Silicon Valley Isn’t a Meritocracy | Hacker News Reader

Silicon Valley Isn’t a Meritocracy

wired.com

117 pointsdroz180 comments

This article is largely garbage. Sure, Silicon Valley isn't a "perfect" meritocracy, but it is the most meritocratic of any other place in the world, at least that I've been in.

In Japan, and presumably other places in Asia, women are still supposed to include a photograph with their resume, and employers are reluctant to hire married women past a certain age because they feel they will get pregnant and stop working as hard. I had a friend who moved to Japan, and despite the fact that his wife was native Japanese, because she was 31 and married, she was practically unemployable. And the best he could do was get a job at coffee shop speaking English to customers. After 10 months, they moved back to the US. He hates Japan because there is no meritocracy whatsoever. Everything is based on age.

There may not be a lot of women who are CEOs of startups, but it's getting better every day, and the corporate ladder is very rewarding to smart women and minorities, at least in Silicon Valley and probably other places like NYC, LA, etc. My wife, who is in finance, went from Senior Manager to Senior Director is 3 years because she's very, very smart and the CFO recognized this and rewarded her aptly. Her bonus was >$100,000 for the 3rd year in a row, and I'm willing to bet she's made more money from her bonuses than 90% of the aspirational startup founders on HN. Her peers in finance are >60% women, and they are all extremely smart and well compensated as well. If she were living in any other country in the world, who knows if she would have been given as lucrative of an opportunity.

So sure, it's not perfect, but it's a pretty good meritocracy here, and as I said, getting better every year.

The point of the article was that we're pretending it's an almost pure meritocracy though; which itself is hampering efforts to improve on the current situation.

More than anything else it's about the tech industry being in denial about this.

but it is the most meritocratic of any other place in the world

Really? I think most pro sports leagues would give SV a run for it's money in terms of meritocracy.

To be fair, that's just beginning to change because of analytics.

You mean those with rich sugar daddy's funding them as a vanity project as most top tier football (soccer) clubs are or do you mean the socialist closed shop NFL where they only penalty for failure is the pick of next years best players.

He means the players, not the teams. Player compensation is tied more closely to performance than most other sectors, although not perfectly.

err so do the losing nfl and afl teams cut their players salarys?

Look at how hard Jeremy Lin had to fight for a spot on a team. Still lots of bias in pro sports.

I can't tell if you're serious, but Jeremy Lin isn't that good of a player.... He had an amazing run, but over time fell back to earth.

>$100,000 bonus - Haha what? What department/branch of the bank? No way is it IT. Investment? I work at a bank and the most I've gotten was $10k and that's extremely rare for anyone. Hell, making $100k salaries you need to be here for like 15 years.

I'm in the wrong fucking field.

I imagine she's not your average finance person. His whole point was that she worked hard, excelled and was recognized for that. It's probably a fairly rare occurrence. Like anything else, bonuses are top-loaded, so if she's near the top of the pile, she'll do very well.

Look around the country and I'm sure you'll find $100k bonuses in a lot of fields. It's not commonplace though.

Not IT if the CFO promoted her.

Me too. I've done pretty well for myself in tech, but if I knew how much people in finance made back when I was in college, I would have made the switch in a heartbeat.

Congratulations on your wife's success, but how does that paragraph serve your point?

    I'm willing to bet she's made more money from her bonuses than 90% of the
    aspirational startup founders on HN. Her peers in finance are >60% women,
    and they are all extremely smart and well compensated as well.

That's finance, not the startup world, and you even make the comparison yourself! Sounds like finance companies are a much more meritocratic based on your anecdote.

My point is that just because there aren't a bunch of startup founders who are women, doesn't mean that women aren't benefiting from the halo effect of meritocracy in SV. And you don't have to be a startup founder to be extremely well compensated.

Looking at Snapchat and complaining that there aren't enough women CEOs owning $4B valuation companies is not the point. It's almost ludicrous to use what is basically a black-swan, lottery ticket winner as some sort of point of comparison for progress. The real story isn't that there aren't enough of these female lottery ticket winners in SV, it's that if you are a smart and hardworking woman, you can make a lot more money than most startup founders ever will.

> ...doesn't mean that women aren't benefiting from the halo effect of meritocracy in SV.

You haven't provided any real evidence of the existence of a "halo effect of meritocracy" that is benefiting women in Silicon Valley.

There are lots of women who are well-compensated outside of Silicon Valley. Have you never met a female lawyer, doctor, investment banker, accountant, dentist, real estate agent or small business owner who lives and works outside of this area?

> It's almost ludicrous to use what is basically a black-swan, lottery ticket winner as some sort of point of comparison for progress.

That is a reasonable argument, but just because you can show that this is a less-than-convincing way of debunking the notion that Silicon Valley is a meritocracy doesn't mean that you have proven Silicon Valley is a meritocracy.

> The real story isn't that there aren't enough of these female lottery ticket winners in SV, it's that if you are a smart and hardworking woman, you can make a lot more money than most startup founders ever will.

You keep pot-shotting "startup founders" but it's not clear what point you're trying to make.

Given the high failure rate of new businesses generally, you're not saying much by pointing out that it's easier to "make a lot more money" through gainful employment than entrepreneurship. Heck, a person making minimum wage is earning "a lot more" than the broke, couchsurfing founders you will inevitably meet from time to time in Silicon Valley.

>>It's almost ludicrous to use what is basically a black-swan, lottery ticket winner as some sort of point of comparison for progress.

Entrepreneurship itself is a massive black swan event. With failure being most common outcome, and success a rarity.

The whole idea of a start up revolves around the concept of persistence. Its a long drawn battle, which demands a arduous march towards a point where some thing magical is supposed to happen. If you are not ready to put in efforts which can kill you, only face crippling failure on routine basis, don't start a company.

There is nothing fair/unfair merit or otherwise about it. This is how the game is.

Don't expect to walk into a boxing game and expect to be hit by cotton buds.

This is anecdata. And if we're being as rigorous about evidence against the claim that it's meritocratic, we need to be as rigorous as evidence affirming that it's meritocratic. This does not meet that standard.

I think it's fair to start with, "No industries or geographies are pure meritocracies." Then it's worth asking, "Where does Silicon Valley fit in the spectrum?"

Is it more or less meritocratic than teaching? Being an actuary? A politician? A banker? A lawyer? Advertising? Writing?

I don't know all of the answers, but my impression is the market forces on startups (Can you get funding? Can you get customers?) at least pushes them towards being meritocratic. Software also is more binary than fields like writing. The program does have to compile and work.

But is it a pure meritocracy? I doubt it.

It's worth noting that the term "meritocracy" was defined to be something quite different, and rather more interesting, than it's current usage:

http://www.theguardian.com/politics/2001/jun/29/comment

Somewhat similar to the "American Dream".

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/James_Truslow_Adams#American_Dr...

The thing the author is challenging here is not whether Silicon Valley is a meritocracy, but whether it is as much of a meritocracy as its participants believe. It doesn't matter much how it compares to other industries.

In my (limited) experience, among successful founders and investors -- the "trend setters" of startup culture -- there is a widely held notion that anyone with a computer, a good brain, a decent idea, a little bit of luck and the gumption to do some hard work can build a billion dollar company. The author is suggesting that this is not true.

I'd tend to believe that if you have a badass business deal that is truly worth 1B, you have know-how to get it off the ground, and have exceptional presentation skills (its all about the sell, at this point) a VC wouldn't say no because a person is black, female, gay, or all 3. VCs are their to make money, and they see white male harvard dropouts with no social life to be a safe bet. Convince them that you have a plan to net a return, that is, convince them based on your MERIT, and you'll be successful.

Meritocracy is based on merit, not "giving everyone a fair chance," even if that's what the author would prefer. Though, that's not to say that a bias doesn't exist.

It says enough that when thinking of what would overcome the obstacles of being black, female and gay you come up with a "sure-thing 1 billion dollar deal."

I'd tend to believe that if you have a badass business deal [...] a VC wouldn't say no because a person is black, female, gay, or all 3.

But what data causes you to 'tend to believe'? That assumption is kind of at the heart of the article - not that SV is a pure meritocracy (I doubt many places in the world really are) but that people's perception is that it is a lot more meritocratic than it is - and no-one ever checks to see if their perception is backed up by fact.

But what data causes you to 'tend to believe'?

Probably the same level of data behind the article we're discussing.

If she had started the article with "I'm just basing this whole article on my own biases and no real data, but..." then we wouldn't really have much to argue about.

I think in this case the article is trying to shift the burden of proof. Why should it be on someone who's asking whether it's a meritocracy rather than on the folks who're repeating this claim? And if the answer is in the affirmative, let's have that discussion.

This isn't directed at you as such. Just that a lot of folks assume the burden of proof ought to be on the questioner(s) of this proposition rather than the proponent(s).

If you're a SV demographic outsider (say: black, gay, female) it's still going to be an order of magnitude harder to raise institutional money. You're not going to socialize in the same circles and thus your referral network will be tiny. If you get a meeting, you're going to need to spend the first 15 minute somehow counteracting the generalizations piling against you.

That said, starting with the same skills and money it shouldn't be any harder to bootstrap a tech business. If you're profitable and growing, raising money should also be pretty fair. Traction is the real meritocracy.

> You're not going to socialize in the same circles and thus your referral network will be tiny.

I don't think white nerdy males from top schools (like MIT) socialize much in rich VC circles either.

They socialize with entrepreneurs and senior mgmt who have been funded by VCs - which is a common and effect intro path to said investors.

Fair enough. But I'd suggest that it's much easier to get to $20 million as a non-white-Male than it would be in most other fields with similar educations. I don't see too many non-white Males at the top of law firms, in our country's cabinet, or atop large investment banks.

But this is speculation. What would be interesting to see is hard data based on an entry point (People graduating with CS degrees applying for VC funding versus people with law degrees applying for an associate spot) and watching how the funnels change over time. This type of data has to exist somewhere. It won't prove causality, but it will at least tell part of the story better than personal experience and anecdotes.

> in our country's cabinet

http://www.whitehouse.gov/sites/default/files/20120730-cabin...

I stand corrected. I wonder how the past 20 years have looked. (Not trying to be a smartass, interested in the #s)

"Can you get funding?"

I believe that was actually part of the argument: the necessity of looking the same for the venture capitalists pushes them away from meritocracy.

And software doesn't care whether or not you dropped out of Stanford or Harvard.

The same arguments would prove that math isn't a meritocracy. Which it presumably isn't, entirely, but only because nothing is entirely. And if SV is only as much of a meritocracy as math, that's pretty good. Indeed, that's what the word means in ordinary usage.

Way to miss the point and exemplify it in the same breath.

The article is about how SV thinks it's more meritocratic than it actually is and how this false pride is a problem in and of it's own.

P.S. P.G. When this thread started I was almost tempted to make a snide comment saying "3.. 2.. 1.. Flagged off the front page."

It actually took a bit over an hour but it's now indeed been flagged off of the front page despite getting a significant number of upvotes while it was there.

Is that not just another example of allowing a vocal minority (flag-wise) to silence a majority who are apparently interested in discussions like these?

"SV thinks it's extremely meritocratic. It's only very meritocratic. This is a big problem."

I would in no way say that SV is even very meritocratic. Compare start-up demographics numbers to population-at-large numbers... The fact that commenters like you would read this article, hopefully think for half a second, and then still insist that SV is "very meritocratic" is exactly the problem.

Yes, there are too many pesky east-Asians and Indians.

There might be a Jewish problem as well.

I'm not sure if you are making an intentional reference to this or not, but it does make an interesting counter-point to the assertion that mathematics is a meritocracy: http://arxiv.org/abs/1110.1556

"This is a special collection of problems that were given to select applicants during oral entrance exams to the math department of Moscow State University. These problems were designed to prevent Jews and other undesirables from getting a passing grade. Among problems that were used by the department to blackball unwanted candidate students, these problems are distinguished by having a simple solution that is difficult to find. Using problems with a simple solution protected the administration from extra complaints and appeals. This collection therefore has mathematical as well as historical value."

(Previously discussed here: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=3096793 and here: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=4759642)

I don't think that's a counter point; it's a long discontinued practice of deliberately discriminating against people of a given race because other people of that race were too successful.

It's not something I support, by the way, in case the sarcasm in my above comment wasn't apparent.

It is one example (of many) of access to a mathematics education not being a meritocracy. In the linked discussions on that paper, there are people arguing that this practice is ongoing in the US (although tweaked a bit to be less obvious).

Regardless, I think it is important to realize that access to a [mathematics] education not being a meritocracy is different from mathematics itself not being a meritocracy. It is related, so this is only a partial counterpoint, but I think it is interesting to consider nevertheless. Certainly one has to keep in mind that biases in our education system will influence what we see in industry, even if the industry really is a meritocracy.

Isn't that the definition of "positive discrimination" and "affirmative action" ? Both of which are most certainly in wide use today.

The problem, I think, is external to SV. It's not that women and minorities find themselves blocked within SV - it's that they don't get into that path in the first place. The problem starts long before someone gets the opportunity to drop out of Stanford CS to pursue their dream of selling Facebook for Cats to herd-mentality VCs.

And what if it's only moderately meritocratic? Or even below average?

I'd love for PG to run an analysis once of what words occur most frequently in flagged posts and their comments.

I don't think you could get a better representation of this community's unspoken biases than that.

I'm also pretty sure you'd find that words like feminism, female, sexism e.a. would feature quite high on the list.

Maybe the community has a bias against pointless class warfare. You want to make an effective feminist statement in Silicon Valley? Start with a github profile.

Right, right. Let's skirt past the idea that men may be in any way responsible for the industry they dominate, and focus on the fact that women aren't creating enough GitHub profiles or having enough hackathons.

In addition to shifting the blame, this is a convenient way to avoid taking any sort of responsibility for our own behavior or our peers, so congratulations on squaring that circle.

This community, like most others, has an unspoken bias against third-wave feminist bullies.

Look what happened to the "Atheism Plus" communities. They have been completely taken over by bigoted "social justice warriors" and their activism.

Completely.

Atheism is almost never discussed. And when it is, it is always discussed in the context of third-wave post-modern feminism. Think I'm lying? Take a look at any Atheism Plus community. Any!

Once a community accepts the tenants of post-modern discourse, it's over.

SV believes so strongly that it's meritocratic, that every successful person believes they deserve it. That's a problem.

Why is that a problem? Because someone who can say with moral certainty "this is my money, I earned" is not an easy mark for the sort of people who produce nothing but demand an equal share of the work of others? Because they won't subscribe to the ridiculous notion that there is no virtue in creating wealth but only virtue in giving it away? Maybe that is precisely why those who produce nothing hate the concept of meritocracy so much. It makes it harder for them to guilt people into giving away what they rightfully earned.

It's important to be able to tell the difference between something you earned and something you were given without earning it.

If someone fails, does that necessarily mean they didn't deserve success? Or is it possible that external forces took from them something they had, "with moral certainty", earned?

The article points out that white males are overrepresented in SV success stories. Are you going to argue that they are dozens of times more productive than women, or non-white people?

Let me make the point in a way that does not pit groups of people against each other. If you do the same thing over and over, hustling and making pitches, and then one day you get someone to fund you, does that make you inherently better on that day? Do you have more "virtue" on that day than you did the day before?

Let's say someone founds a company and it fails. This person feels like they didn't deserve to fail, so they start another company and it succeeds. This person will take the success as s true measure of what they deserve, and will ignore the failure as a fluke. But they will look at failed companies around them and feel superior, even though they also failed once.

There are lots of people founding similar companies, making similar pitches to the same investors. I can't see an argument that they "deserve" wildly different valuations.

Holding wealth creation as a virtue devolves very quickly into worshiping money. Anyone with money is to be respected, and anyone who doesn't have money has nothing interesting to say.

You begin from the premise that everyone who believes they have earned their money is correct. This is why the phrase "born on third base, think they hit a triple" was born.

It's fine if your premise is that people who have money deserve it a priori. But let's be honest. A great many haven't worked orders of magnitude harder despite orders of magnitude greater wealth. A great many are not themselves (but for their wealth) orders of magnitude inherently more valuable to society than everyone who has less.

In your mind, is it possible for someone to disagree with the article without "exemplifying the problem"?

That's the issue with first-world "social-justice warriors", like the author of the linked opinion piece. If you disagree with their premises on factual grounds, you're labeled as part of the problem. It makes honest discussion impossible.

For example, you completely ignored the point that PG made. You didn't even attempt to address it. You just labeled him as the enemy and went on to make your own point.

He made a good point, but in my mind, he didn't go far enough. Both (American) mathematics and SV are disproportionately dominated by east-Asians and Indians relative to their respective population sizes. Why does everyone ignore this?

In post-modern Marxist discourse, who is speaking matters more than what is being said[1]. There is literally no way a white male could win the argument. Since he belongs to the oppressive/over class, his viewpoint is corrupted and invalid.

By the way, this is the bread and butter of what they teach to kids in the soft majors in university nowadays.

[1] http://www.arts.uwaterloo.ca/~kwesthue/regiftedxmas12.html

It's a shame that love and compassion has indeed left both the liberal arts educations as well as the worlds of business and entrepreneurship. But fear not, there is a coming Romantic Renaissance! Once again our children will turn to poetry, the arts and the love and celebration of their neighbors!

The danger isn't in rationalism, or in relativism, or in whatever weird and distorted man-made system of thought is de rigueur.

The danger is that the love of every man leaves our hearts and souls.

All systems of thought are ultimately erroneous because they must have been made by a single subjective vantage point. The truth comes from without, not from within.

This is the message in all great and lasting art. I dare you to find me a great song or a great poem where the messages of eternal and unending love for our brothers and sisters are not at the root of their creation!

I'd quote some poetry here, but I'm afraid the lot of your are quite illiterate! I apologize to those who do have a love of letters, but hopefully you'll grant me the license to call out this forum of philistines!

Art wins! Love is real!

I am seriously trying to figure out if you are trolling or not. I mean, there's something to what you're saying here. Just that you've picked the weirdest-ass venue for it. You're not supposed to give a shit about your fellow human being if he or she is (imputatively) genetically incapable of or unwilling to perform the same feats of achievement as you.

> " I dare you to find me a great song or a great poem where the messages of eternal and unending love for our brothers and sisters are not at the root of their creation!"

I am guessing he is not sincere, unless he has something against instrumental pieces...

I am completely sincere and I was referring to all manner of artistic creation.

Are you familiar with the concept of poetic license or has your digital life completely beaten out any sense of art from your world?

The main problem here is the age old dichotomy of Dionysus and Apollo... er, I'm sorry if I resort to stories, shall I instead delve in to the labyrinthine machination of modern philosophical thought? But then don't you see the amount of wasted effort that poets have to go through to "convince"? Again, the burden of proof shouldn't be on me to convince you that "seeing is not believing". I can't ever prove that to you, or to anyone. I'm not choosing the life of a missionary, rather a story teller.

If this doesn't make sense, I'm sorry, but I guess I need to enter your maze...

I think the main issue in Silicon Valley is the emphasis on rationalism. There is no art or love. There is rampant irreligious sentiment. There is rampant disbelief in the magical nature of our reality. You can say it isn't magical and it is completely rational, but the truth of the matter is you can't ever prove that. You can only theorize. The problem arrises when you start to put your misplaced faith in to science and technology. That's the fucking problem here!

Misplaced faith, faith in the creations of men, and not faith in fellow men, is the fucking problem.

Faith in Seasteading, Transhumanism... faith that men will become transcendent, hero worship... it is all signs that people have turned away from humanity!

Put your faith in to your fellow men directly, not through the lens of something else.

Stop building fucking mazes for your desires to get lost in to! Online dating sites? Social networks?

"There is literally no way a white male could win the argument."

Where to begin?

"win the argument" -- in what other way could anyone "win" the argument? Who's the referee? This is such a backward and binary way of looking at this topic.

And that's as if the only way for this to move forward is to win or lose, and as if a white male must naturally adopt a dissenting opinion.

As for the rest, who knows? You can of course find the least articulate, most extreme examples of a heterogenous group of people and argue with that, and maybe you'll "win" the argument. But you haven't really contributed anything to the dialog except criticize something most people already disagree with. It's kind of a waste.

PG either failed to grasp or completely ignored the point the article made and immediately went on to reiterate how SV is nearly as much of a meritocracy as his perception of a near perfect meritocracy (math.)

By doing so he gave an almost painfully accurate example of the problem the article addressed, hence my use of the word "exemplifies."

As for the east-Asians and Indians; I've never heard anything but positive stereotypes about them when it comes to programming. It's worth considering that that itself might be contributing to their disproportionate presence to some degree (i.e. in which way does causality go in this case.)

> "As for [...] Indians; I've never heard anything but positive stereotypes about them when it comes to programming."

I find that incredibly hard to believe. There are a lot of racist ideas and stereotypes surrounding Indian programmers. For just a small taste of it, coming from or perceived by this community, search "indian programmers" with quotes on hnsearch. Pages and pages of people either making negative generalizations about Indian programmers, or pointing out that other people make negative generalizations about them.

This community tends to put a damper on that sort of thing, so rest assured that there are plenty of people who have opinions a lot stronger than they are willing to voice on this site.

You're correct. I should have limited myself to saying that at least there are stereotypes (and a few key public role-models) of well-adjusted, successful Asian and Indian entrepreneurs.

The point I was trying to make, staying with the spirit of the article, was that these stereotypes and the reality we see influence each other to a much greater degree than we often dare to admit.

To be fair, if you accept the premise that Silicon Valley is driven by power and prejudice rather than merit (for the record, I reject it), then clearly, pg is part of the problem. That doesn't mean you reject his argument, it means you ignore it as an irrelevant analogy.

I think it's a lot more interesting to take pg's argument in a different direction. If you accept the premise that intellect is evenly distributed regardless of race or gender (for the record, I accept it), then why is mathematics dominated by white males? Because it's an observable fact.

Start applying Five Whys and see what happens.

Interesting example, both math and entrepreneurship are abound in examples of people making a big splash after going off on their own. From mathematics, people like Srinivasa Ramanujan and Gottfried Leibniz made an impact despite lacking formal mathematics educations. Their results spoke for them, not their credentials.

Edit: Nash apparently did study mathematics, not sure what I was remembering...

Better examples of autodidact mathematicians are Galois and George Green.

Those are indeed better examples, though I had to look them up. The history of mathematics is really something I should read more about.

That's an interesting question, is there an institution or subculture in the world that is more meritocratic than Silicon Valley? If there is, then the author's argument has some merit. If there isn't, then the author is wasting time attacking the one institution that comes the closest to embodying the meritocracy ideal. To what end?

That is an interesting question. I still can't think of one better than math and the hard sciences, which in my experience are roughly tied with SV.

The to what end question is easy to answer though. It gets you a lot more attention to claim SV isn't a meritocracy than to claim that math isn't.

> math and the hard sciences, which in my experience are roughly tied with SV

Can you point me to the great mathematical and hard science accomplishments going on right now?

All I see is ad sales and hucksterism.

> is there an institution or subculture in the world that is more meritocratic than Silicon Valley?

Obviously professional sport. Especially "one-dimensional" sports like running or swimming. The "best" runners in the world are so named because they consistently run the fastest. There are some qualifiers in terms of who has the time and money to train, and access to coaching, but all in all it's highly meritocratic.

The end is to sell her book, which is published tomorrow.

That's an interesting question, is there an institution or subculture in the world that is more meritocratic than Silicon Valley?

Jobs where the individual’s numbers are everything, like sales and trading.

If there isn't, then the author is wasting time attacking the one institution that comes the closest to embodying the meritocracy ideal.

The author makes the mistake of looking at Silicon Valley as a monolithic institution. There are many different aspects to life as a dev.

Having said that, coding ability isn’t >*. Things like culture fit and the ability to work with other people also factor in, unless you go the solo dev route. Also, there are still a lot of idiots getting promoted, like the people that end up populating the tales of The Daily WTF.

I would submit that mind sports are the most meritocratic subculture; performance is statistically ranked and sometimes measured directly.

And........ we find that there are no women at the top.

There is 1 woman in the top 100 at speedcubing [1].

There is 1 woman in the top 100 at chess.

There are only a few women in the top 100 at scrabble [2].

There is only one woman in the top 100 at Go (EGF).

[1] http://rcm-papers.info/gender-and-speedcubing.html

[2] http://rcm-papers.info/gender-and-scrabble.html

Here's one story of why a girl quit playing competitive chess as a teenager: http://fanoudraws.tumblr.com/post/68091072768/sorry-this-pos...

Math is a field famously overrun with white men. Probably not the best comparison to make if you really want to talk about what a "meritocracy" should look like. Unless, of course, you think white men naturally have more merit than everyone else..

I never thought I'd live to see Marxists attack Math with their class war nonsense, but there you go. Shameless.

So anyone who questions merit vs privilege is "Marxist"?

Maybe I'm just dumb, but I don't see any Marxism here.

Cultural Marxism substitutes white male oppressors for capitalist oppressors. The rest of the philosophy is strikingly similar.

"Cultural Marxism"? When did Marx talk about culture in that way? He spoke very directly of class and economics. What similarities are you perceiving here? Expectations of equal opportunity are far different from the inversion of political subjugation that Marx proposed.

Honestly, I think you're just tossing the word "Marxist" in as a form of name-calling, with no viable connection to your point.

Do you believe there are a large number of people in {white/asian men}^C who are good at math but unable to progress in the world of math?

So just because white men predominate in a field that automatically makes the field less meritocratic? If you live in a society where white men have more access to the tools that will allow them to forge their merit, when those white males encounter a meritocracy they will naturally rise to the top. You can argue that the society where these men come from is not meritocratic, but you can not argue that the field they enter is not meritocratic just because they are over represented.

Notice that if any other group is proportionately overrepresented in a population, it can still be "meritocratic". It is only if there are too many white men, and only white men, that a group can no longer be considered meritocratic.

Meanwhile, people tend to forget that half of successful startup founders are immigrants, including large portions from China and India. Most tech companies I've seen are not very white. If Silicon Valley is a good old boys network, the good old boys have done a terrible job at exclusion.

Also, apparently women from other countries didn't get the memo that the tech industry is sexist, and they come in droves to Silicon Valley to kick ass and chew bubble gum.

The plural of anecdote is not data, let alone the singular.

> Notice that if any other group is proportionately overrepresented in a population, it can still be "meritocratic".

false. a meritocratic system will very closely match the demographics of the population at large, because no given demographic is inherently better at a given task[1].

> It is only if there are too many white men, and only white men, that a group can no longer be considered meritocratic.

it's no coincidence that most un-meritocratic systems are overrun with white men-- white men are, historically, a priviledged group. so, of course, if a system values privilege over merit, one will see more white men. is that really that hard to understand?

[1] there are, of course, some small differences in average ability among different populations, but in most every case this is not the overriding factor leading to population imbalances in a given field.

You realize that it is trivially easy to falsify your worldview by glancing at, say, Asian American SAT statistics? Measured ability varies widely across population groups, and not always in white guys' favor. Otherwise, every profession from the NBA to electrical engineering would be perfectly balanced like a college recruiter's pamphlet.

Your statement is just a statement of faith, contradicting all available evidence.

The burden of proof doesn't rest on the person arguing against your borderline phrenological explanations of intelligence.

And yes, faith in humanity IS needed for an enlightened thinker.

The meaning and purpose of life will never be proven. There is plenty of room for faith in our world of rationalism.

You need more art in your life! The world is more than just a bunch of metrics in a spreadsheet to fret and argue about.

We should be skeptical of superstitions, but not skeptical of love, truth, and beauty! Don't misinterpret the quest of the Enlightenment! To listen to love and to live!

How is "different genes have different impact on different mental tasks" anything like a phrenological explanation?

Because it makes it easy to keep his faux-outrage going.

Don't project your misery on to me my friend, it is wasted breathe! I've got the fire of life on my tongue and your motivations are but wisps of faint discontent. In the raging flames of passion all you can see are your own fallacies.

(get it, the play on "faux outrage"? faux/fallacies, outrage/raging flames? sorry to ruin the poem for you, but you know, part of the problem here is that too few people on this forum have ever learned how to read/listen/see...)

I did get it, and it was very well done :)

That's a well stated argument, and it's definitely true that you can't look at the tech industry in a vacuum. But I think it would be very difficult to argue both that US/Western/California society is sexist in a way that prevents women from entering the field, and also that all the men that entered the field have magically freed themselves from the sexist cultural biases and attitudes of the larger society they grew up in.

Also, in this scenario, even if the tech industry is not actively sexist, it is being affected by the sexism of the wider society - and, if you think there is anything wrong with that (eg decreased pool of potential employees/founders/idea people), then it is quite possible to make tech-industry-specific moves that counter the extra disadvantages imposed from outside the industry, like affirmative action programs for girls that give them increased access to the tools that will allow them to forge their merit, even when you can't quite identify the process that is reducing their access in the first place. In fact I think that for a field which prides itself on solving big problems, saying 'it's not us it's the rest of society' is a cop-out, and to agree with your statement and not support affirmative action in some form is equivalent to supporting entrenched sexism.

There is a huge difference between saying "tech industry, you are so innovative, why don't you look at this problem and see if there is something you can do to fix it" and saying "tech industry, you are racist, sexist, misogynist, and you should be ashamed of yourselves". I am all for the tech industry finding solutions to hard problems, and I am all against the tech industry being blamed for something it did not cause.

Yes, and 'tech industry, you are so sexist and should be ashamed of yourselves' is a reasonable response to people saying 'Lack of women in tech is clearly a sign that women don't want to be in tech/aren't suited to it because anyone can enter tech and pitch a VC if they want', or 'Affirmative action will just mean there are incompetent females getting ahead at the expense of more competent males' (see the complaints about the Etsy scholarships, for instance: usually comes with complete denial of any systemic disadvantages).

I guess in these cases they are being blamed for not seeing the problem and so perpetuating it, rather than for causing it. But at some point it seems reasonable to say that ignoring or denying the existence of something so well-studied is wilful rejection that makes you part of the problem. How about the phrasing 'tech industry, you are perpetuating sexism/racism even if you don't intend to and you should be ashamed of yourselves'?

is a reasonable response to people saying 'Lack of women in tech is clearly a sign that women don't want to be in tech/aren't suited to it because anyone can enter tech and pitch a VC if they want'

Is there any argument against your views for which an ad-hominem attack would not be a reasonable counterargument?

What if those young white men are all working in companies that depend on VC capital to survive and thrive? And what if the VC investment decisions are also made by young white men?

That is the real Silicon Valley of today.

Math is a good analogy, because I think it illustrates the real question here -- to what degree should we care about the pipeline into the meritocracy?

Is a meritocracy effective if it's selecting the most deserving candidates from a skewed pool? Can we call it a meritocracy? Is it fair, for that matter, to evaluate a meritocracy by expecting an even distribution among attributes like gender or ethnicity?

> But if the tech scene is really a meritocracy, why are so many of its key players, from Mark Zuckerberg to Steve Jobs, white men?

a jewish guy and a half arab guy aren't exactly the best examples of the point this guy's trying to make.

there's also no shortage of asian and indian "key players" so ... i think this guy is trying to make one point, but accidentally making another point altogether, and then failing at it.

In what ways a jewish white man is not a white man ?

It's a serious question, are people of jewish faith not considered "white" in the US ?

it depends on who you ask.

and what decade you ask it in.

You know full well what decade we're in, and virtually everyone today outside an Aryan Nations get-together is going to call Zuckerberg a white guy.

you are delusional if you think jewish is uniformly accepted as 'white', even today.

it's not. full stop.

You call him delusional yet offer not one bit of real evidence.

It's complicated. Jewish is a religion as well as an ethnicity.

The much-before-CE cult turned into a religion turned into one of the longest running breeding experiments we have. The historical focus on internal tribal mating self-selected certain superpowers (e.g. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ashkenazi_Jewish_intelligence) that come in quite handy these days.

I think the author's greater point is correct but you're right, those two are terrible choices. I also think most people would not stop and question whether Jobs & Zuck are "white" and that says something about how we pick and choose who is "white." I'm black and I remember a time in high school where I was planning a trip to a baseball game with my friends (who were white) and one friends' father told us "I don't like the idea of you three white kids in that neighborhood late at night." Which was funny because, as I said, I'm black but he certainly didn't see me as so in that context. People use race to describe how they think of another person as much as they use race to describe skin colors.

Also, this statement isn't proof of anything! Assuming white males have the same probability of being successful as any other demographic and there also happen to be more white male engineers, then it makes sense that the majority of "key players" in the computer industry will be white males!

It would be much more convincing if the author said X% in the industry are white males and Y% of CEOs/founders are white males.

It's important to separate the argument that society is failing in encouraging/promoting engineers outside of certain demographics and the argument that Silicon Valley is unfairly supporting one demographic over another.

of the point this guy's trying to make

i think this guy

I think this post makes the article's point nicely.

(take another look at the article byline, and lookup the author on Google)

well the point specifically said white men. not men, white men. i was reacting to the content - what does it matter who wrote it? aren't we discussing ideas here?

The article was written by a woman, so why would you assume it was written by a man? We're discussing ideas, yes, and those ideas have a lot to do with gender.

> so why would you assume it was written by a man?

i dunno, maybe it's because i'm sexist, misogynist asshole that supports the patriarchy?

you people are making a mockery of yourselves, to be honest. it's kind of pathetic.

Why do you care about the gender of the author so much? I thought we were supposed to evaluate things based on merit...

Not the parent, but I can't be the only guy who uses "guy" as a synonym for "person" (i.e., not necessarily "male person").

She might be referring to the 36M African-Americans & 50M Hispanich-Americans in this country. So American still has a White majority at around 60% of the population.

In the year 2010, only 36 million African-Americans in the US, is that right? http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Demographics_of_the_United_Stat...

Anyway, these groups are under-represented in the Technology field. I heard one response that maybe these groups "don't value education" - I don't know how to respond to that one actually.

>I heard one response that maybe these groups "don't value education" - I don't know how to respond to that one actually.

I'm not sure about Hispanics, but this is definitely a problem in many African-American communities. It's considered 'white' or essentially bending over for the system if you go to school and actually try.

I think that's the general idea. Going to school - rather than getting a job right away - is considered a waste of resources, or elitist and therefore a rejection of one's community.

For some reason, education does not carry the stigma of sports or the arts or business in these communities.

It is trendy to talk about Women in technology, but we need to think about Race and technology. Everyone notices it nobody wants to talk about it.

Coming from a poor black community I have heard that many times, but only from people that would never be able to obtain higher education for some reason outside of their control. I think it is more so an excuse, or a way to feel better about their own situation.

However, often times when someone has a valid opportunity it's usually encouraged

I am so happy that this view is being shared - so happy, in fact, that I created a HN username just so I could comment on it. I am female and graduated from MIT several years ago. While I was there, tech entrepreneurship far and away the sexiest thing to be doing. It was at the point where you felt like a loser if you didn't have your own startup.

Unfortunately, this fetishization of startups resulted in many ideas that were, to put it bluntly, stupid. I couldn't believe how many people - including investors, not just students - were obsessed with creating iPhone apps and social media networks.

I had a telling encounter a year ago with a woman who ran an incubator; it was somewhat tech-focused, but also had a creative bent and was partially funded by state money for assisting small businesses. I wanted to invest my money locally (a la Slow Money - www.slowmoney.org ) and was looking for mentors and partners. We had a long conversation during which this woman said things like, "what a great idea, I've never heard of anything like that before". At the end of it, though, she asked: "so let me get this straight. Are you an innovator, or do you just want to fund innovators?". This kind of myopia about what constitutes innovation devalues the contributions of non-tech entrepreneurs (and many others, too); furthermore, it discourages young people from attacking important problems outside of technology.

Interestingly, the Economist had an article recently about how public veneration of the tech elite may be ending: http://www.economist.com/news/21588893-tech-elite-will-join-.... Even though I'm part of this group, I'm glad this issue is being discussed.

Sadly, this article has already been kicked off the HN frontpage by the "flamewar" filter, and the comments here (including from HN's illustrious founder, Paul Graham) illustrate just how resistant tech types are to the mere suggestion that factors beyond individual gumption play into their successes.

' Helene Ahl found that in business discourse 70 percent of words used to describe entrepreneurs were male-gendered — these included “self-reliant”, “assertive”, “forceful”, “risk-taking”, “self-sufficient”, “leader”, “competitive”, and “ambitious”.'

I don't see anything male about any of these words, I know many women who can be accurately described by these words, as well as many men who cannot. Why is the author conflating being male with these descriptions? I find the assertion that those words are indeed "male-gendered" very disturbing.

There's a very deep rabbit-hole of feminist studies...

Regardless of your sex, you're going to have a tough time as a startup founder if you can't embody those qualities. As of yet, there is no affirmative action in startups, so it's put up or get an easier job.

That's the point, no? "male or female, you will only succeed if you can act in these typically male ways, regardless of how good your idea and execution are." Therefore, the tech scene is clearly not judging you solely on your idea and execution as they believe they are.

Those qualities are what's needed to build something out of nothing. It has never been easy. If you don't think females can do it, well that sounds sexist to me.

Nobody has a magic wand they can wave to give startup success to timid, easily defeated people. If it is your nature to make excuses, I suggest you go get a government job. No amount of feminist cultural revolution is going to convince VCs to throw away their money in order to be politically correct.

No, most of those qualities are what it takes to make other people believe you can build something. It's an important distinction between 'people who can build amazing products' and 'people who can convince PG/YC that they should be given money because they can build amazing products', and the areas where the two do not overlap are the ones which demonstrate that SV is not a strict meritocracy based on tech skills and execution. You may be attempting to argue that it is a strict meritocracy based on 'the skill of convincing people that you are worth giving money to', and I might agree, but that is not what people generally seem to think they are arguing when they say SV is a meritocracy (although I think there is increasing recognition for this, based on slight differences in the themes of articles across HN).

How is assertive "male" gendered?

I don't think that that was Ahl's intentions when she labelled those terms as 'male-gendered'. I do not believe that she meant they were male-gendered like say.. 'he' or 'him'.

Likely, male-genderedness is suppose to mean something along the lines of "without additional information, most people would assume these words refer to a male rather than a female". The point isn't that you can't use these words to describe females, or that all males can be described by this, but that people just associate these words with males. For example, "chopsticks" -> asian, "NBA basketball player" -> African American.

This could actually be studied (though I can't find any studies... my social sciences research-fu is apparently really weak), and could actually be proven (as much as such things could be proven).

That said, without the proof that they actually are male-gendered, it's kinda flimpsy.

> "without additional information, most people would assume these words refer to a male rather than a female"

Surely that is the problem. The problem isn't that those traits are seen as desirable or common for entrepreneurs. The problem is the people think those traits can only be found in men.

Particularly the idea that "self-reliance" is a male trait is a classic example of something that feminists have been successfully refuting for decades. It should be very clear that the notion that women cannot be self-reliant is very old fashioned; if that attitude is still present in the bay area, then it needs to be stomped out.

Maybe. So there are two branch points for this, and one little thing first.

Firstly, I don't think anyone ever thinks that those traits can only be found in men. It's just that they believe that its more likely men to have those traits. Like the chopstick example I gave, no one is ever going to say only asians use chopsticks, and if you told them that the person in question was actually white, they likely wouldn't bat an eye. But their first guess would be asian. So it's not really a problem, because that situation doesn't really exist.

But say we adjust and say the problem is that people think its more common for men to have those traits. Then:

A) Someone comes up with a very good way of measuring those traits. Say it actually turns out to be pretty objective and repeatable and consistent. And then they go out into the field and test a representative sample of North Americans. And then they find that amongst North American men and women, men do score higher in those traits by meaningful measurements of "higher" (say both a higher mean, and an asymmetric distribution shifted towards the higher end).

Now, I'm not saying that that's true, nor do I want that to be true. But if it -is- true, then it turns out people are right! Their intuition matches reality. Now what? Maybe the problem is that its actually true, and we have to dwelve into nature vs nurture and all that "good" stuff. And this is honestly something we have to consider. Given the self-reinforcing nature of society/cultural pressures, and the non-trivial possibility that there are actual biological differences that will bias the traits of the genders, it's actually possible that some sort of difference could be found.

B) Same thing as above regarding reliable tests, but the tests come out negative. No meaningful differences between genders. Well then yes, we have a problem.

I don't think that skill with chopsticks is a good comparison. Chopsticks are an invention with an invention date and location that give them a very tangible cultural association to this day.

The traits listed in the article are not skills with a certain tool, they are more accurately described as personality traits. Men didn't invent and popularize them. There is no inventor of self-reliance, that is something that anybody can exhibit. (And even if we look at so called "traditional" gender roles in society, how many single men raising children are there? How many single women? Anyone saying that women cannot be self-reliant is delusional).

If we want to stick with a 'skill with invention' analogy, why not plow? If I told you that somebody was skilled with a plow, would you first guess that they were Egyptian?

No, that's Ahl's intentions. Check the previous quote: "celebrating masculine concepts of control, competition, rationality, dominance, etc."

Apparently she believes being rational is a masculine concept.

It's about taking traits that occur more frequently in men (whether they're due to nature or nurture is irrelevant) and then using them as the scales on which to evaluate entrepreneurs. There's no reason why entrepreneurs shouldn't be described as caring, holistic, fair, benevolent, cooperative.

A good example of these kinds of hidden biases is that I've found that women tend to prefer presenting their business in a calm narrative that allows them to connect emotionally with the audience.

Most startup pitches however are designed for a rapid-fire, fast one-minute, high-energy, show-time kind of 'pitch,' which to a large degree is a display of masculinity and thus a playing field where women are at a disadvantage because they either need to bend the rules to fit their natural presentation style or imitate an unnatural presentation style; both of which are disadvantageous to them.

I still remember being at this accelerator pitch where we saw tons of decidedly mediocre companies pitch and then there was this one women who had such a powerful presence and decided to bend the rules. She extended her time from one to two minutes on the spot and convinced the event organizers to go along with that in such a beautiful display of female dominance and went on to deliver a great story that emotionally connected with almost everyone in the audience.

In the end she didn't go on to the next round of course because well ... she broke the rules ...

This is the kind of rubbish that actually perpetuates sexism in the name of fighting it. "Leader" is a male-gendered word, are you kidding me?

So I was editing OpenStreetMap the other day, because I wanted to fill in the shops in my neighbourhood.

They have a feature where you can see all the editors that are near you. There were dozens of them, and they were all men.

Why? What could possibly be preventing women from editing OpenStreetMap? Why are men at the vanguard of this project? This project is good for society, and I saw no women.

I was actually surprised, after the Wikipedia-is-dominated-by-men articles from a few months ago. I expected that women would purposely be seeking out opportunities to contribute in other areas.

In a few years when OpenStreetMap is larger, feminists will complain that there aren't enough women editors, and that men are preventing them. But men aren't preventing them.

When there's nothing preventing your group from doing something, and your group is under-represented, it is your group's fault.

Alternately, when you assume there's nothing preventing someone from doing something, that doesn't mean there's nothing preventing it. First rule of debugging should be to not walk in with a bunch of assumptions and jump to conclusions based on them.

Start following out the logic of your concluding sentence, and it leads to "groups of people are unsuccessful because they are lazy and/or stupid". Is that really a conclusion you expect to reach, or that sounds right to you? If not, then maybe your assumptions are flawed.

Two economists see a Ferrari. "I want one of those", says the first. "Obviously not", says the other.

The article, like most following this formula, assume that because rewards are not distributed among a sufficiently racially/sexually diverse group, meritocracy must therefore be absent. They fail to account for the possibility that merit might not be distributed in the manner that they think.

Agreed. However, an uneven distribution of merit might still be a social problem; it might be indicative of vast inequality of opportunity for developing said merit. However, in this case, the problem is not one specific to silicon valley in any sense.

In fact, a true meritocracy in a very competitive field is more likely to exacerbate the differences that already exist in society and result in an extremely uneven distribution. In a non-merit based industry uncle Bob can get a top job for his 3 children, and his friend's children regardless of gender, race, and any other characteristics. He can also appease reporters that criticize the distribution of his company and hire more people in the less represented populations to correct the problem. In a purely meritocratic field uncle Bob has no influence, no control, and each of the kids has to fight his or her way in. All uncle Bob can do is pay for the best education and the best opportunities for his children to compete in the meritocracy. To the extent that there are small inequalities among the population, those with the most resources will prepare their kids best to compete, and those kids will be over represented in the most competitive fields. The fact that the tech industry is dominated by white males only indicates that it is very competitive, and that white males historically have had a leg up in American society. A leg up that the meritocracy is quickly erasing.

The war on the word "meritocracy" is just weird. You can just watch it bubble up through twitter to large blogs, to wired.

The weird thing about it is the people who hate the word are arguing not against the actual usage -- "people who demonstrate their merit get ahead" -- but against the illiberal definition they've assigned to it: "people who have inherent merit get ahead".

Disclaimer: I'm not familiar with the valley, and if there really are a bunch of young white males with the right "pedigree" who are getting money thrown at them without having demonstrated any real merit, then I withdraw my objection. However, if they're getting money for things that you don't think have merit, like the Nth photo sharing app, then I think it stands.

> if there really are a bunch of young white males with the right "pedigree" who are getting money thrown at them without having demonstrated any real merit, then I withdraw my objection

That's exactly what happens. You are much, much more likely to get funded if you're a young white (or perhaps asian) guy doing an undergrad at Stanford than if you're a black woman studying at Berkeley. Now, you can hand-wave about connections, and entrepreneurial culture or what have you, but at some level, that just reinforces the point.

There are hugely disproportionately more Indians and East-Asians than there are whites in the Silicon Valley. Why do you think that is?

So where is your data showing that?

http://www.cbinsights.com/blog/venture-capital/venture-capit...

According to that report, 87% of funded founders are white; 92% of funded founders are male.

You said: You are much, much more likely to get funded if you're a young white (or perhaps asian) guy doing an undergrad at Stanford than if you're a black woman studying at Berkeley.

Your data does not show this. You'd need the denominators as well, you have only the numerators.

But what percentage of applicants were neither white or male? Without knowing that your statement is essentially propaganda dressed up as statistics.

Likewise, can we get some data providing (e.g.) negative indicators that race is a factor? A lack of correlation between gender/race and achievement would be useful.

As I said upthread, I don't think the burden of proof should rest solely on people who're questioning whether SV is basically a meritocracy. Either it's relatively easy to demonstrate that the claim is sound, or we have a lot more discussion ahead of us.

The important piece is not even so much to say categorically that "it's not a meritocracy," but to make the claim for data reciprocal. Ideally both positions should supply data, and in general I don't believe people expect data from folks who say "SV is meritocratic." People will rush to poke holes in people's arguments who claim the contrary, but I see a dearth of data & skepticism supporting the affirmative case.

If we're all supposed to be skeptical nerds, maybe we should apply a little more skepticism towards positions that, to skeptics like ourselves, would seem self-serving (i.e. it's basically is a meritocracy and therefore we needn't worry or take action).

What percentage of black female CS grads from Berkeley can't get their startups funded? It would surprise me to hear there were many, because the CS grads I've known from Berkeley are very good

My take on this, and I have spent some time in SV working at a startup in Redwood City, is that SV does NOT attract the best and the brightest. Instead it attracts a gaggle of me-too-ers who apply cargo cultism to ape the successful companies. This actually has the effect of REDUCING innovation because the startup culture is afraid to try new things, afraid to build on something tried and tested in the MidWest or New York because they are worshiping at the temple of Sandhill Road.

It is not just an issue with women (who the article quite rightly points out, have a great track record of starting successful businesses) but it is also an issue with age and with experience. SV often rejects people who are not young enought purely for ageist reasons but it also rejects those who are too experienced, too educated. The kind of people that built NASA are persona non grata in SV.

There are still some smart people coming out of SV because of Stanford and UC Berkeley being there, but if those two schools moved away, the whole house of cards would collapse.

>Helene Ahl found that in business discourse 70 percent of words used to describe entrepreneurs were male-gendered — these included “self-reliant”, “assertive”, “forceful”, “risk-taking”, “self-sufficient”, “leader”, “competitive”, and “ambitious”.

What a load of feminist rubbish on the front page.

I agree with most of what this article is saying, but the existence of YC is a perfect counter-argument. Although I've disagreed with PG regarding his opinions on "Zuckerberg-likeness" being important in founders, I know that YC selects for merit above all else.

How do I know this? Because PG has stated many times that he is excited about founders from the University of Waterloo in Canada, which used to be unknown on the international level. Clearly, after having met some incredibly talented founders, the YC team has calibrated its "prestige" ranking to match their observations based upon UW founder success.

To me, this is as close as one can get to a merit based system. Hire based on reputation, but adjust your reputation based upon the data you collect in real time. And most importantly, give everyone a fair chance. Never disqualify anyone preemptively without viewing their application.

Furthermore, as far as VCs are involved, there can be no better stamp on your resume than having gone through a program like YC.

Now, the counterpoint to all this is that, ideally, you should be able to crowd source/bootstrap this whole thing as a solo founder because you have merit. I think we are definitely moving in that direction, but some ventures will always be more capital intensive in terms of burn rate. As such, incubators and VCs will still be the "safe" path for fast growing and/or very ambitious companies.

You do know waterloo is where some of the builders/inventors of colossus ended up post ww2 and has along history in computing.

I'd disagree with that one data point proving too much. For a start, I don't think it contradicts the "Zuckerberg-ness" issue- graduates from Waterloo are also very likely to be hoodie-wearing white men, I don't think that being Canadian counts as particularly 'diverse'.

Sure, PG is open to graduates that aren't from Ivy League universities. That's one factor. There are a lot of others.

Waterloo has been prestigious for at least 5 years (when I was applying it was among the hardest Canadian universities to get into, and it was already globally recognized). The only thing that has changed is more VC money, and more startup incubators, drawing the interest of progressively larger institutions.

I think the whole "meritocratic" argument is stupid. But it's worth pointing out that Waterloo is a self-fulfilling prophecy: a lot of startups are being founded because a lot of support and infrastructure is being thrown at the students. Whether the students are more suitable than others is anyone's guess, but they're in the right place at the right time (and they can afford the tuition).

Whether or not Waterloo is a self-fulfilling prophecy, after having professional experience with Waterloo graduates, I cannot help but pay attention when Waterloo vouches for somebodies merit.

Whether Waterloo is making merit, or merely distilling it out of the general population isn't really important in this case.

I think it's https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Oligarchy

The myth is that anyone can come from anywhere and achieve great success in Silicon Valley if they are skilled. It holds that those who “make it” do so due to their excellent ideas and ability, because the tech scene is a meritocracy where what you do, not who you are, matters.

Thus is the straw man constructed. The dismantling of that poor fellah is absolutely breathtaking to behold. He had it coming.

Who actually makes absolute claims like those except for in a feel good, keep your glass half full if you want to succeed kind of a way?

Anyone writing an article like this should also write what would change their opinions and a plan to fix it. Imagine you've won me over completely and SV is an elitist boy's club. Now what do we do to change it? When is your standard met? Of course defining those views would be harder to defend. It's much easier to have arbitrary standards of fairness and point out how others don't live up to it.

I don't agree with many of the author's assumptions (do most people working at startups in SV really think that their web/mobile app will "change the world"? do everybody in SV think that tech entrepreneurship is a solution to everything ?).

I would say that most people just want to work on something they like, having an alternative lifestyle to a 9-5 job and possibly taking the chance of making it big.

I agree that there is a excessively romatic view in some circles, but is it the real representation of what people in SV think ? Or is it the most appealing view for the media ?

Regardless, some points are valid. The fact that most (all?) entrepreneurs come from middle/upper class rings true, and the "white male" argument as well (although less so, imho).

But to the credit of tech entrepreneurship, there ARE proyects that are helping to close the gap, offering education to everybody, I think about Khan's Academy, Coursera, Udacity...

I think it's too convenient to classify tech entrepreneurs as a single group, with the same vision and ideals.

Effort does not correlate exactly with results, but the chances of success are high if one tries and is capable.

In both tech and hustle, it's easier with wealth, privilege, connections, luck, and/or friends.

But large swaths of tech and hacking can be done on a $200 netbook or a lab of $100 used notebooks.

The hustle part... That's easier if you have hustle. If you are a geek, make a tool that's needed and sell it to another geek.

I've seen male, female, black, white, mongrel, rich, poor, and those with role models and without success at tech and business. It's harder without but still possible.

And I think SV may indeed be the best place in the country to succeed in - in gambling terms, the result converges faster with the expected value given effort and application.

Particularly (in my opinion) because past failures are discounted and companies, especially startups, are willing to give startups a try without as much suspicion.

tl;dr silicon valley isn't the liberal utopia and therefore not a meritocracy.

That presumes liberals are redefining 'merit' such that it's meaningless. While I would not be surprised in the least if that's the case, I have yet to see indications from any liberal thinkers that they'd ever want to base anything on merit. Even a redefined "merit."

I'm a liberal who believes strongly in meritocracy. The problem starts with limitations of opportunity. I grew up poor, in a poorly educated family, and I appreciate just how difficult it is to grow out of circumstance.

There are two separate problems here: What opportunities you have, and what you do with the opportunities you have. The latter is where merit comes in. The former is where the -isms live. Those who are fighting disadvantages must spend tremendous amounts of personal energy just getting to be on the level, merit-based ground.

Now, I think the author is fundamentally wrong in a lot of ways. She's faulting Silicon Valley itself, but I think the problems are upstream, and she did basically no analysis on that. So white males are getting the majority of venture deals? What's the ratio of deals applied to deals received? White males are the ones looking for venture deals and other Silicon Valley entrepreneurial stuff. No one is stopping women, minorities, etc from doing the same thing, and I doubt there's a significant punishment for them compared to the other 99+% of companies that get rejected.

And another thing she glossed over is the meritocracy of simply getting to that point. You don't get to waltz in and get showered with angel money just because you're white and male. You have to deliver. Those institutional biases to twenty-something Stanford CS dropouts reflect both the kind of people likely to succeed, and the kind of people likely to choose the path at all.

So while the article itself is mostly a fail, there's some truth to it. Whining about how liberals hate merit, on the other hand, is just political nonsense.

liberals don't believe in meritocracies. They value labor and the 'effort' put into something. i.e. someone who dug ditches all day should receive more compensation than someone who wrote code for 2 hours.

Yeah those damn liberals. I totally heard Obama say ditch diggers should have offices in SV with foozball tables and fancy chairs and coders should be paid minimum wage.

What are you talking about? If you don't have anything intelligent to add to the conversation, don't post a comment. Learn about what Jon Stewart and others that follow Marxist theory mean when they refer to the value of labor being the most important thing: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Labor_theory_of_value

Nonsense.

Intelligent response. Perhaps you should learn more about the labor theory of value. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Labor_theory_of_value

"Labor is not the source of all wealth." -Karl Marx (from your link)

It would appear that Marx rejected the Labor Theory of Value. So do I, for that matter. It does not account for the quality of labor, scarcity, or demand. Labor is a factor in value, but it's not the only factor, or even the primary one in many cases.

Leaving behind the 19th century anarchists who were still wrapping their heads around an economy that didn't even exist yet, modern practitioners of the labor theory of value are classic examples of theorists in denial of reality. If the theory and reality are at odds, then clearly reality must be wrong, correct? But they're also pretty irrelevant outside their little ivory towers. Power is collected by realists.

Personally, I think it's much more interesting to consider where capitalism fails at measuring value - basically, the idea that all value can be measured in terms of fungible currency, and anything that cannot be measured in currency therefore has no value. This problem sticks out like a sore thumb at awareness of externalized costs (or the lack of awareness, in the case of the hordes of neoliberal "conservative" fools who have no idea what a real free market looks like). But so much of value can't be measured in dollars.

I look at companies like Everpix with users, revenue, and growth and then companies like Albumatic.

Albumatic raised 4.1 million dollars and pivoted 3 months later.

Everpix was building a product that users loved and they had the trajectory to be great.

One question we must ask is: "What do we define as merit in silicon valley?"

Additionally, while it is far from optimal, I do believe we(other than Israel) have the best systemic distribution of capital to companies.

here is the problem with the concept of "meritocracy". What constitutes "merit"? And if you have two orthogonal, meritorious qualities, which is more deserving of advancement, one who is 100%A, 0%B? Or another who is 0%A, 100%B? Who gets to decide?

Not sure when it became ok to call something a myth without emperical evidence.

The definition of a myth is that there's no evidence!

Well... yes it is. You don't need empirical evidence to call unicorns a myth, it is sufficient to point out the lack of empirical evidence supporting the existence of unicorns.

It's who you know, not what you know.

Things are nuanced rather than binary.

Pretty vapid.

Author doesn't seem to be that knowledgable on the valley.

I'm really interested in this kind of sentiment. Why do you feel so certain SV is a meritocracy?

People in SV who have some success want it to be a meritocracy so they can feel that they succeeded on their own internal merit.

Nothing that people do could possibly be a meritocracy, because people are fucks. In fact, every social problem is easily explained by the fact that people are fucks. Q.E.D.

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