Could someone give me the rundown on "Silicon Valley"?

fengpi · 2017-09-25T21:03:11+00:00

It's a shorthand nickname for the area around San Jose south of San Francisco where a giant cluster of technology companies have developed. A few dozen of them are in the Fortune 500.

Most of the articles I have seen about women there are either about 1. it's so darn haaaaa-aaaaaard for a super-smart woman (is there any other kind?) to get millions of dollars there because male nerds are a bunch of evil misogynists who won't share the money in the way a Truly Honorable Man should and 2. male nerds are a bunch of evil misogynists who keep raeping everybody and it's so haaaaa-aaaaaard to be a super-smart woman (but I repeat myself) and be surrounded by such disgusting beasts.

The impression I get is that super-smart women adore the money that they can't figure-out how to earn and they think that men who earn it are icky.

SaviourScout · 2017-09-25T20:03:27+00:00

In what sense? It's where a lot of modern computer companies first started out and has remained a powerhouse of technology. It's also quite expensive to live there, resulting in some odd dynamics between the bay area and the central valley ( commuters and such ).

It's kinda a broad topic, you're going to have to be more specific.

2017-09-25T20:22:27+00:00

The Trillion Dollar Question

We may have gotten a hint of an answer this week whether blue-state America’s worsening climate of science denialism will backfire on the giant tech quasi-monopolies when Google CEO Sundar Pichai publicly fired a software engineer for writing a carefully argued memo, “Google’s Ideological Echo Chamber.”

The brilliant young coder is James Damore, a former doctoral student in systems biology at Harvard.... Ironically, Damore was fired for defending Google against the libel that only rampant sexism can explain why the second-richest company in the world doesn’t employ 50 percent women in technical jobs (much as Larry Summers was forced out as president of Harvard a decade ago in sizable measure for defending Harvard from similar charges).

In response, the Google CEO argued, in effect, that Google’s female employees, being highly emotional and not very logical women, can’t be expected to not take personally abstract masculine concepts such as “averages.”

It’s not punching down for the Indian-born CEO of Google (who was paid $200 million last year) to fire a twentysomething coder, it’s punching up because the victim’s a white male, just as it wasn’t punching down for Apple CEO Tim Cook to attack an Indiana pizza maker because Tim is gay. (In today’s zeitgeist, the billionaire always wins.)

Granted, all of this sounds ridiculous, which it is. If Google’s CEO actually believed that his firm was leaving money on the table by not employing enough women (or black or Hispanic) engineers due to sexism, it would be his fiduciary duty to hire far more.

But of course he has zero intention of doing much of that.

genderbent · 2017-09-26T10:57:20+00:00

Silicon Valley is an area in California that's been one of the major centres for tech in the US since the 1970s. It got that name because several early semiconductor companies were headquartered there, and it's currently the home to a bunch of major web companies like Google and Facebook.

Politically, it's kind of a shitshow, full of billionaires who like to pretend they're leftists by jumping on every social justice trend despite using every trick in the book to extract as much labour from workers as possible for the minimum pay. Basically, it's arch-capitalists who pretend to be socialists for the good PR.

Title	Could someone give me the rundown on "Silicon Valley"?
Author	SaviourScout
Upvotes	6
Comments	5
Date	September 25, 2017 7:45 PM UTC (8 years ago)
Subreddit	Posted in /r/MensRights
Original Link	https://old.reddit.com/r/MensRights/comments/72exth/could_someone_give_me_the_rundown_on_silicon/
Archive Link	https://theredarchive.com/r/MensRights/could-someone-give-me-the-rundown-on-silicon.913844 https://theredarchive.com/post/913844

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