Silicon Valley Techno-Utopianism

Rural USA lags well behind urban USA in terms of infrastructure, despite receiving far more in state and federal spending than they pay back in tax revenue. Much of their local infrastructure is supported by the local county tax base.

Jeff and MH otm, I'm going to wind up teaching a brown bag series on Stupid Outlook Tricks to my current office because these kids don't know how to search with quotation marks or use the scheduling assistant on appointments or anything

I just can't stand every SV exec on some crusade to make everyone and their mother learn to program like it is going to save education/future/world/etc. Teach everyone spreadsheets instead.

― Jeff

goddamn right, don't teach programming in high school, teach them how to make _pivottables_.

and how to fix printers and network connections goddamit

#1 thing I tell people at job fairs who are looking for jobs in IT - have you worked the helpdesk?

Love too fix computer!

This is fabulously stupid.

https://amp.businessinsider.com/reid-hoffman-mark-pincus-wtf-2017-7

I like interviews about the ideology of Silicon Valley:

--
This Is Hell! | Beware the welfare market: The case against Silicon Valley's techno-libertarian UBI.

https://thisishell.com/interviews/961-julianne-tveten-paul-blest

---

The linked article is okay. The point she makes about the tech version of UBI is astute. I don't buy that Zuck or Cuban are dumb enough to run for President, though.

yeah zuck's not running imo

everyone i know how knows him or works at FB says the election shook him up, and he sincerely thinks of this swing state tour as product research

when all you have is a hammer

so...

http://gizmodo.com/exclusive-heres-the-full-10-page-anti-diversity-screed-1797564320?rev=1501965015200

so has anyone publicly outed who the writer of that rant was?

sort of crazy that given an even playing field, women excel at science and engineering, but given all the resources in the world there are men who don't understand social interaction

https://medium.com/@catehstn/we-know-who-he-is-596fdd93d7c2

http://www.kylieerin.com/lets-talk-about-google/

https://medium.com/@yonatanzunger/so-about-this-googlers-manifesto-1e3773ed1788

yes it's https://www.linkedin.com/in/james-damore-b277b62b/

I can't help laughing at this Googler's misogynist manifesto because it reminds me of what one female Uber HR rep told me

— Susan J. Fowler (@susanthesquark) August 7, 2017

She told me that, in her experience, there were more Asian women in accounting because Asian women are just really good with numbers.

— Susan J. Fowler (@susanthesquark) August 7, 2017

Likewise, she said, there were more white men in engineering because white men were simply more suited for engineering than others!

— Susan J. Fowler (@susanthesquark) August 7, 2017

(woman who wrote the "strange year at uber" thing)

"Black people would be great in Customer Support roles because Black people know how to talk to people." ~Investor who will remain nameless

— EricaJoy (@EricaJoy) August 7, 2017

“You should be able to say that women are bad engineers. But sharing salary info will get you in trouble.” - Googlehttps://t.co/sKpCTPrpIT https://t.co/Qr050oBQki

— Elizabeth Sampat (@twoscooters) August 6, 2017

http://www.nature.com/naturejobs/2011/110526/images/nj7348-545a-i2.0.jpg

also last i heard is that this google guy's manifesto is an internal nightmare for higher ups who are still figuring out what to even do

— ಠ_ಠ (@MikeIsaac) August 7, 2017

employee revolt vs legal nightmare plus validates what people already latently believe about engineers and tech anyway

— ಠ_ಠ (@MikeIsaac) August 7, 2017

for some reason I was assuming the writer of the rant was older than me, which is definitely not the case

thank you for your aggregation and reportage, caek!

forgive me but i looked up his publications. he didn't finish his phd afaict (which makes the "he's a biology phd, he knows what he's talking about" line less useful). this is the most cited of his two papers, and it's seems to be a screed about people not being logical enough. you can sense that he had https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_fallacies open in the next tab while he was writing.

*this https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC3176967/

microbial cooperation is very interesting and people are writing about it more and more

so this guy's education/career route followed the princeton -> research science -> oh shit I want the silicon valley money -> software engineering -> google route

this is not unique among people I've talked to

there but for the grace of god go i. but i find it ... noteworthy that he seems to have written purely polemical papers (not even theoretical, much less working with actual data) and quit before it got hard.

you actually had a career that morphed over time, though, right?

the other confounding thing I heard from someone who used to work at google is that, if you're not in the software development track, your opinions on app ideas or what might be interesting products to develop are ignored. because software developers are the ideas people.

yeah i finished my phd and did a couple of postdocs. not saying that was the best (or quickest) way of learning what i learned in academia, but it's clear this guy did not get to the bit of a phd where you deal with the real world.

ok but lol

google interviews are infamous for basically asking zero non-technical questions. you could be willing to admit to murder if asked, and it wouldn't come up in their recruitment process.

i knew you'd be on this mordy

tbf this guy sounds like an idiot and i have no feedback despite reading (most of?) the manifesto. but i had to lol at "did not get to the bit of a phd where you deal with the real world."

i don't recall murder coming up in any of my job interviews tbf

like you never tried to murder an interviewer or they never asked u your opinion of murdering in general or

I think that's why I didn't get past the first round of the HYDRA interview

there is a bit. it's usually at the end. xxp

I should start asking interviewees about murder instead of just relying on the "have you committed a felony" check box on the application.

i've interviewed at a bunch of tech companies (not google) and they all have substantial "cross functional interviews" about "what would you do if" conflict handling and ethics stuff that at least officially they take seriously.

btw lol at the pathologizing of not being willing to work more than 40 hours a week http://www.businessinsider.com/rest-and-vest-millionaire-engineers-who-barely-work-silicon-valley-2017-7?op=1

definitely

at the very least I've asked questions to determine how someone would communicate with other groups or analysts if something would require a change in project scope, or how they address conflict. usually people don't say "well if they're a woman they're not being logical" doesn't come out immediately as a response, but uhhh... you can read between the lines

I obviously stopped to check on a work email message mid-post there, but you get the point

"how do you convince your boss you need more training data?" is a good superficially technical question for that in my field

from the rest and vest:

As tired as she was, she couldn't just quit this job. She owed a big chunk of money in taxes thanks to that stock and needed her salary to pay those taxes.

sell-to-cover next time, maybe?

if they're RSUs in a post-IPO company that you work at then you can owe tax on them immediately when they vest, but be prevented from selling them by insider trading laws. not sure if that's what was going on here.

(and if you were in a senior role in the acquired company you may also be prevented from selling by the terms of the acquisition)

I'm surprised that you can't still sell-to-cover in that case. It seems like you could lose a whole lot of money if you accepted a large RSU bonus from a company that then went under.

tbf it sounds like a carrot-or-stick way that people are bound to stick with their jobs post-acquisition or IPO. you want the people who built the technology or company to stick around, but holding the payoff just out of reach while working them just as hard creates a high-pressure job that's demoralizing. you theoretically got your payoff, but you can't touch it. the tax situation is the stick, the payoff is the carrot that's out of reach

most big companies garnish the RSU grant at vest to cover tax for you, so it's usually not a problem. that's true for regular new hires, but if this person was in a management role her deal may be structured differently which yes raises the possibility of being underwater.

i'm looking at an acquisition term sheet right now, and yes, a minority of employees are being given very secure golden handcuffs