As vast amounts of money pour into Silicon Valley, various shakedown artists, not surprisingly, have emerged from the woodwork to get themselves a cut. What's striking is how out-of-the-running the usual suspects -- blacks and Hispanics -- have been relative to attractive young women. Here are three recent bogus brouhahas:
Now that I look back at them, they all were written up in the New York Times by Claire Cain Miller, who seems to have figured out that there is an insatiable appetite for stories, no matter how far-fetched, about perky Programmer Babes standing up to the Alpha Male culture of software engineering. Sex, money, and feminist righteousness make an intoxicating and enstupidating brew in the 2010s.
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62 comments:
Perhaps Ms. Claire Cain Miller is angling for a Hollywood script contract. After all, Hollywood's given us 'The Wolf Of Wall Street," so why not 'The Sexist Oppressors Of Silicon Valley'?
Hey guess what I'm looking at right now!
Claire Cain Miller's Legs!!
YEAH! Those are some legs baby!
Whenever I interview people in the tech world I make sure to have my bare legs sticking out across the stage.
Also, from the black polka dot shirt to the white shirt...boobies looks a bit fuller.
Just noticing things...that's all folks!
Totally off topic, but there is now more convincing evidence that Nuland's friends were behind the shootings in Ukraine.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=zDPJ-ucnyPU&feature=youtu.be
http://scieng-women-ontario.ca/en/files/2013/08/2.jpg
Clair Cain Miller is kinda cute for her age.
Ms. Claire Cain Miller is apparently the NYT's gossipy Ms. Busybody in Silicon Valley. Once you have more than one woman in the workplace you have a gossip problem, it's part of their 360-degree management style.
If you watch Silicon Valley, in Mike Judge's view the only thing these beta-nerd programmers can "oppress" is the keys on their keyboards.
She has discovered, I think, one of the few remaining hiding places for men who just want to be left alone to make a living, without the requirement to salute the Diversity flag.
The women are resolute in their desire to stamp out all heresy.
maybe it's just her oversized head, but she looks like one of Wolfe's social x-rays.
The right-leaning economists say, "Subsidize something and you'll get more of it."
The contemporary analog is "Publicize something and you'll get more of it."
That is, if you keep putting a particular narrative of oppression in the nation's top newspaper, you are going to encourage attention-seeking people to interpret their petty experiences in this new way, invested with much deeper significant and weighty social importance, and they are going to come forward in droves. People are always trying to rationalize away their behaviors, deny their banal hormonal, emotional motivations, and to blame others for whatever is making them upset. But when the prestige press practically hands you a culprit, and pretends it's a systemic social problem, and will write a perfect version of just your side of the story, well, how can a girl resist?
And now the narrative has produced its own evidence, "We covered this, but now that we've said it, all these terrified women realize they are not along and they are being brave enough to come forward and share their common struggles, and we realize that it was always much worse than we ever imagined."
Just like all those girls started coming out of the woodwork accusing everybody of being witches in 1680's Massachusetts after Increase Mather spread the first few tales from pulpit to pulpit and in his book. Says Mather, "Oh, now look! We had no idea how huge the witch-problem really was!"
Women, especially, are attention-seeking complaint-conformists. When the NYT puts up a kleig-light, the brat-signal instead of the bat-signal, they all come storming in with their pathetic dramas stretched to fit the Procrustean Bed of today's Big Narrative of Oppression!
What is with you guys and women?
Why do yo hate them so much?
Lack of familiarity?
The Black shakedown artists can always make up the shortfall in Silicon Valley by mining deeper in the vein of gold they discovered at the Denny's restaurants.
Why do the founders of these software companies (or whatever they are) feel the need to christen them with stupid, childish names? Github? WTF does that even mean?
Companies used to have more honest names, plainly describing what they did, or were named for their founders, or both.
It's all so "meta" nowadays.
There was Adria Richards.
Silicon Diggers
"Now that I look back at them, they all were written up in the New York Times by Psy Ops Col. Claire Cain Miller"
fixed that for you
I think it just got harder to justify employing female technical staff in Silicon Valley.
I was interviewed yesterday in Silicon Valley by a CEO who coyly told me he had to let a female technical member of staff go because of behavior issues. Seems she didn't play well with other people with respect to her "territory."
Now that I look back at them, they all were written up in the New York Times by Claire Cain Miller, who seems to have figured out that there is an insatiable appetite for stories, no matter how far-fetched, about perky Programmer Babes standing up to the Alpha Male culture of software engineering.
Stop noticing!
gender is the cutting edge of HBD cultural warfare. the west needs a mass dis-miss-al of wo-men from the labor pool and nuclear family proliferation to right itself.
"Totally off topic, but there is now more convincing evidence that Nuland's friends were behind the shootings in Ukraine."
Wow, this is pretty damning. And from German TV, no less.
query: git
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Git_(software)
This is manufactured outrage to generate clicks and page views for technology news sites like techcrunch and gawker. Just part of our present outrage culture. Everyone is looking for victims or to be the victim. But if this happened at a non-tech company it wouldn't get any media coverage. Internet companies are like PR magnets
So who did father the founder's newborn?
"Github? WTF does that even mean?"
It's actually a decent name for their target audience of programmers. "Git" is the name of a distributed database of sorts for source code. Variants of the term have a long tradition in source code control. You retrieve the source code for your project--"git" it--from a web site, the hub. Github.
Non-programmers don't really need and are not expected to get it.
I suppose they could have come up with some pseudo-greek neologism that would have completely obscured the nature of what they do, in the style of drug companies.
What is with you guys and women?
Why do yo hate them so much? Lack of familiarity?
Oh wow man. That stings. That really stings.
Our office once handled a wrongful discharge case in which one of the early female senior VP's testified about the plaintiff's performance. She said, "it was, 'just the facts m'am'." For her that was a negative.
Github? WTF does that even mean?
It's a hub (an ordinary word meaning a central connecting point) for distributing software using a program called 'git.' So it does say exactly what it does to anyone who has a use for it.
Steve this is completely off-topic, but is there a good comprehensive book of American history that you would recommend? Lately I've been buying historical books such as Gibbon's The History of the Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire and Tocqueville's Democracy in America. Most of the information I remember about American history is what I learned in school growing up, and I'd like to have a good history book to own and to refresh my knowledge about America.
What is with you guys and women?
Why do yo hate them so much?
Lack of familiarity?
It seems that you are the one lacking in familiarity, not to mention IQ.
One problem women and NAM’s have with upward mobility in the Silicon Valley is that the business life cycle of high tech companies moves too quickly. They seem to infiltrate only after a company has become successful and is staffing up and by that time these companies are well past the genesis where the ownership and upper management is set cutting them out of the most powerful positions and biggest payouts. Women in particular seem to opt for a steady paycheck and eschew risking their own time and capital in startups preferring to wait and parachute into HR positions, legal, etc. Most of the founders of these companies are engineers and finance guys. This probably has something to do with the theory ‘sperm is cheap and eggs expensive’ theory where women’s reproduction success is more assured and thus do not need to take the same risks that a man does. Just ask Melinda Gates about that.
Might take smallest of efforts to know comsci. Enrollment of women vs blacks/Hispanics in ComSci 101 courses might be a nice data marker
I have a few rare distinctions. For example I once supervised not just one but two black programmers at the same time. If you know anything about the industry you'll understand just how unusual that is.
As it happened I fired both of them for incompetence. One of them I reported to the FBI. He had created a backdoor.
Good coders are of course smart but the real distinguishing characteristic is that they must love to code. This seems rare among blacks and women.
I once interviewed 26 applicants for a single web coder position. None of them were women. Nor were any of the hundreds of other coders I knew when I was a software development contractor as a single contributor or a manager. I once knew a female mathematician when I was a management consultant but never a female programmer.
When I was in government there was a woman Systems Analyst working on our account. Given the career ladder in those days she must have once been a junior COBOL programmer. But by the time she was assigned to my department she couldn't even read COBOL much less any other computer language. There were a lot of females in Civil Service data processing but these women stayed as far from the machines and the software as possible. They attended meetings for a living. They also wrote a lot of memos.
At one web development company where I worked there were a lot of young women but they were all in the graphics section. All the coders were male and very male at that. There was a lot of what I called 'see my hairy chest' behavior.
I had a friend coder with whom I went shooting after work. When that company went bankrupt (as they all seemed to do) he moved back to Texas because it allowed concealed carry. California was too 'beta' for him.
Albertosaurus
fwiw github is a real, important tool for developers. it is not just some app to find a $200 limo in in dubai on a muslim holiday or whatever.
http://www.thewrap.com/amy-berg-documentary-on-hollywood-sex-rings
http://scieng-women-ontario.ca/en/files/2013/08/2.jpg
Clair Cain Miller is kinda cute for her age.
Unless she's 50, I disagree. She just dresses like a young woman.
Steve this is completely off-topic, but is there a good comprehensive book of American history that you would recommend?
Zinn's A People's History of the United States is good.
>Zinn's A People's History of the United States is good.<
Yes, for toilet paper - if you're lost in the woods and the only alternative is poison oak.
Handle:
Great comment.
I looked up the Zinn book on Amazon and saw this as part of the description: "Known for its lively, clear prose as well as its scholarly research, A People's History of the United States is the only volume to tell America's story from the point of view of -- and in the words of -- America's women, factory workers, African-Americans, Native Americans, working poor, and immigrant laborers."
This might be a good book for the critical theory types, but I'd rather not read something if it's going to constantly say "blame whitey!!!"
Steve, it is not Alpha Male culture. Alpha males are SEXY! and women forgive them anything. Heck, popular culture is filled with sexy, bad, domineering Alpha males that women happily surrender to thinking they can "change" them: Twilight, Fifty Shades of Grey, the Blacklist (the female lead's "secret hit man killer husband,"), Game of Thrones, Marvel's Agents of SHIELD (the younger male lead is now a "traitor" who the ingenue/audience proxy hopes to "change.")
Heck the female audience (and female show runner) swooned over the rape scene in Buffy. And just could not get enough of the vampire!
What women will NOT FORGIVE, ever, in men, is lack of sexiness. Not ever. Not once.
What is going on here is the defenestration of White beta males. The model for Silicon Valley success was, a founder attracted both venture capital, not that much, because the less needed the bigger the founder payout, and also costs for Web ventures declined significantly post-Dot Com crash with overcapacity in servers, data centers, fiber cable, etc. Then attract a FEW insanely talented coders who would work insane hours to create something and cash out, leaving lots of money still for the founder.
Now the founders WANT IT ALL. They figure H1-Bs and the like can be used much cheaper, no piece of the action, they get all the pie.
The female jihad against White Beta Males (and the Github founder was beta, considering his wife was fighting with the woman in question over the woman's boyfriend, only a man whose wife has no attraction for him would see that behavior) is just a smokescreen for purging them and replacing them with ultra cheap H1Bs. That's it.
Follow the money.
Women are just pawns, but happy to be that way because they really do HATE HATE HATE White beta males. For being unsexy.
Game might be the only salvation of the West. With CH/Roissy the only real prophet. And yes I'm serious. Believe me if the two women were fighting over the founder not the boyfriend, he never would have resigned. After all is Brad Pitt finished in Hollywood after he dumped Hollywood good-girl Jennifer Aniston for bad-girl Angelina Jolie?
H, the book was pretty foundational to modern multiculturalism, largely by the mechanism Handle describes in his comment above.
>Silicon Diggers<
Silcone Diggers.
Where is Whiskey??? Nerds getting gutted by pretty faces is classic Whiskey mash.
Why so few black and Hispanic shakedowns in SV compared to female ones? Maybe it's a case of angel-faces rush in where fools fear to tread.
It's actually a decent name for their target audience of programmers... Non-programmers don't really need and are not expected to get it.
True in this case, but programmer subculture does favor nomenclature tending toward the bizarre at one end and shading into the creepy at the other. The open source Photoshop clone is called GIMP and was named only a couple of years after Pulp Fiction came out, after all.
Most is rather innocuous and goofy (naming lexical parser tools YACC and BISON), but since this is offputting to women it won't be long before any Monty Pythonesque joke at work will be deemed a terminable microaggression.
Q)How do you know you made it in Silicone Valley?
A) When hiring an illiterate crack addict that counts as Hispanic, black, and female is a good cost containment measure.
Male geeks ought to love these stories.
"Gee, we are alpha? Who knew?"
Ban Alpha... along with bossy.
What is with you guys and women?
Why do yo hate them so much?
Lack of familiarity?
The old saying is: Familiarity breeds contempt.
I just got back from attending two job fairs in Silicon Valley.
What struck me was that a plurality of the attendees were attractive young immigrants of the female sort.
And what they were dressed to sell wasn't programming.
Wouldn't a sprinkling of young, not-ugly women be good for overall morale, even if they were just merely competant technically?
Wouldn't a sprinkling of young, not-ugly women be good for overall morale
Sure, until they get to fighting over the hottest dude in the office and end up generating sexual conflicts, or create busywork for themselves by setting up PC committees, both of which we've seen result in a CEO's "voluntary resignation" in recent weeks.
Also, "merely competent" seems to be optimistic in most cases.
I spent a year in engineering school, where there were 2 females in a class of 120. Granted, this was 30 years ago, but the M/F ratio is still pretty lopsided now. I then left for a field where I was surrounded by women.
Believe me, the latter situation was great for my morale.
Right now, I am sitting in a bar in downtown San Jose watching a basketball game.
Next to me are 3 high-end software sales guys talking away. Sartre was right: hell is other people.
"Steve this is completely off-topic, but is there a good comprehensive book of American history that you would recommend?"
Page Smith wrote a wonderful series of America history books, Great reads, great analysis. Fun to read and more facts than you can shake a stick at. About 7500 pages in 15 volumes. Take a year and learn your American history from a master storyteller who loved his country and his people.
"Anonymous said...
""Github? WTF does that even mean?""
It's actually a decent name for their target audience of programmers."
They all just sound like gits to me.
If you have to ask what github means, then you will never be a billionaire.
But that's OK. Now scrub that tile a little bit harder.
"Anonymous said...
If you have to ask what github means, then you will never be a billionaire.
But that's OK. Now scrub that tile a little bit harder."
Yeah, right. Like being a programmer is the path to riches. Evidently, "billionaire" is the only level of attaiment you value - what a dull, insipid fellow you must be.
Paul Johnson "A History of the American People"
The point is not that programmers get rich, though Gates, Andreesen, Zukerberg, others wrote actual code to lead into their current vast fortunes. But. if you don't even know about github, you prob. won't be the next tech billionaire.
Sorry.
"Anonymous said...
The point is not that programmers get rich, though Gates, Andreesen, Zukerberg, others wrote actual code to lead into their current vast fortunes."
What programming Gates did had nothing to do with his fortune. He made his fortune by selling somebody elses product to IBM, and subsequently by being a ruthless monnopolist. For a slavish little cheer-leader of the wealthy, you don't even know their history very well.
"But. if you don't even know about github, you prob. won't be the next tech billionaire.
Sorry."
And if you do know what github is, you probably won't be the next "tech" billionaire (people like you don't even know what "technology" really is). Likewise, you probably won't be the next "tech" billionaire if your too lazy to spell out "probably". And in particular, YOU probably won't be the next "tech" billionaire.
As I said, you are a dull, insipid fellow.
"your too lazy....". Really?
I don't if some of the commenters here are going for meta or are just, umm, cognitively sub-par.
I confess. I am not a tech billionaire.
But the tens of millions is still pretty sweet.
How is cleaning that tile going?
I didn't say Gates made his fortune by programming; obviously, he did not.
But he did get into the business by coding BASIC for the primitive desktop computers. And Andreesen did code most of the Mosaic browser, and Zukerberg did the same for the initial Facebook app.
None of them got crazy rich from the programming itself, but it was how they started out, and it gave them insights into the nature of the field.
You really don't have a clue, and you haven't done a good job scrubbing the tiles yet.
I question whether many professional women are chasing business power n' prestige in *any* commercial field, not just tech (see: "the bigger they are the harder they fall").
To me it seems most are content to settle for the Yoko role -- like what Sailer has written about high-status women becoming helicopter moms of their richer hubbies' progeny; meanwhile the Glenn Close character from "Damages" is pretty rare IRL. Really ruthless women are more often college presidents or politicians
"Anonymous said...
You really don't have a clue, and you haven't done a good job scrubbing the tiles yet."
You have no idea what I do for a living. Cleaning tiles is not part of it. We also know nothing about you........save that you are a dick.
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