The problem with Juciero and Theranos isn't that they failed. The problem with them is that Juciero was an immensely dumb idea that was never checked or questioned and thereby wasted tons of money, and Theranos was so unabashedly, obviously mustache-twirlingly evil that if it were used to script an evil corporation for TV, I'd have called it unrealistic (and thereby, it wasted tons of money). They're the worst parts of SV (dumb companies offering things nobody wants at outrageous prices, and obvious evil pretending things are OK because they're 'changing the world' or some other nonsense) exaggerated to near-comical extremes.
Silicon Valley's problem is deeper than failing businesses or not enough diversity. It's that the entire enterprise is a bold-faced moneygrab for VCs; ethics, diversity, etc. were never really part of the point, and it's only now that the rest of the world is starting to figure that out. SV's problems are at the core of the reasons for its current existence.
Like bottled water. The idea of people paying 1600x markup for something they got essentially free while creating massive amounts of waste when sports bottles already existed. When bottled water came out, I remember thinking, "that's a friggin' joke."
It sure worked out though.
Before someone replies that tap water is perfectly suitable for drinking: Sure it's safe, but I have never had municipal water that didn't taste bad. Never. Maybe I'm just spoiled because I have a well that provides tasteless water.
We can substitute bottled water with premium bottled water and the argument holds though.
Put another way, do you imagine that nobody at Nestle or wherever stood up and said "this is a dumb idea" when bottled water was being devised? And how would you imagine the creators of the idea answered that challenge?
The first makes money, the second doesn't. :)
There are dumb ideas, and dumb ideas that are poorly executed.
Juciero is clearly the latter.
But just because an idea is dumb, doesn't mean it won't be successful in the market.
Two of my favorite satires on this point.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=t28ZB1t6gg8
and
http://www.cc.com/video-clips/9nzwjt/the-colbert-report-vess...
Now try to remember a tech/company you thought was stupid that became a massive success. For me, I remember thinking wifi was stupid -- I was a power user, laptops were grossly underpowered circa 1998. Why would anyone need wireless internet on a desktop?
I keep that story in mind because it keeps me humble about hindsight bias.
With regards to Theranos, my point also stands. It's baldly evil on its face and shouldn't exist. Capitalism and "it's none of your business" are not excuses.
The rise in income inequality is tied pretty directly to pervasive automation. Economic efficiency is not always social progress, especially when coupled with retrograde politics and social policy. We're not having "more leisure" or whatever because of it, we're having people ground to dust in worthless jobs because the computers are doing more and more.
To that end, tech (and not just the Valley, but the Valley is a particularly visible and awfully smarmy representation of tech) probably should get more shade thrown at it than it does.
> then to lambaste SV for trying to come up with solutions to ameliorate that problem
Tech is doing no such thing. Tech is reifying capital, it is not trying to solve the problem on behalf of labor.
Which is caused by two major factors: easier shipping, easier communication--both of which the tech sector encourages, facilitates, and pushes forward. And yes, automation is a nontrivial part of wealth inequality's growth, especially over the last ten years rather than twenty--you don't move a secretary's job elsewhere, you destroy it. Capital requires fewer hands than ever before and enables further centralization of that capital--and this is direct fallout of automation making workers superfluous.
The issue here is that many people feel SV's ideas of basic income will absolutely never work in the long-term. Heck, it will never work in this country period. We can't even socialize healthcare in this country, and those who collect unemployment are looked down upon.
What makes you think basic income will ever become a reality? What makes you think a major political party wouldn't call those people freeloaders and work ceaselessly to remove those benefits if they are put in place? And what makes you think those millions of people being given subsidized, substandard, meaningless lives won't rise up against a system that has basically sucked as much productivity out of them that they could before abandoning them?
People don't like new people getting money. A story as old as time.
Some who make this argument (and I'm not necessarily saying you're in this camp) are essentially saying that "nerd culture" is some oppressive sexist force. That's sort of ironic given that it's basically a subculture formed by social rejects. There are of course aspects of workplace culture which do this, but an appreciation of science fiction and dungeons and dragons really shouldn't be on that list.
See, SV doesn't have to tolerate weirdness- everyone in tech there is replaceable (there's a surplus of members). Because of human nature, the people there now have to adopt a different ingroup/outgroup structure (which usually has a negative correlation in how interested/competent in tech they are), and what better way to do that than by using the local political leanings?
And, as a quirk of (the local) progressive politics, this also puts SV and the rest of the tech community at odds- SV claims that it's important for tech communities to exclude men/non-minorities to promote the participation of women/minorities, but the vast majority of tech communities see an objective shortage of members and can't afford to discriminate (the fact that they skew male/majority is an afterthought) so they rightfully object to doing that.
Put another way, SV can afford to be illiberal/progressive and discriminate; the rest of us are liberal because being illiberal still has meaningful consequences.
The theory that explains this phenomenon needs to address how things still go wrong even when nobody has any dislike or prejudice.
Yeah so... about that. Here is an article about someone infiltrating one such conference in Seattle that was literally full of white male mostly techies who were discussing different ways of doing that.
http://www.thestranger.com/news/2017/10/04/25451102/we-snuck...
Yeah, yeah... you'll probably point out that this was a only a couple hundred people, and thats very few when you compare it to the total population of seattle. And I'd mostly agree with that argument.
But I just thought it was funny that one such conference just happened.
One need not be white or male to be biased against people of color or women. It's probably easier for us to fall into those patterns, and historical patterns of deliberate oppression were undoubtedly a major factor in establishing those biases as dominant cultural patterns, but anyone can do it with a little extra effort to rationalize how they're "one of the good ones".
How so? Suppose everyone accepts this... then what? What do we do with this information to change things?
I don't think racist and sexist white men are the problem. They exist, of course, and are a problem but that's not what's driving Silicon Valley's diversity issue. It's (1) the bias people have for entrusting people they understand and feel understand them and (2) the compounding opportunity gap various groups have.
Further, casting the issue this way nearly precludes a solution since it attacks and alienates the people whose help you probably need to change things -- those very white men running so much of SV and so much of everything else.
I guess it feels good to rage against the system, but in doing so you end up perpetuating and strengthening it.
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.
It is not just a pipeline problem at the elementary school level where women aren't being given enough Legos to play with or something.
It is a pipeline problem at the company level as well. As in, women in tech are very often driven out of the industry because of all the BS that they have to put up with.
Fix the sexism problem at the company level and the industry stops losing good workers who were being driven out.
Also something to think about, why would women want to join an industry when they know that they will have to put up with a lot of sexism? That would be a pretty big deterrent from them getting a CS degree in the first place.
Do we see as many article about the lack of women in waste management?
I think that's because seem like easy well-payed jobs. The reality is stupid hours, stupid management and no life. Only people who value money more than their time would choose to stay there.
But hey! A possible solution would be to force women to learn to code then work there for decades. We could start with those who chose to become journalist or some other humanities major. Women are too stupid to choose the right path for them, am I right? /s
Problem should be fixed. They should be fixed because they are problems that make lots of people unhappy and keep them out of high paying jobs.
Women aren't stupid for choosing to not subject themselves to rampant sexism. That's actually smart. But fixing a huge problem that effects lots and lots of people is objectively a good thing.
Your argument is equivalent to saying "hey, black people don't want to report things to the police, because they are afraid of the police (do to them being shot at a much higher rate), but that's THEIR problem because it is their life and their choice to not have access to the police system whenever a crime accures to them and they choice to not report it".
That argument would be a bad argument, because even though they are "choosing" to not report things to the police (and therefore have to way to not get justice for crimes committed against them), we should still work to fix the problem of them being RATIONALLY afraid of the police (perhaps by trying to convince police to shoot them less).
Look, if you really don't care about a major problem that is effecting lots of people, we could at least look at this from a purely selfish perspective for the company. When women leave an industry the company loses lots of money, because they have lost a high skilled worker.
Therefore it is an objectively good thing for the tech industry to solve this major problem that is causing the industry to lose so many highly skilled workers. Because that cost money.
The reason there are more articles about this than simply bad management is because a hostile work environment for lots of people is a much worse problem that effects people in worse ways.
How do I "know" that it is a worse problem? Well that's because women are being driven out in droves. Obviously it is a worse problem, as evidenced by the sheer number of people for whom it causes to leave their very high paying jobs.
The only sexism I've seen in tech is benevolent sexism. People interrupting you in meetings? Same thing for men. People who shit on your work? Same thing for most men. Bad jokes? I mean, put an audio recorder in a room full of men and see how it can be.
Most techies I know have been raised to be respectful of women. I'd say even too much.
So when suddenly tech becomes fashionable because there's lot of money there and most outsider media start bashing the field for being full of misogynists I'm starting to get a feeling of cognitive dissonance. A feeling of 1984 becoming reality.
How do men react then? They start getting distant and avoid interacting with women. And now you get articles about the lack of mentoring of women and how men don't interact the same way with women than they do with other men.
It's like the only way would be for men to live, think and interact exactly like women. And soon we'll have the same thing in the workplace as in school: men are defective women.
Maybe women should start their own tech companies and recruit other women if men lead ones are not good enough for them.
Why would they start doing that? Eliminating sexism just means that you don't have any bias, not that you suddenly see them as the next coming.
One of the teams eventually had two women, but at that point six of the men shared a name with another team member.
Or you'd have to recruit from other kind of degrees.
But realistically most companies are already begging for women in tech teams. Not being in the US, I've had some jobs where I've been told if they had just one female applicant the job woul be for them if they can type an Hello World program. But when you have 6 women in a class of 80, half of which are students from another country going back there once they have their degree it's hard to imagine a 50/50 team.
I think the biggest wall is not sexism, but the media using some cases to create the illusion of rampant sexism. Exactly like how people think violence is on the rise while stats show it is down due to coverage.
Please interpret remarks charitably.
IMHO you are right though about discrimination existing.
I say it pretty often, and I don't get "slaughtered". The commentariat here tends to be kinda gross at times (and, tbh, the proprietors should probably do something about it, but I kinda shrug at that one now) but the votes generally bear out that the crowd, at least, is reasonable.
Claiming racism and sexism will put off anyone in the center who may be convinced that there is a diversity problem. I would prefer the term "subconsciously biased against". It's not so much a concentrated group effort by everyone who hires to keep minorities down, but a subconscious effect caused by the media and constant anti-minority propaganda (only a few decades ago). Even minorities themselves are influenced by this (see: confidence issues).
It's not conducive to growth as a society or as individuals when you attack people who may otherwise be convinced to help you. The ones that are just blatantly racist are fair game (imo), though.
http://nymag.com/scienceofus/2017/01/psychologys-racism-meas...
The idea that the media is pro-minority when we still have the media pissing themselves over kneeling in protest is silly. Also when Fox News is still watched by a significant portion of Americans. Also when the media constantly shows minorities in negative situations (yes, it's reporting, and information, but that creates biases as well). I mean it's easier to internalize a minority doing a violent crime as "terrible" than it is a white male embezzling funds or something. In addition, a few decades ago the story was not the same. The people who grew up then have developed a bias due to the media and the people who are raised by the people who grew up then will also internalize some of it. Discrimination is not something solved in a generation.
EDIT: Edited my post a bit because I completely misread your comment.
No worries. Sorry if I was hard to understand.
> people with minority names on their resume get significantly less callbacks?
Assuming this is a consistently-reproducible finding (I'm aware of at least one study that finds no disparity), how far can we extrapolate this finding? On this basis alone, can we conclude that pay is lower for employed minorities than otherwise equivalent whites/males, or that workplaces are more hostile? Is it sufficient to change policy? Can we extrapolate this to tech specifically? Should we fire people who openly question our extrapolations?
> Not every bias test uses it.
No, but most do, and it's considered to be the best bias test in social psychology (a very low bar, due to the difficult and complex nature of divining motives). If you throw away the racial-bias research predicated on the IAT and other unreliable tests, what remains is largely anecdote.
> The idea that the media is pro-minority when we still have the media pissing themselves over kneeling in protest is silly.
I don't see why; rightly or wrongly, most of the media is sympathetic to the BLM side of the issue. Media reporting is widely considered (by the left and right) to be socially left-leaning, and it's self-evident that the media goes to great lengths to show minorities in the best-possible light. Of course some outlets are exceptions--like Fox News--but exceptions don't disprove the rule. Even if the media are horrible racists (90% of journalists are Democrats, so we should expect them to favor a pro-minority narrative, but even assuming this isn't the case...), they are compelled by self-interest to at least appear pro-minority (in which case, they are still pro-minority for all relevant purposes).
With sincere respect, if you really think the media is anti-minority, I don't see how you and I can have a reasonable, agreeable, productive conversation about bias in tech, and maybe we should just let this thread die.
EDIT: Some edits made to improve clarity/organization.
Studies like that generally tend not to replicate, including at least one specifically about race and names on resumes.
Blue-collar jobs aren't considered prestigious, so they'll get little more than lip service.
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
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.
The criticism of Juicero and Theranos being emblematic of focusing on the wrong problems is not sensible. Companies fail, sometimes spectacularly, sometimes due to dishonest behavior, etc. If Theranos had the tech they claimed to have, it would have been richly rewarded (outshined only by the consumer surplus it would have created).
The oddest turn is that of blaming the global rise in income inequality on SV, and then to lambaste SV for trying to come up with solutions to ameliorate that problem as it proceeds to its logical extreme.