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What about class? Ivy League Parents -> Private School -> SAT tutoring -> Ivy League College -> Investment by Ivy League VC -> Acquired by Ivy League Tech Comp

by staunch 12y ago

What about class? Ivy League Parents -> Private School -> SAT tutoring -> Ivy League College -> Investment by Ivy League VC -> Acquired by Ivy League Tech Company vs Poor parents -> Shitty Public School -> High School Drop Out -> Programmer at Ivy League Tech Company (maybe) There's a reason most of the big tech companies are from Ivy League graduates. And you can't ignore how many successful startups only happened because parental financial support. Someone working paycheck to paycheck to pay for college isn't going to have a reading week to hack with. Or can't borrow $40k from their parents. Or live at home for free. The game is ultimately fair - even a dog could get funded with traction. But there really is a class system in the U.S. and it is probably the biggest bias in the system.

argonaut 12y ago
Minor nit, which is that all the top CS (and engineering, for that matter) schools are not Ivy League schools: MIT, Berkeley, Stanford, CMU. And I've never heard of top tech companies being referred to as Ivy League tech companies. But your point is still valid when you talk about "top schools."
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- famousactress 12y ago
  Ah, the irony of making sure we're careful to make subtle distinctions about the top fraction of a percent of the population... in response to a comment about massive class imbalance.
  - argonaut 12y ago
    Your words, not mine. My actual intention was to get the OP to move away from an emphasis on the "Ivy League" brand, which I think people need to stop putting up on a pedestal.
    - famousactress 12y ago
      I understand, and I don't mean to be argumentative or even trite but my intention was to express disinterest in what words we use to describe elite schools that close-enough-to-no-one can go to.
jiggy2011 12y ago
There's likely to be big correlations between class and race. Gender is obviously a much more complicated one. I think aspirations are likely to play a big role here, after all people tend to judge their successes relative to their family and close friends. So for a kid from a poor neighbourhood (who's more likely to be black), getting a good job with a decent salary and benefits is a great success already and running a startup is too risky so there's less incentive. If you come from an upper middle class family and all of your siblings are training to be lawyers or doctors then that ups the ante a lot in what your "floor" to success is, and like you say risk is reduced because of family so starting "the next facebook" looks like a more attractive option.
- JVIDEL 12y ago
  The problem is that as the gap widens that poor kid might have no actual chance at a decent stable job with benefits. Odds are he will be stuck in part-time land with no benefits and doing odd jobs on the side, so for him going with a startup must seem like a better choice. Also since we are talking about aspirations you have to consider the "all or nothing" attitude that's so common these days, and I see a lot of people particularly in the lower classes who are far more motivated about the tiniest possibility of a quick jackpot than a slow but steady improvement in their lives. But then again that way of thinking might have more to do with the way the middle class (the "steady option") is disappearing than with a social fad.
  - jiggy2011 12y ago
    Someone sufficiently poor probably doesn't have the funds to start a startup period. You might strike lucky and get funding from YC but how likely is that to cover everything? Including getting to the stage of securing the funding (like travel expenses, time to build a prototype etc). Also amongst poorer families there is a greater expectation that children will contribute back to the family pot at an earlier age. I agree that it sucks to be poor, but I don't know how much startup funding can fix that.
- rhizome 12y ago
  So for a kid from a poor neighbourhood (who's more likely to be black), getting a good job with a decent salary and benefits is a great success already and running a startup is too risky so there's less incentive. For starting and running a startup, maybe, but those forces are much less in effect when the upper classes are doing the hiring. As we see at a lot of these companies, they aren't really reaching very far outside of their cohort. Cue the culture-fit debate.
dpeck 12y ago
Ivy League is an athletic conference, or at best a collection of prestigious schools from the north east: The eight institutions are Brown University, Columbia University, Cornell University, Dartmouth College, Harvard University, Princeton University, the University of Pennsylvania, and Yale University. I don't think this is what you mean.
- jbigelow76 12y ago
  I think the colloquialism of "Ivy League" as a psuedo pedigree or class distinction has superseded the actual athletic conference definition. I knew exactly what the OP was driving at even if the details were off, and only after you point out that Ivy League is an athletic conference did it occur to me that that would be where the current colloquialism came from.
  - dpeck 12y ago
    even without it being related to the athletic conference, and refering only to those schools, that is for the most part a completely different set of schools than the ones whose alumni are involved in the startup/VC game. Words mean things.
Permit 12y ago
I'm not sure how this is releveant; how can YCombinator influence this? The disparity in education has already taken full effect by the time people apply to YC. It's great that YC has taken steps towards gender equality, but I don't think they have much of a say when it comes to inequality in education.
- a-t-shirt 12y ago
  Their steps toward their vision of gender equality make it even more difficult for men who didn't attend a prestigious university to be accepted.
- mrkurt 12y ago
  The selection problems that make Stanford grads have a leg up on startups isn't education related, really, it's network related. YC helps get more people into the circles required for fundraising. There's no other way I, for instance, would have had any credibility with the people who fund companies.
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ahh 12y ago
Class issues help people from the wrong caste. Who cares about poor men when there are rich women who don't have enough in their lives already?
runako 12y ago
This argument dodges the thrust of Sam's essay, which centered on gender disparities. Your argument doesn't work for gender disparities. For example, MIT is ~46% female. Stanford is 47% female. (I won't be pedantic about the Ivy League thing.) These numbers look absolutely nothing like the small end of the VC funnel.
- astrange 12y ago
  Do you know which schools those numbers are from? (That doesn't really affect your chance of startup success, but surely it affects your inclination to go into one.)
shanacarp 12y ago
True - the way out is to hire interns from state schools/small programs.
Dewie 12y ago
> What about class? The issue of "class" doesn't have nearly enough political clout in this context in order to get a mention from any important person. Gender does, though, for obvious slightly related historical reasons. The only hope that class itself can get a mention is by piggy-backing on the issue of gender.[0] The topic of Diversity in Tech shows that 1) hacker types aren't as unsuspectible to being political as they historically may have thought, when their career and businesses start to be influenced by their own reputations. 2) Diversity seems to largely just inspire sympathy for whatever issue which has enough political influence to actually be kind of threatening, which seems to be very convenient. My point is; assuming that there was never any movement or awareness of inequity in tech, what would have been the prevailing attitude? Well, it seems that "meritocracy" is big in tech culture. What is the attitude now? Meritocracy, with the stipulation that your gender can cramp your style. Has the attitude changed all that much, really? Or has it perhaps stayed the same, with some lip service in the general direction of gender issues for good measure? "Tech" in this context refers to tech in America. That makes for an industry (at least a subset of which) that is known for having the belief in a meritocracy, which exists in a country that historically has had a strong collective belief in meritocracy. The archetypical hacker is someone who at a very young age felt the calling of the computer[1] and learned himself (or herself!) to program with some cruddy manual. I am not exaggerating by calling it a calling: if you didn't feel that calling to program your calculator in the second grade of elementary school, then tech was probably not for you, whether you're a boy or a girl. Now? All of the sudden environmental factors like culture, opportunity, other kids who tinker with computers, matter. Wow, all of a sudden tech types are starting to talk in sociological terms rather than black and white simplifications. Old-school hackers (those who have the experience and connections to be political) haven't struck me as being very "sociological". To them, there are four kinds of people: hackers, java developers (snorts), managers, and everyone else (mostly tech-illiterates). Hackers are self-made, passionate people. Java developers and managers are sell-outs. Tech-illiterates just don't care. Hell, they probably don't even have a job they like, passionless peasants. But wait, now you're saying that passionate developers can come from all walks of life, that there isn't some universal Calling of The Computer that happens around ages 5-8, that passionate people can be scared away/demotivated by things incidental to tech and not just power through it, that not everyone has had access to a computer since a young age, that a professional work culture can discourage the people who are working in it enough to quit, even though the deficiets are not really law breaking but discouraging in a subtle, insidious way? Wow. These hacker types sure get more reflected when their careers and reputations depend on how they look to the outside world, as opposed to when the only people they would risk offending were users of some inferior editor or programming language. [0] User NaitJones also mentions black men, a class of people who in his experience doesn't get nearly as much air time when it comes to diversity in tech as the usual classes of people. [1] preferably sometime in the 80s or earlier, to get some creds with the millenials for having hacked on "low spec PCs".
xiaoma 12y ago
I have to say I found it disappointing to see Sama call out Hacker School and Google's explicitly discriminatory policies in a positive way. I'm all for helping people in need. As someone whose earnings were at less than half the poverty level just two short years ago, I can definitely empathize with people struggling at the margins, whether social or economic. However, I believe making the decision solely based on a person's anatomy is wrong. Context here: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=6879598 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=6879598

by staunch 12y ago

argonaut 12y ago

Minor nit, which is that all the top CS (and engineering, for that matter) schools are not Ivy League schools: MIT, Berkeley, Stanford, CMU. And I've never heard of top tech companies being referred to as Ivy League tech companies. But your point is still valid when you talk about "top schools."

deleted 12y ago
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deleted 12y ago
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famousactress 12y ago
Ah, the irony of making sure we're careful to make subtle distinctions about the top fraction of a percent of the population... in response to a comment about massive class imbalance.
- argonaut 12y ago
  Your words, not mine. My actual intention was to get the OP to move away from an emphasis on the "Ivy League" brand, which I think people need to stop putting up on a pedestal.
  - famousactress 12y ago
    I understand, and I don't mean to be argumentative or even trite but my intention was to express disinterest in what words we use to describe elite schools that close-enough-to-no-one can go to.

jiggy2011 12y ago

There's likely to be big correlations between class and race. Gender is obviously a much more complicated one. I think aspirations are likely to play a big role here, after all people tend to judge their successes relative to their family and close friends. So for a kid from a poor neighbourhood (who's more likely to be black), getting a good job with a decent salary and benefits is a great success already and running a startup is too risky so there's less incentive. If you come from an upper middle class family and all of your siblings are training to be lawyers or doctors then that ups the ante a lot in what your "floor" to success is, and like you say risk is reduced because of family so starting "the next facebook" looks like a more attractive option.

JVIDEL 12y ago
The problem is that as the gap widens that poor kid might have no actual chance at a decent stable job with benefits. Odds are he will be stuck in part-time land with no benefits and doing odd jobs on the side, so for him going with a startup must seem like a better choice. Also since we are talking about aspirations you have to consider the "all or nothing" attitude that's so common these days, and I see a lot of people particularly in the lower classes who are far more motivated about the tiniest possibility of a quick jackpot than a slow but steady improvement in their lives. But then again that way of thinking might have more to do with the way the middle class (the "steady option") is disappearing than with a social fad.
- jiggy2011 12y ago
  Someone sufficiently poor probably doesn't have the funds to start a startup period. You might strike lucky and get funding from YC but how likely is that to cover everything? Including getting to the stage of securing the funding (like travel expenses, time to build a prototype etc). Also amongst poorer families there is a greater expectation that children will contribute back to the family pot at an earlier age. I agree that it sucks to be poor, but I don't know how much startup funding can fix that.
rhizome 12y ago
So for a kid from a poor neighbourhood (who's more likely to be black), getting a good job with a decent salary and benefits is a great success already and running a startup is too risky so there's less incentive. For starting and running a startup, maybe, but those forces are much less in effect when the upper classes are doing the hiring. As we see at a lot of these companies, they aren't really reaching very far outside of their cohort. Cue the culture-fit debate.

dpeck 12y ago

Ivy League is an athletic conference, or at best a collection of prestigious schools from the north east: The eight institutions are Brown University, Columbia University, Cornell University, Dartmouth College, Harvard University, Princeton University, the University of Pennsylvania, and Yale University. I don't think this is what you mean.

jbigelow76 12y ago
I think the colloquialism of "Ivy League" as a psuedo pedigree or class distinction has superseded the actual athletic conference definition. I knew exactly what the OP was driving at even if the details were off, and only after you point out that Ivy League is an athletic conference did it occur to me that that would be where the current colloquialism came from.
- dpeck 12y ago
  even without it being related to the athletic conference, and refering only to those schools, that is for the most part a completely different set of schools than the ones whose alumni are involved in the startup/VC game. Words mean things.

Permit 12y ago

I'm not sure how this is releveant; how can YCombinator influence this? The disparity in education has already taken full effect by the time people apply to YC. It's great that YC has taken steps towards gender equality, but I don't think they have much of a say when it comes to inequality in education.

a-t-shirt 12y ago
Their steps toward their vision of gender equality make it even more difficult for men who didn't attend a prestigious university to be accepted.
mrkurt 12y ago
The selection problems that make Stanford grads have a leg up on startups isn't education related, really, it's network related. YC helps get more people into the circles required for fundraising. There's no other way I, for instance, would have had any credibility with the people who fund companies.

deleted 12y ago

[deleted]

ahh 12y ago

Class issues help people from the wrong caste. Who cares about poor men when there are rich women who don't have enough in their lives already?

runako 12y ago

This argument dodges the thrust of Sam's essay, which centered on gender disparities. Your argument doesn't work for gender disparities. For example, MIT is ~46% female. Stanford is 47% female. (I won't be pedantic about the Ivy League thing.) These numbers look absolutely nothing like the small end of the VC funnel.

astrange 12y ago
Do you know which schools those numbers are from? (That doesn't really affect your chance of startup success, but surely it affects your inclination to go into one.)

shanacarp 12y ago

True - the way out is to hire interns from state schools/small programs.

Dewie 12y ago

> What about class? The issue of "class" doesn't have nearly enough political clout in this context in order to get a mention from any important person. Gender does, though, for obvious slightly related historical reasons. The only hope that class itself can get a mention is by piggy-backing on the issue of gender.[0] The topic of Diversity in Tech shows that 1) hacker types aren't as unsuspectible to being political as they historically may have thought, when their career and businesses start to be influenced by their own reputations. 2) Diversity seems to largely just inspire sympathy for whatever issue which has enough political influence to actually be kind of threatening, which seems to be very convenient. My point is; assuming that there was never any movement or awareness of inequity in tech, what would have been the prevailing attitude? Well, it seems that "meritocracy" is big in tech culture. What is the attitude now? Meritocracy, with the stipulation that your gender can cramp your style. Has the attitude changed all that much, really? Or has it perhaps stayed the same, with some lip service in the general direction of gender issues for good measure? "Tech" in this context refers to tech in America. That makes for an industry (at least a subset of which) that is known for having the belief in a meritocracy, which exists in a country that historically has had a strong collective belief in meritocracy. The archetypical hacker is someone who at a very young age felt the calling of the computer[1] and learned himself (or herself!) to program with some cruddy manual. I am not exaggerating by calling it a calling: if you didn't feel that calling to program your calculator in the second grade of elementary school, then tech was probably not for you, whether you're a boy or a girl. Now? All of the sudden environmental factors like culture, opportunity, other kids who tinker with computers, matter. Wow, all of a sudden tech types are starting to talk in sociological terms rather than black and white simplifications. Old-school hackers (those who have the experience and connections to be political) haven't struck me as being very "sociological". To them, there are four kinds of people: hackers, java developers (snorts), managers, and everyone else (mostly tech-illiterates). Hackers are self-made, passionate people. Java developers and managers are sell-outs. Tech-illiterates just don't care. Hell, they probably don't even have a job they like, passionless peasants. But wait, now you're saying that passionate developers can come from all walks of life, that there isn't some universal Calling of The Computer that happens around ages 5-8, that passionate people can be scared away/demotivated by things incidental to tech and not just power through it, that not everyone has had access to a computer since a young age, that a professional work culture can discourage the people who are working in it enough to quit, even though the deficiets are not really law breaking but discouraging in a subtle, insidious way? Wow. These hacker types sure get more reflected when their careers and reputations depend on how they look to the outside world, as opposed to when the only people they would risk offending were users of some inferior editor or programming language. [0] User NaitJones also mentions black men, a class of people who in his experience doesn't get nearly as much air time when it comes to diversity in tech as the usual classes of people. [1] preferably sometime in the 80s or earlier, to get some creds with the millenials for having hacked on "low spec PCs".

xiaoma 12y ago

I have to say I found it disappointing to see Sama call out Hacker School and Google's explicitly discriminatory policies in a positive way. I'm all for helping people in need. As someone whose earnings were at less than half the poverty level just two short years ago, I can definitely empathize with people struggling at the margins, whether social or economic. However, I believe making the decision solely based on a person's anatomy is wrong. Context here: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=6879598 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=6879598