What does it mean to be “in the tech industry”?

Last updated on: November 18, 2013 at 1:53 pm by Jane the Actuary

What does it mean to be “in the tech industry”? 2013-11-18T13:53:00-06:00 Jane the Actuary

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Yesterday the Tribune featured, as it often does, an article from the Los Angeles Times, titled “Sexism a problem in Silicon Valley, critics say,” which describes instances of sexism/misogyny in the tech industry in Silicon Valley and the crass so-called “brogrammer” culture, and said that, Sheryl Sandberg’s prominent position as Facebook COO and Marissa Mayer’s position at Yahoo notwithstanding, women are held back by the sexism and sexual harassment.

The Tribune then featured smaller articles with voices from the Chicago “tech start up” scene, one of which was by Sharon Schneider, founder and CEO of Moxie Jean, a web-based buyer and seller of upscale children’s clothing.

But here’s the thing:

Sharon Schneider doesn’t have a tech background. She’s an entrepreneur who hired tech contractors to build and maintain her website. Nothing in her biography (see this profile) includes any programming background. There’s a lot to do in running such a business beyond computer programming — the mechanics of setting prices for buying and reselling the clothes, photographing them, processing the orders, marketing, etc. — and it simply doesn’t seem appropriate to call her business a “tech start-up” when the internet is just a platform, a tool no different than the computers and telephones we all use everyday.

Now, based on their Wikipedia profiles, Meyer does genuinely come from a technical background, but, again, Sandberg comes from a management background — a Harvard MBA, then work at McKinsey, then, prior to joining Google, “from 1996 to 2001, Sandberg served as Chief of Staff to then United States Secretary of the Treasury Larry Summers under President Bill Clinton where she helped lead the Treasury’s work on forgiving debt in the developing world during the Asian financial crisis.” (from Wikipedia).

So three things strike me:

First of all, Sandberg’s ascendance has nothing to say to women who may or may not be budding computer programmers, except that tech companies are now mainstream enough to pull from the same executive pool who move from one industry to another.

Second, not every company which uses the internet as a tool is a “tech company” — let’s keep that label only for those which rely solely on users using the internet for their business, rather than those selling a product or a service using the internet to reach customers and process orders.

Third, back when my dad was a GM employee, there was a certain culture clash between “car guys” who had risen through the ranks from engineering, and those who had come from a management background. Or, at least, among the engineers, there was a suspicion that if the non-car guys had charge of the company and tried to run it in a way that was indifferent to, well, cars, except as a product line-up no different than shampoos or vacuums, the company would go to pot. I am curious (though not necessarily enough to dig into this) about the extent to which there is a present or future culture clash between programmers and management.

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