Farhad's and Mike's Week in Tech: When the Tech Industry Lives in a Bubble - New York Times
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I wrote this week about how stunned people in tech were by Trump’s win. It’s no wonder: Most people who work in Silicon Valley have no regular contact with anyone who voted for Trump. As some on Twitter noted, the opposite is also true — probably a lot of people who voted for Trump have no regular contact with people making the world’s great technology products. (And as our colleague Jim Rutenberg noted, the same facts hold true about those in media, who are also disconnected from much of the country.)
What we should talk about is whether the tech business’s distance from so much of the country is a bad thing, and something that can be solved in some way.
Mike: Here’s something that could make it worse: There’s actually a movement by a handful of tech leaders to urge California to secede from the union. To me, that’s patently absurd, but if you ever wanted evidence that Silicon Valley lives in a bubble of its own making, I can’t think of a better example.
For what it’s worth, the so-called secession plan is little more than a few tweets and a website at the moment, so I don’t think it’s going anywhere. But it did create an instant tech angle!
Farhad: If California does become its own nation, I will run for president. You can be my veep.
Back to tech. I don’t think it’s great that so much of the tech business swims in the same waters. I’m not saying people in tech should be more open-minded toward Trump. I’m not saying it would be better if 50 percent of Facebook employees voted for Trump.
But I do think this election underscores a problem for the tech industry. It works on scale. The whole premise of a software business is that a few people can make something that the entire world can use. But the flip side of that magic is that the whole world ends up using products that only a small group of people control. It’s not just Trump voters. Tech giants are making products that are being used by subsistence farmers in India, taxi drivers in China, bankers in London and schoolteachers in Brazil, to name a few random people off the top of my head.
The election emphasizes how crazy that task is. How can a 24-year-old white male engineer at Google who graduated from Stanford ever hope to empathize with the vast majority of people who use the products he’s working on?
Mike: I fully agree with you. I think that’s compounded by this top-down mandate from companies like Facebook to work at its home base — in this case, Facebook’s headquarters in Menlo Park, Calif. — which is essentially like a bunch of Martians creating products and sending them back to earth.
There is no way a recent, extremely well-paid Stanford graduate can be expected to empathize with the rest of the country if the extent of his or her worldliness means knowing the best time to cut out of work to beat traffic from Silicon Valley back to San Francisco.
Not only do these employees have no personal incentive to travel to the Midwest, but they aren’t forced to do so by those in upper management, who also live in a bubble largely of their own making.
By the way, I am self-aware enough to recognize the irony of this criticism coming from a coastal media type who has lived in New York and California while working for The New York Times. But I will say, I grew up all around the country, including largely in the South, so I don’t feel as out of touch as, say, someone who has lived their entire life in the 100-mile radius of the Bay Area.
Farhad: But what do we do about this problem?
I’m not sure. I don’t think the tech companies are either. The facile answer is to work much harder on diversity — not just racial and gender diversity, but also geographic diversity and diversity of thought. I hope they do that. But that goes only so far. After all, Apple can’t go out and recruit a bunch of workers just because they like Trump.
Mike: Honestly, diversity of thought seems more important than ever right now. Part of the issue some of these companies have is that you need to buy into the groupthink to work there. Be on board with the mission and all that, which usually leads to a kind of uniformity of thought.
Why not hire a more diverse candidate pool? Those with liberal arts degrees and students of history? People from across the country? I think that would be a start. And Mark Zuckerberg himself said on Facebook’s earnings call that 2017 would be a big year for recruiting investment.
Farhad: Beyond this issue of the tech industry’s distance from the country, what other lessons do you think the campaign presents for Silicon Valley?
Mike: Perhaps be willing to make your voices heard more than ever? I think something many are grappling with right now is what to do with themselves.
I’ve seen many techies offer to work with the White House to get talented people on board with the next administration. And to the opposite effect, I’ve seen some who will fight the Trump administration tooth and nail, against any injustices they may see.
I admire both impulses, though I think what’s most important is to have an actual opinion rather than, I don’t know, blandly letting the next four years go by while doing one’s own thing inside the island of California. Be civic-minded, both locally and nationally. Don’t let public relations and company statements speak on your behalf.
That’s what I plan on doing. At least until I get canned someday.
Farhad: I agree, brother. O.K., next week, let’s talk about Snapchat Spectacles. See you then!
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