From the outside (Portland, OR) looking in, it seems like SV not only has a diversity of race issue (which I DO believe can drive different thoughts, look at a map of where most black Americans live -- spoiler alert: it's the south, I wonder how many folks in SV grew up in the south) but also a diversity of industry problem.
I grew up in New York, which has a pretty big tech sector, but also has fashion, finance, publishing as major industries as well. There are folks who work for the big tech companies in New York who have also worked on Wall Street and I think that helps to prevent monoculture from growing out of control.
You are correct. It is very hard to be different in the wrong ways in the Bay Area, and the social sanctions against being different affect all aspects of your life including loosing friends and jobs.
What is the wrong way of thinking is largely defined by people that seem to believe they know the truth and will do anything including lying about how you are different to further their agenda.
No, it's not. The Damore case is a textbook example of someone who thinks they're the smartest person in the room, and how "I can't be bigoted/misogynistic, cause science!" despite the fact that much of the quoted science was debunked, or his use of it was wildly out of what those that actually wrote the papers he quoted meant.
Look at the lawsuit, not just the paper he wrote. He provides evidence of managers colluding to prevent conservative employees from getting promoted, examples of employees booing when the number of white male managers is listed, etc.
You can look at the lawsuits filed by James Damore and others that provides evidence of managers at Google sharing an internal blacklist of politically conservative employees so they can collude to keep them from advancing in the company.
I searched "Exhibit B Damore lawsuit," and the first link is dead because it belonged to a subreddit that got banned.
Of course, I can guess by the subreddit title alone, "sjwhate", that reddit had sound reasons for the ban. Nevertheless, I'm ticked to see the thing I'm looking for get censored by the monoculture.
> It is very hard to be different in the wrong ways in the Bay Area, and the social sanctions against being different affect all aspects of your life including loosing friends and jobs.
Is there actually a uniform definition of the "wrong way"? I doubt circumstances are the same for someone in SV who is originally from the Midwest and someone who is from Andhra Pradesh.
There have for a few decades been a progressive activist sub-culture in the bay area, mostly springing out of berkeley social science departments, and they seem through brute force and bullying tactics to define what is "rightspeak" as what furthers their activist agenda. Their agenda is to fight for their in-group.
If you look you'll notice what is defined as the in-group not changing much, while what is defined as the target for change does change and expand over time. The goal seems to be to have their in-group win at whatever cost necessary.
> I wonder how many folks in SV grew up in the south
A reasonable number, actually. Hell, Apple is run by southerners (Tim Cook is from Alabama). I happen to work with a number of folks from North Carolina and Virginia.
That's like going to a town meeting in 1630 and saying "ok, everyone who's a witch raise your hand." A few people will admit to being from cities in the south. Nobody is going to admit to being from the rural south.
Not really true; I've got three friends from the rural South here, and one from the farm belt. They don't make any big secret about where they're from.
> it's the south, I wonder how many folks in SV grew up in the south
If we look at https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_U.S._states_by_African... and sort by population, many of the states with the largest number of black Americans aren't in the south anymore (though they are large states, so don't rank as much percentage wise).
But having lived in the midwest, south, and west, and living in places with many black Americans (Vicksburg, Toledo) at that, the south has a very poor handle on diversity in general. Self segregation is very common even when integration has been mandated.
I'm not sure how you got that read on the situation. Georgia is top, and then if you add together FL, TX, NC, MS, the south is still the population-center (and arguably the current cultural center, via ATL) of black people in the US.
Add in the fact that we're seeing trends of migration of more black people back to south (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/New_Great_Migration ) and there's no escaping the fact that companies which exclude the south are effectively excluding many black people, including some of the most educated ones (Lookup the states with the most HBCUs, they're all in the South).
The south is a big place though, and those places you named are not typical of the places that are growing now (ie, "New South" cities). Charlotte is my home town, and if you look at maps comparing the degrees of segregation there, vs places like Philadelphia, there's no competition. There's one expensive neighborhood area with mostly white peope, but on average people in CLT are FAR more likely to live in diverse neighborhoods than people in most other cities. Add in the fact that southern cities (including Charlotte) have historically practiced school busing for diversity, and you'll find that the handle on diversity in many Southern metros is actually pretty good. Check it out yourself.
To say California doesn't have many black people still isn't correct, it is in the top 5, and most of those people are concentrated in two regions (LA and Bay Area). New York is #2, and many of those are in the NYC area. And obviously, Detroit, Chicago, .... There are lots of places of diversity outside of the south.
There is a huge difference between the south and the deep south (the other city I lived in was midwest near Detroit with different issues completely). Mississippi is going to have much larger problems than North Carolina or Georgia. Still, being forced into busing doesn't mean you have a leg up in handling diversity, it means quite the opposite actually. Places like Boston have had similar conflicts, but I guess I wouldn't call them peachy either.
I'm not seeing where I claimed that California doesn't have many black people. I recognize it does, but as of 2010 57% of all black Americans live in the Southern US, and trends keep showing that number is only growing. Heck, black millenials in particular, the people who are of the age to contribute the most to the workforce in the next few decades are disproportionately moving to the south, from all regions[1].
To reiterate, my main point is still that it impossible to have a number of black people in tech that is even close to being representative of the overall population of black people in the US without including the southern US in the tech workforce.
Fair enough on busing though, seems there is a lot of inconclusive data floating around. First hand though, I went to an extremely diverse high school for 3 years (about equal parts white, black, and hispanic students) and a not diverse HS for one (90%+ white, in a different county) and there's no doubt that the on-campus environment was less toxic towards people of all races at the diverse one. I never once heard a white person throw out a racially insensitive term just to be "edgy" when half of that person's friends and classmates would actually notice and be offended. It happened way too often at the other school though.
> A report released last year by the New York City comptroller, Scott Stringer, found that between 2000 and 2014 about 61 percent of millennials moving to New York were white, while only 9 percent of 18- to 29-year olds moving into the city were black.
> Nationally, almost 82,000 black millennials migrated south in 2014, according to an analysis of census data done independently by Artem Gulish, a senior analyst at the Center on Education and the Workforce at Georgetown. Forty percent of these black transplants came from the Northeast, 37 percent from the Midwest and 23 percent from the West. Black millennials from abroad are more likely to settle in the South.
I went to a racially diverse HS as well in Vicksburg that was 60% black, 49% white. n-bombs were dropped all the time, outside of band mixing was rare. Even the neighborhoods were pretty segregated (whites mostly living out in the county, blacks mostly in the city). The next county west across the river was where David duke had all his political support. Our experiences differ significantly (MS, LA, and AL are also bottom ranked states for issues like this).
It is hard to consider the south as a monolithic entity. Some states are way behind others.
Wow, that surprises me that still happens. Thanks for sharing that experience. Being perfectly honest, I suspect the reason the n-bomb didnt get thrown around by white people in my world was half because of respect, and half because if anyone did, they would get their ass beat. I never witnessed that first hand, but people got their ass handed to them for much smaller insults than that.
But typically the type of guys who would start fights were all part of the same group (chronic skippers, people into drugs, hard partiers) so the white ones had no incentive to ruin their whole social life and get excluded from the fun over stupid racism.
And maybe that just goes back to having integrated neighborhoods and a pretty good black middle class, so that while most poor people were black or Hispanic, it wasn't something you where you could assume class by race. The white kids who grew up in the poorest neighborhoods (ie, public housing) usually adopted mostly black friend groups, and their style and mannerisms were more like their black peers, while upper class black people typically did the opposite (took on styles and had friend groups that were mostly white). I will say that the poor white people with black friend groups had some a tough time, other white people would frequently bully them openly for not conforming. I don't know if they also faced that from some black peers, but probably so.
I’m visiting Manhattan and coming to realize that the global citizens here are disconnected from the rest of America to an extent that even people in the SF Bay Area aren’t.
So both are diverse and have large foreign populations. But SV’s diversity largely comes from immigrants in search of the American Dream, most of whom tend to have affinity with the rest of America as well.
Manhattan in contrast has a lot of global citizens who would have more affinity with other cosmopolitan cities like London and Paris than with the rest of America.
This is a huge generalization and a guess on what it means. If you are in tech, looking to live in the US from abroad, some really only consider moving to NYC or maybe SF, LA or DC. Then once in the US, you don't really ever get a feel for living anywhere else in America. Whereas US born citizens living in NY or SF probably grew up somewhere else, so they have more of a connection with the rest of America.
> If you are looking to live in the US from abroad, you really only consider moving to NYC or SF, maybe LA or DC.
Interestingly enough, Houston Texas now ranks as the US city with the most international diversity. This is leading to all sorts of interesting things, like the development of new 'creole' cuisines (see the recent and rapid development 'Viet-Cajun' food).
Honestly, I’m not sure how I feel about it. Probably trending negative. On the one hand it really feels great to experience a global capital where people from around the world have come together. On the other hand, this explains how the print media (centered in NYC) seems to have a lot of articles talking about American issues where journalists seem to be from another world. E.g. the belief that undocumented workers do jobs no one else would be willing to do.
"it seems like SV not only has a diversity of race issue"
Asian, Pacific Islander, and Hispanic are races too y'know (well, technically Hispanic is a linguistic category). On that front SV is a lot more diverse than most American cities. Take a look at the San Jose race map and compare to Portland:
Totally agree on the lack of industry diversity, though. SV = tech the same way that Detroit = autos, and it will likely go the same way once the tech industry is in the same place as the auto industry.
True, California in general is pretty diverse. I believe it's "majority-minority", but what about the folks who make up the "culture" of the valley? The workers, VCs, professors, etc. Based on the diversity reports from the big tech companies it seems like they are still lacking. Even when it comes to female engineers there is a lack of representation. I remember a twitter thread a few weeks ago that lamented the fact that activity trackers did not have a "pregnant mode" to account for the extra calories and (perhaps) lesser physical activity of pregnant women.
> ...what about the folks who make up the "culture" of the valley? The workers, VCs, professors, etc. Based on the diversity reports from the big tech companies it seems like they are still lacking.
How so? Asians and Indians are very well represented among those categories in SV and the other tech hubs as well.
What's the "correct" level of diversity, out of curiosity? The US is ~75% phenotypically white (including white Americans with Hispanic or Latin heritage) and about ~62% white of European descent.
Tech boardrooms are way less diverse than the general population but way more diverse than the business culture in the rest of the country.
Among the MAGA (4 most valuable tech companies - Microsoft, Apple, Google, Amazon), there are 2 Indian CEOs and 1 openly gay CEO. Alphabet's board of directors [1] is about as diverse as the NYTimes board of directors [2], and way more so than say Coca-Cola's board of directors [3].
Engineering is largely male (90/10 or so) but professional employment within tech companies as a whole is generally quite mixed (60/40). As a multiracial Asian/white entrepreneur I don't feel unrepresented at all - hell, I'm practically a stereotype.
Based on my own personal experience, the underrepresentation faced by women by tech isn’t necessarily all about companies not hiring women, at least when it comes to engineering — from what I’ve seen, the stream of female candidates is extremely weak (even more so for small to mid size companies), with what few that do come through not being a good match for the position. Either the majority of potential candidates aren’t applying or they just don’t exist.
The only way I can see this getting corrected is for schools to start encouraging girls to get into technical subjects and provide better support for those who take interest or for companies to provide programs to educate women into technical roles (imagine a high quality code boot camp, except company run or sponsored).
In my experience female engineering candidates are generally strong but not very numerous. As in, when you find one she's often as good or better than your best male candidates, but you won't find very many. This is consistent with the rest of the pipeline being a high-pass filter: you have to be good to put up with the bullshit female engineers get in school and junior jobs, and so everyone that's not washes out of tech by mid- to senior-levels.
Also, if you do find a good female candidate, she's probably going to get hired by Google or Facebook and accept their offer instead. They offer less risk for more pay and less attitude, which is an attractive bargain to many people.
Of all the things you can blame, diversity of race is not. SV is majority Indians and Asians in engineering roles. Of course it could do better to have more white, black and Hispanic engineers
Totally agree about Portland, I'm aiming my critique more at the institutions that make up "silicon valley" rather than California as a whole though. Maybe that wasn't clear.
Maybe we should stop trying to judge things by the color of skin? I don't know, it seems like a good idea. I think a pretty famous guy suggested it before.
Which is great for the market. Borrow all of the good ideas that SV has and bring them to markets that they are blind about. I see this as a huge opportunity.
Gee, a company who's business is data is obsessed with engineering and data? Color me shocked.
Snark aside, technology is hard. If you've worked in consulting for any amount of time you've probably realized that outside of a few pockets (SF, NYC, Austin, etc) most of the world is really, really bad at technology. Many of the biggest, most important institutions in the world really have no idea what they're doing. The biggest problem in my mind is that technical know-how is not distributed evenly. I don't know why that is, but I don't think diversity has very much to do with it.
I disagree heavily. Many people worldwide are incredibly good at working with the technology in their environments. In fact, I would say most Silicon Valley engineers do not actually understand the environments they develop products for.
Probably one of the best historical examples was when Facebook had to force employees to use low end Android phones so their developers could figure out how badly the experience sucked.
Silicon Valley tells us to connect everything to the cloud while 10 meg Internet and wireless devices that costs us far more to stream than to store locally are common.
Security is another good example: Silicon Valley engineers are often worried about side channel attacks, arcane sandbox escapes, discussion about how to jump an airgapped PC using a speaker or something. Meanwhile, it's 2018, and Google just realized Chrome extensions are full of malware and is finally taking baby steps towards fixing that. We've had an ironclad solution over here in Chicago for years: We disable all Chrome extensions.
The technologies developed and the solutions created in Silicon Valley are rarely good solutions for the rest of the world. Silicon Valley is very good at fixing very first world problems, like the constant attempts to make travel data easier to find in your email box or your assistant, while failing to recognize that most people can't afford to travel often enough for a feature like that to matter.
I'd have to agree. From what I've seen, the SV reality distortion bubble makes it difficult for its occupants to understand the practical reality of people outside of it. There's that old expression, that when all you have is a hammer every problem looks like a nail? SV seems to be almost entirely populated by hammers.
You're right. The rest of the world has plenty of smart people, including developers and engineers. SV and some other metros have advantages in funding sources that let them brain-drain other areas through better salaries and stock, but it's not that people in other place just don't what they're doing.
RHEL does just fine with talent operating out of Chicago and Raleigh NC. If companies are willing to pay solid salaries, and give growth opportunities to people outside of SV (this was actually the biggest downside I noticed while working at a very large sattelite office of a SV-based tech company in NC), then they will find sufficient talent in most any large enough / educated enough US metro.
> If you've worked in consulting for any amount of time you've probably realized that outside of a few pockets (SF, NYC, Austin, etc) most of the world is really, really bad at technology.
You mean outside of Tokyo, Calgary, Tampere (points if you can locate it on a map without names), Geneva, the Ruhr area, Milan, Shenzen and a thousand other places?
The 'world' is a lot larger than the USA and there are many places where people are really good at technology.
They may not be able to address a large unified market and they may not have access to enormous amounts of dumb money to chase the latest social media fads but that doesn't mean you need to ignore their existence, unless it was your idea to underscore the point of the article.
I mean, even in other countries, there tends to be one or two cities that are major tech hubs and the rest of the country is not. I don't know that this is necessarily a bad thing or just a normal thing. There are many industries or specialties that are concentrated in certain areas (or have been historically), like autos in Detroit (although that's changing), finance in NY, movies & fashion in LA, etc.
I'm curious why you don't count Detroit as a "tech hub"? Or NY? Or LA? Does you definition of technology not extend beyond software development?
There are myriad industries, like car manufacturing, energy, finance, filmmaking, aerospace, health, etc. that involve huge amounts of technology, and whose leading players are based nowhere near Silicon Valley. But instead of going out and working in these industries to build something revolutionary, tens of thousands of world class programmers cluster in Silicon Valley, all talking to each other about how amazing and disruptive they are, while wasting their prime years blowing through VC money in startups chasing the latest ecommerce/chatbot/messaging/AI/blockchain fad, or as a cog in some tech giant's machine to turn customer data into advertising dollars.
Geneva and Tampere (200k pop each! how many devs do they even have?) and Milan and Calgary are known for tech? Quite frankly that's news to me in each case. What are the biggest tech companies from each of those? After a quick google search for "largest tech company city_name", Milan was the only one to pop up with a familiar name (Accenture).
> Geneva and Tampere (200k pop each! how many devs do they even have?)
Geneva is home to CERN, if you shoot a random passer by your chances are pretty good that you hit someone that is good in physics, software or both.
Tampere is where Nokia had a huge installation.
Milan has lots of CAD related companies as well as ABB.
Calgary is one of the cities in Canada that have lots of networking tech related companies, and also Rockwell, Unysis and Garmin (and many others besides).
Silicon Valley is dominant in web tech, not in tech.
Previous post suggested to me that SV was the center of only web technology. I was pointing out it is the birthplace of Intel, AMD, Altera, Xilinx, NVIDIA, etc. And has offices of Samsung, Hynix, Mediatek. Really too many to name.
> Silicon Valley is dominant in web tech, not in tech.
SV is dominant in web/mobile/cloud/social/productivity/AI/autonomous driving/electric cars/sharing economy and in foundational tech like programming languages, databases, kernels, and networking. This is in large part due to American graduate-level education in tech being vastly superior to anywhere else in the world, both in quality and in having its finger on the industrial and market pulse. (I've experienced high-quality graduate programs in other countries, incl. Germany, France, and Canada, who are just completely out to lunch in terms of what's relevant.)
I know I'm making some big claims here but in my experience as a elsewhere-born American graduate student, software engineer, and world traveler, this is pretty much true.
Yes, Amazon is really good at that. Located in... Seattle
> social
Preceded by many countries we are now left with a handful of dominant players, and fwiw we could miss them and I wouldn't lose a single nights' sleep. But yes, Social is something that SV is dominant in.
> productivity
Which packages are we referring to here? Productivity is a bit broad to assign to SV in its entirety, or even dominance wise. There are so many players in that space all over the world that I'm not sure that is a credible claim.
> AI
Yes, probably you are right there. But the University of Waterloo, Canada is where the vast bulk of the current AI wave originated.
> autonomous driving
Is an offshoot of that AI effort mentioned above.
> electric cars
True again, and it couldn't happen anywhere else than in California.
> sharing economy
I would be happy to get rid of all of it.
> programming languages, databases, kernels, and networking
That's pure rubbish. These have been contributed too all over the world and SV is not currently dominant in any of that.
pretty much every piece of tech you mentioned had decades of government investment. Maybe what makes those places possible is government policy. Not many governments are as rich as USA.
> Silicon Valley is dominant in web tech, not in tech.
I would generalize that to software engineering, or at least large-scale industrial software engineering. You cant compare what's happening in SV to Geneva.
That has nothing to do with placement and everything to do with intent and motivation. A generation ago the landscape was technology lifers and scientists -- now it's everybody and their mother trying to make a buck. The bar for competence is too high for the majority of people entering the field these days.
Tech is hard, but also unwanted. I don't think what distinguishes people in tech is proficiency in certain tools. It is a drive to optimize their lives that people outside of tech do not have. I think most of them are happier. Not "ignorance is bliss," just contentment with the present.
"“...If you have a hierarchy where engineers are at the very top and the people who are interfacing with the outside world are a couple rungs below that, you really miss something when those people don’t have an equal voice at the table.”"
Technology is hard. Customer support is hard. Making money without collecting a massive amount of data about everyone is apparently very hard. Many things are hard.
Broadly, Ms. Powell suggests that many of Silicon Valley’s problems can be laid at the feet of an engineering-and-data-obsessed monoculture that invites little input from people outside the bubble.
Zoning has a lot to do with this: https://www.livablecity.org/rethinking-rh. Zoning lets cities dramatically restrict the supply of housing, thus favoring incumbent owners; by now, the only people who will move to SF / SV are those who want to start a startup (or "play the startup lottery" if you prefer a different set of emotional valences). The city almost can't help become a monoculture, because everyone else has been priced out.
Everyone's been priced WAY out of Manhattan too, but I don't know that I would call it a "monoculture". (Tribeca/Greenwich Village area is very different than the Upper East Side for instance. Very different cultures. But only 0.0001% of Americans could ever really afford to live in either place.)
That's why I'm not sure that the affordability of housing is what's causing the monoculture?
In fact, I'd wager that with greater affordability in SF, the only thing you would really buy yourself is MORE monoculture. I don't think there is a massive wave of NON-tech people waiting to move into SF.
In addition, living without a car in NYC is common and normal, while cars cost $8,500/year TCO on average: https://www.aaa.com/autorepair/articles/what-does-it-cost-to..., and, while SF / SV is making some progress in the mass-transit area, it's still much harder to be without a car.
And NYC's absolute market rent levels appear to be lower than SF's.
>And NYC's absolute market rent levels appear to be lower than SF's....
That's NYC, not Manhattan.
Manhattan is worse than SF, (and certainly worse than any other place in SV). And yet, it's not a monoculture. That's the point I'm making. It strongly suggests that the issue in SF is less about affordable housing, and more about the fact that SF/SV is simply popular with a certain type of person.
And, as noted in the original post, in Manhattan it is very easy and typical to live without a car; in SF, less so, further increasing the cost disparity.
Tech is not even in the top 4 employers in SF (tourism, government, medicine and finance are ahead). Granted, a large contingent of techies working at Google/Facebook/Apple in the Peninsula would rather live in SF than the mind-numbing tedium of Silicon Valley.
I don't want to distract from your point too much, and I know you chose a percent out of a hat, but 0.0001% of Americans is ~300 people. Certainly 300 people can afford to live in expensive parts of NYC. In fact 0.0001% of the world (~10,000 people) can easily live in the most expensive parts of NYC (and do!).
I'd hardly call the Bay Area itself a monoculture. Palo Alto is very different than Oakland which is very different than San Francisco. Hell, even in San Francisco the Mission, North Beach, and the Outer Sunset are totally different worlds.
'In short, Silicon Valley’s problem is sameness, stupid — and in Ms. Powell’s telling, we are not going to get a better, more responsible tech industry until we get a more intellectually diverse one.'
Can't argue with that. Pretty concerned about the impact of the tsunami of Chinese venture money that is going to take this thinking globally, I suspect SV is still kinder and gentler than the rest despite shortcomings...
https://www.ft.com/content/71ad7cda-6ef4-11e8-92d3-6c13e5c92...
SoftBank: inside the ‘Wild West’ $100bn fund shaking up the tech world
(The Vision Fund is changing the rules for investing but will its whirlwind decision-making lead to bad bets?)
It is orthogonal to the Times article, but George Gilder's recent book "Life After Google: The Fall of Big Data and the Rise of the Blockchain Economy" [1] offers a valuable perspective. His recent interview at the Stanford Hoover Institute [2] is compelling.
Silicon Valley culture could use a large dose of empathy. For such a customer-focused industry, folks' unwillingness to 'walk a mile in their shoes' is eye-opening
Everyone could use a large dose of empathy. Either you're a Nazi fascist or a spineless socialist. Everyone is so quick to dehumanize each other and have zero tolerance for thoughts outside their circle. This isn't unique to SV, but it's definitely more apparent there.
The first time I visited Mountain View, I was absolutely blown away by the "sameness" of the people living there. Racially, it is much more diverse than my hometown of Austin, but I could never escape the feeling, after talking to random people, that I was stuck in a scene from "The Stepford Wives."
This refers to an awful "novel" IMHO - I read a few chapters before I started to cut myself. I'm confident that if the author didn't have a magic Google resume entry, it wouldn't have been published, much less hyped in the NYT as a Great Statement.
The New York Times is unable to write the truth here for fear of offending their readers: The monoculture in Silicon Valley is that of hyper liberal people. This is so obviously the case and they are going so far out of their way here to not mention it one can only conclude that they are attempting to mislead deliberately.
The reason the New York Times can’t say “Silicon Valley is completely 100% liberal and that is a serious problem” is because most Liberal people genuinely believe they are the disruptive punk rockers who are fighting against the evil forces of darkness. In reality, being Liberal is highly homogenous and unoriginal.
But if you write that down as the Times, you immediately become a target for political attack. So they take the easy road here which is vaguely mentioning some foggy, abstract term “monoculture.”
We know what monoculture means. It isn’t a conservative republican monoculture.
I work in this industry, 90% of my coworkers and colleagues universally agree and emphatically support diversity of all types. They talk about it all the time, hold diversity workshops etc. nothing much has changed.
So get out of here with this fake monoculture Orwellian nonsense.
some americans have really weird meanings for some words.
such as left to mean center-right
Political Compass put me at center-left. Some people in the Bay Area have tried to call me a Republican. Differing Points of View can be weird. That's what Diversity is all about.
Come to Europe to get a different perpective. I would guess Bay Area liberals would be placed somewhere slightly left / liberal of center over here. And neo-cons in terms on capatalism. I can only guess what I would be called in the US. Perspective is everything I guess.
Ok, that is strange. There is, it seems, more than one political axis. What kind of test did you take? Now I'm curious to find out what I'm classified as.
Yeah even as an American I've noticed "decadent" used this way. Not just chocolate, you see it with many sweets or other calorie dense foods. Hell Starbucks has become one of the most ubiquitous companies in the world largely due to the popularity/markup of its breakfast milkshakes.
I guess the idea with "decadent" is something like "this is your rare and entirely sinful reward for your hard work maintaining your overall health with your generally sensible choices in what you eat." Kindof like a dietary lent.
Meanwhile 40% of the US adult population is obese. 40%. That is absolutely staggering.
There's nothing "decadent" about eating food that is nutritionally poor here...it's entirely normal.
It's all relative. Every place has it's own unique political spectrum. The US is no exception in this regard. To your point though, there is nothing "liberal" about companies behaving the way you describe. If we are guilty of anything, it's conflating the ideas of "liberal" and the political left.
I duno. I feel like the valley is a weird / contradictory mix of some liberal policies / ideas and libertarianism when it comes to handling users, the responsibility of handling so much data and etc.
I think it is more of a wild mix of differing ideas.
Hard to imagine anyone with any political perspective watching valley companies operate and figuring it is in a "liberal" fashion...
“Silicon Valley is completely 100% liberal and that is a serious problem” is because most Liberal people genuinely believe they are the disruptive punk rockers who are fighting against the evil forces of darkness. In reality, being Liberal is highly homogenous and unoriginal.
Silicon Valley definitely isn't 100% liberal. Not even close. The SF Bay Area is overwhelmingly liberal, true, but most male techies self-identify as libertarians, to the extent they choose to engage in politics, making the SV portion of the Bay Area comparatively conservative.
Moreover, you seem to be conflating multiple types of liberals into a single identity. Just as there are neocons, MRAs, white supremacists, and evangelicals on the conservative side, their are different types of liberals. You have treehuggers, bleeding hearts, socialists, progressives, pragmatists, BFL (business friendly liberals aka blue dogs), reformed Republicans, etc. Many of these groups (like the MRAs, neocons, white supremacists, and evangelicals on the conservative side) identify themselves by what they are fighting against. But the majority identify themselves by what they are for.
While in the U.S. being libertarian is associated with being right-leaning, the small government vs big government debate is pretty orthogonal to left vs right. The silicon valley stance on economic matters doesn't fit cleanly into the usual liberal or conservative platforms.
On social issues, it's more clear.
Edit: I thought this was a fairly bland comment on my part, so can I ask what reasons people have for silently disagreeing?
OK, I'll not-silently disagree (though I didn't downvote you).
The right can be either small- or big-government. (Cynically, the party of the "right", the Republicans, is big-government when in power and small-government when out of power.) But I see very little on the left that is small-government - certainly not the Democratic Party, and not much outside it. (I suppose at least some of the anarchists can be considered left, but as far as I can tell they are a very small group.)
>but most male techies self-identify as libertarians,
Aka "I'm a liberal but a highly visible minority of the people around me who call themselves liberals are extremists who have gone too far so I need to call myself something else to distance myself from them."
Adding to @gamblor956 comments, the greater bay area - where I've lived for a quarter century - is still dominated by old money country club types with a separate highly transient population coming and going. The latest waves have been tech.
The european concepts of 'liberal' and the US version (especially on the west coast which is completely different culturally to the east coast) causes endless confusion as like so many words in the English language mean different things on different continents and even places.
The New York Times is unable to write the truth here for fear of offending their readers: The monoculture in Silicon Valley is that of hyper liberal people.
Hyper liberal people are fine. It's intolerant authoritarian people which are the problem, regardless of where they claim to be on the political spectrum. In activist circles, it's said that no movement can succeed without at least 10% radicals. That's nothing new. What's new in the past several years is the willingness to harass, destroy people's lives and livelihoods, and even to vandalize and enact physical violence.
Most of the tech class in SV isn't doing the things I list above. However, many people here give their tacit acceptance of these things.
So get out of here with this fake monoculture Orwellian nonsense.
The monoculture is a real monoculture. It's also really Orwellian. There's this kind of "seeking out" stance people can take. I remember it when getting profiled from racists. I remember such attention from people questioning my sexual orientation. Now I see it from people I meet here in the Bay Area.
I find myself allying with anti-authoritarians across the political spectrum, as both parties (though more so the republicans) have cozied up more with more extreme and more authoritarian ideologies.
Liberals are all about "we know whats best because of our education and these studies" and conservatives "we know whats best because jesus (tradition, et al)" - in the end, both of them are trying to pass more malum prohibitum laws with dubious effects. I'm dubious of technocrats and religious tests.
The thing that I see that scares me the lack of room for disagreement, if you dont agree with us, you're one of 'them' whoever them is.
The thing that I see that scares me the lack of room for disagreement, if you dont agree with us, you're one of 'them' whoever them is.
Hell, "if you dont agree with us, you're one of 'them'" is okay, so long as people remain cordial and just chill. I had that while at grad school at the University of South Carolina. The traddies, folkies, world music people, eastern religious nuts, African drum people, neo-hippies, goths, metal-heads, Harley motorcycle people, punks,... I could go on. We all hung out together. We even got into arguments and tried to point out how the other was deluded and screwed up, and we still hung out together.
I guess it's easy if you're a small group of fringers in a sea of mainstream people. When the fringe gets too big, it starts to develop social pathologies of its own. I think the Bay Area fringe is more prone to such pathologies than average.
I think the point that I was trying to hammer home, is you must be ideologically pure, and in total harmony with all views, otherwise you're branded one of 'them' and you, and any viewpoints you have, are discarded.
"Conservative Republican" describes like dozens of belief systems in 2018.
Does a conservative Republican support free trade or tariffs?
Does a conservative Republican believe "I earn what I get" or "companies must be forced to provide equal time for me"?
Does a conservative Republican support "work toward citizenship" or "kick Muslims and Mexicans out"?
Does a conservative Republican believe business owners should be free to pursue profit, or business owners should be forced to deliver the President's policy goals?
Does a conservative Republican believe in "leader of the free world" or "America first"?
Does a conservative Republican believe in "pax Americana" or "the U.S. is not the world's policeman"?
Who does a conservative Republican like more: Justin Trudeau or Vladimir Putin? Angela Merkel or Kim Jong Un?
The crazy thing is, right now you can find people who believe either side of one of those dichotomies above, and both of them might call themselves a conservative Republican!
Likewise: it's equally silly to say that "The monoculture in Silicon Valley is that of hyper liberal people." Because it's possible to do the same exercise with conflicting liberal beliefs.
The key thing to consider is that there is more to thought than where it lies on a political spectrum. A liberal millionaire and a conservative millionaire are going to share modes of thought that are orthogonal to which party they prefer to vote for.
>In reality, being Liberal is highly homogenous and unoriginal...
So is being conservative. And both of those are just as homogeneous and unoriginal as being independent. Etc etc.
You don't even get originality when you mix these sorts of dogmatic ideologies, because they are quasi-religious at this point. Just kind of the reality of the modern era. You have to choose to live in a place and go with it. If it makes you feel any better, none of these political ideologies are likely to be any more beneficial than the religious ideologies that preceded them.
This account looks to have been created for the sole purpose of posting this comment.
I've noticed an increasing trend of top level comments on social commentary articles immediately jumping to "liberals are the problem". Just yesterday, [0], the first reply. I do not see this happening in reverse. It is divisive and disheartening.
Further, this comment does not echo my take on the article as a whole. It's half a book review, half a person's commentary on their life in SV. The key paragraph:
> I felt like I’d ceased to become anything else,” she said. “All I did was work all the time and talk about tech.” She concluded that a job that asked her to jump from crisis to crisis, that did not admit time or perspective to consider many ideas that were outside its small world, was not the best use of her time.
The main gist of the sameness mentioned is that everything is tech.
Where is this political play coming from? Why is it a liberal problem?
On HN, I mostly see it in replies. Then again, I don't click on all comment sections; maybe I naturally have been avoiding the articles that elicit those comments.
Generally, I expect comment sections that immediately devolve into political discussions to be flagged.
I wish there was a auto-merge function for political comment threads. Sameish comments, would get merged to one comment. Emotional sob-story's without links squeezed to one-liners. The enlightenment going with a flaming broad-sword hitting left, right and center of those, who are not trying to see the world, but what they have in there head.
It’s a white male monoculture. The liberalism you’re talking about is white male liberalism, which in all honesty isn’t that different from conservatism. Being in favour of diversity and actually working to make it happen, kicking out harassers &c are quite different. Take a look at the recent love-in between Bannon and Maher.
I hate to disappoint you, but you have way more in common with your liberal co-workers than you think, and you both have less in common with the general population than you’d like to believe.
? So they asians and indians/pakistanis are just a ilusion?
Its a mono-culture, of those cultures who are allowing for non-machoism endavours by teeangers to be pursuited.
Interesting view, given that Whites are proportionally underrepresented in much of Silicon valley companies. In fact, Google's tech roles are now majority non-white. Not that this is necessarily a problem, but it does not align with the idea that SV's monocultue comes from an overrepresentation of White people.
The point is, at most there's a male over representation - but there's not a white over representation. The majority of Googlers are non-white, it seems dubious the country would have a white monoculture.
Not to mention, we're being pretty ambiguous as to what we're really referring to by a "white male" culture. I'm going to hazard a guess that the >60% of white men who voted for Trump have a very different culture than the average white person at Google.
Bingo. This shit is starting to seep into my company and may drive me out. I'll just have to find reasonable types and start my own billion dollar industry I suppose.
It also would hit home too hard, since print institutions like the Times have been a significant source of this monoculture within the highly literate Silicon Valley.
Oh, the irony. Silicon Valley is the way it is in large part because the media keeps a close eye on everything that it does. Naturally, groups of people are going to behave in whatever way allows them to best survive under prevailing conditions. If the media, including NYT, hadn't spend the last 10+ years both salivating over and strongly critiquing Silicon Valley, there wouldn't be so much of a need for conformity.
Just do a Google search and you'll find opinion pieces, as well as ones published by the New York Times, about how Silicon Valley is misogynist, racist, and homophobic. Why would it be any surprise that people in the industry are paranoid of not being perceived as ultra liberal and diverse? A strong monoculture is a survival mechanism from environmental pressure.
I think the comments here, at least the popular ones, kind of reinforce the article's point about the existence of a monoculture. Or herd-like thinking.
Just a quick, back of the envelope, tally of the responses here shows a real tendency to focus on, let's call them "familiar" subjects. Vast majority of people are talking about left-right politics for instance. Or sex, race, sexual orientation type things. Or inequality. (ie-Housing affordability.) But none of these really contribute in any real way to the lack of diversity of ideas present when brainstorming, say, new uses for nanotech.
We do have a monoculture of beliefs. Everyone believes, for instance, that diversity only means political diversity. Or gender diversity. Or religious diversity. Etc. And so, that becomes the center of our focus. But political diversity, for example, is not even terribly valuable when brainstorming solutions. Gather some Stanford/Berkeley grads along with some impoverished, but clever Africans and Asians, and I'd bet you'd be able to hit on more innovative solutions to more problems than you ever would with a room full of political liberals and conservatives parroting their respective dogma.
Diversity of thought like that is difficult to achieve because, ironically, of our belief that diversity of thought means diversity of political thought. Or diversity of race. Or diversity of gender. Etc. (All of which are next to useless. Especially since all of that diversity is coming from the same overall culture and socioeconomic class in most cases.)
If you want the benefits that diversity of thought conveys, you can't look for comfortable substitutes for it, like religion, race, politics, sexual orientation, or gender. Going to find a religiously diverse team, which inevitably thinks like you, or a politically diverse team, which is even worse in terms of sameness, won't work. You have to go all the way. Not only should their thoughts be diverse, the fundamental way they think should be diverse if that makes sense? (I once gave a presentation at Halliburton, and I can tell you, having someone around who thought about logistics in terms of donkeys was extremely helpful in terms of solution finding and problem solving.) If you're not willing to go all the way with diversity of thought, you're not going to get the benefits of diversity of thought.
You can hire more women, or conservatives, or muslims, or hispanics, but it won't really get you anywhere. You need people who think fundamentally differently than other team members. And you might even need people who think fundamentally differently to even identify people who think fundamentally differently. You don't FILL the team with those people, (you have to be able to get work done), but you should make sure a few of them are at the table if you want to reap those benefits.
I agree. You can force diversity in gender and race (eg. require 1 woman on your board), but they can all still think the same.
When I asked a few tech friends about launching my business, it was this: create a minimum viable product (MVP), apply to a start-up accelerator, get funding, eat ramen, do things that scale, do things that don't scale, move fast break things. That is "the way".
The instant my wife (business partner, computer illiterate, masters degree in marketing) heard of the MVP idea, she went on a mini-rant: "huh? what? Advertising is sooo expensive. No way are we spending all that money at launch to bring in people to see a minimum product. When customers come to our website, we'll have 5 seconds to hook them, so we better have all the features right in their face. If they don't see what they like, they're never coming back"...
Her perspective is so far from the tech scene that this happens repeatedly. Tech guys repeat what they read in some blog which then boggles my wife's mind.
In a different HN discussion regarding MBA degrees, it was stated a couple times that you could just read 2 books and get the MBA curriculum. They don't realize all the different perspectives that you get from business school discussions. It's not about the hard skills. In business school we spent a lot of time doing Harvard Business Cases and hearing from a diversity of opinions.
That's a really good example. I bet there are plenty of hispanics, asians, men, women, christians, hindus, liberals, conservatives, and homosexuals, all spouting "The Startup Way" so to speak.
What diversity benefit is there in having any of those people around when you, yourself, already have the perspective? (Because you already read all the same books and blogs.) Having your wife take a look could certainly provide a more fresh perspective than having yet another tech monoculture drone look at it.
I agree that the prevalent culture tends to result in poorly fleshed out products, and your wife is right on this. I should note though, that technically, such a product is not actually an MVP. If customers come to the website and don't get hooked, it means it doesn't have enough features to be Viable.
Everyone loves to talk about the problems Silicon Valley has but I honestly want to know what harm is Silicon Valley causing to the world? It's not like it caused a global financial crisis like Wall Street. Yes, there are the whole privacy issues with companies who's main business is selling ads but that's the nature of their business. If Silicon Valley was more diverse or if those companies were located in a different city, would there be any difference?
Where to begin ... if you follow HN, you see harm caused by SV companies every day. Sometimes it's privacy infringements; sometimes it's companies and investors making huge piles of money to take over entire markets; and sometimes it's SaaS companies deliberately locking in users, the list goes on.
It's less about what problems Silicon Valley is causing the world, and more, that problems that Silicon Valley cant solve because of its own ideological limitations.
Though I'd suggest that Social Media is causing some very real problems - but I don't see an easy answer that doesn't involve changing the fundamental constructs of social media.
Could you please detail specific examples of what these ideological limitations are?
I see different kinds of limitations that are driven by blindly chasing profit, attempting externalize everything that doesn't affect the bottom line, and insistent refusal to accept even partial responsibility for creating tools when said tools are misused until public opinion is overwhelming against them. I don't think that the limitations that I listed are ideological though.
I guess one example would be the ideological push for dense urbanization. It makes sense from the perspective of a city jammed between mountains or packed on an island, but not so much for a prairie city that could survive quite well with low density development if it’s competent enough at managing its sprawl.
Odd. I've definitely noticed this ideological push, but it has always felt somewhat external to me; it feels like it is mostly pushed by transplants, especially temporary transplants to SF, who think everyone should live in dense walkable cities.
FWIW I do think SF and the peninsula need dense urbanization, but this is due to the geography of the bay and the fact that demand seems to be overwhelmingly outstripping supply, and I'd rather increase density than rip up the green space along the peninsula. I don't think this is necessary for most cities though, or even necessary around San Jose for that matter (since it has less narrow growth constraints due to geography). I get the impression the majority of locals / immigrants in the Bay Area who support denser urbanization have a similar viewpoint, and don't consider it an ideological necessity for the rest of the world.
I think you have to look at "Silicon Valley" as a kind-of short-hand for the FAANG (Facebook, Apple, Amazon, Netflix, Google) companies, along with Microsoft and Intel. It's more of a "state-of-mind" than an actual state.
So the author's point is that the "monoculture of thought" that pervades The Valley (and elsewhere) is in fact a problem, and one that needs to be addressed.
There are different words for the monoculture. Here on HN you might see it referred to as "the hivemind" or "groupthink". Or HN itself might be called an "echo chamber".
I think this is a valid concern, expressed by a voice in the minority, and is worth the time to attend and reflect upon.
To answer your original question, I would say that the harm that Silicon Valley is causing the world is the creation of the hivemind itself. It's not overt; it's insidious.
It's so funny/interesting only a decade ago no one would listen to the engineers and the business types would just screw up everything and do whatever they want. Now the engineers built billion/trillion dollar companies and those types are crying that they've lost the power. Sometimes trying to regain it through political games.
I suppose if they had titled it Google's Keystone problem it wouldn't have gotten as many clicks./cynicism
Lets take the article though for what it purports to be, a review of Medium's first online book, which happens to be a piece of fiction that pilloried Google's culture because the author felt unheard at a company driven by engineering.
It isn't a surprise that voices go unheard in companies (large and small). If I had to guess, I would say the most common refrain I have heard from any employee who quit their job, it was "I tried to tell them what they were doing was wrong but nobody would listen, now look at where they are."
Does that point to any deep regional insights? No. Does it point out that people running companies are human and have blind spots? Well, yeah it does but that isn't exactly startling news.
My suggestion for folks reading the book and this comment are to take away one thing; "Learning how to communicate with the corporate hive mind is an excellent skill to cultivate." and the more practical corollary, "You can't tell someone anything they are unwilling to hear."
You just can't. Get over it. I have had the experience of telling the CEO of a startup that their blind spot was hiding a train coming at them, and that it would take down the company. They couldn't hear it, they rejected my analysis as fanciful and guesswork. And when the company was destroyed by that very train wreck? They were mad at me! Not the situation, not their inability to hear what they needed to hear. No the messenger was the problem, not the situation.
What I learned was that you can't tell someone something they don't want to hear, and if you force them to hear it and are correct, they can end up hating you for it. It is better to ask gently if they are open to alternate views and if they are not, just stop. Let them learn these lessons in their own way and be supportive of them once they fall down and are working their way back up.
There is a theme in "Bad Blood" where they start falsifying their test results because they believe that they are close to having things working and they just need a bit more time. I am sure more than one person said, "Wait, this isn't the right way to deal with this." But to hear that, you had to accept that maybe the whole test with only a drop of blood was not a practical idea. And to hear that, you had to consider the idea that the whole idea was not going to work. Net result, ignore the 'haters' and move on.
> It isn't a surprise that voices go unheard in companies (large and small). If I had to guess, I would say the most common refrain I have heard from any employee who quit their job, it was "I tried to tell them what they were doing was wrong but nobody would listen, now look at where they are."
I'm always struck by how readily people equate "heard and understood" with "agreed with".
It's very possible that a person can be heard, listened to, understood, and then the actions they want not be taken. Just because a person is heard is not the same as that person being agreed with.
My advice for people is to take on board the difficult lesson that someone failing to do as you wish isn't the same as them refusing to listen to you. That your wishes or warnings are not acted upon is not the same as them falling on deaf ears.
I don't disagree, people contextualize the conversation with relation to themselves, but it is a bit more nuanced than that.
This in particular is incomplete: It's very possible that a person can be heard, listened to, understood, and then the actions they want not be taken. Just because a person is heard is not the same as that person being agreed with.
Is half the answer but the important bits it leaves unstated. To hear someone, you should be able to paraphrase their argument such that they agree that you're phrasing, is just as accurate as their original phrasing. And then you have to be able to share your decision process with respect to their argument so that they can see how you reached your choice of directions.
If you do that, whether or not you choose make the change they suggest, they will feel heard by you. Conversely if you can't do that, they have no basis for believing you understood what they said and so they won't feel heard.
You're right! The ability to understand, contextualize, and restate someone's point cogently and clearly back to them will leave them feeling they have been heard and understood.
It's possible that my life experience might suggest that this sense of feeling listened to sometimes dissipates when it is not followed by the actions they would have you undertake. The ability to articulate why you have made this choice contrary to their wishes is, as you so correctly point out, critically important for having the other person understand.
More completely, it can be very helpful in leaving another person feeling heard and understood when you choose not to do as they desire you to. It may be possible that not all people are so understanding as to accept that someone who heard and understood them might genuinely come to a different conclusion, even with a clear understanding of their points and lucid explanations of reasoning processes.
It may also be worth considering how these techniques can, in some scenarios, interact with complex human systems. The techniques you wisely describe can be incredibly effective on a personal level! Yet, they perhaps can function less well when subject to an intermediating system. In such a scenario, some people might opt to interpret people choosing not to act as they suggest as a failure to hear and understand their points. In an organization, giving each individual the personal attention and explanation required to satisfy them and help them feel listened to can very easily become time-prohibitive.
You're absolutely, completely, 100% right. It's just perhaps possible that there might be some further room for subtlety.
This kind of stuff annoys me to no end. I think everyone realizes that Silicon Valley and the overall tech world has a diversity problem. There are aspects of our society that systematically under-develop and discourage minorities and women from following the path to becoming an engineer. It's a problem and it's one that our entire society needs to address.
But do we have an "engineering-and-data-obsessed monoculture" problem? Hell no! We've got a whiny, non-tech contingent that is frustrated that engineers aren't willing to be high-level abstractions on top of computers problem, which is only a problem for those people who are shut out of guiding the direction of the tech industry by their lack of ability to actually do the things the tech industry does. The notion that we'd magically arrive at better decisions if we allowed more non-tech people to make those decisions is ludicrous and insulting. There's no reason to think that without the benefit of hindsight, those people would have made better decisions than were actually made. It's the same specious thinking that leads non-tech "idea" people to approach tech people and generously offer 5% of their sure-to-succeed company in exchange for the mere trifle of actually building it.
Sorry, it doesn't work that way. Execution beats opinions every time. People who are actually capable of doing the work don't give seats at the table just because "diversity." There's no reason to allow a PR person, like the one discussed in this article, to have outsized influence at a tech company. Engineers seek out engineering-focused cultures because they want a greater degree of autonomy in their work and they want to have a larger influence on the success of their company. Changing that would just mean that the best engineers would choose to work elsewhere, even starting their own companies if need be. That's why we have engineering-focused cultures...because these companies need people that can actually do the work. They've proven that it's not hard to find the non-technical talent, so there's no need to put as much emphasis on that when it comes to the culture and leadership of the company.
The one exception to that that proves the point is the current demand for enterprise tech salespeople. We're reaching a point where that talent is in just as high a demand as technical people. And to the companies that need enterprise tech sales, the cultures are adapting to value those employees alongside engineers. But when I read articles like this one from the NYT, it just feels naive and entitled. If you want to be involved in determining the direction of the tech industry, provide a reason and a value proposition based in reality or your going to be ignored.
Tech needs to accept accountability and transparency, but these jealous attacks from old-media has-beens are no less tedious for being so unpredictable.
> If you have a hierarchy where engineers are at the very top and the people who are interfacing with the outside world are a couple rungs below that, you really miss something when those people don’t have an equal voice at the table.
As an engineer, I've always found that I'm quite far from the top rung, and that my voice is frequently not the loudest at the table.
What may give the illusion that my voice is strong is that I only support ideas that I know I can build or are practical.
I find that the people who make complaints like that are usually the people who don't realize that their voices are just as equal as mine at the table. They just need to work on their credibility in order to make their voice stronger.
Edit: Credibility often comes from knowing what ideas to support, and when to stop pushing an idea. The term "idea person" comes to mind here.
That was an especially grating accusation coming from the “director of public relations” who probably had a private office, an assistant, a parking spot, and meaningful equity. Unlike anybody who knows how computers actually work.
Ms. Powell smartly recognizes a truth that many in the industry elide: A lack of diversity is not just one of several issues for Silicon Valley to fix, but is instead the keystone problem — the source of much else that ails tech, from its recklessly expansionist zeal to the ways its brightest companies keep stepping in problems of their own making.
This article is working from a presumption that companies should be subject to a standard of political representation; and if they aren’t then they don’t — and can’t — function. Where did this idea come from, I wonder?
It seems at odds both with recent history (many non-representative companies have done a lot of good) and it seems to not admit of any distinction between business institutions and political ones. Even if Google had broader representation of identity-related protected classes, it would not be a representative sample of the US or the world when considering things like education or other life history factors.
What kind of diversity is the author talking about, and what relationship does it have to any legitimate standard of representativeness?
I grew up in New York, which has a pretty big tech sector, but also has fashion, finance, publishing as major industries as well. There are folks who work for the big tech companies in New York who have also worked on Wall Street and I think that helps to prevent monoculture from growing out of control.
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