are capped at eight hours.

And it is not just the volume of work
that is the problem. Older engineers
and engineers with children can have
a hard time getting jobs, getting fund-
ing, or just managing their lives out-
side of work, as the Hacker is assumed
to be a young punk with no outside
responsibilities. Silicon Valley has a
well-known age bias, with many inves-
tors being quite blunt about preferring
founders under 40. Sequoia Capital’s
Mike Moritz has stated publicly he pre-
fers to fund 20-somethings because
“they don’t have distractions like fami-
lies and children and other things
that get in the way of business.” Even
executives feel age-related pressure:
Randy Adams, the chairman of the
conference-call service Socialdial, is in
his early 60s and says he got an eyelid
lift in order to be taken more seriously
in the Valley’s youth-obsessed busi-
ness culture. Here again the prevailing
myths are irrational and inaccurate: A
study by the Kauffman foundation of
U.S. tech businesses started between
1995 and 2005 found “twice as many
[founders] were older than 50 as were
younger than 25.”
From the early 1980s to the pres-
ent day, the tech industry, the law, and
media representations have evolved in
tandem, all hypnotized by the myth of
the Hacker. Programming, once the
less-rigorous realm of “computing”
at events. But the focus on gender ob-
scures the bigger mythology at play.

Although the skewed gender ratio in Silicon Valley is perhaps the most obvious distorting effect of the Hacker Myth, it is about much more than men versus women, boys versus girls. The Hacker Myth is a wellspring of many inequalities—gender-based, race-based, and age-based—and it is also a gross stereotype that has done very little for hackers themselves.

The Hacker Myth is just as much about assigning privilege and respect to those who fit a certain type, as it is about technophobia and government repression. There are Mark Zucker-bergs, and there are Kevin Mitnicks, but the filter through which they are simplified is one and the same. While today’s tech community acknowledges the irrationality that continues to plague CFAA prosecutions, the flipside of the Hacker Myth has been ignored. A good programmer is not a stereotype, and treating programmers like stereotypes instead of human beings leads to damaging practices in the workplace.

Despite lunch buffets, office gyms, unlimited vacation policies, and other superficially cushy perks, working conditions in the tech sector are often terrible. Startups in particular have always been infamously brutal places to work. As far back as 1994, Jamie Zawin-ski, an early Netscape engineer, wrote in his diary, “I slept at work again last night; two and a half hours curled up in a quilt underneath my desk… I have no life… This job is destroying my body. This can’t be worth it.” Zawiski’s experience is at the far end of the spectrum, but to this day many startups still expect 60-80 hour weeks. Larger companies can demand a perverse degree of loyalty from their employees, whom they insist should feel honored to be overworked in such a stimulating environment, while encouraging them to remain in a corporate bubble complete with catering and recreation areas.

Silicon Valley’s chronic workahol-
ism reflects the mythical belief that
these are the conditions in which the
Hacker thrives, even though hundreds
of studies by productivity researchers
from the 1930s onwards have demon-
strated that workers are most effective
and innovative when their workdays
women, turned into an intellectual en-
deavor whose most important partici-
pants are stereotyped as exceptional
,young white men.

While the myth of the Hacker has assigned great privilege to a certain group of young men, it has also led to the undue persecution of some in their ranks. The stereotype of youthful, unpredictable, rebellious prodigies is held up on a pedestal as it is simultaneously used to foment technophobia and engineer overbroad laws and precedents, such as with the Computer Fraud and Abuse Act.

The Hacker Myth is a deep, pervasive irrationality at the heart of contemporary tech culture. It affects venture capitalists, founders, engineers, employers, and employees; it worms its way into the heads of middle-schoolers at the movies; it whispers into the ears of college freshmen picking their majors.

As long as programmers’ roles are defined to match the attributes of an inherently limited group of people— namely, innately talented, iconoclastic prodigies—and as long as recruiters’ mental images of an ideal job candidate look like Kevin Mitnick filtered through 20 years of cinema, efforts to bring other groups into the tech sector can only go so far.

But even before that, we should simply admit Silicon Valley has never been a meritocracy. It is tempting to believe the current state of affairs resulted from a reasonable demand for a certain kind of labor that certain groups simply happened to be able to supply, but reality is never so simple, and the tech community in particular is overshadowed by an especially tangled set of myths. A call for diversity isn’t a call for inclusion just for inclusion’s sake. It is a call to break free from an illusion, or else face a future where our captains of industry are a bunch of Jonny Lee Millers on rollerblades.

 

Biographies

Sarah Jeong is a third-year student at Harvard Law School who writes about technology and the law. Her work has appeared in WIRED, Slate, and other publications. She is also the author of the advice column “Dear Miss Disruption.” Colin McSwiggen is a programmer and writer living in Boston. His writing has appeared in The Boston Globe, Jacobin, n+ 1, and elsewhere.

Copyright held by Owner(s)/Author(s).

The “outsider”
designation is
largely artificial.
Hackers are rarely
depicted as members
of marginalized
groups, but
are instead
characterized as
young white men
“disrupting” the
establishment of
older white men.