I also think that structurally, universities have academic career advancement problems. It's a very difficult system to to into and out of, in a way that is toxic for everyone but unusually so for women.

It's almost perfectly crafted to disadvantage women. Compare it to law, and imagine someone who moves through the elite path quickly. Graduate college at 22, finish law school at 25, go into heavy debt but start at around $200k a year, work brutally until age 30. Ok, not a great spot for starting a family, but you have now earned well over a mil (you probably started at 200 and are now well above 300k). You don't have much time, but you do at least have money and the ability to buy help. You also (if you're a woman) still have a few years before age related issues in having children manifest.

Now, again, it's not great, but compare this to academic. You finish college at 22, you finis your PhD at 28. That's moving quickly. Next, you do a post-doc or two. Now you're 30. And now, even if you're a winner with a tenure track position (not tenured, just the kind that can lead to it), you're still in grave danger, career-wise. It's do-or-die. You are also, at this point, earning about half of what that law graduate earned at age 26. You have no ability to buy your way out of this.

Now, to me, it's nutty that anyone voluntarily signs up for this, male or female [1]. But it's unusually harsh on women, because taking time off at this junction to have kids derails your career at the worst moment. And academic is unusually bad for on-ramps later in life. There essentially are none. Honestly, in spite of age-related discrimination in tech, I'd rather try my odds finding an on-ramp in tech at age 40 than in academia.

There is a commonly cited study that showed women applying for academic STEM positions received over twice as many offers as similarly qualified men. I actually think the research was good, but people didn't dig into the data. The comparison was for women and men who had achieved a high level position in academics. Yes, I have no trouble believing that women who make it through this gauntlet (which again, I absolutely insist on pointing out is lousy for men too) are very appealing to departments that don't want to change structurally. If a well funded department can hire a group of women who made it despite the odds, they can put a halo up and appear to be one of those virtuous departments even as they participate in the structure that makes it very unlikely women will become one of that small successful group.

[1] indeed, part of the reason universities like worker-visa programs is that it creates a pool of candidates who aren't allowed to live and work in the US with economic freedom.

Keep in mind, in Australia, plumbers and electricians get the maximum points for professional skills. So would nurses, pilots, and even lawyers (though they must be admitted to the Australian bar).

Hell will freeze over before the US lawyers who write the immigration system rules agree that foreign lawyers and patent agents should have access to the US job market the way they think STEM workers should.

Not arguing that people shouldn't fight back against odds, or that there's no benefit to fighting even if you'll lose, but I insist that we be realistic about the situation a lot of people getting bullied are facing.

But I'll give an example. Again, I want to point out that I don't use the term "woke", which I consider to be unhelpful. But here's an example of what I would view as the self-defeating behavior of the far left.

Let's take Judge Duncan's talk at Stanford. Now, I probably don't need to convince you to be concerned about the 5th circuit court or Duncan's judicial record. That much, at least, we already agree about. And anyway, there are far better people than me to explain it.

Unfortunately, those better people didn't get a chance to do so. I would say that the behavior from the Stanford Law school students who chose to disrupt the speech was an example of harmful behavior from the radical left that represents a pretty serious setback for moderate liberals. Duncan won this round, and there really was no need to hand him such a victory. Stanford looked bad, DEI admins looked bad, the student protestors looked bad. They provided a right wing judge with an an opportunity to obfuscate, avoid getting questioned and pressed on important points where he's genuinely vulnerable, and they took from the left the opportunity to raise awareness of really serious implications of what I consider to be a radical court. Worst, they gave him the opportunity to paint his opponents the worst possible light. I think they gave the right wing a real gift that day.

So yeah, I think that everyone on the moderate left knows this is becoming a problem.

But if you decide to dismiss the concerns about the excesses of the far left by pointing to racist responses to a tweet somewhere, you aren't being honest about a real problem.

I avoid the term "woke", but when James Carville (famous democratic strategist) said "wokeness is a problem and everyone knows it" (in regards to the far left harming mainstream democrats in elections), I'm not sitting around scratching my head bewildered as to what he's talking about.

But really, if you took Stockholm out of Sweden and plunked it down into the middle of the US, how long do you think the social safety net would last before it went bankrupt? And this is assuming you retain the european willingness to be coercive about mandatory rehab and confinement (something US based progressives are reluctant to note is a feature of the european social safety programs they otherwise praise).

There's one thing that concerns me, it's the line: "We make money in two ways: engineers pay us for mock interviews, and employers pay us for access to the best performers."

I definitely don't want to equate this with the legal but perhaps disreputable "pay-to-play" or "double-dipping" practices of charging both job seekers and the companies trying to hire them. This looks like a good company, and it makes sense to offer a paid service for people who want to practice but aren't looking for a recruiter. Still... I see a potentially uncomfortable situation where someone who wants a job is paying $150/hr or more to take a mock interview for a recruiter who would then market the candidates who are able to pass.

Comments URL: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=35073404

Points: 1

# Comments: 1

I remember, during the dot com boom of the late 90s, how much my impressions of the working world differed from people who graduated just a few years after me. I graduated from UCSD into the recession of the early 1990s, and I was living in SoCal, which was unusually hard hit. Graduates of very elite colleges were getting career-building jobs (UCSD is well regarded, but it wasn't quite in the tier to provide that immunity), and very in demand STEM majors were still getting good offers, but a lot of college grads were stringing together multiple service industry gigs. I'm really not kidding when I say that 5 years later, English majors thought the main difference between college and the working world is that now you can easily find well-paid work in media companies and your employer pays for the booze and parties (though finding an apartment in SF was a nightmare compared to the recession).

I suspect it's this way for people who graduated on the wrong side of the 2008 banking crisis as well. It's not Gen X or Millennials or Z, it's a much narrower time frame.

Some of this is definitely about resilience. I personally allowed it to affect me too heavily. I went back to college to study engineering and never really managed to shake the belief that I'm only as employable as my most up-to-date hard skills. The idea that a smart person can enter a new field and learn on the job... I know it's true, but I've never quite been able to really believe it. This has made me too conservative.

Not everyone from my cohort responded this way, but I do think it's more likely among people whose first few formative years in the workforce happen during a very poor hiring climate. The thing is, as I learned from he next bust - if you have a job before the recession, you often manage to hang onto it, and by the time the next boom rolls around, you're well positioned to take advantage. Even if you lose your job after a couple of years, you have some experience locked in, and you understand how it all works, and you know that there really are jobs, that things will improve, and that you just need to weather the storm. But for people who've never really experienced anything else, I think it creates higher risk mental habits of risk aversion that can be hard to shake. I also think that once a better hiring climate resumes, employers are more likely to go to colleges to recruit for entry level positions, and tend to overlook people who graduated several years earlier but lack relevant experience.

I've read that this effect is much more muted among very elite college grads, and I strongly suspect the same is true for a few very in demand STEM majors at non-elite colleges. Since this is hacker news, I can describe it as a vector field. People who are just on the wrong side of the line can get swept into a completely downward vector field than people just a couple spots before or after on the X-axis. Very elite college grads and some STEM majors can re-enter that positive, upward vector field at a later date.

[1] https://siepr.stanford.edu/publications/policy-brief/recessi...

Yeah, I'm being a little glib there. But what they love is golf, tennis, violin lessons for kids. Yes, they own expensive golf clubs (and memberships) and tennis rackets and violins. But what they love is that they can slum it with a very inexpensive tennis racket or golf club or violin, whereas the expensive gear is useless in the hands of someone who hasn't had a lifetime of lessons that cost in the tens of thousands of dollars. Even if you have the money, you can't buy the technique, and people who play these sports/instruments can recognize instantly if you know what you're doing (even in movies, tennis, golf, and violin, faked technique is immediately recognizable). It helps a lot of your parents had money and trained you up in these things when you were a child.

However, I ultimately have the same reaction you do to this sentence. The pure language of compassion shows no compassion for the victims of this crime, or the horrifying and brutal nature of this crime. It really does pinpoint the source of paralysis in a very progressive city like San Francisco. I have trouble believing that we won't reach some kind of turning point, mainly because the failure is just so spectacularly and overwhelmingly undeniable.

If that last sentence caused you to pause a bit, fair enough, I paused when I read it in the Chronicle as well. Those aren't my words, that's a quote from someone involved in the program. Thing is, I actually do agree with the statement. But it does astound me how determined we are to use only the language of compassion, even when describing a drug addicted man who is roaming the halls of the housing of last resort for homeless people in a pandemic, slashing faces with a knife. Our language around this does hint at the source of our profound paralysis.

As for mental institutions, they have a bad rep for a good reason. But consider the depths we have plumbed in street conditions, tent camps, drug scenes, fentanyl overdoses, meth-induced violence, and somehow using a single term, "homelessness", to encompass this and people who are having trouble affording housing, blurring the distinction. I know it's always risky to take the perspective of the future as if it will prove one right, but... maybe we will look back on our treatment of the mentally ill as simply another installment in the cruelty of our mental institution, just that we sent it from the institutions to the streets for a while, but that those looking back will not see an appreciable difference. That last sentence is optimistic, because it at least leaves open the possibility that we will someday look back on this from a better place.

[1] https://www.sfchronicle.com/projects/2022/san-francisco-sros

What are these schools where an algorithms class has no coding assignments? At my college, you could take graph theory in the math department and not take the optional programming lab, but in CS? Really? Not saying this doesn't exist but... weird.

I think they've gotten away with it for this long because they have an exceptional tool in their arsenal - calling anyone who opposes employer controlled visas "anti-immigration". Even PG got in a few digs[1]. They get an assist from genuinely anti-immigrant people, whose opinions they present as the only argument, and they succeed in making people with reasonable objections to employer-controlled immigration spend the rest of the talk show disassociating themselves from this allegation.

At this point, I'm convinced that part of the reason we don't have a skilled immigration that preserves the freedom of mobility of the immigrants themselves is that high tech companies and investors don't want immigrants to have this freedom. They like it that an immigrant's right to reside in the US depends on staying in the good graces of their employer. They like it that a founder's right to live in the US depends on the blessing of a venture capitalist. Employers and investors don't want their power to end at offering a job or money, they want more power over people than this. They keep things this way because it gives them a tremendous amount of power over their workforce.

[1] http://www.paulgraham.com/95.html