Comment by pessimizer | Hacker News Reader

Comment by pessimizer | Hacker News Reader

It's weird how the first sentence promises that we'll learn the answer to why successful tech people blame DEI for something, and then never mentions DEI again.

Being anti-"DEI" is a trendy hobby for most, a serious concern for others, but for "Marc Andreessen, Mark Zuckerberg, and James Damore" it's literally the default, because DEI is a patchwork of inconsistent restrictions of various and often dubious authority placed on people who hire. It's against them, of course they're against it. They're against workers and labor rights in general, just like most owners.

You might as well say that oil companies are against environmental policies because the world has changed and they can no longer do what they used to do, and maybe they just got lucky anyway... or instead assume that most people are against regulations that restrict them from doing things that they might want to do.

edit: I suspect this might be a covert explanation about why this particular technologist is less enamored by the future possibilities of their chosen career than they were when they started it, just (for some reason) projected onto celebrities who have already been massively successful.

I believe there is an implicit answer here, but I agree that the author didn't tie the threads together as clearly as they could have.

What they are saying is that tech moguls have a period in their life where they felt they were at their best, living their glory days. They are latching on to and trying to recreate that environment, including superficial properties that environment had that don't actually have anything to do with why it was such a formative period for them.

One attribute of programming back in the 90s is... it was mostly non-poor white guys.

Now, obviously anyone with a certain level of maturity and wisdom would realize that the demographic monoculture of the 90s was an effect of the fact that computers were still relatively rare and expensive in the 80s, and those most people who had access to them back them came from a certain level of privilege. Being wealthy, white, and male all increased the odds that you were able to spend your endless summers PEEKing and POKing on an Apple IIe while other less fortunate people didn't have a computer or had to work.

Being wealthy, white, and male didn't cause people to be better hackers. Having economic stability is what gave people the freedom to become better hackers. It's just that that level of economic stability has historically not at all been uniformly distributed across people in the US. Thus anti-DEI measures are counterproductive. Going forward, society has a moral and rational incentive to extend that opportunity to as many people as possible, regardless of their anatomy or skin color because that's how society gets the most out of all of its members.

I wish I could have said it as well as you have here.

> Being wealthy, white, and male all increased the odds that you were able to spend your endless summers PEEKing and POKing on an Apple IIe while other less fortunate people didn't have a computer or had to work.

How do you figure being male help one's chances with that?

I think it's a combination of a few factors:

* Girls are often put under more social obligations than boys. Look around and you'll find lots of stories where girls are expected to help out with the housework while their brothers are given free reign to do what they feel like.

* I deeply believe that representation matters. Many girls probably never even considered that computers were a thing they might enjoy because they never saw other girls being into it.

* This less true today, but there has historically been a lot of pressure on girls and boys to do gendered activities, and tech was male coded. Parents would tell their daughters to play with dolls, not videogames. (And videogames are very often the pathway into programming.) Peers would make fun of girls that were interested in nerd stuff.

* For reasons that aren't entirely clear to me, male nerd culture has often been outright hostile to females entering the space. Girls trying to join programming clubs, take CS classes, etc. would frequently get harassed by guys. (You can look at Gamergate as an extreme example of this.)

Meanwhile, male found it easy to think of being into computers because almost everyone you saw using a computer was a male like them. They were given ample free time, and faced few headwinds when expressing an interest in tech.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com