Revenge of the nerds?
I arrived to San Francisco about 3 years ago, and I found that the internet software engineering and data science industry here is a nerd paradise. Job security is very high, companies are constantly hunting for new engineers with good analytic skills and natural science or mathematics background. Salaries in the Silicon Valley are around twice the national average for software engineers. People work no more than 8-9 hours a day including lunch, and they don't work very hard - there is lots of idle chatting, long lunch and coffee breaks, and YouTube watching (sometimes out loud!). People take vacations, and it's no problem to run an errand at any time of day and stay home afterwards. "Working from home" really means working for only some part of the day - it is a micro-vacation in disguise. Offices are informal, there is no dress code, no hierarchy, and no standards of behavior - people scream, jump, run, play games, shoot guns at each other, etc., during working hours. Full health insurance and retirement benefits are a given. I have yet to hear a single racist or sexist remark in the office. The majority of engineers and low-level managers are from ethnic minorities, and there are quite a few women in data science (although they are almost all Chinese). The highest concern of the management is that key engineers could suddenly leave the company, setting back entire teams by weeks. Management is anxious to talk to every single engineer each week to find out whether the engineers feel good at work.

And yet, there seems to be another side to Silicon Valley, as this New York Times article describes. That Silicon Valley features low pay, no job security ("disposable workers"), grueling work hours, and "rampant racial and gender discrimination" as they claim. Supposedly, some Amazon employees cry at work out of frustration and fear, and it is supposedly considered par for the course by management.

Are these different worlds? While reading the article linked above, I noticed that the work is cursorily described as "sales calls". Something clicked. Can it be that those people who have no job security and who cry at their desks are actually not engineers at all? The author of that article has also written a book, "Disrupted", which perhaps gives more substantial information.

If so, this is the "revenge of the nerds". People who are supposedly socially awkward or strange ("nerds" or "geeks") are now irreplaceable employees who dictate their conditions to management. Everybody else - including "managers"! - are disposable.