I’m a white male, so keep in mind that I don’t have direct experience, but these are some of the issues that I see.
1. Silicon Valley doesn’t really need any more talent. For all the talk about “talent shortage”, that’s mostly marketing. If you claim that you’re hot for talent, you can get smart people who feel under-appreciated to apply, and because they feel under-appreciated, they’ll work extra-hard to prove themselves, even if you give them grunt work. The fact is that Silicon Valley has more talent than it has need for it, can’t recognize talent very well, and doesn’t have that many jobs that have the kind of high-end talent needs that would make racial and cultural barriers go away. (If it did, why would it kick non-managing programmers out at 40, when their prime is still ahead of them?) Silicon Valley is about marketing using technology, and we still live in a very racist world.
2. Silicon Valley is deeply corporate and conformist. I have more than one friend who has been told (yes, in “reputable” tech companies) that her natural hair is “political” or is making some kind of statement. What the fuck? It’s just hair. Also, hiring and promotion in Silicon Valley are often by committee and consensus; you rarely see the person with the courage to stand up for someone even if the interviewers split 5-1 or 4-2. This tends to magnify small biases. If you need 5 yeses to hire, and all it takes is one ignorant jerk who thinks natural hair is “political” (and I’ve heard worse terms) and “just didn’t see a fit”, what do you expect? A lot of these guys are cowards who’d never date a black girl (and you do not want to hear some of the justifications that I’ve heard for that) so it’s not surprising that they’d be weird about hiring.
3. Someone who can overcome the social disadvantages of being black (or female, or both) is unlikely to end up in the Silicon Valley trap. It might be worth it to be a founder or to work in Google’s AI lab, but most startup positions are subordinate drone work on 0.05%. One of the taxes on white, male, upper-middle-class privilege is that it tends to make us very fucking naive, especially before age 30, and unrealistically optimistic about our ability to “work our way up” and impress people with our “merit”. I can speak from painful personal experience on this one. In general, I think that Philip Greenspun’s explanation of why there are so few women in academia has some truth in it. People who are able to overcome severe social disadvantages tend not to be naive (the ones who were naive didn’t make it far enough to be on Google’s radar) and are more likely to end up at hedge funds than in dead-end software industry positions.
4. It does, but it has trouble keeping them. Not everyone in Silicon Valley is racist, of course. There are many who will go to bat for someone who’s talented, regardless of gender or race or sexual orientation. Unfortunately, technology has a lot of inconsiderate and immature people (and they’re a pain for all of us to deal with) who will attack (a) those who are different from them, and (b) those whom they perceive as weak. The shit that women and minorities deal with in some of these companies is unbelievable, and if you know how unicorns work, you know that management will do nothing because the C-levels are too busy managing up into investors to be bothered to actually take care of their companies and their people. Eventually, they get fed up and leave.
someone who is too afraid to do what is right or expected : someone who is not at all brave or courageous
If we go with the former definition, we could call all sorts of people “cowards”, like those who don’t want to set themselves on fire or engage in some other “dangerous” or “difficult” activity. We’d all be cowards by that definition.
So “unpleasant” and “dangerous” aren’t the right criteria. As far as interracial dating goes, someone might just not like to date outside their race, and that doesn’t make them a “coward” anymore than those who prefer the taste of one food, or the appearance of one gender, over another.
I think the second definition has it right: a coward is someone who is afraid of doing what’s right.
If someone finds themselves wanting to date outside their race, but chooses to turn their back on their own feelings out of fear of the disapproval of their peers or family, then there might be something cowardly about their behavior because they are being dishonest with themselves and with the other person. Even then, there could be some weird situation where “the right action” is to date in secret (for example, if not doing so would result in serious and unnecessary harm to themselves or someone else).
People who are able to overcome severe social disadvantages tend not to be naive (the ones who were naive didn’t make it far enough to be on Google’s radar) and are more likely to end up at hedge funds than in dead-end software industry positions.
“Not being naive” does not mean you end up at a hedge fund. I don’t even think I need to spell out why that is, so I’ll just leave it at that.
Coward probably isn’t the right term to use there. I’ve heard people make that claim before (that they wouldn’t date someone who was [insert race]), and I’ve always found it to be a bit racist. I can understand having a certain preference, but to flat out blacklist the set of all people of a specific race without knowing anything else about them seems rather closed-minded.
I’ve heard people make that claim before (that they wouldn’t date someone who was [insert race]), and I’ve always found it to be a bit racist.
By that logic, someone saying “they wouldn’t date someone who was [insert sex]” is being “a bit sexist”.
I can understand having a certain preference, but to flat out blacklist the set of all people of a specific race without knowing anything else about them seems rather closed-minded.
Following that same logic you’d have to agree that “to flat out blacklist the set of all people of a specific sex without knowing anything else about them seems rather close-minded.”
You can swap out “sex” for “race” or “religion” or any other criteria that people use to select their mates and make equally judgmental statements about people’s preferences in terms of their partners.
Yeah I’ve had this conversation with friends and they’ve brought up the same points. I’m no expert on this subject, but I always found that syntactic argument rather weak. Certainly we can replace the word racist with sexist, but the statements “I wouldn’t date a person of a [specific race]” and “I wouldn’t date a person of a [specific sex]” spoken out loud -feel- very different (at least to me). That being said, even the latter I find a bit strange for reasons I can’t quite put my finger on.
Religion feels like the exception in the sense that it’s something that you opt into (though a statement like “I wouldn’t date a jew” does sound pretty silly imo). It can also play an important role in shaping your identity, which seems like a legitimate thing to filter people by. I’d argue it’s probably still closed-minded to claim that there could be no such person of religion x that you might be willing to date.
I think, while dissecting michaelochurch’s choice of words, we’ve gotten a bit off-topic from this article, but I find this conversation fascinating and would be totally down to continue it offline some time.
Just because someone doesn’t want to date outside their race, doesn’t necessarily make them a coward.
Well, that’s a fair point. In this case, I’m not talking about (say) Jews who want to date other Jews (not all Jews are white, but in the U.S., restricting yourself to Jews probably means that you’ll be dating mostly white people). I understand wanting to date within one’s ethnicity (although I never had that preference myself). I’m more opposed to a certain attitude that I’ve seen in middle-class whites, the people who select every race but black on their dating profiles for what they’re interested in. Long ago (I’m married now, and this was probably 7-8 years ago) when I used online dating sites, I remember getting messaged by a girl who did that. I’m not black, but it was a huge turn-off.
“Not being naive” does not mean you end up at a hedge fund
Sure, but when you work at a VC-funded startup, you’re Working For Money. “Changing the world” by, um, carrying water for a profit-maximizing enterprise no different from the tens of thousands that have already failed our species… that’s a bit silly. If you’re going to be Working For Money, you might as well actually fucking make some, am I right?
I’m not going to say that you’re naive if you dedicate your life to art or music, or to fighting malaria or religious intolerance or female genital mutilation or homo/transphobia or poverty. There are worthy causes that merit not taking the highest pay package that you can get. I am going to call you naive if you end up in the startup world, where you’re very much Working For Money (with all of the soul-raping compromise that it entails) but where the 99th-percentile scenario (liquidity event, common stock worth something, not “cliffed” or put on “earn out” or otherwise fucked-over) is that you get the kind of bonus that bankers laugh at. “After taxes, you can buy yourself a new car, and all you had to do was carry a pager and work 80-hour weeks for 4 years. That’s so cute!”
I certainly would not have left finance if I saw the startup world for what it actually was, and now that I’m 32, I’d probably be fucking retired and able to do something that I actually care about with my life. (Don’t get me wrong, I love programming; it’s the 90% of every tech job that is politics that I can’t stand.) My actual situation is… fairly disappointing, and my outcome is probably better than average, even for talented people. Most of us end up miserable. There’s a reason why, every other week, there’s a story on Hacker News about some seemingly fairly successful tech person killing himself.
The only good thing that can be said about the VC-funded startup world is that there’s a chance of getting rich, but the odds are much better on Wall Street and (despite reputations) so are the ethics. If you become someone’s protege at Goldman Sachs or Morgan Stanley you are rock-solid. At a tech company, though, no one will help you, because corporate tech people are the definition of crab mentality and don’t look out for each other. The only way to get rich in tech (and this comes down to luck) is to join a company that has so much money coming in that the executives don’t have time to claw back your equity, because they’re too busy researching yachts and hiding money from ex- and soon-to-be-ex-wives.
So, in sum, people who aren’t naive are not necessarily destined for Wall Street, but they are going to avoid the VC-funded garbage.
As far as i can tell silicon valley is hyper sensitive about the issue and the talent just isnt there. Im sure women and black peopel who go to elite univerisites are doing fine. Google didnt recruit at my middle of the pack state school either.
Maybe i just live in a sub bubble but my impression is that if you are a skilled minority then people are very eager to higher you.
The talent is there, but Silicon Valley doesn’t care enough to find it. Likewise, there’s a lot of 40+ talent (in fact, the best programmers are often 40+) that they can afford to overlook. I don’t think that most of them are any more racist than the rest of society, but they also don’t have enough of a genuine need for talent to look past systemic problems and social injustices.
Silicon Valley tech barons give a lot of mouth-honor to diversity to distance themselves from “those other” businessmen (who are supposedly racist, conservative, Midwesterners) but this is just because they’re all a bunch of private-sector politicians. I don’t think that they’re especially racist, nor do I think that they really care about these issues.
I’m a white male, so keep in mind that I don’t have direct experience, but these are some of the issues that I see.
1. Silicon Valley doesn’t really need any more talent. For all the talk about “talent shortage”, that’s mostly marketing. If you claim that you’re hot for talent, you can get smart people who feel under-appreciated to apply, and because they feel under-appreciated, they’ll work extra-hard to prove themselves, even if you give them grunt work. The fact is that Silicon Valley has more talent than it has need for it, can’t recognize talent very well, and doesn’t have that many jobs that have the kind of high-end talent needs that would make racial and cultural barriers go away. (If it did, why would it kick non-managing programmers out at 40, when their prime is still ahead of them?) Silicon Valley is about marketing using technology, and we still live in a very racist world.
2. Silicon Valley is deeply corporate and conformist. I have more than one friend who has been told (yes, in “reputable” tech companies) that her natural hair is “political” or is making some kind of statement. What the fuck? It’s just hair. Also, hiring and promotion in Silicon Valley are often by committee and consensus; you rarely see the person with the courage to stand up for someone even if the interviewers split 5-1 or 4-2. This tends to magnify small biases. If you need 5 yeses to hire, and all it takes is one ignorant jerk who thinks natural hair is “political” (and I’ve heard worse terms) and “just didn’t see a fit”, what do you expect? A lot of these guys are cowards who’d never date a black girl (and you do not want to hear some of the justifications that I’ve heard for that) so it’s not surprising that they’d be weird about hiring.
3. Someone who can overcome the social disadvantages of being black (or female, or both) is unlikely to end up in the Silicon Valley trap. It might be worth it to be a founder or to work in Google’s AI lab, but most startup positions are subordinate drone work on 0.05%. One of the taxes on white, male, upper-middle-class privilege is that it tends to make us very fucking naive, especially before age 30, and unrealistically optimistic about our ability to “work our way up” and impress people with our “merit”. I can speak from painful personal experience on this one. In general, I think that Philip Greenspun’s explanation of why there are so few women in academia has some truth in it. People who are able to overcome severe social disadvantages tend not to be naive (the ones who were naive didn’t make it far enough to be on Google’s radar) and are more likely to end up at hedge funds than in dead-end software industry positions.
4. It does, but it has trouble keeping them. Not everyone in Silicon Valley is racist, of course. There are many who will go to bat for someone who’s talented, regardless of gender or race or sexual orientation. Unfortunately, technology has a lot of inconsiderate and immature people (and they’re a pain for all of us to deal with) who will attack (a) those who are different from them, and (b) those whom they perceive as weak. The shit that women and minorities deal with in some of these companies is unbelievable, and if you know how unicorns work, you know that management will do nothing because the C-levels are too busy managing up into investors to be bothered to actually take care of their companies and their people. Eventually, they get fed up and leave.
Not to discount your personal experience of reality, you may well be right about most of that, but I take issue with a couple of things you said:
Just because someone doesn’t want to date outside their race, doesn’t necessarily make them a coward.
Depending on where you look, you’ll find different definitions for the word “coward”. Here’s one:
Here’s another that I find more meaningful:
If we go with the former definition, we could call all sorts of people “cowards”, like those who don’t want to set themselves on fire or engage in some other “dangerous” or “difficult” activity. We’d all be cowards by that definition.
So “unpleasant” and “dangerous” aren’t the right criteria. As far as interracial dating goes, someone might just not like to date outside their race, and that doesn’t make them a “coward” anymore than those who prefer the taste of one food, or the appearance of one gender, over another.
I think the second definition has it right: a coward is someone who is afraid of doing what’s right.
If someone finds themselves wanting to date outside their race, but chooses to turn their back on their own feelings out of fear of the disapproval of their peers or family, then there might be something cowardly about their behavior because they are being dishonest with themselves and with the other person. Even then, there could be some weird situation where “the right action” is to date in secret (for example, if not doing so would result in serious and unnecessary harm to themselves or someone else).
“Not being naive” does not mean you end up at a hedge fund. I don’t even think I need to spell out why that is, so I’ll just leave it at that.
Coward probably isn’t the right term to use there. I’ve heard people make that claim before (that they wouldn’t date someone who was [insert race]), and I’ve always found it to be a bit racist. I can understand having a certain preference, but to flat out blacklist the set of all people of a specific race without knowing anything else about them seems rather closed-minded.
By that logic, someone saying “they wouldn’t date someone who was [insert sex]” is being “a bit sexist”.
Following that same logic you’d have to agree that “to flat out blacklist the set of all people of a specific sex without knowing anything else about them seems rather close-minded.”
You can swap out “sex” for “race” or “religion” or any other criteria that people use to select their mates and make equally judgmental statements about people’s preferences in terms of their partners.
Yeah I’ve had this conversation with friends and they’ve brought up the same points. I’m no expert on this subject, but I always found that syntactic argument rather weak. Certainly we can replace the word racist with sexist, but the statements “I wouldn’t date a person of a [specific race]” and “I wouldn’t date a person of a [specific sex]” spoken out loud -feel- very different (at least to me). That being said, even the latter I find a bit strange for reasons I can’t quite put my finger on.
Religion feels like the exception in the sense that it’s something that you opt into (though a statement like “I wouldn’t date a jew” does sound pretty silly imo). It can also play an important role in shaping your identity, which seems like a legitimate thing to filter people by. I’d argue it’s probably still closed-minded to claim that there could be no such person of religion x that you might be willing to date.
I think, while dissecting michaelochurch’s choice of words, we’ve gotten a bit off-topic from this article, but I find this conversation fascinating and would be totally down to continue it offline some time.
Well, that’s a fair point. In this case, I’m not talking about (say) Jews who want to date other Jews (not all Jews are white, but in the U.S., restricting yourself to Jews probably means that you’ll be dating mostly white people). I understand wanting to date within one’s ethnicity (although I never had that preference myself). I’m more opposed to a certain attitude that I’ve seen in middle-class whites, the people who select every race but black on their dating profiles for what they’re interested in. Long ago (I’m married now, and this was probably 7-8 years ago) when I used online dating sites, I remember getting messaged by a girl who did that. I’m not black, but it was a huge turn-off.
Sure, but when you work at a VC-funded startup, you’re Working For Money. “Changing the world” by, um, carrying water for a profit-maximizing enterprise no different from the tens of thousands that have already failed our species… that’s a bit silly. If you’re going to be Working For Money, you might as well actually fucking make some, am I right?
I’m not going to say that you’re naive if you dedicate your life to art or music, or to fighting malaria or religious intolerance or female genital mutilation or homo/transphobia or poverty. There are worthy causes that merit not taking the highest pay package that you can get. I am going to call you naive if you end up in the startup world, where you’re very much Working For Money (with all of the soul-raping compromise that it entails) but where the 99th-percentile scenario (liquidity event, common stock worth something, not “cliffed” or put on “earn out” or otherwise fucked-over) is that you get the kind of bonus that bankers laugh at. “After taxes, you can buy yourself a new car, and all you had to do was carry a pager and work 80-hour weeks for 4 years. That’s so cute!”
I certainly would not have left finance if I saw the startup world for what it actually was, and now that I’m 32, I’d probably be fucking retired and able to do something that I actually care about with my life. (Don’t get me wrong, I love programming; it’s the 90% of every tech job that is politics that I can’t stand.) My actual situation is… fairly disappointing, and my outcome is probably better than average, even for talented people. Most of us end up miserable. There’s a reason why, every other week, there’s a story on Hacker News about some seemingly fairly successful tech person killing himself.
The only good thing that can be said about the VC-funded startup world is that there’s a chance of getting rich, but the odds are much better on Wall Street and (despite reputations) so are the ethics. If you become someone’s protege at Goldman Sachs or Morgan Stanley you are rock-solid. At a tech company, though, no one will help you, because corporate tech people are the definition of crab mentality and don’t look out for each other. The only way to get rich in tech (and this comes down to luck) is to join a company that has so much money coming in that the executives don’t have time to claw back your equity, because they’re too busy researching yachts and hiding money from ex- and soon-to-be-ex-wives.
So, in sum, people who aren’t naive are not necessarily destined for Wall Street, but they are going to avoid the VC-funded garbage.
As far as i can tell silicon valley is hyper sensitive about the issue and the talent just isnt there. Im sure women and black peopel who go to elite univerisites are doing fine. Google didnt recruit at my middle of the pack state school either.
Maybe i just live in a sub bubble but my impression is that if you are a skilled minority then people are very eager to higher you.
The talent is there, but Silicon Valley doesn’t care enough to find it. Likewise, there’s a lot of 40+ talent (in fact, the best programmers are often 40+) that they can afford to overlook. I don’t think that most of them are any more racist than the rest of society, but they also don’t have enough of a genuine need for talent to look past systemic problems and social injustices.
Silicon Valley tech barons give a lot of mouth-honor to diversity to distance themselves from “those other” businessmen (who are supposedly racist, conservative, Midwesterners) but this is just because they’re all a bunch of private-sector politicians. I don’t think that they’re especially racist, nor do I think that they really care about these issues.
Same.
I suspect a large base of diversity and talent exists outside of the top 15 universities that Silicon Valley doesn’t care to tap.