If The Shoe Fits: The Failure Of Silicon Valley Culture
by Miki SaxonA Friday series exploring Startups and the people who make them go. Read all If the Shoe Fits posts here.
Not all techies are “brilliant assholes” or even aspiring to that label.
Further, there plenty of brilliant nice folks and plodding assholes to be found amid the majority of people that populate techdom.
Unfortunately, that loud, vocal, arrogant, in-your-face minority often becomes the standard by which all participants are judged — think Gen X (slackers) and Millennials (entitled).
Worse, their MAP (mindset, attitude, philosophy™) tends to rub off on others and permeate the group culture, as it did on Wall Street, to the point where those who don’t fit the mold are ashamed to admit their involvement.
“MBA jerks used to go and work for Wall Street, now wealthy white geeks go to Stanford and then waltz into a VC or tech firm.”
Patrick Connelly, founder of health-tech startup Corevity, also sees the Wall Street parallels.
“The focus of Silicon Valley used to be innovation with the wonderful bonus of money on the side of that, but those two things seem to have switched – just as the pencil-pushing mentality of finance in the 70s became the champagne lifestyle in the 2000s, People have come to have too much swagger and not enough insights.”
Like Wall Street banks in 2008, Big Tech is in no hurry to take responsibility for its actions, as shown in the recent congressional hearings — no CEOs or executives showed, instead they sent their company lawyers.
Big Tech sold the world and its employees on the idea that, unlike Wall Street and other dominant corporate entities, tech was focused on changing the world for the better and would do no evil.
But, like most concepts, evil has a fluid meaning (like murder) and money is a change agent — nothing that drives revenue is evil. That includes Russian ads, hate, bigotry, and trolling.
Industry leaders espoused values that anyone could embrace: sharing, connection, community, openness, expression. The language they spoke was the language of a universal humanism….
These concepts might have sounded vague, but they produced concrete political outcomes. They convinced politicians to privatise public goods – starting with the internet itself. In the 1990s, a network created largely by government researchers and public money was delivered into private hands and protected from regulation. Built on this enclosed ground, a company like Facebook could turn formerly non-economic activities – chatting with a friend, or showing her a picture of your kid or crush – into a source of seemingly endless profit. Not by chance, the values that these companies touted as intrinsic goods – openness, connectivity, deregulation – were also the operating principles that made their owners rich.
That said, not everybody has drunk the kool-aid. There’s a small, but growing, cadre of techies working to change things from the inside out.
While tech has outsourced many roles, software development is, and probably always will be, handled internally.
Even if (when) AI reaches the point of being able to automate some coding, it will take far longer for it to take on the roles of creation, architecture or design.
And that will concentrate even more power in the hands of the engineers able to handle that work.
One can only hope they use it more wisely than their bosses.
Image credit: HikingArtist
