I agree with most of what you said. Here in Israel we have a saying that roughly translates to "You don't need nepotism when you've got connections". My point about narrowing the stereotype was that if a poor guy from a minority that fits the "true nerd" stereotype will arrive in Silicon Valley and show the necessary qualifications he'll have a decent chance to get an high-tech job - but being a poor minority means he has slim chances to get these qualifications and get to Silicon Valley.
These is not just, but I'm not sure what the solution should be. Location is important, and high-tech companies benefit from being in high-tech hubs - so if a single high-tech company builds it's HQ or a development center in a poor region, that company will be at a great disadvantage. Mainly because it'll have a hard time hiring experienced people. I'm not saying that all the people in that poor are stupid and unfit, but since they never had the a opportunity to work in the high-tech industry they'll be unexperienced - and high-tech companies need a core of experienced engineers. That company is unlikely to survive.
So, in order to get successful high-tech companies in that region, you need a lot of them - so that experienced developers will move there, seeing lots of employment opportunities. But that means gentrification - the poor region will strive and become rich, but the poor people will not.
But I digress. I wanted to talk about open source.
You said, that in order to get an high-tech job, one should either live in the hub or be scouted by the companies which requires to:
be a well-known rockstar programmer on GitHub with years of experience working in major tech companies.
My argument is that the "on GitHub" part is not as nearly as important as the "years of experience working in major tech companies" part. Like you've seen - they don't really consider open source as experience (maybe unless you are a renowned open source programmer? But then you'll probably also have professional experience, or a position in MIT or some other academic/research institute...). They give that as an option in the resume because they want to attract people who care about open source. And because candidate with professional experience may add their open source projects to their resume, and as @moopet
mentioned in another thread here - this gives them a chance to judge their code.
So, I'm objecting to the OP's claim that companies say "write open source and we may hire you" to get people to give them free code. They do use unpaid internships for that purpose, but in these cases they get to tell the coder what to do. With open source the company can't demand anything from the contributors, can't have the software built to their specifications, and can't have the maintainers (or someone trained by and paid by the maintainers) on their beck and call in case something goes wrong and they need urgent support. From a business point of view, this makes open source very risky.
And yet - you see many posts about how open source contribution can land you a job. I'm sure what the gain from it (business models in the internet are weird), and it's probably not direct, but I still call them "pickaxe sellers". Yes, you paid good money for the pickaxe and worked very hard, but it's still not the rock's fault that you didn't get any gold from it.
Learned Fortran on an old TI-99; forgot Fortran; learned to draw, paint, sculpt, and play violin; learned how to merge code and art, turned it into my UX/Front-end dev Frankenthing.
Look, I'm not saying everyone is going to, or should, get that first job with no effort, nor am I saying that all effort produces the same, perfect results. You seem to be misunderstanding me on both those points right there.
Perception is a huge problem when stereotypes (not actual merit) are what will determine whether or not you will be able to get a job.
Examples: I first learned to code a bit shy of 40 years ago, though I had a gap in coding for nearly 2 decades - first when school started and I was denied access to computers, and later during military service when internet access was nearly impossible to come by during much of that time. CS courses were not a thing in the colleges at the time, either. And yes, I'm showing both my age and the sad state of internet access in the US. Now, if I had never learned code on my own and I had taken 4 years of college (at the right school with the right students to make connections with), including some CS classes, I'd be looking like a pretty good candidate to any tech company. Instead, the decades of teaching myself to code are treated as 'proof' that I am unmotivated to learn and that I have no interest in coding, which is clearly the opposite of the truth. No one devotes decades to teaching themselves to code if they hate both code and learning.
Another example: Women are seen as only being interested in fashion, finding recipes and baking, finding a rich husband, making babies, and creating drama. We are seen as not understanding numbers, being terrible at logic, and being far too emotional and pregnant to handle having a professional level job. Men are seen as naturally good at logical things like code and at putting in more work. None of this is proven by actual data; it's merely seen as a thing 'everyone knows'. It's as if the 1800's never ended. Being born with a vagina is a serious detriment to being taken seriously when trying to land a job outside of retail, porn, and nursing. The fact that women, by and large, have far less time they can devote to Open Source due to unpaid home obligations reinforces the perception that 'women can't do math or code'.
So, possible solutions? There's a few that could certainly be put in place together in order to fix the issues.
The OP mentioned creating new Open Source licensing that gives creators and maintainers of Open Source code more control over who gets to use that code, what purposes they can use it for, and a legal framework for enforcing those licenses. You see, roughly an hours worth of driving from the rural area I live in, is a large city full of hotels, convention centers, and other tech meet-up necessities (and very little in the line of actual tech companies). Plenty of programmers live there, but many must work remotely as Silicon Valley isn't exactly next door. A new trend in the hotel industry in this city is using Open Source for everything but room key codes and storing guest's personal information, which allows them to keep a cutting-edge system and code base for everything from food ordering for the 5-star restaurants, water and air recycling to protect guests, aka walking ATMs, from the water and air dirty poors may have 'contaminated', to maintaining their own security and banking systems and still keep only the bare minimum of programmers hired, sometimes as third-party contractors so they can skimp on paychecks and avoid paying for benefits. Imagine if all the free Open Source resources were cut off to them until they started paying fairer wages, hiring more programmers, providing benefits, etc. You could still code as a hobby; that wouldn't go away. What would change is how the people that create and maintain the code are treated and that they'd have more say in whether or not their code could be used for evil.
We could also work towards changing cultural norms in an effort to rid society of the unjust master/slave relationship between men and women, between whites and non-whites, and between rich and poor. Currently, at least in the US, non-whites, esp. blacks, are set up to be funneled into the prison system from a very early age. A white kid gets disruptive in class and the campus cop writes them up. A black kid disrupts the class, and he ends up face down on the floor in cuffs and gets hauled off for processing into juvie. Men are expected to be employed. Women are expected to be employed, maintain the entire household, get the shopping and dry cleaning dropped off, raise the kids, care for the elderly parents, and have dinner ready for when the man of the house gets home, all for less pay from their place of employment and no pay at all for the rest of it. Poorer people have spotty access to the internet, can't afford healthcare, go homeless when the can't pay the rent/mortgage, and go hungry when food banks run out of food, all to be arrested if they fall asleep in a car or on a sidewalk or if they loiter, use public bathrooms too frequently, or worse, use the bathroom in public when the nearest public bathroom is miles away. Wealthy people can commit DUIs and barely get a slap on the wrist, or in some cases, repeatedly commit rape, murder, or other felonies, but use money and status to weasel out of having any real consequences.
We could also, again in the US, do like much of the rest of the world, and make things like higher education affordable, or better yet, 'free' (as in shared cost by way of taxes, like public education does now), but without the strangled budget the wealthy have been setting up using their financial power as political campaign donors.
It's not impossible, and it won't take your hobby away, but if we implement the right solutions, we just might bring the world some justice, help those with actual merit succeed, create better code by bringing in new ideas, and set up tech that works for everyone (as opposed to self-driving cars that don't stop for people with darker skin, automated phone services that do not recognized women's voices, and all sorts of other screwed up issues).
I agree with most of what you said. Here in Israel we have a saying that roughly translates to "You don't need nepotism when you've got connections". My point about narrowing the stereotype was that if a poor guy from a minority that fits the "true nerd" stereotype will arrive in Silicon Valley and show the necessary qualifications he'll have a decent chance to get an high-tech job - but being a poor minority means he has slim chances to get these qualifications and get to Silicon Valley.
These is not just, but I'm not sure what the solution should be. Location is important, and high-tech companies benefit from being in high-tech hubs - so if a single high-tech company builds it's HQ or a development center in a poor region, that company will be at a great disadvantage. Mainly because it'll have a hard time hiring experienced people. I'm not saying that all the people in that poor are stupid and unfit, but since they never had the a opportunity to work in the high-tech industry they'll be unexperienced - and high-tech companies need a core of experienced engineers. That company is unlikely to survive.
So, in order to get successful high-tech companies in that region, you need a lot of them - so that experienced developers will move there, seeing lots of employment opportunities. But that means gentrification - the poor region will strive and become rich, but the poor people will not.
But I digress. I wanted to talk about open source.
You said, that in order to get an high-tech job, one should either live in the hub or be scouted by the companies which requires to:
My argument is that the "on GitHub" part is not as nearly as important as the "years of experience working in major tech companies" part. Like you've seen - they don't really consider open source as experience (maybe unless you are a renowned open source programmer? But then you'll probably also have professional experience, or a position in MIT or some other academic/research institute...). They give that as an option in the resume because they want to attract people who care about open source. And because candidate with professional experience may add their open source projects to their resume, and as @moopet mentioned in another thread here - this gives them a chance to judge their code.
So, I'm objecting to the OP's claim that companies say "write open source and we may hire you" to get people to give them free code. They do use unpaid internships for that purpose, but in these cases they get to tell the coder what to do. With open source the company can't demand anything from the contributors, can't have the software built to their specifications, and can't have the maintainers (or someone trained by and paid by the maintainers) on their beck and call in case something goes wrong and they need urgent support. From a business point of view, this makes open source very risky.
And yet - you see many posts about how open source contribution can land you a job. I'm sure what the gain from it (business models in the internet are weird), and it's probably not direct, but I still call them "pickaxe sellers". Yes, you paid good money for the pickaxe and worked very hard, but it's still not the rock's fault that you didn't get any gold from it.
Look, I'm not saying everyone is going to, or should, get that first job with no effort, nor am I saying that all effort produces the same, perfect results. You seem to be misunderstanding me on both those points right there.
Perception is a huge problem when stereotypes (not actual merit) are what will determine whether or not you will be able to get a job.
Examples: I first learned to code a bit shy of 40 years ago, though I had a gap in coding for nearly 2 decades - first when school started and I was denied access to computers, and later during military service when internet access was nearly impossible to come by during much of that time. CS courses were not a thing in the colleges at the time, either. And yes, I'm showing both my age and the sad state of internet access in the US. Now, if I had never learned code on my own and I had taken 4 years of college (at the right school with the right students to make connections with), including some CS classes, I'd be looking like a pretty good candidate to any tech company. Instead, the decades of teaching myself to code are treated as 'proof' that I am unmotivated to learn and that I have no interest in coding, which is clearly the opposite of the truth. No one devotes decades to teaching themselves to code if they hate both code and learning.
Another example: Women are seen as only being interested in fashion, finding recipes and baking, finding a rich husband, making babies, and creating drama. We are seen as not understanding numbers, being terrible at logic, and being far too emotional and pregnant to handle having a professional level job. Men are seen as naturally good at logical things like code and at putting in more work. None of this is proven by actual data; it's merely seen as a thing 'everyone knows'. It's as if the 1800's never ended. Being born with a vagina is a serious detriment to being taken seriously when trying to land a job outside of retail, porn, and nursing. The fact that women, by and large, have far less time they can devote to Open Source due to unpaid home obligations reinforces the perception that 'women can't do math or code'.
So, possible solutions? There's a few that could certainly be put in place together in order to fix the issues.
The OP mentioned creating new Open Source licensing that gives creators and maintainers of Open Source code more control over who gets to use that code, what purposes they can use it for, and a legal framework for enforcing those licenses. You see, roughly an hours worth of driving from the rural area I live in, is a large city full of hotels, convention centers, and other tech meet-up necessities (and very little in the line of actual tech companies). Plenty of programmers live there, but many must work remotely as Silicon Valley isn't exactly next door. A new trend in the hotel industry in this city is using Open Source for everything but room key codes and storing guest's personal information, which allows them to keep a cutting-edge system and code base for everything from food ordering for the 5-star restaurants, water and air recycling to protect guests, aka walking ATMs, from the water and air dirty poors may have 'contaminated', to maintaining their own security and banking systems and still keep only the bare minimum of programmers hired, sometimes as third-party contractors so they can skimp on paychecks and avoid paying for benefits. Imagine if all the free Open Source resources were cut off to them until they started paying fairer wages, hiring more programmers, providing benefits, etc. You could still code as a hobby; that wouldn't go away. What would change is how the people that create and maintain the code are treated and that they'd have more say in whether or not their code could be used for evil.
We could also work towards changing cultural norms in an effort to rid society of the unjust master/slave relationship between men and women, between whites and non-whites, and between rich and poor. Currently, at least in the US, non-whites, esp. blacks, are set up to be funneled into the prison system from a very early age. A white kid gets disruptive in class and the campus cop writes them up. A black kid disrupts the class, and he ends up face down on the floor in cuffs and gets hauled off for processing into juvie. Men are expected to be employed. Women are expected to be employed, maintain the entire household, get the shopping and dry cleaning dropped off, raise the kids, care for the elderly parents, and have dinner ready for when the man of the house gets home, all for less pay from their place of employment and no pay at all for the rest of it. Poorer people have spotty access to the internet, can't afford healthcare, go homeless when the can't pay the rent/mortgage, and go hungry when food banks run out of food, all to be arrested if they fall asleep in a car or on a sidewalk or if they loiter, use public bathrooms too frequently, or worse, use the bathroom in public when the nearest public bathroom is miles away. Wealthy people can commit DUIs and barely get a slap on the wrist, or in some cases, repeatedly commit rape, murder, or other felonies, but use money and status to weasel out of having any real consequences.
We could also, again in the US, do like much of the rest of the world, and make things like higher education affordable, or better yet, 'free' (as in shared cost by way of taxes, like public education does now), but without the strangled budget the wealthy have been setting up using their financial power as political campaign donors.
It's not impossible, and it won't take your hobby away, but if we implement the right solutions, we just might bring the world some justice, help those with actual merit succeed, create better code by bringing in new ideas, and set up tech that works for everyone (as opposed to self-driving cars that don't stop for people with darker skin, automated phone services that do not recognized women's voices, and all sorts of other screwed up issues).
Video that explains what privilege is and isn't and why awareness of one's own privilege and taking responsibility for righting wrongs is a good thing