a phenomenally in-demand job which requires high amounts of education and has high standards but also has very intense working conditions. Nursing is also quite technical - you can't walk off the street and begin injecting chemicals into people without spending a significant amount of time in class.

Yet we see very little push to create more white male nurses, the topic is always intensely focused on STEM.

I used to be a huge supporter of diversity initiatives in tech. That has changed.

Over the years, I noticed more and more that diversity as a topic in high tech had morphed from something positive into a witch hunt against white men and against people who were generally friendly towards the idea of diversity yet did not practice sufficient rigor in enforcing a very specific idea of diversity at their events.

A great example is Nodevember kicking out Douglas Crockford because he made a couple relatively non-offensive jokes using secret accusations against him. Another great example is the ongoing attempts by social justice warriors to force the Drupal community to discriminate against a relatively harmless follower of the Gorean movement for his private life.

Still other examples include unsubstantiated accusations of sexual harassment at OSCON by an anonymous blog. I have been to OSCON and saw absolutely nothing like what was being complained about in that blog post. Yet another example is the continuing efforts to pressure the organizers of Lambda Conf to ban people who privately have non-politically correct views.

Instead of diversity being a "positive thing," it became "if you don't do diversity, if you don't invite 50% female speakers, if you don't have a code of conduct...you are racist."

I also noticed Meetup organizers and conference organizers coming under continuous direct public shaming pressure by screaming mobs online when they didn't have a precisely calibrated gender balance amongst speakers despite a numerical discrepancy in submitted talks. On top of that, I frequently see female engineers now actually complaining about being asked to talk about diversity at conferences too frequently because they are in a minority who are able to fill these gaps.

Finally, and most boring, diversity-related content has creeped into many Meetups, conferences and other events to the point where formerly content-filled events are now 30% diversity-related content by weight. Instead of interesting information about Python, we get 7 talks about how Python programmers can be more diverse and what it is like being a female Python programmer.

I find these changes disturbing. I find conduct codes to be sinister and a form of creeping control by the Left to attempt to extend safe spaces into industry and other places they don't belong.

We have a code of conduct in the United States, it is called the law. The constitution is the code of conduct we need to be concerned with now.

Hello,

I went through something similar. As a self-taught software engineer with a business background from a not great school, the hiring process at most large companies is specifically built to prevent people like me from getting in the door.

What you are encountering is the "gatekeeper layer" of these major tech companies. I call this "the front door." To put it mildly: The front door of tech is configured to reject everything that doesn't match some unrealistic perfect ideal of a genius savant engineer. To summarize Gandalf's general disposition towards flaming Balrogs:"Thou shalt not pass!"

Why is the focus on rejection and not acceptance?

There are three reasons. First, everyone wants to work at Google, Facebook etc. and there are a lot of unqualified people coming in. Second, these companies can't afford to grow at the rate at which they can gain talent. If Google were to hire a tiny fraction of the people applying to them every day, they would rapidly grow far beyond a size which makes sense. Third, they are very strategic about which directions they plan on growing in. They would rather acquire talent in groups focused in strategic topics like automotive than bother letting in single general-purpose individuals based on some brain teasers. Fourth, the actual volume of truly qualified people is even too high! The big companies can't afford to hire every qualified person who actually wants to work for them in some cases.

Therefore, anyone who possesses a diversity of skills beyond pure programming should completely avoid the front door, it isn't going to value your whole person (as you have seen).

Instead, you need to be using the "side door." That means you go and find people who you like (want to work with, resemble, build interesting stuff you like to use) and approach them personally and sit down with them like a regular human being and talk about building cool shit together.

If you are really great, people will recognize your greatness and they will help you get in the door.

Using the side door is about creating your own interview process rather than letting someone else define your interview process for you. Shoot high. Pick people who can hire you or have influence directly over hiring decisions. You don't need the gatekeepers.