Is Google Just Another Uber Bro? Unraveling the Tangled Silicon Valley Tech Geek Myth

InterProphet: My first funded startup as technology co-founder on our first anniversary. Image: Jolitz, 1998.

The most recent attack on women and minorities in Silicon Valley has arisen unexpectedly from Google. Mounted by an anonymous Google engineer as a “manifesto”, it presents no facts, regurgitates disproven theories on the “biology” of men and women and, most tellingly, blames diversity for upper management’s cancellation of underperforming products at Google.

Symmetric Computer System wirewrap prototype, 1983 and 375 BSD Unix system, 1989. Vintage Computer Faire. Image: Jolitz

There are a lot of women who have worked on technology projects in SV over the years (me included), but you wouldn’t know it because no one writes about it, so no one believes that it happened even though this is a young industry and most of us are still alive. That missing piece of the story leads to the notion that women have not had any involvement in any technology and it’s a man’s world. It’s an absurd notion.

386BSD conference button, Dr. Dobbs Journal. Image: Jolitz

Whenever one sees these attitudes one also sees history has been deconstructed to focus only on one person at the expense of others – unless earlier in the history of the field there were key women who could not be deconstructed, like physics has Curie and Meitner. Those who control the information – tech journalists, writers and amateur enthusiasts – have had an almost laser-focus on men. Why?  Continue reading Is Google Just Another Uber Bro? Unraveling the Tangled Silicon Valley Tech Geek Myth