Do YOU find this a believable idea? If so then it is probably true for YOU.... If not then it is probably not true for YOU... YOU probably have to believe one thing about this idea though - the recorder of it believes it to be true... So if YOU go to Silicon Valley with that expectation then chances are it will turn out to be true for YOU too...

From what I've been told from my friends who work in Silicon Valley and others familiar with the corporate structures there, women still aren't treated equally. Despite there being a big push to recruit female employees and balance gender statistics, women typically have to work a lot harder to gain respect.

While there might be all this buzz that Silicon Valley companies are fantastic places to work and really cater to their employees unlike any other place in the world, like any workplace, I think there will be some kind of inequality for a long time to come, unfortunately.

Heather, I would strongly agree with you - I think San Francisco is a beautiful city, and I would live their in a nick-beat if I was bohemian. I just happened to be non-bohemian, but what I find relevant about Silicon Valley in relationship to San Francisco isn't the beautiful nature of San Francisco, it is an insanity that that will inevitably occur with any form of manic focus, which includes gentrification, as well signing up for the resulting rollercoaster ride, and that is on top of the natural adjustment to become blissful about living life on a major geological faultline. The irony of Silicon Valley is that it was built upon the foundation stone of the Hippie culture - that it brought forth a Wozniak and a Jobs but still managed to serve to create something far removed from that culture. Maybe what I should have said to my wife in the 80's is, I didn't come here to marry you, but to pay my last respects to the Hippie generation as they begin to meet with the sunset, but unfortunately somewhere in the 60's I got transplanted with a Howard Cosell gene of "I'm just telling it like it is". As much as I respect the impact of the Hippie Generation, I learned enough from listening to John Lennon when he wrote the words "No longer riding on the merry-go-round, I just had to let it go" on his final album called Double Fantasy, to instinctively know that there is one Hippie-leading light that I would be wise to truly learn from……M.

I would say this is far truer of the people in the city just to the north, The City, San Francisco. I lived there long enough that when I left to visit elsewhere, I would be shocked almost every time I rediscovered that it wasn't the same way all over the US. I always say that San Francisco is a city full of people that not only know how to, but actually DO "live, and let live." I've never seen any place in the US that can be compared to it either, it's simply amazing. As an amazing lifestyle, as it is an amazing tragedy that it ISN'T the same way all over the US...

While I don't like talking about my private life I will hand out a little tidbit as to how I personally would handle this "Big Idea". Over two decades ago when I married my wife, she fully expected me to live with her, at her then hometown of San Jose, California. While that was the plan, reality and plans don't often jive well or turn out as you might expect them to and so it proved in my case. I had to explain to her that Silicon Valley was far too an expensive a proposition for me, that it will be an economic roller coaster for me and that I won't rather than can't put in the crazy hours to keep riding at the top of the crest of the Valley's economic wave. That is the chief focus out there, not how much you do have but how much more you need to have. Now if people are economically glued to surviving this manic work culture of the Valley, pray tell me who of those so mentally exhausted after the crazy-hour culture Silicon Valley people put in, have the patience or energy or time to express actual hatred. In order to express hatred you need to have the time to express that hatred, so I then don't know what is actually worse, a hate filled culture or an insane one. In England we expressed biases all the time, but we also said "Sorry" to people all the time especially when we did nothing wrong; and we still had that sense of humour that wouldn't ever cut mustard anywhere in North America, indeed Americans do find the Brits a very strange bunch indeed, but they really dig the accent. Indeed I realize the fact that I have largely been domesticated by North Americans because usually when I write online I now take the "u" out of humor. We eventually ended up living in a midpoint between San Jose, USA and London, England and I do not regret either leaving England (the loutish of the British always reminded me that I was living in "their" country even though I was born there) and do not regret abandoning a life in California (just being miles away from the in-laws is actually an unintended benefit in itself). Now being discriminated against sure isn't nice, and I have had my fill of it. Unless one is willing to see the bright side of life, it will color ones own thinking and lead one to carrying those words like a sack of cement getting harder and heavier with age. Now there are people who carry that load and call it injustice, but there are a whole lot more people in the world, who just want to act dumb and stupid and display themselves doing so on You-Tube. Either mentality is not going help one to overcome a world of mindless discrimination or a world of mindless distraction. Somewhere along the line, one has to say to themselves, "this simply isn't worth it" and lose the weight, discard the hate filled memories and start anew, focused on a world that still contains a majority population who actually discriminate because they make human mistakes. So this isn't really a "Big Idea", it is an "Inflated Idea" and while we do need to address bullying, scolding and violence - we also have to know that the worst of this exists in the 10%. We cannot afford to apply 90% of our focus on a 10% solution. We need to apply a 100% effort to a 10% solution but we must not lose sight of the other 90% that do live lives that are not hate filled, just mistake filled. We can't put out the fire of hate by blowing it with oxygen, and sometimes a small fire may put out a big fire, but most of the time we don't focus on the simple fact that we can make people who hate realize how estranged and different they are from those that make genuine but ignorant human mistakes, and we all make mistakes. So we have to learn to think differently to reframe problems as solutions and find ways of both letting go and starting over, anew and fresh, so that we keep reminding ourselves that there is always a bigger and better option, a solution orientated world rather than a problem orientated world, so long as we are not so busy that we don't give or allow ourselves the time, or the opportunity to see it, to realize it or to those times when it really does matter to the quality of a human life, to mean it......M.

I don't know about this one. I have many African-American friends and white women friends in the Valley who still meet challenges in the workplace and more often than not find that it's a result of who they are and not what they're capable of. Overall though, I think that the tech sector, at least the web and media portion of it, is opening up more and more to becoming less full of "isms" than other sectors.

Arrington's original post Coming to America: Getting visas to do business in Silicon Valley (http://www.techcrunch.com/2008/05/02/coming-to-america-getting-visas-to-...), in which he discusses the high index of emigre's in San Francisco as an introduction to a guest post by Peter Nixey , founder of Y Combinator startup Clickpass, about how tough it is it get a visa.