I ask this as a general question to all of tech culture, not to just this particular setting:

What about subtile elitism?

It's one of the biggest subtile -isms I've run into. If you didn't go to a top ten university, you're sort of in a lower echelon in the tech world. In practice this subtilely selects for people from higher socioeconomic backgrounds and/or people who have an "academic-oriented" learning style as opposed to an autodidact or self-directed learning style. It also contributes to America's regional class system... the top ten schools are by and large on the coasts. If you're from, say, Kansas or Ohio you are less likely to attend one of them than if you're from California or Massachusetts.

My impression for a long time has been that a significant chunk of the tech world is a top ten universities only club full of Stanford, MIT, Harvard, etc. graduates hiring, funding, and promoting other top university graduates. You could play a drinking game on sites like AngelList: take a shot every time someone lists "attended MIT" or "graduated from Stanford" as their sole qualification for being a founder or seeking a job.

Racism and sexism definitely exist, but from what I've seen socioeconomic elitism is the most powerful discriminatory -ism in the tech world. It's not an either-or thing of course. It just adds yet another barrier that outsiders must overcome. Barriers are kind of additive... each barrier reinforces the other pre-existing barriers by adding another point of resistance.

I've got to admit that this is a personal gripe. I'm from the flyover country, and I'm also not an academic type. I hated school for the most part. I just don't learn that way. But for some reason listing things like "has single-handedly conceived, designed, implemented, and shipped the following products..." or "taught myself 6502 assembly language at the age of ten using only the appendix of the Commodore 64 extended manual" just doesn't carry the same weight as "graduated from Stanford." Even if I could say "graduated with honors from the University of Cincinnati," I doubt this would carry near as much oomph as "attended MIT" even if my grades at MIT were poor.

I can't imagine being female or black/hispanic and not having the top ten degree. I feel like without "MIT" or "Stanford" I have to be twice as smart and work twice as hard. It feels like it's exponential. If I were not white and male I'd have to work... what... sixteen times as hard?

Edit: HN won't let me comment on this thread any more, so I'll put my responses here:

Re: elite universities equalizing admissions: no, it doesn't matter. There are 300+ million people in America and 7+ billion on Earth. Your odds of getting "tapped" by one of these kingmakers is vanishingly small regardless of how smart you are or how hard you work. Tweaking the selection bias of a tiny choke point does not change the overall size of that gate.

Re: the thread in general: whenever these kinds of threads come up, I find myself disagreeing with both the PC police and the hordes of right-wingers that materialize out of the ether. I really say a pox on both their houses. The wingers are hopelessly naive about the realities of discrimination. The PC police sort of have their hearts in the right place, but the problem is that PC stuff addresses the wrong causes. Women don't find it uncomfortable to work in tech because of phrases like "man up" or "hey guys." They find themselves excluded for more subtile reasons of cliquishness and in-group selection. These cliquish mechanisms are the same ones that give rise to top ten university bias, racial bias, cultural bias, etc. It's a microcosmic manifestation of what on the larger social stage is called the "old boy network." Playing language police is a lot easier than trying to really break up the cliques. The latter is incredibly difficult, as humans are tribal and cliquish by nature.

Still unable to post. I'm not going to forcefully assert some kind of soft-banning since as far as I know I'm being fooled by randomness, but I have noticed that "you are posting too fast" tends to appear in a way that seems uncorrelated to how fast I'm actually posting. Maybe it's just a strange algorithm with weird edge case behaviors. But... I did want to post this:

http://www.broadstreetreview.com/cross-cultural/Demise_of_An...

It is highly relevant, as I think it illustrates how PC policing can lead to a kind of "Animal Farm" scenario. While the rhetoric might be all about diversity, the reality is that diversity rhetoric can be used as another mechanism for the real power clique to maintain its dominance.