With white male privilege, eccentricity is not disqualifying at a job interview. The most famous fictional example of this is probably Sheldon Cooper (Jim Parsons) from The Big Bang Theory.
Sheldon works at a prestigious university as a physicist, but he doesn’t teach any students and he doesn’t grease elbows with donors. The university tried to get him to teach a class (“The Junior Professor Solution”) and the university tried to get him to talk to donors at a fundraiser (“The Benefactor Factor”). Both efforts failed, so the university’s administrators are content to let him work and be eccentric on his own, away from the students and the donors.
Rewatching Silicon Valley, I came across another good example: Jared Patakian (Carey Embry), cyborg, a one-off on that show. None of the main characters would be mistaken for blue collar folks, but they’re nowhere near as weird as Jared Patakian.
I’ve been rewatching Silicon Valley and writing articles on Medium about the technical things they get wrong, and they get those things wrong in ways that stop the suspension of disbelief. My most recent one of those is about how the writers of the show seem to not know anything about version control systems like Git. I figure it’s not a topic many of the people who read my Daily Kos articles would be interested in. The next one I plan to post on Medium will get a little political because there’s a critique of billionaire parasites in it, though the main focus is on what happens when you delete a file from a computer.
When I rewatched the Silicon Valley second season episode “The Lady,” I knew I wanted to write about it but decided the article makes more sense here on Daily Kos. The technical stuff in this episode is correct, or if it’s wrong it’s of very little consequence to the story. Though the title is not about the woman who is hired, the episode does deal with gender discrimination, but it also winds up endorsing white male privilege.
In “The Lady,” Pied Piper needs to hire more software developers. Jared Patakian is a very weird job applicant who illustrates some things from the don’t’s column of the table of the do’s and don’t’s of job searching.
To be clear, Jared Patakian is qualified for the job. His résumé tells that story, but it also tells a story most career coaches would say should be left out of a résumé. Jared Patakian interviews with Pied Piper founder and CEO Richard (Thomas Middleditch) and eventual Pied Piper COO Donald “Jared“ Dunn (Zach Woods).
RICHARD: So it says here [on your résumé] that you're proficient in C++, code assembly for multiple processor architectures, and that you are a cyborg?
JARED PATAKIAN: That is correct, short for cybernetic organism. I came into this world of filth and pain with a congenital heart condition, requiring the installation of a pacemaker, upon which I am mortally dependent.
Jared Patakian dramatically opens his shirt to reveal the scar from the incision the doctors used to implant the pacemaker.
JARED DUNN: Wow, he's technically a cyborg.
RICHARD: Makes the résumé accurate.
JARED PATAKIAN: Look, we all know that I can make a s***load more money working for some multi-colored Happy Town in a hermetically-sealed box. But permission to be honest?
RICHARD: Permission granted.
JARED DUNN: Granted.
JARED: I like that you guys are so weird.
RICHARD: Yes, we are the weird ones.
There are objections to hiring Jared Patakian. Jared Dunn worries he’ll have to go back to being called Donald. More importantly, Erlich (T. J. Miller) objects to Jared Patakian because of the applicant’s history with Erlich’s old company, Aviato.
Erlich made a job offer for Jared Patakian to work at Aviato, then Jared Patakian used that job offer to get a bigger job offer from a different company. But be honest, Erlich: if Jared Patakian had done that to someone else’s company, you’d admire him for it. Jared Patakian knows his worth and is not afraid to play potential employers off against each other.
Richard doesn’t like being called “weird,” at least not by someone as objectively weird as Jared Patakian. It’s off-putting, but guess what: it’s not disqualifying. Richard insists on hiring Jared Patakian despite Erlich’s objections.
After Erlich has meltdowns over narrow spoons and Star Blazer VHS tapes, he withdraws his objections to hiring Jared Patakian. But now Richard has decided to withdraw Patakian’s job offer. Except that, quite predictably, Jared Patakian has gotten a better job offer from another company. Erlich and Richard bond over their shared experience of losing an applicant to a company willing to pay more.
There are white men in this episode who were interviewed and did not get the job.
The first applicant (played by Jeff Staron) seems way too focused on what it means for a workplace to be “dog-friendly.” Whatever that is, it goes over Richard’s head.
And the third applicant (played by Charlie Saxton) has an incredibly vague résumé: he “crushed it” in 2010, 2011 and from 2013 to the present (the episode first aired on May 3, 2015), leading Jared Dunn to ask “So are we to understand that you did not ‘crush it’ in 2012?” The applicant responds with what might be the most hilarious line of the episode: “There was a medical situation preventing me from ‘crushing it’ to my usual standards, so I had to take some time off until I was able to ‘crush it’ at 100%, at which point I resumed ‘crushing it’ full-time.”
On my first viewing of this episode I didn’t make much of the fact that the second applicant is a black man (played by Dwayne Colbert). He’s eccentric in that he also asks about Pied Piper being dog friendly, but at least this applicant is able to articulate that he would like for the pool to have a lifeguard because his dog can’t swim.
I do remember thinking it was a thinly disguised racist joke. Supposedly black people can’t swim and it is true that some people project their own traits onto their dogs. Ergo, the black man’s dog can’t swim. Ha ha ha.
Of course lots of black people can swim. And for the ones who can’t, that probably has more to do with the history of segregation and its still present consequences than with any innate physical or psychological characteristics.
A black man saying his dog can’t swim is weird, and apparently disqualifying. Dwayne Colbert never showed up on Silicon Valley again, and I have trouble remembering black people in any capacity in any later episodes of this show. There was a stripper and her bodyguard in the previous season, but black software developers on this show? Never.
Richard and Jared Dunn also interview a woman, Carla Walton (Alice Wetterlund). Despite her impressive résumé, the decision to give her an interview at all is preceded by a tortured series of disclaimers, as if women need extra verification of their abilities.
Gilfoyle at first vouches for Carla without hesitation, but then joins in on the disclaimers. Surely there was no similar handwringing before interviewing the cyborg.
Carla is abundantly qualified as far as technical skills go. She can spout technobabble to impress Richard and explain it in terms that Jared Dunn can understand.
And she’s also a better “culture fit” than Jared Patakian. As soon as she starts working, she starts pranking Dinesh and Gilfoyle with a fake Dolce & Gabbana purse, a fake credit card statement and the suggestion that she’s about to replace her crappy old car with something new and top of the line. This sends Dinesh and Gilfoyle into a spiral of insecurity with the worry that the new employee is getting paid a lot more than either of them, or perhaps more than the two of them combined.
The show’s first season drew widespread criticism for the near total absence of women. Monica (Amanda Crew) was arguably among the show’s main characters, but she was a businesswoman and her interactions with Richard were almost entirely only about venture capital for Pied Piper. There were no women as software developers (or “coders,” to use the incorrect popular parlance).
The producers of the show explained that they wanted to portray Silicon Valley as it is, not as they wish it was. Which meant that when Gavin Belson (Matt Ross) looks out the window of his C-suite office to look at the random software developers walking around outside the building, he only sees men in groups of four or five, mostly white men with one Indian man in each group.
That makes sense… until you crunch the numbers. Though still dismal, estimates at the time of the show’s first season said 12% of software developers in Silicon Valley were women, which according to Quartz reporter Lauren Bacon meant that “about one in eight anonymous walk-ons should be female.”
That Quartz article was published in 2014 and updated in 2022, but as far as I can tell, nothing of importance to readers was changed. Bacon’s article is a good indication of what people thought of the show’s first season when it first aired.
Only one female character speaks a line in the first episode: She’s an assistant to a venture capitalist. And while it’s entirely possible that this was a conscious choice on the part of the show’s creators – a satire of Silicon Valley as a land without women – I’m not convinced it’s a successful one. The near-total invisibility of women in the show doesn’t problematize the valley’s lack of gender diversity so much as it simply replicates it and dials it up to ten. A more successful strategy for highlighting the dearth of women in tech would be to actually show us some interesting female characters, and have them play a part in critiquing the current reality.
To that end, Bacon suggests five types of women characters the show could add. The show’s producers took her advice to heart, because four of those eventually made their way onto the show. The first one clearly became Carla Walton.
1. The Girl Coder
She’s a hacker in the accelerator—the only woman there. She wears what the dudes wear: t-shirts, jeans, hoodies, maybe a little more fitted, or maybe not. Her hair could be a different colour every other episode. She’s working on an app that’s as niche and unknowably obtuse as the rest of her cohort’s.
Clearly this suggestion became Carla.
The Girl Coder’s backstory: She started out as a front-end coder (cue many inside jokes among her peers about her non-hardcore-ness) before digging deeper into how to build software and configure servers. She’s now a ridiculously good coder, and can hold her own with the geekiest engineers anywhere. But being an outsider because of her gender has made her good at blending in. She can take a joke, has a high tolerance for environments where she’s the only woman, and experiences much of the same social awkwardness as her male peers.
Reading that makes me certain that the show’s producers specifically read Lauren Bacon’s article and took it to heart, to an extent.
What she adds to the show: The Girl Coder racks up the tension in the accelerator by both embodying and showcasing the social awkwardness of her cohort. Every now and then, the guys in the accelerator notice that she’s actually female, and experience a brief moment of awareness that apps like “Nip Alert” might not be what’s going to net them their first billion. (Potential character arc: She eventually figures out that her environment is sexist and loses patience with it, a la Elissa Shevinsky.)
To be fair, Nelson Bighetti (Josh Brener) realized early on that his Nip Alert app is “a sexist, useless thing.” Nelson was on the show to the very last episode, but Nip Alert was completely forgotten after the first season, aside from very fleeting mentions.
And Carla Walton was already very much aware of the sexism in the industry before getting hired at Pied Piper. When Jared Dunn makes awkward attempts to get Carla to hang out with Monica, Carla is annoyed but not surprised. Same goes for Monica.
Amanda Crew stayed with the show all the way to the series finale. But Alice Wetterlund didn’t even make it to the second season finale. The penultimate episode of the season was taken up with an arbitration proceeding in which Pete Monahan (Matt McCoy) stole the show as a seemingly ordinary lawyer with a very colorful past, to put it mildly.
Carla’s last appearance on the show had her watching helplessly as an unexpected massive deletion of files from a porn server jeopardized Pied Piper’s chances of signing a contract with that porn company. I have been working on an article on Medium about that episode, I have decided I’ll cross-post it here.
Without explanation, Carla was absent from the second season finale, in which the Pied Piper guys struggle to upscale a suddenly compelling livestream for an audience of thousands. I suspect Erlich was assigned some lines that were originally meant for Carla.
Alice Wetterlund said the show’s set was a hostile workplace. Apparently the producers did not have a real life equivalent to Jared Dunn, telling them how to navigate possible problems, much less anticipate them.
T. J. Miller played an obnoxious character, but that doesn’t excuse his being obnoxious when the cameras weren’t rolling. Miller’s behavior made Wetterlund uncomfortable, but she didn’t say anything at the time. When old allegations of sexual abuse by Miller surfaced, Wetterlund was not surprised.
Michelle Vincent writes for Femestella that
The most widely reported complaints behind the scenes revolved around former Silicon Valley star T.J. Miller, who abruptly left the series after season four amid rumors that he was showing up to set late, under the influence, or not at all.
Actress Alice Wetterlund made waves when she spoke out about “bully and petulant brat” Miller after her time on the series, noting that her turn as coder Carla was “kind of a nightmare.” She alleged that “pretty much everyone who had any power on that (almost all male) set, including the male cast members, enabled him and were complicit in his unprofessionalism” and they can “[expletive] off forever.”
The producers and the writers clearly took a dim view of Miller and burned a literal pig in effigy of him. But Middleditch, much like Richard to Erlich, was loyal to Miller and made excuses for Miller, whining that any man can be falsely accused of sexual harassment. Middleditch also drew scrutiny for his supposedly open marriage, which would be none of our business if we could assume the wife is 100% on board with the arrangement, which we actually can’t because of public remarks from Middleditch.
When the news of Wetterlund’s complaints broke, the suits at HBO pretended this was the first time they were hearing of it. Or maybe they really were. Maybe everyone just made excuses for Miller’s behavior and no complaints made it out of the set.
I understand why Wetterlund didn’t complain during her time on the show. This was her first recurring rôle and she rationalized her discomfort with Miller as just one of those things that you have to put up with for the sake of your career.
There were other women software developers on the show. There was a woman working remotely from Europe whose main purpose was to provide Dinesh (Kumail Nanjiani) a woman he could pathetically pine for. And there was Richard’s one-episode girlfriend who teased him about his preference for tabs to spaces. I haven’t rewatched those episodes yet.
Being weird like Jared Patakian is definitely preferable to being a sexist pig like T. J. Miller, harassing the few women actors on the set. But in the past, neither of those would cost a man his job, nor jeopardize his chances of getting the job in the first place.
Jared Patakian was not meant to last on the show, and he didn’t. But without his predestination, he easily could have. In Silicon Valley, there’s no penalty for a white man being weird like Jared Patakian. For women and racial minorities, the slightest weirdness can be disqualifying. That’s not right.