Like Peter Thiel, Tech Workers Feel Alienated by Silicon Valley ‘Echo Chamber’

I don't get it. I grew up in Silicon Valley and I work in tech, and so do many other people I know. They run the gamut from far-left socialists to libertarians to own a bunch of guns. They have all kinds of ethnic backgrounds and religious views.

Some of my most libertarian/pro-gun friends have not been shy about their political views and it hasn't hurt their tech careers at all. They are far more welcome here than liberals are in other parts of the country.

It seems to me, from personal experience, that the people who feel alienated are the ones who bring politics to work in an overbearing contrarian way, seeking to cause offense under the guise of "debate," and then pretend to be shocked when people don't want to put up with their shit. Work is for working; it's not a debating society, and especially not when the debating is done in bad faith.

Peter Thiel has been more politically vocal than most, and he is vocal about things he knows to be unpopular. He can't be surprised that people who disagree with him are also vocal. If he can't take the heat he should stay out of the kitchen.

I work in the Bay Area and I have personally worked with (as in, on the same team with and working directly in cooperation. CEOs, founders, etc. are not included in this count), exactly one person who discussed their conservative views. This is in comparison to hundreds of liberals. Sure, you may be able to identify at least one person on variety of ends of the political spectrum, but I don't think anyone can sanely deny a vast under representation of conservatives in Silicon Valley. Granted, Silicon Valley itself is politically imbalanced. But even in San Francisco 9% [1] of voters voted Republican in 2016.Despite that, I haven't witnessed anything close to that share of conservatives in my tech jobs - even in my jobs lower in the Peninsula and in South Bay.

Adding this as an edit: Also, do you work in the Bay Area currently (you mentioned you grew up there)? There is a pretty substantial discrepancy between voicing political views in high school and college vs. when people actually start working. I have met more than an order of magnitude more conservatives and non-liberals in 4 years of university in the Bay Area as compared working in tech there - 25 to 30 in unviersity vs. exactly 1 in industry. Also edited in the fact that I work in the Bay Area in the first sentence, so I realized I didn't mention it until the last.

I agree with you that the numbers are very skewed, but I agree with the parent in that, of the few outspoken conservatives I've worked with, I have not seen anyone's career suffer for their politics.

Brendan Eich, James Damore?

Damore wasn't fired because he is a conservative. He was fired because he thinks women are inferior wrt tech and was very vocal about it.

Sigh. As the sibling comment points out, what you are saying is not true. It is contradicted by the text of the memo itself. Moreover he wasn't "very vocal about it", he wrote a memo that was then deliberately leaked by his ideological opponents in order to destroy his career: successfully so.

Five years ago I felt my political views were pretty mainstream for the tech industry, for the Valley (although I did not live there). I'd have described myself as a centrist or maybe centre-left.

These days my views have shifted, I can feel myself getting more conservative with time. It's not an age thing. It's more that I've started to notice the sort of tactic you used above - faced with someone making conservative arguments you disagree with you didn't bother debating the points he made. Instead you just lied about what he said and then attacked a straw man.

This is consistently how Damore is treated. There are liberal arguments that can be made about what he wrote - people could point out methodological errors in his studies, or logic errors in his arguments. But they never seem to do that. Whether it's in the media (who love calling what he wrote an "anti diversity memo" even though it praises diversity and has ideas for how to increase the number of women in tech), or on Hacker News, the tactic is always the same - pretend he claimed women are worse than men and then viciously attack him on a personal level. And it's just totally false.

The same tactic crops up in other similar contexts. Jordan Peterson being interviewed on Channel 4 is a recent notorious example. The guy made debatable but essentially conservative arguments about how men and women are not the same, the gender pay gap has multiple causes and so on. And Cathy Newman (the interviewer), who clearly isn't really interviewing him at all but rather sees her job as destroying the ideological enemy, just constantly twists his words. The entire interview consists of her exclaiming, "So what you're saying is ..." followed by some absurd straw man that bore no resemblance to what the guy just said.

It got so insane that by the end of the interview, after Peterson made a long and complicated point about the biological roots of social hierarchies using the nervous system of lobsters as an example, she replied "So what you're saying is, we should organise our society along the lines of the lobsters" and the guy doesn't even blink or miss his stride. He just gets right on with correcting her, because by that point the lying and distorting of what he just said has become so predictable:

https://youtu.be/aMcjxSThD54?t=26m55s

It's one of the most astonishing TV interviews I've ever seen and that sort of debating "tactic" is everywhere.

I keep seeing this argument, and wonder if we read the same memo. And to mirror your view, I'm getting pretty tired of people just brushing off criticism of the memo as "Strawman! Fake news!" when it's anything but. I guess it's a successful tactic though.