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Comment by _m8fo | Hacker News Reader

My point is basically this: the average is being extremely skewed by survivorship bias, namely, White and Asians who attended elite schools. I assert that getting the salaries noted in the article is especially unlikely if you're on the other end of the spectrum: Women and minorities from non-elite schools.

MD means medical doctor. Wages among doctors are far more predictable.

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Nothing is keeping women and minorities out of tech, they're just choosing different careers.

I'd love to see your evidence for this. Namely, you'd need to prove that for a given educational level, geographical location and familial history, they're more likely to choose something other than tech than white males.

Given the fact that every college in the country enacts affirmative action, it's apparent that non-whites and women would have no problem getting into the IT field. And given the fact that over 60 percent of people graduating college today are women, that tells me that it's just not a field they're interested in. I don't see why that's a problem.

You don't understand why lack of diversity in an industry is a problem? A complaint that I often hear is that SV is full of start ups focused on "Uber for catnip" and other unimaginative useless things. Wouldn't diversity address this alleged homogeny of services(think Bevel)?

I see no merit in forced diversity. If they have the opportunity and incentive to choose this field, yet go elsewhere, that's fine by me.

You've yet to prove that they've had "the opportunity and incentive to choose this field, yet go elsewhere."

Affirmative action means women and minorities get preferential treatment during hiring. Given the fact that women and minorities are underrepresented in tech, it should be obvious that they would have an incentive to join the industry because they would have very little trouble getting hired wherever they want. And given the fact that over 60 percent of graduates are women, it's clear that lack of opportunity isn't a factor for women at least.

So you basically have no evidence to back up meaningless, unsubstantiated claims. You don't even support your statement: "affirmative action means women and minorities get preferential treatment during hiring." Guess the discussion is over since you refuse to provide any evidence to back up your ridiculous claims.

> You don't even support your statement: "affirmative action means women and minorities get preferential treatment during hiring."

Are you saying this is untrue? If I am wrong, then what is affirmative action?

It's really easy to plug your ears and scream that an opponent's argument is "ridiculous" (what you are doing). It's more difficult to actually make a counterargument yourself (what you are not doing). Try harder, maybe.

Look at college freshmen, see what portion of women/minorities are studying something tech related? Or am I misunderstanding something?

The pipeline for tech oriented careers opens up around the 6th grade, and starts to become harder to enter around the 11th. I know from personal experience that kids at those ages rarely have any idea about what career they'll actually be in at age 30. So the parents that have high expectations--and push their kids to achieve academically--fill up that pipeline early.

My own high school had roughly equal numbers of black and white students (40% white, 40% black, 20% others). But all my classes were overwhelmingly whites, Jews, Chinese, and Indians, and their parents were mostly doctors, lawyers, tenured professors (or even university presidents), and business owners. Most of the boys were all in the same scout troop (50). Few played a sport; if they did, it was tennis or cross-country running. Most played a musical instrument.

I don't even know where all the black people went after elementary school. They were still there at school, they just weren't in most of my classes (except for the 2 that were in all of them--they had high-expectations parents). Then, once I went off to college, most of the ladies vanished, too. They were in my chem and psych classes. They were in the band. They were certainly there. But they didn't take the CompSci classes.

And in the workplace, well, they show up from time to time at different jobs, but most places look just like all the boys from my 6th grade accelerated math class, 30 years later.

I don't think you can entirely blame the hiring companies for this one.

Huh, okay.

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