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Yes, and also: if anything, technology enables more than ever anyone to build anything. There may be discrimination if you need to rely on external help (invest

Yes, and also: if anything, technology enables more than ever anyone to build anything. There may be discrimination if you need to rely on external help (investors, etc), but there are many very successful bootstrapped tech startups. You don't need anyone's approval to make money online these days. You just need time, the willingness to learn and a computer.

josh-sematic 3y ago
True that the free availability of tools broadens the field, but you can’t solve inequality by that alone. “Time” is still a necessary ingredient in that success recipe and if you’re working two jobs just to keep a family afloat due to generational poverty you’re not also going to be starting Microsoft in your garage.
- andsoitis 3y ago
  So what’s your very specific solution that the tech world should embrace to address this scenario you outlined?
  - josh-sematic 3y ago
    I won’t claim that these are perfect solutions, but I do believe they’re better than just making stuff open source and then feeling that you can ignore diversity. So with that, here are a few things that I think could be helpful: - use employment rather than contractors for things like janitorial and service work. This give people more stable employment and better benefits that can be leveraged to climb the social ladder - develop strong recruiting efforts at HBCUs and other sources of under-represented talent - add some non-university/credential based sources in your recruitment pool (ex: leet code) - sponsor your employee’s time to volunteer during the workday for things like robotics competitions and other STEM clubs at area high schools that have under-represented youth - at a cultural level, begin to at least collectively acknowledge that almost nothing is a pure meritocracy; that attitude serves as air cover to avoid confronting internal biases. You may doubt that implicit bias exists or that it impacts you. If so, I kindly request that you take [this test](https://implicit.harvard.edu/implicit/takeatouchtest.html https://implicit.harvard.edu/implicit/takeatouchtest.html) before responding to this particular point.
- louison11 3y ago
  For sure. But what do you think of the possibility that many people who are suffering from financial inequality may actually have quite a bit of free time? That's my sense at least looking at global screen time statistics not only in the US but in many poor countries. I have also lived in poor countries, and can say from personal experience that it's a 1st world myth to believe that in poor countries everybody is exhausted from overworking. In many poor countries, people actually don't work all that much, and are poor as a result of a lack of opportunity. In these places, there is actually plenty of time, but no opportunity. And the more technology develops, and jobs become available remotely, the more smart, ambitious people in these countries are able to rise above their circumstances. Of course they need to at least have enough money to have a computer and an internet connection, but these are becoming more accessible every year. Don't get me wrong - it's highly unlikely some little kid from Kenya will build the next Facebook. It's much more than time and bandwidth. But it's a process, and I'd say we're headed in the right direction. Just go on UpWork and see how many people from developing countries are now making very decent wages.
  - josh-sematic 3y ago
    I’m in agreement that increase in tech availability and accessibility are a big and positive factor. My point is mainly that we need to augment tech with some social solutions to solve this problem rather than treating it as only a problem of technology + waiting for the problem to solve itself. And the problem looks different from country to country—the way we get people from developing countries into high-paying jobs is different from how we get underrepresented people from developed countries into high-paying jobs. It’s a complicated and hard problem. I just get annoyed when people are super reductive about it and pretend that there is one magic bullet to solve it (especially when, surprise! that purported bullet requires doing no extra work).
hospadar 3y ago
> You don't need anyone's approval to make money online these days. You just need time, the willingness to learn and a computer. Sure maybe you’ll bootstrap an amazing product with some secret sauce that’s magically hard to copy, but more likely you’ll need a bunch of people (we’ll call them “investors”) to give you their approval (we’ll call it “money” or “capital”). If your great idea with no investors is competing against someone else’s pretty-similar-but-not-quite-as-good-idea-except-they-have-a-hundred-million-dollars, you’re probably going to lose. If the group of people who can access that capital is very homogeneous (and it is in real life), we’re probably missing out on designs and ideas and innovations that would otherwise make everything better. Also worth noting that this isn’t just about gender and race/ethnicity, disability is a great practical example: disabled folks are more likely to create things that are accessible for disabled folks, but non-disabled folks very often benefit from that accessibility (i.e. stuff is easier to use). We’d be shooting ourselves in the collective foot to have only non-disabled folks making stuff.
cratermoon 3y ago
> technology enables more than ever anyone to build anything This underestimates the difficulty of going against the grain of technology. Some things are easy to do with current tech, some are much harder. As it happens, the things that are easy are the things that align with the dominant paradigms of tech culture.

josh-sematic 3y ago

True that the free availability of tools broadens the field, but you can’t solve inequality by that alone. “Time” is still a necessary ingredient in that success recipe and if you’re working two jobs just to keep a family afloat due to generational poverty you’re not also going to be starting Microsoft in your garage.

andsoitis 3y ago
So what’s your very specific solution that the tech world should embrace to address this scenario you outlined?
- josh-sematic 3y ago
  I won’t claim that these are perfect solutions, but I do believe they’re better than just making stuff open source and then feeling that you can ignore diversity. So with that, here are a few things that I think could be helpful: - use employment rather than contractors for things like janitorial and service work. This give people more stable employment and better benefits that can be leveraged to climb the social ladder - develop strong recruiting efforts at HBCUs and other sources of under-represented talent - add some non-university/credential based sources in your recruitment pool (ex: leet code) - sponsor your employee’s time to volunteer during the workday for things like robotics competitions and other STEM clubs at area high schools that have under-represented youth - at a cultural level, begin to at least collectively acknowledge that almost nothing is a pure meritocracy; that attitude serves as air cover to avoid confronting internal biases. You may doubt that implicit bias exists or that it impacts you. If so, I kindly request that you take [this test](https://implicit.harvard.edu/implicit/takeatouchtest.html https://implicit.harvard.edu/implicit/takeatouchtest.html) before responding to this particular point.
louison11 3y ago
For sure. But what do you think of the possibility that many people who are suffering from financial inequality may actually have quite a bit of free time? That's my sense at least looking at global screen time statistics not only in the US but in many poor countries. I have also lived in poor countries, and can say from personal experience that it's a 1st world myth to believe that in poor countries everybody is exhausted from overworking. In many poor countries, people actually don't work all that much, and are poor as a result of a lack of opportunity. In these places, there is actually plenty of time, but no opportunity. And the more technology develops, and jobs become available remotely, the more smart, ambitious people in these countries are able to rise above their circumstances. Of course they need to at least have enough money to have a computer and an internet connection, but these are becoming more accessible every year. Don't get me wrong - it's highly unlikely some little kid from Kenya will build the next Facebook. It's much more than time and bandwidth. But it's a process, and I'd say we're headed in the right direction. Just go on UpWork and see how many people from developing countries are now making very decent wages.
- josh-sematic 3y ago
  I’m in agreement that increase in tech availability and accessibility are a big and positive factor. My point is mainly that we need to augment tech with some social solutions to solve this problem rather than treating it as only a problem of technology + waiting for the problem to solve itself. And the problem looks different from country to country—the way we get people from developing countries into high-paying jobs is different from how we get underrepresented people from developed countries into high-paying jobs. It’s a complicated and hard problem. I just get annoyed when people are super reductive about it and pretend that there is one magic bullet to solve it (especially when, surprise! that purported bullet requires doing no extra work).

hospadar 3y ago

> You don't need anyone's approval to make money online these days. You just need time, the willingness to learn and a computer. Sure maybe you’ll bootstrap an amazing product with some secret sauce that’s magically hard to copy, but more likely you’ll need a bunch of people (we’ll call them “investors”) to give you their approval (we’ll call it “money” or “capital”). If your great idea with no investors is competing against someone else’s pretty-similar-but-not-quite-as-good-idea-except-they-have-a-hundred-million-dollars, you’re probably going to lose. If the group of people who can access that capital is very homogeneous (and it is in real life), we’re probably missing out on designs and ideas and innovations that would otherwise make everything better. Also worth noting that this isn’t just about gender and race/ethnicity, disability is a great practical example: disabled folks are more likely to create things that are accessible for disabled folks, but non-disabled folks very often benefit from that accessibility (i.e. stuff is easier to use). We’d be shooting ourselves in the collective foot to have only non-disabled folks making stuff.

cratermoon 3y ago

> technology enables more than ever anyone to build anything This underestimates the difficulty of going against the grain of technology. Some things are easy to do with current tech, some are much harder. As it happens, the things that are easy are the things that align with the dominant paradigms of tech culture.