Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

Silicon Valley Isn’t a Meritocracy

wired.com

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

61–70 of 188 posts

Re: Silicon Valley Isn’t a Meritocracy

#61

Post by beachstartup »

rhdoenges wrote: post #24
beachstartup wrote: post #20

Earlier quoted context omitted.

well the point specifically said white men. not men, white men. i was reacting to the content - what does it matter who wrote it? aren't we discussing ideas here?

The article was written by a woman, so why would you assume it was written by a man? We're discussing ideas, yes, and those ideas have a lot to do with gender.

> so why would you assume it was written by a man?

i dunno, maybe it's because i'm sexist, misogynist asshole that supports the patriarchy?

you people are making a mockery of yourselves, to be honest. it's kind of pathetic.

Re: Silicon Valley Isn’t a Meritocracy

#62

Post by ForHackernews »

jraines wrote: post #53

The war on the word "meritocracy" is just weird. You can just watch it bubble up through twitter to large blogs, to wired. The weird thing about it is the people who hate the word are arguing not against the actual usage -- "people who demonstrate their merit get ahead" -- but against the illiberal definition they've assigned to it: "people who have inherent merit get ahead". Disclaimer: I'm not familiar with the val…

> if there really are a bunch of young white males with the right "pedigree" who are getting money thrown at them without having demonstrated any real merit, then I withdraw my objection

That's exactly what happens. You are much, much more likely to get funded if you're a young white (or perhaps asian) guy doing an undergrad at Stanford than if you're a black woman studying at Berkeley. Now, you can hand-wave about connections, and entrepreneurial culture or what have you, but at some level, that just reinforces the point.

Re: Silicon Valley Isn’t a Meritocracy

#63

Post by kumarski »

I look at companies like Everpix with users, revenue, and growth and then companies like Albumatic.

Albumatic raised 4.1 million dollars and pivoted 3 months later.

Everpix was building a product that users loved and they had the trajectory to be great.

One question we must ask is: "What do we define as merit in silicon valley?"

Re: Silicon Valley Isn’t a Meritocracy

#64

Post by kumarski »

kumarski wrote: post #63

I look at companies like Everpix with users, revenue, and growth and then companies like Albumatic. Albumatic raised 4.1 million dollars and pivoted 3 months later. Everpix was building a product that users loved and they had the trajectory to be great. One question we must ask is: "What do we define as merit in silicon valley?"

Additionally, while it is far from optimal, I do believe we(other than Israel) have the best systemic distribution of capital to companies.

Re: Silicon Valley Isn’t a Meritocracy

#65

Post by steven2012 »

peter_l_downs wrote: post #48
steven2012 wrote: post #22

This article is largely garbage. Sure, Silicon Valley isn't a "perfect" meritocracy, but it is the most meritocratic of any other place in the world, at least that I've been in. In Japan, and presumably other places in Asia, women are still supposed to include a photograph with their resume, and employers are reluctant to hire married women past a certain age because they feel they will get pregnant and stop working…

Congratulations on your wife's success, but how does that paragraph serve your point? I'm willing to bet she's made more money from her bonuses than 90% of the aspirational startup founders on HN. Her peers in finance are >60% women, and they are all extremely smart and well compensated as well. That's finance, not the startup world, and you even make the comparison yourself! Sounds like finance companies are a much…

My point is that just because there aren't a bunch of startup founders who are women, doesn't mean that women aren't benefiting from the halo effect of meritocracy in SV. And you don't have to be a startup founder to be extremely well compensated.

Looking at Snapchat and complaining that there aren't enough women CEOs owning $4B valuation companies is not the point. It's almost ludicrous to use what is basically a black-swan, lottery ticket winner as some sort of point of comparison for progress. The real story isn't that there aren't enough of these female lottery ticket winners in SV, it's that if you are a smart and hardworking woman, you can make a lot more money than most startup founders ever will.

Re: Silicon Valley Isn’t a Meritocracy

#66

Post by ars_technician »

rfnslyr wrote: post #44
steven2012 wrote: post #22

This article is largely garbage. Sure, Silicon Valley isn't a "perfect" meritocracy, but it is the most meritocratic of any other place in the world, at least that I've been in. In Japan, and presumably other places in Asia, women are still supposed to include a photograph with their resume, and employers are reluctant to hire married women past a certain age because they feel they will get pregnant and stop working…

>$100,000 bonus - Haha what? What department/branch of the bank? No way is it IT. Investment? I work at a bank and the most I've gotten was $10k and that's extremely rare for anyone. Hell, making $100k salaries you need to be here for like 15 years. I'm in the wrong fucking field.

Not IT if the CFO promoted her.

Re: Silicon Valley Isn’t a Meritocracy

#67

Post by crusso »

The myth is that anyone can come from anywhere and achieve great success in Silicon Valley if they are skilled. It holds that those who “make it” do so due to their excellent ideas and ability, because the tech scene is a meritocracy where what you do, not who you are, matters.

Thus is the straw man constructed. The dismantling of that poor fellah is absolutely breathtaking to behold. He had it coming.

Who actually makes absolute claims like those except for in a feel good, keep your glass half full if you want to succeed kind of a way?

Re: Silicon Valley Isn’t a Meritocracy

#68

Post by Crito »

pg wrote: post #50

The same arguments would prove that math isn't a meritocracy. Which it presumably isn't, entirely, but only because nothing is entirely. And if SV is only as much of a meritocracy as math, that's pretty good. Indeed, that's what the word means in ordinary usage.

Interesting example, both math and entrepreneurship are abound in examples of people making a big splash after going off on their own. From mathematics, people like Srinivasa Ramanujan and Gottfried Leibniz made an impact despite lacking formal mathematics educations. Their results spoke for them, not their credentials.

Edit: Nash apparently did study mathematics, not sure what I was remembering...

Re: Silicon Valley Isn’t a Meritocracy

#69

Post by beachstartup »

ceejayoz wrote: post #17
beachstartup wrote: post #11

Earlier quoted context omitted.

it depends on who you ask. and what decade you ask it in.

You know full well what decade we're in, and virtually everyone today outside an Aryan Nations get-together is going to call Zuckerberg a white guy.

you are delusional if you think jewish is uniformly accepted as 'white', even today.

it's not. full stop.

Re: Silicon Valley Isn’t a Meritocracy

#70

Post by icegreentea »

Crito wrote: post #56
icegreentea wrote: post #43

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I don't think that that was Ahl's intentions when she labelled those terms as 'male-gendered'. I do not believe that she meant they were male-gendered like say.. 'he' or 'him'. Likely, male-genderedness is suppose to mean something along the lines of "without additional information, most people would assume these words refer to a male rather than a female". The point isn't that you can't use these words to describe f…

> "without additional information, most people would assume these words refer to a male rather than a female" Surely that is the problem. The problem isn't that those traits are seen as desirable or common for entrepreneurs. The problem is the people think those traits can only be found in men. Particularly the idea that "self-reliance" is a male trait is a classic example of something that feminists have been succes…

Maybe. So there are two branch points for this, and one little thing first.

Firstly, I don't think anyone ever thinks that those traits can only be found in men. It's just that they believe that its more likely men to have those traits. Like the chopstick example I gave, no one is ever going to say only asians use chopsticks, and if you told them that the person in question was actually white, they likely wouldn't bat an eye. But their first guess would be asian. So it's not really a problem, because that situation doesn't really exist.

But say we adjust and say the problem is that people think its more common for men to have those traits. Then:

A) Someone comes up with a very good way of measuring those traits. Say it actually turns out to be pretty objective and repeatable and consistent. And then they go out into the field and test a representative sample of North Americans. And then they find that amongst North American men and women, men do score higher in those traits by meaningful measurements of "higher" (say both a higher mean, and an asymmetric distribution shifted towards the higher end).

Now, I'm not saying that that's true, nor do I want that to be true. But if it -is- true, then it turns out people are right! Their intuition matches reality. Now what? Maybe the problem is that its actually true, and we have to dwelve into nature vs nurture and all that "good" stuff. And this is honestly something we have to consider. Given the self-reinforcing nature of society/cultural pressures, and the non-trivial possibility that there are actual biological differences that will bias the traits of the genders, it's actually possible that some sort of difference could be found.

B) Same thing as above regarding reliable tests, but the tests come out negative. No meaningful differences between genders. Well then yes, we have a problem.

Post reply on HN