Your rainforest of innovation has turned into a factory farm.
If ever any sentence better described YC, its brethren incubators and demo days, I haven’t read it.
Dear Silicon Valley: America’s fallen out of love with you
61–70 of 491 posts
Re: Dear Silicon Valley: America’s fallen out of love with you
#62As someone outside of SV (Nevadan living in Boston and practicing medicine), I think this article largely misses the mark. I think it is true that there is a diversity problem in SV, just like there is a diversity problem in medicine. It’s a problem, because there is no a priori reason for women and ethnic minorities to be less prevalent in our high-paying fields. But that’s probably the only point that resonates. Th…
" there is no a priori reason for women and ethnic minorities to be less prevalent in our high-paying fields." Sure there is: racist and sexist white males making decisions and developing a workplace culture that prevents them from attaining those positions. And the sooner people accept this, the better for everyone.
This view is ridiculously out of touch with reality. What you're describing is borderline cartoonish levels of evil. You make it sound like white males get together with conferences to discuss new ways of oppressing people.
The theory that explains this phenomenon needs to address how things still go wrong even when nobody has any dislike or prejudice.
Re: Dear Silicon Valley: America’s fallen out of love with you
#63The fundamental problem with this article is it presupposes that America used to love Silicon Valley. I think Silicon Valley loves Silicon Valley, and investors kinda-sorta love Silicon Valley, and the rest of us like Apple and begrudgingly use Facebook, because, well, what else is there?
It'd be nice if Silicon Valley did something other than make software to keep our noses in our phones.
Re: Dear Silicon Valley: America’s fallen out of love with you
#64Earlier quoted context omitted.
" there is no a priori reason for women and ethnic minorities to be less prevalent in our high-paying fields." Sure there is: racist and sexist white males making decisions and developing a workplace culture that prevents them from attaining those positions. And the sooner people accept this, the better for everyone.
You’re agreeing with the OP while acting angry and using a critical tone. This detracts from discussion. Please interpret remarks charitably.
There is no anger in the tone. People see it is angry and critical because they are upset by the opinion.
Re: Dear Silicon Valley: America’s fallen out of love with you
#65Earlier quoted context omitted.
I think some of the people that do have a problem with SV or tech in general also just have a problem with people they perceive as having lower social status succeeding. It's not anti-intellectualism exactly, but it sort of parallels it in my opinion.
I agree. It is not the classic anti-intellectualism, but I think a refined version of it.
It’s old money vs. new money. New money doesn’t respect the culture, rituals, and hierarchy created by the old guard. And because tech is printing money it doesn’t have to.
Re: Dear Silicon Valley: America’s fallen out of love with you
#66People generally do love Silicon Valley and what it creates. It’s the media that doesn’t. Ask the average person what brands and products they like and use the most (or just look at the data on where and how they spend their time and money) and you’ll see that Silicon Valley is doing just fine in the eyes of the populace. In fact, Silicon Valley has never been more influential. Ask people to go to a world without iPh…
It's false loyalty. People put up with Facebook, Apple, Google, etc with their fake "we care about you" marketing (could apps stop literally telling me this? it's weird), overpriced, and walled garden megalomania because they are addicted and their other options are mediocre walled gardens (look around).
People aren't stupid, they can sense when they are being used and those companies have treated their customers like cattle for the last decade or more. It's going to come crashing down one day, you can't treat customers with blatant disrespect time and time again and be shocked when they finally leave.
Re: Dear Silicon Valley: America’s fallen out of love with you
#67That's not the real reason public opinion has shifted sharply against denizens of the Valley. That would be Uber. A company so sociopathic, so awful, so entitled, so full of loathsome self-aggrandising bullies they became an unwitting figurehead for hatred of the Valley. And Uber make it so easy to hate them.
I think those early SV days were probably not that way. Hard to see Hewlett and Packard or the folks at Fairchild or some of the other firms out there acting the way SV folks act in 2017.
Can you imagine Bill Hewlett kicking some kids off a field because he had reserved it for his kick-ball team?
Re: Dear Silicon Valley: America’s fallen out of love with you
#68To you, in the words of one Silicon Valley investor, this seems like “the only logical conclusion.” To the average person, this seems like the height of arrogance. People are uncomfortable with universal basic income because you’re essentially saying their labor isn’t worth anything — but you don’t see it! I think this point is really missing from most UBI conversations that happen on HN. UBI is the answer when you b…
I don't see UBI as saying that someone's labour isn't worth anything, it just allows them the freedom to keep experimenting in order to find out what it is worth when applied to different jobs.
Re: Dear Silicon Valley: America’s fallen out of love with you
#69As someone outside of SV (Nevadan living in Boston and practicing medicine), I think this article largely misses the mark. I think it is true that there is a diversity problem in SV, just like there is a diversity problem in medicine. It’s a problem, because there is no a priori reason for women and ethnic minorities to be less prevalent in our high-paying fields. But that’s probably the only point that resonates. Th…
" there is no a priori reason for women and ethnic minorities to be less prevalent in our high-paying fields." Sure there is: racist and sexist white males making decisions and developing a workplace culture that prevents them from attaining those positions. And the sooner people accept this, the better for everyone.
For the rank and file of tech the problem can't be eliminated until more than 20% of the STEM pipeline is comprised of women. This means fighting sexism at the startup level is useless, you better encourage young people to get into science by making it sexy and not for social outcasts. If there is sexism to fight against it is in education with how maths and physics are painted as "for dorks" instead of showing how you do some crazy awesome things.
For the management level you have two problems:
- people tend to prefer people with technical baggage to handle technical teams. So you're back to the pipeline problem
- for the exec level you usually get older people for established companies. So it is a question of time for things to get better: current execs are from 1 or 2 generations past. Once those generations are replaced they'll mechanically have more women, those who are currently in their late 30s and working on their career. You don't have a lot of 20ish men at those positions.
For the startup founders you just need an idea, some seed money and time.
Re: Dear Silicon Valley: America’s fallen out of love with you
#70As someone outside of SV (Nevadan living in Boston and practicing medicine), I think this article largely misses the mark. I think it is true that there is a diversity problem in SV, just like there is a diversity problem in medicine. It’s a problem, because there is no a priori reason for women and ethnic minorities to be less prevalent in our high-paying fields. But that’s probably the only point that resonates. Th…
" there is no a priori reason for women and ethnic minorities to be less prevalent in our high-paying fields." Sure there is: racist and sexist white males making decisions and developing a workplace culture that prevents them from attaining those positions. And the sooner people accept this, the better for everyone.
That’s not a priori, that’s given X, this follows. Had the dominant race been, say, Chinese, had the dominant sex been women, there is no reason to think the sexist and racist people would be behaving any differently than they are now.
We still need to stop the racists and sexists. My personal short-term benefit from being in the “right” group comes at the hidden cost of 96.75%* of the world not being treated fairly or given tools that genuinely help them.
* 6.25% of humans are “white”, according to wikipedia