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What's the systemic issue that keeps doing wealth gatekeeping? It crops up over and over. If X is a path to upper-middle class or above, it's almost inevitable

What's the systemic issue that keeps doing wealth gatekeeping? It crops up over and over. If X is a path to upper-middle class or above, it's almost inevitable that filters and gates are put in to place that primarily work to ensure it's available only to children of the upper-middle class or above. There's nothing inherently within most software development that makes it out of reach of being treated like a technical skill like electricians, carpentry, or plumbing. Personally, I suspect it's more to do with "cultural fit" issues than skill issues. College is a great filter to find people who self-select and are trained to fit into the global corporate world. Unfortunately, the side effect of this is concentrating wealth into the hands of people whom already have significant wealth and advantages. Efforts to counteract this (like the GI Bill, and college loans) have tended to have additional expensive barriers to weed out people deemed a "bad fit". For example, requiring more advanced degrees or hard to get internships (that may even be unpaid!).

curiousllama 5y ago
Gatekeeping effectively boils down to using a heuristic to make a decision (good or bad). Once a heuristic is known, people who want $thing will optimize for $arbitrary_heuristic. Those with more resources will use them to optimize better. Toss in natural human network effects (eg, giving a friend advice), and those with resources will tend to dominate. You need active countervailing forces to avoid that natural tendency.
epicureanideal 5y ago
I recommend a book that discusses this topic in detail: Pedigree. Basically discusses the mechanisms of how connections and wealth affect hiring.
theamk 5y ago
I don’t see an “upper-middle class” filter in this particular case though. The company college hiring pipelines are often not limited to Ivy League or “top 10” universities. For example my company was looking fOr summer interns, and any college would work. We’ve had an intern on our team from college which was ranked around #80... gave him full time offer btw.
dustingetz 5y ago
scale. big companies set up basically mechanical processes that remove or reduce variance from human decision making, not just in recruiting but also their software dev, marketing, factory assembly lines, this is how scale works. a side effect of increased process is you can no longer achieve outlier results but the average result is predictable. and predictable results (predictable revenue) is precisely what big companies want.
- advael 5y ago
  I think this is actually a great argument for incredibly stringent anti-trust that prevents companies from getting very big at all. Successfully scaling inevitably produces extremely undesirable outcomes for anyone not invested in the company, including customers who have to integrate the heavy level of process into their usage, employees who have to deal with all the process but don't personally reap much of its benefits, competitors who are edged out by economies of scale more significantly than other competitive edges, and reactionary regulation to harms caused by all this that tend to create both more entry barriers for competitors and more process. Scale and automated processes are a means of reducing risk for shareholders and rigging competition, and preventing them should be a priority for everyone who isn't already wealthy enough to angel-invest (And probably those who are too, ultimately, although this does not bear out in the short term)
  - dustingetz 5y ago
    economies of scale are why we are rich, imagine if you had to grow your own vegetables
    - advael 5y ago
      Most of the vegetables I eat are grown in my backyard. As for "why we are rich", who is the "we" in that sentence? You? Me? Some aggregate across millions - maybe even billions - of people that's meaningless to most of them?
      - pc86 5y ago
bpodgursky 5y ago
The systemic issue in my experience is the extraordinary flood of poor-to-mediocre candidates you get for entry-level roles... I personally really hate college-gating admissions and would rather legally forbid that kind of discrimination (as far as, not allowing college to be on a resume). But it's impossible to deny that it helps solve a real filtering problem tech companies face.
- advael 5y ago
  It may have at one point, but Goodhart's Law is always looming in the background, waiting to fuck with any filter you care to come up with. In the last few generations, the shift to college being viewed (and subsidized) as an effectively-required vocational training program has diminished the quality of education in degree programs expected to turn out workers while pushing a lot of people through who would not otherwise have been interested in higher education. It's no longer a very effective filter for quality applicants
- CTDOCodebases 5y ago
  Could the solution to this be some type of exam/testing process similar to a bar exam that lawyers are obliged to pass before becoming a lawyer? By this I mean an applicant funded testing (not educating) process operated by a respected institution that can be used as a heuristic for competency.
  - alice-i-cecile 5y ago
    That was TripleByte's whole idea. They recently pivoted though :(
Hermitian909 5y ago
> If X is a path to upper-middle class or above, it's almost inevitable that filters and gates are put in to place that primarily work to ensure it's available only to children of the upper-middle class or above. Once X is widely known as a path to wealth, entry level positions get flooded with applications (e.g. a junior posting at my company could easily receive 1000 resumes) beyond what they are capable of judging on an individual basis. Once companies hit this point, they start looking for heuristics to cut down on the amount of searching they need to do. "Gatekeeping" is these heuristics. Consider that for most top law firms, if you're not coming out of the top 3 law schools they're not interested. Why? Because those schools do a good job of filtering out bad candidates, and offer up enough good ones to fully meet the hiring needs of the company, figuring any generational geniuses they miss will make a name for themselves some other way and can be hired later. So why does the gatekeeping all seem to help upper-middle class people? As a former educator I'm going to say it's because when it comes to the skills companies are looking for on average children of upper-middle class people are better if for no other reason than they've generally had much more money spent on their education and training, to the tune of over a million dollars compared to lower class peers.
- France_is_bacon 5y ago
  >Consider that for most top law firms, if you're not coming out of the top 3 law schools they're not interested. Yes, and this is certainly not a new phenomenon. I used to work with a recruiting department at a large upper-end law firm. They only took new associates from the top 10 universities. This was 35 years ago. So there's nothing new under the sun.
- foobarian 5y ago
  I used to get kinda miffed that super popular restaurants like Border Cafe in Harvard Square do not take reservations, so you basically have to wait an hour or two to get a spot. But from their point of view it makes perfect sense. Why would they go through the trouble if they fill their tables at 100% with a line around the block to boot? That's how I think of the hiring pipelines as well. p.s. Yes this is out of date somewhat but I promise Border Cafe was a hopping place 20 years ago :-)
dougmwne 5y ago
You've found a feature, not a bug. In my view, wealth and power concentration is the point of nations and empires, not the side effect. Keeping all that power within a few like minded hands is how the upper classes keep their heads attached to their shoulders. From there it's turtles all the way down.
yobbo 5y ago
> What's the systemic issue that keeps doing wealth gatekeeping? UMC wants these jobs reserved for its children. Btw, what's wrong with that? If the job itself doesn't require any particular skill or competence but is very rewarding, why should they not reserve it for themselves? There still exists jobs that can't be filled through these networks and they are open to anyone.

curiousllama 5y ago

Gatekeeping effectively boils down to using a heuristic to make a decision (good or bad). Once a heuristic is known, people who want $thing will optimize for $arbitrary_heuristic. Those with more resources will use them to optimize better. Toss in natural human network effects (eg, giving a friend advice), and those with resources will tend to dominate. You need active countervailing forces to avoid that natural tendency.

epicureanideal 5y ago

I recommend a book that discusses this topic in detail: Pedigree. Basically discusses the mechanisms of how connections and wealth affect hiring.

theamk 5y ago

I don’t see an “upper-middle class” filter in this particular case though. The company college hiring pipelines are often not limited to Ivy League or “top 10” universities. For example my company was looking fOr summer interns, and any college would work. We’ve had an intern on our team from college which was ranked around #80... gave him full time offer btw.

dustingetz 5y ago

scale. big companies set up basically mechanical processes that remove or reduce variance from human decision making, not just in recruiting but also their software dev, marketing, factory assembly lines, this is how scale works. a side effect of increased process is you can no longer achieve outlier results but the average result is predictable. and predictable results (predictable revenue) is precisely what big companies want.

advael 5y ago
I think this is actually a great argument for incredibly stringent anti-trust that prevents companies from getting very big at all. Successfully scaling inevitably produces extremely undesirable outcomes for anyone not invested in the company, including customers who have to integrate the heavy level of process into their usage, employees who have to deal with all the process but don't personally reap much of its benefits, competitors who are edged out by economies of scale more significantly than other competitive edges, and reactionary regulation to harms caused by all this that tend to create both more entry barriers for competitors and more process. Scale and automated processes are a means of reducing risk for shareholders and rigging competition, and preventing them should be a priority for everyone who isn't already wealthy enough to angel-invest (And probably those who are too, ultimately, although this does not bear out in the short term)
- dustingetz 5y ago
  economies of scale are why we are rich, imagine if you had to grow your own vegetables
  - advael 5y ago
    Most of the vegetables I eat are grown in my backyard. As for "why we are rich", who is the "we" in that sentence? You? Me? Some aggregate across millions - maybe even billions - of people that's meaningless to most of them?
    - pc86 5y ago

bpodgursky 5y ago

The systemic issue in my experience is the extraordinary flood of poor-to-mediocre candidates you get for entry-level roles... I personally really hate college-gating admissions and would rather legally forbid that kind of discrimination (as far as, not allowing college to be on a resume). But it's impossible to deny that it helps solve a real filtering problem tech companies face.

advael 5y ago
It may have at one point, but Goodhart's Law is always looming in the background, waiting to fuck with any filter you care to come up with. In the last few generations, the shift to college being viewed (and subsidized) as an effectively-required vocational training program has diminished the quality of education in degree programs expected to turn out workers while pushing a lot of people through who would not otherwise have been interested in higher education. It's no longer a very effective filter for quality applicants
CTDOCodebases 5y ago
Could the solution to this be some type of exam/testing process similar to a bar exam that lawyers are obliged to pass before becoming a lawyer? By this I mean an applicant funded testing (not educating) process operated by a respected institution that can be used as a heuristic for competency.
- alice-i-cecile 5y ago
  That was TripleByte's whole idea. They recently pivoted though :(

Hermitian909 5y ago

> If X is a path to upper-middle class or above, it's almost inevitable that filters and gates are put in to place that primarily work to ensure it's available only to children of the upper-middle class or above. Once X is widely known as a path to wealth, entry level positions get flooded with applications (e.g. a junior posting at my company could easily receive 1000 resumes) beyond what they are capable of judging on an individual basis. Once companies hit this point, they start looking for heuristics to cut down on the amount of searching they need to do. "Gatekeeping" is these heuristics. Consider that for most top law firms, if you're not coming out of the top 3 law schools they're not interested. Why? Because those schools do a good job of filtering out bad candidates, and offer up enough good ones to fully meet the hiring needs of the company, figuring any generational geniuses they miss will make a name for themselves some other way and can be hired later. So why does the gatekeeping all seem to help upper-middle class people? As a former educator I'm going to say it's because when it comes to the skills companies are looking for on average children of upper-middle class people are better if for no other reason than they've generally had much more money spent on their education and training, to the tune of over a million dollars compared to lower class peers.

France_is_bacon 5y ago
>Consider that for most top law firms, if you're not coming out of the top 3 law schools they're not interested. Yes, and this is certainly not a new phenomenon. I used to work with a recruiting department at a large upper-end law firm. They only took new associates from the top 10 universities. This was 35 years ago. So there's nothing new under the sun.
foobarian 5y ago
I used to get kinda miffed that super popular restaurants like Border Cafe in Harvard Square do not take reservations, so you basically have to wait an hour or two to get a spot. But from their point of view it makes perfect sense. Why would they go through the trouble if they fill their tables at 100% with a line around the block to boot? That's how I think of the hiring pipelines as well. p.s. Yes this is out of date somewhat but I promise Border Cafe was a hopping place 20 years ago :-)

dougmwne 5y ago

You've found a feature, not a bug. In my view, wealth and power concentration is the point of nations and empires, not the side effect. Keeping all that power within a few like minded hands is how the upper classes keep their heads attached to their shoulders. From there it's turtles all the way down.

yobbo 5y ago

> What's the systemic issue that keeps doing wealth gatekeeping? UMC wants these jobs reserved for its children. Btw, what's wrong with that? If the job itself doesn't require any particular skill or competence but is very rewarding, why should they not reserve it for themselves? There still exists jobs that can't be filled through these networks and they are open to anyone.