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So the data supporting all these broad assertions that a diverse group is in fact uniform and abhorrent is a couple episodes of Silicon Valley and looking through a message board, right?
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Jul 23, 2014 00:45
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Filippo Corridoni posted:dont worry, those foreigners are the rich white people of their nations Maybe it's just a coincidence but I've worked with several SV companies and the startups are way whiter than the established players. E: also, many of the foreigners that are working in the US are the winners of an incredibly intense competition to get the best grades from the best schools and your average child of privilege will lump themselves into that group by virtue of similar outcome. A sentiment along the lines of "society would be a much better place if everyone worked as hard as people like Rajesh and me" isn't uncommon when in reality Rajesh had to work 100x harder to get there. Dr.Zeppelin fucked around with this message at 00:50 on Jul 23, 2014 |
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Jul 23, 2014 00:46
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on the left posted:How can people say STEM is for rich white people with a straight face when it's got probably the largest concentration of foreigners from extremely poor countries of any white collar profession? This kind of self deluding double-think is exactly what we're here to get to the bottom of. 
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Jul 23, 2014 00:46
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Filippo Corridoni posted:dont worry, those foreigners are the rich white people of their nations "India rich" is still generally pretty poor compared to US standards.
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Jul 23, 2014 00:47
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Dr.Zeppelin posted:Maybe it's just a coincidence but I've worked with several SV companies and the startups are way whiter than the established players. I get the feeling a lot of that has to do with them not wanting to pay visa fees and/or there may be limitations on startups bringing in labor from overseas.
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Jul 23, 2014 00:49
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So desperate to avoid the fees that they'll pay hand over fist to put their dev teams in international waters! https://blueseed.co/
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Jul 23, 2014 00:51
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Like I get that this is an LF thread, but I am surprised to see an LF thread conflate workers and owners so readily.
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Jul 23, 2014 01:00
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#NotAllDevs  I am a rather outspoken solcialist in my office in Nashville. Apart from the only black guy on the 12-man team and another dude who grew up north of the Mason-Dixon Line like me, everyone else is at least neoliberal if not outright randian. I'm not very popular when the discussion turns to politics. Fortunately they all tend to look like they feel sorry for me rather than angry, but if poo poo ever hits the fan I'll be first against the wall.
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Jul 23, 2014 01:12
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Best Friends posted:Like I get that this is an LF thread, but I am surprised to see an LF thread conflate workers and owners so readily. It's called outgroup homogeneity, get on the bandwagon already
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Jul 23, 2014 02:52
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Lordshmee posted:#NotAllDevs I'm actually in Silicon Valley at one of the larger companies out here. Most of the people I talk to don't seem particularly über-Randian, but I suspect that working for a company that existed before the web did tempers it a bit. I mean my coworkers are no doubt milquetoast liberals by and large if not slightly conservative when it comes to any houses they may own, but it doesn't seem much different from the rest of upper-middle-class America. I suspect the completely lovely libertarianism has more to do with the absolute shithole that is startup culture, instead of more established companies 
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Jul 23, 2014 03:16
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The means of production are readily ownable for programmers and individual skill/smarts can pay off in a way it doesn't in other industries
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Jul 23, 2014 03:17
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ComradeCosmobot posted:I'm actually in Silicon Valley at one of the larger companies out here. Most of the people I talk to don't seem particularly über-Randian, but I suspect that working for a company that existed before the web did tempers it a bit. I mean my coworkers are no doubt milquetoast liberals by and large if not slightly conservative when it comes to any houses they may own, but it doesn't seem much different from the rest of upper-middle-class America. When something like that was brought up in the thread that I imagined spawned this one somebody said that people working IT for larger companies qualify as "corporate drones" and not "techies" which are apparently only SV startup people. Edit: I assume this extends to the "software developers" that the OP is talking about.
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Jul 23, 2014 03:25
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born on a buy you posted:news.ycombinator.com While there are more libertarians on Hacker News than in the general population, I wouldn't cite it as evidence that all, most, or even a big portion of techies are libertarian. Indeed, most libertarian posts on HN are downvoted heavily, and anyone who dares mention Ayn Rand to support their view is laughed at. I'd say that libertarianism is more common among younger techies, usually those who are in college or who have recently graduated and have not yet been properly exposed to the real world. The thing is though, at least in my experience, most techies are also ultra-logical, and once they start using those logic skills to think more critically about libertarianism and see that there is no supporting data for any of its claims, most of them realize it's an incredibly dumb ideology and they abandon it with haste. There are always a few bad apples though, and the thing with political ideologies is that their bad apples tend to be extremely vocal to the point of fanaticism. Hence the caricaturization of ultra-socialists by conservatives, ultra-conservatives by liberals, and libertarians by everyone.
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Jul 23, 2014 03:27
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"old" SV companies are rife with libertarian shitheads. Does your company have a branch in Raleigh? Congratulations, it's full of assholes. e: here's why: your company is likely full of us ex-military and they're all loving heinleinian cunts
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Jul 23, 2014 03:28
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Mr.Unique-Name posted:When something like that was brought up in the thread that I imagined spawned this one somebody said that people working IT for larger companies qualify as "corporate drones" and not "techies" which are apparently only SV startup people. Software dev and IT support are very different skill sets and employment experiences. Large companies all have IT support and many have software devs. Both software devs and IT support will have certain common traits different from the common population on average. Neither group, or any large group, is "almost unanimously, slavishly" devoted to Ayn Rand. Startup culture sucks, libertarians suck, a whole lot of software devs suck, some fraction of software devs who suck are libertarian, and yet this is a very bad thread premised on idiot hyperbole and as you note Grandma levels of ignorance on what the computer people even do or even the difference between a software dev and a billionaire CEO. Cultural Imperial posted:e: here's why: your company is likely full of us ex-military and they're all loving heinleinian cunts Yet more brilliant and well-supported insight in very good thread thank you. Best Friends fucked around with this message at 03:39 on Jul 23, 2014 |
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Jul 23, 2014 03:37
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Best Friends posted:So the data supporting all these broad assertions that a diverse group is in fact uniform and abhorrent is a couple episodes of Silicon Valley and looking through a message board, right?
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Jul 23, 2014 03:38
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Justine Tunney sort of broke identity politics for me. She's done a really great job of damaging the already damaged image of Occupy and when she had her meltdown, there was no shortage of twitter people accusing all her critics of being transphobic. (There were undoubtedly critics who actually were transphobic, but no nuance was addressed.)
Fidel Castronaut fucked around with this message at 04:03 on Jul 23, 2014 |
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Jul 23, 2014 03:42
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Cultural Imperial posted:Does your company have a branch in Raleigh? Congratulations, it's full of assholes. No? And of course my company is going to have its share of libertarians. The ethos is not uncommon among the upper middle class in general if they haven't adopted conservative social views as well; it's merely obnoxious uber-Randians who tend to be unusual. Also I'm not sure why ex-military individuals are being brought up here because they have about as much to do with "conservatarianism" as Obama does.
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Jul 23, 2014 03:44
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cheese posted:The recently released by Google employee demographic data (which finally came out after years of Google successfully petitioning to have it secret) suggests that this group is in fact quite uniform. hth If by "quite uniform" you mean "not actually uniform" sure.
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Jul 23, 2014 03:44
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Look at this guy asking for ~*hard facts*~ on the demographics of SV companies on an anonymous internet forum
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Jul 23, 2014 03:44
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Best Friends posted:Software dev and IT support are very different skill sets and employment experiences. Large companies all have IT support and many have software devs. Both software devs and IT support will have certain common traits different from the common population on average. It was in response to somebody talking about devs, I'd assumed he was using "IT" as a general term for somebody working in any capacity with that kind of stuff at a large company, since I have seen listings for dev positions under "IT" in the past, particularly with companies that only do internal development work. Either way, I agree trying to claim (almost) all workers in field x (software engineering) are y (libertarians) is stupid. Most people I've worked with didn't talk about politics at all. The one guy that did openly talk politics seemed really far to the left and not particularly libertarian or neoliberal.
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Jul 23, 2014 03:53
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on the left posted:How can people say STEM is for rich white people with a straight face when it's got probably the largest concentration of foreigners from extremely poor countries of any white collar profession? Because I'm discussing the field in regards to the American born people who wind up in it, not their Indian equivalent counterparts.
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Jul 23, 2014 04:26
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Hmm Sheltered + over-privileged + white + good salary = libertarian? Sheltered + over-privileged + white + poor salary = leftist
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Jul 23, 2014 04:46
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As a white male student in the physical sciences who does a fair amount of software development, let me tell you that my anecdotal evidence about STEM nerds is absolutely worthless.
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Jul 23, 2014 04:49
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asdf32 posted:Hmm Sheltered + over-priveleged + SA account = bad poster
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Jul 23, 2014 05:22
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There is also a substantial chunk of the infosec crowd that generally views Neal Stephenson novels as a lifestyle handbook.
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Jul 23, 2014 06:01
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Did anyone say solipsism and narcissism? Solipsism and narcissism. Also they are uneducated.
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Jul 23, 2014 06:08
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i see nothing but armchair psychology and general disdain for the well off. is there any statistic that points to this group of people having such and such beliefs?
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Jul 23, 2014 06:29
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stoutfish posted:i see nothing but armchair psychology and general disdain for the well off. is there any statistic that points to this group of people having such and such beliefs? Guilty of the armchair psychology but for many of us these people are our coworkers/clients/etc so the perception isn't based on any sense of class envy.
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Jul 23, 2014 06:32
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asdf32 posted:Hmm You are missing some finer points regarding depression, anxiety attacks and general sadbrains, but a good start. SedanChair posted:Also they are uneducated. It's always rich to see people imply that a liberal arts degree is necessary to be educated or "think critically". If engineers are uneducated, imagine how retarded people who didn't go to college or dropped out of high school are!
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Jul 23, 2014 06:35
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All Watched Over by Machines of Loving Grace is pretty much what you are looking for OP, a good part of the documentary focuses on this exact question.
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Jul 23, 2014 06:39
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Fidel Castronaut posted:Justine Tunney sort of broke identity politics for me. She's done a really great job of damaging the already damaged image of Occupy and when she had her meltdown, there was no shortage of twitter people accusing all her critics of being transphobic. (There were undoubtedly critics who actually were transphobic, but no nuance was addressed.) And then she went and praised the Front National's successes in the euro elections because it's led by Marine Le Pen
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Jul 23, 2014 06:39
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Specifically, Love and Power http://vimeo.com/38724174
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Jul 23, 2014 06:42
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Haha I just clued in she's a dude.
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Jul 23, 2014 06:44
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stoutfish posted:general disdain for the well off  on the left posted:It's always rich to see people imply that a liberal arts degree is necessary to be educated or "think critically". If engineers are uneducated, imagine how retarded people who didn't go to college or dropped out of high school are! Realtalk they are kind of retarded on average
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Jul 23, 2014 06:47
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Oddly enough I don't know of a single libertarian engineer or software developer at my workplace, they're almost entirely apathetic about politics. Many of the people in management, marketing, and sales are Republicans probably just because they're old white dudes. Even then taxes are pretty much the only thing they care about or mention related to politics.
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Jul 23, 2014 07:06
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Those (software) developers probably wear Fedoras and post on reddit, Lol.
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Jul 23, 2014 07:06
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Exclamation Marx posted:And then she went and praised the Front National's successes in the euro elections because it's led by Marine Le Pen If I remember right she wasn't doing it out of actual praise for the FN but as a sort of "gotcha" to those leftist feminists because they only support women in power when they agree with them!!!
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Jul 23, 2014 11:14
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Waaaah the Christians are out to get me
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To flip the question on its head, is there a field of work that pays well and doesn't attract douches? Medicine, law, finance, tech fosters FYGM attitudes. I can't think of a counterexample.
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Jul 23, 2014 12:43
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SedanChair posted:Did anyone say solipsism and narcissism? Solipsism and narcissism. Narcissism is a great driver of any extreme ideology - "I'm not wildly succeeding so obviously _____ must be to blame" and "I know the real problems, everyone else is being duped by the system" The blank gets filled in with different things over time, other races/religions/tribes more often in the past but with the ever increasing distrust of institutions today's popular fill in's are government or business. A dose of "gently caress you dad" doesn't hurt either.
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Jul 23, 2014 13:22
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