Her portrayal of the wealthy was downright kind (which makes sense, because at a party you won't really get to know them) compared to the actual behavior of such people.
I've worked for and with them. Sure, a few of them are decent people, just like anyone else--and a bit embarrassed by the wealth they have. Usually, they try to get away from it--they have a desire to prove themselves, so they go into academia or the military or seminary and try to reinvent themselves, hiding their origins entirely. (Fred Trump, who became a pilot, is another example.) That might be 20 percent, the ones who deliberately leave the world of the wealthy, the world of unearned opportunity, the same way poors leave small towns in which there is no opportunity. The other 80 percent, the ones who like being in that sphere, are depraved fucking ghouls, and there are really no exceptions because their world is itself ghoulish.
That is just one very narrow window into an entire class of people. Do you can’t any of them your friend? Or your rival? Or family? You’re magnifying a single type of relationship into a general description of a class of people.
It would be like writing three paragraphs about Hispanics based on the many taco trucks you frequent.
Do you know how offensive it is to compare an ethnic group (in fact, numerous ethnic groups) to the ultrarich hyperconsumptive ghouls who run the world?
People can choose not to be ultrarich. People can choose not to be ghouls. People who get the opportunity to run the world can either decline or step up and actually do a good job, unlike the shitbags currently in charge.
To make a comparison between (a) a group defined by ancestry and linguistic heritage, and (b) a group in which a person must deliberately choose membership, and must commit harmful acts in order to remain a part... is just insane.
I know it can’t be that offensive because I’m not exactly in the ultarich group and I’m comfortable extending a bit of cognitive empathy their way.
The onus is on you to explain why certain groups of people cannot be analyzed like another group of people. And why different standards of analysis should apply to different groups.
> Except there's plenty of old-money (hereditary class) in the US that looks, talks and acts exactly like the "class" structures you're claiming are very different from those in Europe. You're arguing semantics because "it's different" in the US, which may be superfically true, but not meaningfully so.
This. The idea that we were founded by the industrious poor of Europe doesn't really hold out. People came to the New World with all sorts of different motivations, and from all social classes. The rich who came over to get super-rich got super-rich and their descendants are now the elite. The poors who came over to work in the coal mines stayed poor and their descendants now work at Wal-Mart. And the one-sixth of this country whose ancestors were brought over against their will are still treated horribly because their skin color makes it evident (or at least likely).
Not only is social mobility rare, but there's a mean-reversion. Class doesn't prevent you from attaining wealth, but it makes it harder to keep it; there are so many forces in play that most people aren't even aware of, but that exist to keep long-term upward mobility at a minimum. You can get a PhD and work at a FAANG, and you're still going to lose in project allocation and in promotion battles to 23-year-olds whose fathers and grandfathers the VPs are afraid of.
It depends on your definition of dynasty, but they absolutely did.
Similar to the UK, most of these dynasties were based on real estate and failed to safeguard their wealth during the transition to the postindustrial era (post-civil war), unless they transitioned into finance/insurance.
Because of this, we don’t know their names today as well as we know the (post-)industrial names (your example of Astor is an exception because his story & wealth were singular, but even Astor isn’t well-known outside of NY).
John Jay, the various Roberts Livingston, the van Rensselaers,the Van Cortlandts, the Schuylers, Morris, etc.
These were people who had functionally feudal titles in post-revolutionary America, and many descendants retained them until the mid 19th Century.
They weren’t Windsors, Hohenzollerns or the uppermost crust of European houses. They were generally the descendants of Scottish, Dutch, or French elites who came to the new world once they caught wind of the killer opportunity provided by untouched and underutilized natural resources, in combination with a highly malleable set of local legal institutions. Many of them also had the motivation of fleeing asset seizures at home.
I guess this hangs on your definition of "came to America rich". America was a frontier, not the kind of place that rich people came to for fun, but the kind of place that people went to escape glass ceilings and exploit natural resources for profit.
It required capital and connections to make it big in the Hudson valley: many of the wealthiest families in the US at 1776 were descended from people of relative wealth and influence (again, not Windsors and Hohenzollerns), who found the british colonies to be a place where skill, capital and connections could be compounded into meaningful wealth at a far higher rate than their birth countries.
Jay's progenitor fled asset seizure in France to take up commodity trading in NY, where he became cozy with the established elites: Jay's mother was a Van Cortlandt, themselves married into the Van Rensselaers, who were among the founders and directors of the Dutch West India Company.
(Most prominent New Yorkers of the 1770s intersect with the Van Rensselaers). Alexander Hamilton married a Schuyler, a family whose history mirrors the Van Cortlandt's (wealth deriving from the furs trade, cemented with marriage to the "Vans").
Robert Livingston the Elder fled to the Netherlands from Scotland, where his well-to-do father had faced religious persecution. He ended up in New York, where he married a Van Rensselaer widow and was granted a "patent" to 160,000 acres of farmland along the Hudson.
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South of the Potomac River, the stories are pretty similar if you substitute "fur trade" for "tobbacco trade".
e.g. James Madison's paternal grandfather was a man of influence and landowner in Virginia, who cemented his family's future influence with a marriage into the Penn family. The Penns, along with the Baltimores, represent an extreme end of the "arrived wealthy" spectrum.
And it's still happening. America is, compared to other first world countries, not the easiest to immigrate to. So out of all immigrants, who would choose to go to America (appreciating that many immigrants don't have much choice)? The ones most aligned with America's opportunities, so people who want to be capitalists. If you value a chance at getting rich over stability and safety, come to America. If you want a strong social safety net and aren't willing to arm yourself against your neighbors, go somewhere else.
I was an engineer at a FAANG. The effects of pre-existing, generational social class are as strong there as anywhere else.
If you grew up old money, you get tapped for the best projects and will make Staff by 25, Principal by 30. If you don't have the technical abilities, they'll make you a manager. On the other hand, if you come from the rabble, you stay in the rabble--you get assigned regular grunt work and performance reviews actually matter to your future.
> If you grew up old money, you get tapped for the best projects and will make Staff by 25, Principal by 30. If you don't have the technical abilities, they'll make you a manager. On the other hand, if you come from the rabble, you stay in the rabble--you get assigned regular grunt work and performance reviews actually matter to your future.
I could not disagree with this more. I would say that tech, unlike legal, medical or other fields, is by far the most egalitarian. You can be a kid that comes from the "rabble" and make Staff/Principle if you are really good and committed.
Likewise I have seen many "old money" folks like you describe completely wash out. We had a few at my company get their foot in the door because the parents play golf with the owner. Sure they have the advantage in getting in, but once youre in if you aren't skilled technically, you're going to wash out very quick (both guys we hired were gone in ~3 months)
I think a lot of people might not notice it happen but it definitely happens and is common. And not just in FAANG's but in most companies. There are special people who, by virtue of something, end up being the "golden children" and are put on the express train through promotions. For reasons completely unexplainable if you believe in egalitarianism. You've got a team of people, and some NewGuy joins. They seem like your peer: they're at your level! You don't really know what their job performance is like. Then all of a sudden, they're Staff level, then Principal. Then the org-wide memo announcing that Executive X has moved on in their career and NewGuy is now Senior Director of your whole division. How TF did that happen? He was employee number 45519 a year ago! You can see it happen with actually-talented people and with bozos. It seems uncorrelated with how good at your job you are, and more correlated with less obvious/measurable things like your social standing, your background/pedigree, your "elite" mannerisms... it's hard to articulate what these things are when you're not part of the club, but they're there. You can see it in the way this class carry themselves: that haughty way they hold their head up, the fake but gorgeous smile, the handshakes, the similar speech patterns and word choices. It's like a secret code they share that's invisible to the rabble--like the aliens in They Live. They even all kind of walk the same way--that weird presence that is both carefree and commanding. Probably mannerisms they honed in finishing school, or in the Ivies or Stanford where they all seem to have come from. If you start looking for these things, you can squint and barely see them all over your company's leadership. There are always exceptions where one of the rabble got through, but they're rare.
This sounds wrong. Old money people are not working at FAANGs, they’re investing in them. Old money people have enough wealth where you don’t need to code in an open office 60 hours a week. That is for the working class.
The old money kids don't have to use the open-plan offices, and they usually either get choice roles (not regular SWE work, but GoogleX stuff) or directly put on the management track (since they're almost never coding for more than 2-4 years out of school). They get put in as proteges of high-level people and what they do on a day-to-day basis doesn't matter; it's more like a college major than a career, something to say they did.
You're right that they don't need to work. They do it to legitimize themselves. And, of course, to make sure any genuine opportunities go to their social class and not the rest of us.
> Not sure how those folks could be leveraging their social class in America.
One example off the top of my head: Indian caste discrimination in Silicon Valley [1][2]. Cisco was even sued by the state of California for such discrimination [3].
a good friend of mine who worked at a FAANG expressed similar sentiments. he is the son of a taxi driver and a christian healer and a person of color. his words were "G was a disneyland for rich white kids".
> Her life seems intense to me, and I don’t understand how she’s here at this party looking lively. I personally can work on my research a few hours a day before I need to go nap or watch some youtube videos. Is she fundamentally different from me in some profound way? Does she just have more energy resources? Or does she (and everyone else here) habitually exaggerate their productivity?
The thing to understand about these people is that they're institutions. The people under them do the work, and they make a full-time job of making themselves look good. Which doesn't mean they don't work at it, but it's a different kind of work and it's less taxing. With deep work, you start to decline after 4-5 hours per day. Schmoozers can play their game all day; it's just not as mentally difficult.
And yes, they are very good at making themselves appear to be people whose shit doesn't stink. Spoiler alert: it actually smells like everyone else's.
Bingo, I could not have said it better myself, and right after I just left a meandering, confused comment in different thread trying to say the same kind of thing. This is exactly it. When you have convinced (or hired) other people to do the work you're supposed to be doing, you suddenly have 24 hours a day free to work on self-promotion, and "building your own brand," schmoozing, bullshitting, having that look, having that style, all those things that signal class and actually impress the big-shots who, in turn help to make you a big-shot. FTA:
> I don’t understand how they do it, and I can’t tell if I or they are the weird ones. People here are directors of strategy or vice presidents or head tech coordinators or editors at magazines. I don’t think I could do any of that even if I had all of it handed to me.
I think she's wrong: She could do this. Anybody could do it if it were handed to them. Imagine what you'd do if your livelihood was taken care of for you--you don't have to worry about money. You'd just kind of do what you want to do and hire other people to do the hard stuff. That's all these people are doing.
You can be handed a functional institution, but unless you know how to keep it together, you'll just run it into the ground eventually.
If you accept that the institution-people aren't actually working but building brands and selling their brands, then it follows that it is a different set of skills to do the work than it is to represent it.
> I wonder how much of this is intentional behavior by tech companies. They want to select for workers that will tolerate their bullshit and are willing to receive some level of abuse.
It is. That said, I don't think tech execs are sexist or racist so much as they are classist and money-obsessed. They don't necessarily want a crappy culture; they just don't care.
> Or are we really to believe that all these huge corporations full of incredibly brilliant and skilled individuals are somehow too dumb and ignorant to figure out how to fix these problems?
The huge corporations may be "full of" brilliant people, but the people at the top are the same schmoozing or generationally-connected mediocrities that have always run things, and they're the only ones whose input matters. Having a team of people in your basement with a 150 average IQ doesn't mean you're magically going to make better decisions, not if you never listen to them.
> I'm increasingly cynical that it's ever possible to meaningfully improve human systems or that it's even worth trying.
It clearly is possible, because human systems do get better or worse over time, both on the small scale and the large. Scandinavian countries have better societies than the U.S.; the U.S. is still miles ahead, in this regard, of true autocracies (e.g. Putin's Russia). The vast differences in quality of human systems make it very clear that they can be improved (or degraded). It's just incredibly difficult.
I think of it like voting. Even when everything works and elections are fair, voting isn't really about making the decision. That's not why you do it, because mathematically, you probably won't cast a deciding vote ever in your life. Voting is about holding accountable those who do make the decisions, and at that, it often works very well--black neighborhoods saw improvements in public services after civil rights legislation made it easier for them to vote. Ultimately, of course, you're right: it's still up to forces out of your control whether you win or lose.
I imagine the above is why, although it certainly doesn't require a Western theocentric faith, religiosity (note that I make no claims about whether religion is or is not true) is associated with well-adjustment: it's one of the only ways we have come up with to hold an internal locus of control in a world where, quite frankly, almost everything that happens to us in the objective material world is out of our control.
The truth is that corporate capitalism wasn't built for people like us, people of conscience. It was built by obscenely wealthy ghouls to direct all of society's resources toward themselves. That's it. They will allow technical progress if they believe they stand to benefit; they will oppose it if they think they'll lose. "Meritocracy" is a sham, and corporations aren't built to last... they're built to extract wealth and then wither as invested resources are reallocated. A private company will never be a utopia because it's literally designed to be the opposite (perhaps not a "dystopia" in the classic sense, but one in the realistic sense whereby every dystopia is someone's utopia).
Trying to build a "good" company within corporate capitalism is like building a house on sand. It's not impossible, but it's extremely difficult. You're going to be competing with ruthless bastards and gargantuan institutions that could destroy you just for fun. You're playing a game where evil people win because it's designed that way. The only long-term solution is to destroy corporate capitalism forever.
Are women maltreated in technology? Yes. Capitalism is classist more than anything else and if you weren't born into generational wealth and connections, you're going to get fucked one way or another. Are women maltreated more than men? Eh, it's less clear, but the evidence on pay seems to suggest so. Still, I don't think that's all of why there's a dearth of women in technology. There are two really big factors that don't get a lot of volume behind them because they're politically incorrect (but keep in mind that I'm a leftist and mostly a feminist and I'm still saying this).
One: more women than men leave tech because they can. For every machine learning researcher getting paid $600k to be a basically a professor-in-residence, there are 250 losers doing Scrum. Whether you're a man or a woman, it's a horrible career; the bullshit and toxicity burn you out after 10 years. Men are socialized to believe that (a) making money is their main value both to society and to the people who will depend on them, and that (b) the market will treat them fairly because "meritocracy". We learn that (b) is false in early middle age, if not before, but can't really say it too loudly because we don't want to be tagged as bitter. It's a lot more socially acceptable for a woman to downshift her career to launch a small business than for a man. There's no intrinsic reason why it should be considered usual for men in heterosexual relationships to earn more than women, but emasculating and odd for the reverse to be the case, but you'd have to undo decades of socialization in billions of people to erase that prejudice. For now, it persists, and the common view is that a woman who leaves tech is brave for no longer putting up with the toxicity; a man who leaves tech is a wimp who couldn't hack it.
Two: smart women are more likely to go into medicine, law, and general management. Why? Look-ahead. A 22-year-old heterosexual woman has dated--or at least has friends who have dated--a few 25-year-old men, and maybe one or two in their early 30s. They see where the various paths lead. They see where most techies end up by age 30, and it ain't pretty... and they realize they don't want to go there. because they're smart. The 32-year-old doctor might still have a tough life--insurance companies are the pits, and residents don't make a lot of money--but at least he doesn't have to interview for his own fucking job every morning or deal with user stories and product managers.
Just to be clear - the pay gap mostly disappears once you control for field, position, and experience. Women aren’t getting paid substantially less for the same job while having the same credentials. Also - even in fields like medicine… there’s a reason surgeons are overwhelmingly male. Women don’t want to keep doing training and intense hours during their final years of being able to have a kid. Whereas men will plough through and do it anyway. (Mainly because they have no other choice - men would choose otherwise if women would let them)
Women end up choosing a lot of lower paid fields whereas men choose higher paid ones. You can makeup whatever reasons you want for that but that’s just facts - and that’s what the “pay gap” is from.
> Just to be clear - the pay gap mostly disappears once you control for field, position, and experience.
That doesn't mean anything, because controlling for position means you're factoring out huge disparities--although I will not argue that they necessarily benefit men over women; it is more complex than that--in terms of how performance is evaluated, who gets promoted, and who is offered opportunities for high-quality work experience.
The problem in today's corporate America isn't that people deliberately offer better opportunities and favorable treatment to preferred racial or gender categories (although sometimes they do) but that all this happens subconsciously the whole system is set up so that only a small set of people (the generationally well-connected) have a serious chance of getting a fair shake. The system simultaneously has 85% of its decision makers believing they are executing a meritocracy while, in fact, working to drive predetermined and usually anti-meritocratic results.
> Whereas men will plough through and do it anyway. (Mainly because they have no other choice - men would choose otherwise if women would let them)
Sadly, those men who bear down and suffer because women won't "let them" choose other careers are going to end up ill-treated no matter what they do. The winning strategy for them would be to go overseas, but that's another topic.
You're trying to argue that pay gap exists due to societal issues which push women into lower paying professions. I'm not arguing against that. I'm saying that men and women who push against norms will not experience a pay gap.
The pay gap mostly does not exist if you're willing to go against societal norms - e.g. women should be nurses, men should be surgeons, etc. If you are willing to break societal norms - there is no pay gap.
Which is not something the media is publicizing because it doesn't fit well within our identity politics bullshit.
> smart women are more likely to go into medicine, law, and general management
Smart men are more likely to seek more lucrative fields, too.
Software is sort of a second tier profession. We're constantly trying to dumb things down to the point that we can fill all the open positions with human livestock. At least since COVID, most of us don't have to work in bullpens anymore.
You're absolutely right, of course. I only note this: smart men are likely to seek more lucrative fields if they're informed about the actual odds. Having a high IQ doesn't mean all that much if you haven't got data.
Software plays on male quixotry, yes, but it's able to do so because the average 22-year-old man has friends of the same age group and has never dated anyone older than 22 (because, honestly, he can't... he has nothing to offer women 25+ and they aren't interested). Women, who usually have dated (or at least have friends who have dated) men in their late 20s and possibly 30s, are exposed to high-quality information about which careers actually deliver on their promises; men are not. Men might get advice from their parents, but that's going to be 30 years out of date, in a country where the career game has gone from Easy Mode to Psychopath Mode in a generation.
Great post, I will push back on this point though:
“There's no intrinsic reason why it should be considered usual for men in heterosexual relationships to earn more than women, but emasculating and odd for the reverse to be the case”
I think there is an intrinsic reason for this. Women choose partners, at least in part, based on their ability to provide resources. This makes higher earning men more attractive even too high earning women.
I don't think it's intrinsic that (as you said) "Women choose partners, at least in part, based on their ability to provide resources." A hundred years ago, it was considered intrinsic that men were innately violent and needed experience with deadly conflict (hence, each generation "deserving" to "get" a war) or they would rot. We really know very little about what is intrinsic in us; we do, however, know that in the real world we have to deal with generations of toxic socialization.
You could be right, insofar as in the 1990s, "selling out" was a discrete event and there was no denying that one had given creative control up. In the 2020s, the PR departments are so good at making their efforts look like things that happened organically that the difference between genuine success and packaging has blurred.
I'm guessing the OP is bashing OMSCS based on Reddit comments from people who tried a course, found it difficult (because, hello, it's actual graduate school at a real university), gave up, and are now spreading negativity on the internets about something they only gave a half-assed try.
Sure, there are negatives of learning at-scale. Grades are going to be exam-driven (noisier) because papers/independent projects don't scale as easily, which means there's a chance that you do everything right and get a B. Sure, some of the videos are a couple years out of date. Overall, though, I've taken two GT OMSCS courses and so far the quality has been very high... and the professors, in my experience, are also constantly trying to make the experience better and more flexible.
Great to hear. Which two courses have you taken so far and have you decided on your specialization? I had specialized in computing systems and the courses — especially compilers — was top notch.
Really excited about Compilers. I've heard it's very good. Haven't decided on a specialization yet; I'm still in that phase where everything looks interesting. TBH, there are ~20 courses that appeal to me, although if I still feel like I want to press on after 10, I'll probably look into pursuing a PhD.
You should aim for a research environment where you don't have to justify your existence to some "product manager" every 24 hours. Take it from me as an old person: if you work in stupid environments in stupid ways on stupid stuff... what happens is exactly what you'd think would happen.
They are merely a way to understand what the rest of the team is working on and to make sure you have the resources you need to do your job without having to interrupt you later or are you having to interrupt somebody else later it takes 15 minutes and it often saves hours of wheel spinning.
It's a process without a purpose. It is a process that kills flow and causes less work to get done. Everything important must fit within a short story 24/h later which means work gets packaged into easy to explain daily concepts.
It serves no purpose because if you are blocked today waiting till a morning meeting is a bad approach because the meeting than expands to discussing an issue that belongs at another meeting. Plus the time wasted adds up.
Asking for help today is something seniors do.
Standup meetings treat developers like children and encourage bad habits.
I agree with the sentiment that justifying your existence every 24 hours isn't an effective use of anyone's time. Perhaps "standup" wasn't the right word. But in general, verbal communication/meetings/etc. was the gist.
As a manager, one has to manage many different personality types. Not all people are proactive in communicating that they need help or are lagging. The manager could go to each of his directs and ask these questions individually, but it is more efficient to do it as a group. The group setting also gives coworkers the opportunity to say, “oh, I know what’s going on. I can help with that.”
Stand ups do not have to happen every day. That’s where a lot of managers fail.
It could mean that. It could also mean that there are some parts of working in a group (instead of solo) that are non-negotiable, such as periodically meeting with that group even if it is on a call.
For other topics that aren't strictly programming, eg AI, ML, game theory, cryptography, quantum computing, probabilistic methods, optimization,... it would take a significant amount of dedication to match the amount of understanding that a rigorous course with problem sets can give you in self study.
Also, you're going to have an extremely difficult time getting to work on that stuff without a degree, given that even PhDs often end up on regular business bullshit.
In my experience, it's not the degree that gets you the job, it's the research you got published in the niche you're applying for. The number of people with excellent publications in such a niche, but no degree, is awfully small.
I've worked for and with them. Sure, a few of them are decent people, just like anyone else--and a bit embarrassed by the wealth they have. Usually, they try to get away from it--they have a desire to prove themselves, so they go into academia or the military or seminary and try to reinvent themselves, hiding their origins entirely. (Fred Trump, who became a pilot, is another example.) That might be 20 percent, the ones who deliberately leave the world of the wealthy, the world of unearned opportunity, the same way poors leave small towns in which there is no opportunity. The other 80 percent, the ones who like being in that sphere, are depraved fucking ghouls, and there are really no exceptions because their world is itself ghoulish.