Why I Don't Want My Daughter to Work in Silicon Valley

I'm just about old enough to remember when the common image of a person involved in technology wasn't of some over-entitled brogrammer, and I lament that as much as anyone (fwiw, I think it's a false image and only very few people fit that stereotype, but it's a powerful image). But if you're going to go on the attack, getting basic facts wrong will undermine your argument.

> "Sticks and stones may break my bones but names will never hurt me."

Today it seems more like "Sticks and stones may break my bones but that's okay because there'll likely be DNA evidence; names are not allowed because it breaches my human right to be."

I'm sorry, but my kids will be brought up to ignore names and to punch the bully back twice as hard in person, not in the press; and they will be taught to appreciate differences, not gloss over them and pretend they don't exist. Perhaps most of all they'll be taught to pity those that have brought politics-level bullshit into everyday life, and to rail against it at every opportunity. The Github meritocracy rug fiasco makes me feel physically sick - meritocracy is now offensive? We're now being held at gunpoint by professional victims who have a problem with professional status being merit based? Fuck me.

Humanity has been at war of one kind or another forever, when are we going to learn to stop trying to change each other and just get on with it? I never understand those people in bars who get into fights with others who say something they deem offensive. What a waste of time. Sure you might change the view of 1 in a 100, but that's 100 shitty nights out you've had. What's the point? And who's to say you're right and he's wrong? If you think there's such a thing as a moral absolute, I'm afraid you haven't thought long enough. Despite how the NSA might like things, we're all sovereign beings and no one has the right to dictate the contents of another's mind. So cluster with the ones you like and forget the rest. Life's too damn short.

Oh, and don't feel the need to tell me I don't know what it's like to be on the receiving end of this stuff. Just don't.

I'm really pissed off and disappointed by people that assume that most hackers, being white, male and heterosexual, were somehow privileged to get into the position that we are in now... The reality is, it's not my skin color, my sex or my sexual orientation that made me a hacker, but years of hard work in my teens and pure perseverance in the face of insults, mocking and being "the unpopular geek". I've most definitely been much less privileged during my teen years than most girls (can't say about non-whites or gays, because there weren't any (yet)). It only now, after we've struck gold and the "outsiders" want to get in to get a piece of the pie, that we're being acknowledged, envied and called privileged. Maybe that's why we don't particularly try to make tech welcoming to the outsiders - we want no impostors who are only in it for the money or because it suddenly became cool.

The excerpt before the inevitable correction:

> Some of it may be about age. As The New York Times noted this week, there's a terrifying cult of youth in Silicon Valley, and with youth comes a lot of testosterone and a sense of invulnerability. What Yiren Lu misses in his op-ed piece, though, is that the men who are funding these young guys are often older, but they don't seem to be imparting much thoughtfulness or wisdom into the mix.

I also think drawing daughters or nieces into such arguments is a very cheap shot.

Why not just let people get on with their lives...