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Why Are New Tech Companies So Liberal?
Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg. Kobby Dagan / Shutterstock.com
I know there appears to be an easy answer for this question, demographics. Of course they are liberal, you may say. Their workers are mostly young and urban. They reside in Northern California, Boston, and New York. How could they be anything but liberal?
That is true, but they also consist of engineers and highly skilled immigrants. They are people who have worked hard and are well compensated. While many of their peers were “studying” sociology and women’s studies they were taking computer science and engineering courses. What they learned was rooted in logic and the physical world, not rehashed Marxism and utopian fantasies.
When I was growing up in Massachusetts, it made sense that my teachers were predominantly leftist. They belonged to a union and their pay was determined by how well they could scare the town into approving ever increasing school budgets and not by how well they did their jobs. I recall a great anticipation of reaching the working world where market forces would determine success and thus people would see the inherent benefits of individual liberty and classical liberal values.
Since graduating college I’ve been a naval officer, nuclear engineer, software engineer at an older tech company, and now one that is based in the Bay Area. Until now most of my fellow employees have appeared right of center, thus confirming my expectations. That’s not to say it isn’t a great place to work, it most certainly is. However, I am at a total loss to explain its culture or the cultures of other companies of its ilk.
I have a few theories, but I am not very confident in any of them. My definition of “new tech companies” are those that have been created or risen to prominence in the last 15 years, such as Twitter or Facebook.
- The people are the same but the companies are more authoritarian. Motivated by a very competitive job market and empowered by financial success, these companies seek to engage with their employees at a new level. They encourage their employees to basically live at work, breaking down the professional and personal divide. This fosters an environment not unlike a university. Everyone must be careful not to offend and the needs of all must be accommodated at the expense of the few. The cultures of victimhood and blind acceptance find fertile soil, and people who disagree learn to keep quiet.
- Newer tech companies are more software- and web-based than their predecessors. Therefore aesthetically pleasing design is more important to the success of their products. Therefore more creatives are required and creatives trend left of center.
- College indoctrination has become so successful that it has bled into the hard sciences and engineering spaces. My fellow employees seem more liberal because they actually are more liberal.
There’s very little regulation of the software industry, so we software engineers have no first-hand experience of government overregulation.
Also successful tech companies are wildly successful, with revenues pouring in and as you say few costs in terms of raw materials and such. We don’t experience the razor-thin margins of small business owners, where a small increase in the minimum wage, or cost of supplies, or tax burden could easily put you out of business. If your mental model of a “typical” business is Facebook, Google, or Apple, it’s easy to buy into the Democrat’s argument that raising taxes or the minimum wage won’t have much impact on the economy.
After all Apple had $50.6 billion in revenue last quarter — surely if Bernie took a couple billion of that to give everyone free healthcare and college degrees Apple would barely even notice the difference, right? What’s a few billion between friends?
Your three hypotheses are all good. I would add one more. People are afraid of competition and opt for a system that limits competition and raises barriers to entry.
For occupations that require some college or formal training, such as writing software, the best way to limit competition is to slow down the economy, to delay the day when you become obsolete. Thus vote left.
For occupations that require no college, such as painting houses, the best way to limit competition is to keep the low wage immigrant out of the country. Thus vote right.
All the things folks say above are true, but they would be true if they’d been acculturated in a conservative environment their entire lives. And it used to be that way. While conservatism is more complex and takes longer to come to terms with e.g. how many 20 years olds know enough about life and people to grasp Burke, or Hayek. Marx at it’s simplest level explains all history, sociology, economics, in one emotionally satisfying pamphlet easily accessible by a 20 year old. But that pertains to people who read and ponder and care about the fundamental truth of things. Such people will eventually become conservative. Most people aren’t that way, they absorb culture, their attitudes about politics, people morality by osmosis, from families, teachers, peers, coworkers, media, entertainment. Burke’s bank of ages and of nations, prescriptions and prejudices, or Hayek’s accumulated cultural artifacts that are essential for prosperity and flourishing have been scrubbed out of modern culture. What we were born into has changed from accretions through millennia of trial and error and revelation to fast paced group think fostered by everything we come in contact with. Moreover, life in top down technocratic corporations is transformed by a fallacy of composition into belief that the progressive administrative state can actually work better than free people gradually sorting matters out for themselves.
Thanks, Ulysses, for this fascinating, enjoyable, and thought provoking conversation.
I’ll be talking to a programer today from a major government sponsored and supported research and development firm and will be anxious to pick his brain.
He is a conservative in a sea of progressives.
1.) Lack of significant capital investment
2.) Randomness
Basically look at the 2 sides of the net neutrality debate: The people who own the capital of the internet, say network providers would like to offer new services to extract greater amounts of efficiency from their capital investments. The content providers which don’t have a comparable capital investment, are hostile to this as it would transfer margin from one part of the value chain to the part they don’t control.
Winning the App Lottery is largely random outside of a few key innovators.
I believe there is an inverse relationship between capital investment and liberal outlooks. I also believe that randomness, also breaks the perception of meritocracy in ones own affairs.
I live in a place with lots of really smart engineers, software writers, and techies. They have advanced degrees. Almost all of them work “on base” for the DoD or an associated contractor. They are not a hip crowd, but closer to the pocket protector tape-holding-glasses-together stereotype. (They’re not really that bad, but definitely not anywhere near hip.) And the town skews very conservative. Conservatism just isn’t cool.
This argument makes sense to me, but in the case of software, I’m not sure if it applies. At least not yet.
The traditional mechanism to create this slowdown you speak of isn’t voting (directly), but to form some kind of occupational licensing scheme. Like the AMA or the Bar Association, whatever CPAs have to do, all the way down to less skilled professions like taxi drivers and beauticians. Usually there’s a cartel… Umm, excuse me, professional association involved in lobbying for and establishing said licensing scheme, comprised of the individuals who benefit from the slowdown.
Right now, there is no call for occupational licensing among software companies who you’d expect would try to use one to benefit themselves. If anything, the opposite is happening; the big players are trying expand immigration in order to get more labor for less money.
The other scam to shut competitors out is to impose “safety” regulations that benefit established companies and punish start ups. But, nobody is seriously calling for that either.
This is consistent with my observation of large IT projects. If only the people would do what the computer system is telling them to do, the project would be easier to design/implement and would be more successful. As Dilbert pointed out, the root cause of all problems is people; they’re buggy.
Right. I guess I’m more bothered by the game journalists and activists who make demands of creators, rather than the creators themselves. I don’t know what Lionhead did, but Bioware wasn’t that annoying (e.g. Mass Effect 3’s token gay options), and Maxis… Eh.
Oh, yes, I can imagine.
This is exactly correct. Leftists see themselves as the dissenters and rebels who are disrupting the culture. They do not recognize that to be counter-culture today is to be conservative (or, the term I am beginning to prefer, classically liberal).
Physicists that end up in industry may trend conservative because of the biases in government and academia against conservatives.
My sample is too small to really know, but I think this may have merit.
The flip side is also true, that conservative physicists may prefer the private sector to academia. I think Thomas Sowell wrote something about that once.
This isn’t a hard question. Tech companies are liberal for one simple reason: demographics. They employ a lot of upper-middle-class professionals, including a lot of immigrants. That’s what American liberalism is: the ideology of status-obsessed upper-middle-class professionals, who distrust every class but their own (as I like to say, they hate the poor, the middle class, and the rich; anyone who isn’t like them).
It is that hard, and they are that smart, at least in their professional area.
But I think decisions like this are made on a different axis than pure intelligence… otherwise we would all be libertarians.
(ducks and runs)
Software dudes and dudettes do not live in a world of debits, credits, and cash flows, generally speaking – unless they’re coding in accounting systems or reporting. What’s interesting is that many tech companies have gone through massive upheavals – buyouts, appeals to investors for operating funds, mergers, acquisitions, and door-shuttings.
There’s demand for these skill-sets, and has been for the last 2-3 decades, so you can usually land on your feet. I have a good friend who’s worked in this field for some time now, and he’s oddly conservative in terms of his own finances and how he conducts his own life, but liberal in his political leanings.
I don’t think he’s actually spent a ton of time thinking about this, but I could be wrong. He came from a fairly poor upbringing in terms of family assets (grew up across the street from me so we were both in the same sort of circumstances, more or less). He’s worked like a dog all his life – paper routes, part-time job in college as a necessity, saved money post-college like a fiend, then quit his well-paying job to go back to school for a Masters in another field, etc. He is the opposite of a slouch. He’s a bit of a quiet maniac in that regard.
But I think he has the impression that most conservatives fall into the buckets described by others – racists, homophobes, etc. Doesn’t say this out loud, and we joke about it, but his success was built upon the very things that conservatives espouse – work. Don’t ask for or want a handout. Go get it. He works for tech companies that have to go out and get it, or they fold.
So why is he liberal? I don’t know. There is no easy answer or math to get there. My guess is that he hasn’t had enough serial experience with the benefits of what gov’t does for people – or to them, really – to internalize the horrors of what I and others perceive to be the road to serfdom.
Oh, and as an addendum to #45 above – just saw pictures of my buddy attending a wedding at a country club in Connecticut, by the ocean.
Look out there, spiffy – you might be sliding to the Dark Side:
They make enough money that they can insulate themselves from the consequences of liberal policies. Here are just a few examples:
Liberals through the education system control the terms of argument. They have redefined the language, so a conservative, if not really careful, is accepting the leftist rules of the road to define his position, which begins with a large handicap. It is hard to define a conservative position, when the words to do so, have been co-opted or eliminated from polite discussion.
Next, the tech industry has been, for the most part, only lightly regulated, and these companies earn their profits without having to run the government obstacle course in its full glory, at least not yet! So in an environment where they can’t conceive of an alternate solution, and one where they can still make money, they are not yet aware of the downside of liberal positions. They still form the useful idiots.
This is starting to change, and government is inserting more and more control, and just possibly some of the liberal tech companies may start to see some of the downsides of large government.
Companies must always be rent seekers, and espouse the policies that cost the least, this is why large companies are usually not the source of radical new technologies, they are coerced to be too risk avoidant. I believe as the tech industry matures, some of its leftist bias will lessen, but it may be too late.
That’s funny – was life simpler when we only had 13 channels? I remember when entertainment was that – it made you laugh – we need skipper and little buddy again – now we have reality and it ain’t funny!
You will always have the best and brightest in any field congregating to the cities that attract research and development in those fields – hi tech being at the forefront. The problem I have is that these companies and the people leading them hold tremendous power – money, privacy, influence, etc. is in the hands of a few and they are driving society. The best does rise to the top, but where are the checks and balances? If you look at Google alone, and what they are funding in research, you would think you have arrived on Mars. Money, power and influence is fine, but it goes beyond search engines and social media linking friends and family. Years ago companies made the best product and their employees went home to their families. You worked to live, not the other way around. Has technology made us freer, happier, healthier, more respectful, or do those things come from somewhere else?
There’s definitely a workaholic culture in Silicon Valley, people routinely work evenings and weekends. You can work from anywhere with a laptop, so even at home you might still be working. More companies are offering free catered meals, breakfast, lunch, and even dinner. It sounds like a nice perk until you realize it means these employees are eating meals with their coworkers instead of their family, eating dinner at the office and then going back to work for several hours before finally going home to fall into bed get up and do it again.
Of course many of these companies are predominantly staffed by 20-somethings who don’t have families to go home to, so for them work is an extension of college life with meals provided by the dorm and homework to do at all hours. Still it wasn’t so long ago that a typical 20-something went home at 5:00 to dinner with his wife and kids.
There have also been claims of age discrimination in the Valley. If you have a choice between hiring a 40-something engineer who has to leave by 5:00 to pick up his kids from school/daycare vs. a 20-something who will cheerfully work 80 hours a week for the same (or less) pay, which would you hire?
Not sure I buy that one, real estate prices in Silicon Valley are astronomical. Many 20-something software engineers rent apartments, often in fairly gritty “gentrifying” urban settings. A modest home in a gated community is going to be at least $1 million, sure if you win the IPO stock option lottery you can afford one but I’m not convinced the typical tech company employee is so fortunate.
Are you a software engineer? I don’t find the work of it too challenging. Many B students go on to be software guys. Maybe they didn’t care too much for English of setting their scores.
On average, much smarter than teachers, on whole… well, they don’t cure cancer. They speed up your tweet.
lol, I am… so take any admissions of superior genius with a grain of salt!
There’s a pretty broad spectrum of talent… from people coding simple hosted websites up to systems running many hundreds of millions of operations every hour.
My own experience is in the latter area… I was the principal software designer of the China Internet, and my system is currently maxing out at about 360 million users. Believe me, that was hard and took a lot of work from some really smart people!
Yeah, but what do you mean hard? In the realm of specific knowledge gained over a period of time, could you interchange any set of top 10% of highschool grads with the same said experience to do the job? Or is there a specific genius level insight that excludes most from performing that job.
I’m going to go out there and say Richard Epstein is a genius, his depth of knowledge in all things law and historical is impressive to say the least. Going out on a limb, I’d put his intellect in a debate against many of the Silicon Valley elites. Even with sufficient prep time I would imagine he could clean their clocks.
An estimate, I imagine that on average Silicon Valley is much smarter than America on a whole. But are they smarter than “Smart” America on a whole, I’m curious.
Indeed, and I’ve seen studies that suggest that there’s an enormous range of productivity among software developers, the cream of the crop aren’t just 2x more productive than average, but more like 10x more productive.
I think the top-flight developers I’m describing do have an innate level of genius. I’m thinking here of people like Steve Wozniak, who designed the entire Apple I and Apple II computers basically by himself. I’d call him a genius.
However, the majority of employed software engineers aren’t anywhere near that level. Yeah I’d say any of the top 10% of high school grads could make a career of it, I’m not even sure it’s as exclusive as that.
As for genius, there are different types with different abilities. I’ve seen interviews with the Woz, in fact he spoke to my class at Cal once, I love the Woz, but I think I could beat him in a debate, let alone Richard Epstein. His genius lies in math, circuits, and coding, not so much with the English words…
I know people who work those hours in Boston – in academia and elsewhere and they are older – 40 and 50 but its expected – and plenty of firing if you don’t tow the line – of course they have families – and the family suffers.
There’s actually been a push for the work/life balance from young people too, at least in the NYC/NJ tech scene. Most people I know leave around 6, and many companies give unlimited vacation now. I think IBM recently implemented that policy. I don’t see people putting in these terrible hours, 22 – 50. Why should an engineer, when the hiring climate is where it is, there’s no reason to stay at a sweat shop unless they are showering you with riches.
Yeah, Joseph, that’s basically what I meant. Software engineering is difficult, but so are many other professions.
I think part of it tends to be like Movie Stars, you get paid very well for a comparatively easy job.
It’s supply and demand, there’s a whole lot of demand for qualified people and not enough Americans entering the field to keep pace. I don’t think it’s difficulty that’s keeping people out, unless they just think it’s so hard they don’t even bother to try. I suspect the associated stereotypes of being a geek, nerd, etc. are a big factor that scares many prospective students away.
I’d definitely encourage any college students reading this to take a computer science intro class, it just might turn out to be easier (and more fun!) than you ever suspected.
I actually began writing this post along similar lines. It got a little unwieldy and I edited out. I wish I had remembered to add it back in.
I didn’t enjoy being a nuclear engineer because only 1% of the job involved actual problem solving. The other 99% involved sifting through previous calculations, gathering data, or other drudgery. Typically there was a deterministic solution to the problem at hand and no amount of creativity or problem solving ability would improve the finished product. Methodologies were limited to what have previously been approved by the NRC.
With coding, I have found a great deal more freedom to find new solutions to problems and have those ideas implemented. As you point out, that may counter-intuitively encourage acceptance authoritarian culture. With nuclear engineering we had a clear oppressor in the NRC and ill-informed protestors and politicians threatening our livelihood. Other than Uber, most of the tech industry does not operate under such an environment.