7 ms·

Can someone explain why SV tech workers are more left-wing to me as an outsider? I always thought these tech workers were more libertarian.

• wpasc 7y ago
  I think a variety of things get conflated. (anecdotal insight here): Many people at tech companies are not software engineers. I believe they are more often to the left of the general tech workers. Tech workers can be pretty left still, but I have found to tend more libertarian/a-political. In general though, many people employed at tech companies are young, coastal (by virtue of where they work), and work in cities. All those factors tend to skew more left.
  • methodover 7y ago
    I’ve seen a couple comments saying that it’s the non-SWE’s that are the liberal ones. That’s a very different experience than my own, and that of my friends. My experience: Designers tend to be pretty liberal. Product managers and other managers tend to be moderate (tend to be Biden and Buttigieg fans). Salespeople tend to be extremely conservative. Support is kind of all over the place. Engineers tend to be either diehard socialists or (and this is the minority) libertarian.
    • JansjoFromIkea 7y ago
      "diehard" seems like a stretch when you consider how much support there tends to be for unionisation (and most of us could get by on way less than we make, so it's not like we don't have to power to take some stands)... Lot of social democrats in my neck of the woods for sure but in US terms it'd be way more Warren than Sanders, and she is absolutely not a socialist from what I can see.
      • methodover 7y ago
        You’re totally right. I meant socialist in the same way that Bernie Sanders seems to use it, which I have trouble distinguishing from Warren’s states policies. (I do agree that the traditional definition of word applies to neither Warren’s or Sanders’ policies for the most part. Except for the health insurance industry, where the proposal is nationalization.) I should have said social democrat. Indeed, now that I think about it, few engineers would label themselves socialist. I don’t, though I am a Warren/Sanders supporter.
• changchuming 7y ago
  1. Being in extremely left-wing Bay area with historic ties to the free speech movement. 2. They're not, it just benefits both the tech companies and the media to portray them that way. Based on personal observations.
  • Mountain_Skies 7y ago
    Add in the visa/immigration issues. A large percentage of the workforce in SV is imported from outside the country. While the business wing of the Republican Party loves cheap labor, there are other wings that oppose it. Once upon a time the labor wing of the Democratic Party would have been against importing labor but the influence of that wing has waned considerably while the business wing has established itself in both major parties. If you're not a native born US citizen, a label that describes quite a few tech workers in the Valley, the left seems more aligned with your continued existence in the United States.
    • ThrowawayR2 7y ago
      > "A large percentage of the workforce in SV is imported from outside the country." Imported mostly from East and South Asia, from very socially conservative cultures. I wouldn't be so quick to assume that they're necessarily aligned with the Democrats.
      • rayiner 7y ago
        They mostly are, although this is a recent phenomenon. Growing up in the 1990s, Indians/etc. in my area we heavily republican, consistent with their higher income levels and general social conservatism. In the 1996 election Asians went for Dole by a slightly larger margin than white people. But today, Asians vote Democrat at a higher rate than Hispanics.
  • electricslpnsld 7y ago
    Eh, Bay Area isn’t that left wing. It’s more neo-liberal than anything else, just look at the area’s reps in congress.
• malvosenior 7y ago
  I think it's generational. SV in the Gen X era was highly libertarian. The Millenials in SV seem to be mostly left wing or even socialist. Broadly speaking that is, exceptions abound.
  • nmll 7y ago
    They are branding it as socialism, however the way the operate reminds me of seasoned 70 year old bureaucrats in East Germany. Also, the politics are all over the place, it's left wing if it suits them. [Obviously not everyone is like that, but it's the 30% that are visible on the Internet. There are many totally normal millennials.]
  • rmrfrmrf 7y ago
    A lot of social democrats start out as libertarians and then move left once they see the bigger picture of power dynamics beyond the individual.
    • methodover 7y ago
      This was my experience as well. Started off as a libertarian. But then I started working, first in the lobbying industry, then in Silicon Valley. Meritocracy is not as good an idea as it seems to be in practice.
      • perl4ever 7y ago
        "Meritocracy is not as good an idea as it seems to be in practice" Why not just consider that it is a label which may not apply to the reality you observe? Have we gotten to the point where considering that any X is not Y is considered a "no true Scotsman" fallacy?
      • mcv 7y ago
        The only problem with meritocracy is that it's unattainable in a society with inherited power differences. Other than that it would be a great idea. Just one that hasn't truly been tried outside limited organisations yet.
• mrkurt 7y ago
  Antitrust concerns are reasonably bipartisan. The democratic candidates are getting traction with antitrust platforms because the time is right and they’re the presidential challengers. If Obama was still president, Josh Hawley (for example) would be running a similar primary campaign, with similar success.
  • dageshi 7y ago
    I doubt it. As someone outside the US looking in, real rage towards companies like Facebook/Google only really became a mainstream topic after Trump won. The rage induced by that event got directed at Facebook initially and has now broadened to include all the big tech companies that profit from data collection. If Hillary had won or in a theoretical world where Obama was still president then talk of breaking up Facebook/Google would still be a niche murmur.
    • mrkurt 7y ago
      I think that’s just a coincidence. This has been simmering for about 30 years, I think tech monopolies are just very visible. Remember when Mark Zuckerberg was going to make a presidential run and went canvassing the country in 2016? The dems loved the guy.
• carapace 7y ago
  You would need to look into the history of the Bay Area going back to at least the 1960's, and probably one or two decades further. It's more a case of counter-culture vs. mainstream; with the tech scene appearing Left-leaning only to the extent that the Right tries to portray their agenda as the mainstream in the media. (The Left does that too, it's just that the Right has been more successful since about the 80's when the pols roped in the Christians. Before then, Christians mostly stayed out of politics. Mostly. E.g. "liberal" becoming a "dirty word", etc.) That's why you see e.g. Left-wing sentiment and Libertarian sentiment (as well as Furry sentiment; pro-gun sentiment; anti-gun sentiment; weird-sex sentiment; non-binary-gender sentiment; ... I could go on at length. CA is a weird place, and SF is the weirdest place in CA (except for Berkeley)) in SV. Really, it's a political and social kaleidoscope out here. If it looks Blue or Red it's the tinted filter.
• tootahe45 7y ago
  Left-wing views tend to be highly agreeable views and there's almost no discomfort or backlash in expressing them. IMO, it starts at the top with CEOS who do things like banning firearms sales after a mass shooting for huge PR gain, and propagates throughout the company. Oh and if multiple execs call a meeting and were almost tearing up over an election loss (Google), I highly doubt i'd be comfortable even mentioning my political views, so the stats probably fail to mention people lying about their political views to avoid trouble.
  • adamsea 7y ago
    In principle I agree with your point but imho our current president is an exception to that rule. How often does a self-confessed sexual abuser get elected president? And the sad thing is that comment of mine is not even slander - it’s a statement of fact, since the “Grab ‘em by the pussy” comment === admitting to being sexually abusive. If I was a woman, and an exec, I would certainly be tearing up regardless of my political views.
  • dlp211 7y ago
    You can just look at political donations from employees at these companies. Tech skews heavily Democrat.
• biztos 7y ago
  Are they? Or are left-wing SV tech workers just disproportionally cited in the press? I know plenty of SV tech workers I'd call Libertarian, and even a few Trumpists, though the latter tend not to make a big show of it. Maybe that's because of my age. But I think among the younger workers there's a much higher percentage of immigrants and I really doubt the "SV lefties" narrative holds for a majority of them (because they tend to come from pretty conservative societies and sought out the US for economic benefit). I could, of course, be wrong in my hunches. In which case I'd love to see some sources.
• geofft 7y ago
  As a left-leaning tech worker, I don't have a more satisfying answer for you than that I think the left-wing position is correct (realistic, just, etc.) Part of why it's surprising, I suppose, is the presumption that those making lots of money would tend to be libertarian, since libertarian principles (lower taxes, lower regulation, etc.) would yield higher profits. But I believe tech workers (myself included) make too much money. I don't work harder than, say, the in-house chef at my employer, the construction worker building our new buildings, the folks digging new subway tunnels, etc. I'm self-serving (i.e., a rational agent) in that I'll take the highest-paying job available to me, but I don't have it in me to be self-serving to the extent of saying, this state of affairs is good and we should support it long-term. It often feels like the only reason I need this much money is to keep up with people making even more money than me driving inflation in housing etc. prices, and I have no inherent interest in playing that game. (To be clear, there are reasonable arguments that I should be making as much money as I do, that my contribution to society is greater, etc. I don't think someone who holds such beliefs is a bad person - I'm just reporting on my beliefs and those of many of my peers.) I also see that making more money is how you get leverage to influence society, so I optimize for putting money into my hands - which is unrelated to whether the direction I want to take society ends up with more money in my hands. I also suspect a lot of tech workers, by being at profitable and highly-automated business, are more likely to believe in the feasibility of a highly-automated society that puts money in everyone's hands regardless of how hard they work (think Star Trek, or the "fully automated luxury space capitalism" meme, or whatever). We see huge profits coming from collectives without an individual profit motive (aka "the engineering department") and not as much from rugged individualism, so we're more skeptical of the necessity of right-wing market-based solutions to improve society.
  • m4nu3l 7y ago
    As a moderate Libertarian tech worker I would have to give the same answer. I hold my position not just because I don't want to pay too many taxes, but because I find the position to be the correct one. I think that pay has very little to do with effort of the worker. As you mentioned, lot of people work harder and put more effort while making less money than others. IMO the argument that effort should be used as a measure for pay can easily be invalidated with this reductio ad absurdum: If you pay me for the effort I put on my work I would make more money by carrying a heavy rock back and forth all day than to work on most of the jobs available today. As economy theory goes, labor is a commodity and, as such, subject to the law of supply and demand. That's really it, there is no other way at the moment to assign salaries. Yes you can reduce inequality with taxation. But there is an inverse correlation between taxation an economic growth, even though there are some exceptions. My thoughts on automation are that, yes, automation displaces jobs, but it also reduce prices (not just of the final products but those of capital goods used to produce them too), so, while I don't know how a close-to fully automated society will look like I'm sure resources will still need be allocated based on demand from consumers and the economic output will be limited, hence there will still be a concept of markets and currencies. My guess is that Capitalism will be partially automated itself. We will probably need some limited redistribution for those that initially own no shares in automated companies, allowing them to live and invest in these, or to buy automation capital goods to create new automated companies.
• jedberg 7y ago
  Silicon Valley used to be very Libertarian. In the 2004 presidential election, the San Jose districts had the highest turnout for the Libertarian candidate nationwide. San Jose is still fairly Libertarian (the San Jose newspaper is still the most conservative in the Bay Area with a very Libertarian slant). But the nexus of SIlicon Valley has been migrating north for a long time. SF has always been very liberal, and as the nexus of tech moves towards SF, so does it’s politics.
• confidantlake 7y ago
  In the current political landscape in the us, the left wing tends to be more science based, while the right wing is more religious based. For example the base position in the right wing party is to deny climate change exists. To put superstition and dogma over reason and evidence is the antithesis of the enlightenment.
  • zozbot234 7y ago
    > the left wing tends to be more science based Sorry, but the left wing is not "science based" at all when it comes to the social sciences - their attitude to social issues is very much religious in nature (see any mention of "socialism" and "wealth taxes" as perhaps the clearest and least controversial example) and "the antithesis of the enlightenment". Both sides are playing this game.
    • confidantlake 7y ago
      Agreed, but in my personal view social sciences are not really sciences at all. They have a largely ideological component. I expect there to be disagreements there. On the other hand denying hard sciences seems much worse.
      • zozbot234 7y ago
        > Agreed, but in my personal view social sciences are not really sciences at all. That's quite wrong. Even as we speak, hundreds of millions of people are being lifted out of poverty, thanks in no small part to the gradual adoption of saner policies based in the social sciences. That's not "ideology", it's real results.
        • confidantlake 7y ago
          Agree, I am having trouble expressing my thoughts correctly here. Maybe what I mean to say is describing a physical properties of our universe is much simpler than understanding social systems. Therefore these ideas tend to get simplified and you hear things like "communism is good" or "capitalism is good". It becomes more about tribal identity than scientific inquiry. But I concede that in other instances better policies based on social sciences are helping us tremendously.
• giaour 7y ago
  I would need to find data to back this up, but my sense is that much of the political difference can be accounted for with demographics. Tech workers as a group are younger than the population at large. Tautologically, the group excludes retirees, and as the industry has expanded over the past decades, it's growth has been fueled by hiring recent college graduates. Lower ages and higher levels of education are correlated with left-wing views in polling results. If you controlled for age and education, I don't think you would see any ideological distinctions between tech workers and the rest of the population.
• vidarh 7y ago
  Libertarianism started on the far left - The "original libertarian", the anarcho-communist Joseph Dejacque, attacked Proudhon, the "original anarchist" for being a "moderate anarchist, liberal, but not libertarian" for his regressive views on women. Right-libertarianism was an attempt to unite the libertarian parts of the left with socially liberal elements on the right against authoritarian ideologies; their main distinction are views on property rights and on whether or not de jure vs. de facto rights matter most. As such it is often hard to place people with libertarian views firmly on a traditional left-right axis. You'll find a variety ranging from the far left seeing private property as illegitimate restrictions on liberty (Dejacque applauded Proudhon's famous "property is theft"), to right wing libertarians who see private property as fundamental to liberty (often invoking e.g. Ayn Rand, Hayek and von Mises), to people in between who want various trade-offs (e.g. mostly protecting property rights but seeing a need for some level of welfare provisions) My experience is that engineering in general tends to have a lot of socially liberal people, many of whom could probably be described as libertarian, but that the left/right position of their views is often a lot more ambiguous.
  • abalone 7y ago
    > Right-libertarianism was an attempt to unite the libertarian parts of the left with socially liberal elements on the right against authoritarian ideologies; their main distinction are views on property rights I don't think this is correct at all. What's called right libertarianism or laissez-faire capitalism emerged in the mid 20th century (e.g. Ayn Rand). It stole the term which had historically been a left term and simply cleansed it of its critique of corporate power. Corporations are authoritarian, anti-democratic organizations that exercise a great deal of control over our economic lives. Laissez-faire capitalists saw an opportunity to use Left anti-authoritarian concepts to attack democratic state controls and regulations on corporate power. Often they will employ some mental gymnastics to redefine corporations as extensions of individual rights, hence the John Galt cult of personality stuff. This is akin to calling feudalism "liberty" because, think of the rights of kings. As such we have entered an era of unparalleled corporate power, control and concentration of wealth. What exposes the sheer fraud of "right libertarianism" in Silicon Valley is that much of SV was created by the state and continues to be subsidized to the tune of billions annually. Look up DARPA.[1] So they're not even against state capitalism. [1] https://unherd.com/2018/06/government-agency-made-silicon-valley/ https://unherd.com/2018/06/government-agency-made-silicon-va...
• throwaway713 7y ago
  I work at one of the companies often cited as having very left-wing employees, and my impression is that the media heavily overplays this. I would instead say there is a small but very active group of employees that push a left-leaning political agenda, and most of these people tend to have non-STEM backgrounds (I don’t know why this is the case, but it is what I have observed). Most of the software engineers and data scientists that I work with do not really enjoy discussing politics (at least at work) and have views that lean more libertarian. Four of the people I work with are closet conservatives, and there are some issues I would say I am conservative on as well, but no one ever really brings these topics up at work.
  • adamsea 7y ago
    Not to poke too much fun but a non-STEM background could mean significant coursework in history, political science / theory, philosophy, and sociology or anthropology (which although sciences are usually mor colloquially implied by STEM). So maybe non-STEM folks tend to lean left because they are better educated on the issues ;) I’m a bit tongue-in cheek here, but, couldn’t resist :)
    • throwaway713 7y ago
      > So maybe non-STEM folks tend to lean left because they are better educated on the issues ;) I totally agree with you, but would add the caveat that more education on social issues doesn’t mean more likely to be correct ;) (poking fun back haha)
• 6gvONxR4sf7o 7y ago
  Disregard your SV stereotypes and think about San Francisco stereotypes. Or Oakland stereotypes. Or SF stereotypes from a generation back. They're still here. The bay area, despite being an insulated bubble, is still really not homogeneous. The media loves to portray it as homogeneous, but that's really not the case.
• michaelt 7y ago
  Both parties make strategic decisions about which voters they'll particularly target, and which they'll worry less about attracting. In recent decades the Republican party has had some quite big successes taking a fairly anti-science stance - if a politician thinks creationism should be taught in school, or that climate change is a hoax, chances are they're republican rather than democrat. Neither GW Bush nor Trump marketed themselves as intelligent men, and they were successful despite that. I think it's fairly understandable how that would sit poorly with STEM workers - even if many of them would naturally be conservative on fiscal issues.
• spamizbad 7y ago
  Let’s take the industry out of the equation: if you asked someone who studies political demographics what the likely politics of someone who is under-40, urban-dwelling with a STEM education, who generally work with (and/or for) immigrants... they wouldn’t hesitate to say left-leaning. The industry’s youth and location alone are going to skew political demographics leftward no matter what. And purely anecdotal... but I’ve noticed younger right wingers to be less enthralled by capitalism and market economics.
• oceanghost 7y ago
  Hi, I'm likely the only person here who has read the 1200 page book "Human Action" by Ludwig Von Mises on which libertarianism is based. The book was published in 1949, and the premise which is exhaustively laid out is, if you CAN work, you should, and the government should interfere with its citizens the least amount possible. These are reasonable principles, but two things happened. One, the Republicans captured the Ron Paul/Tea Pary (Libertarian) movement of the early 2000s and tried to fold it into their party. Many of us left (including me), but it effectively dismantled the movement. Second, it was less evident in the early 2000s, but, the premise of libertarianism becomes less and less valid every day. When Human Action was written, the need for physical labor was high, it was probably true that anyone who was able to work, could have found some job doing physical labor or menial jobs. That's simply not true anymore. Physical labor is largely done by machines and SV is actively eating low skill jobs, such that the invariant of libertarinism--that there is always work-- is broken.
  • oceanghost 7y ago
    It's too late to edit; I'd like to add that another fundamental flaw of libertarianism is it always blames the job seeker. Despite macro-economic conditions, despite corruption, despite oppression, it always places the burden of economic problems on the lowest person with the least power. Your job was outsourced? It's your fault for not providing more value. The system is corrupt? Let's just ignore that; it's your fault for not providing more value. In this way, Libertarians (of which I once was) are "useful idiots" for the ruling class-- it's always your fault for not serving the upper classes well enough.