I love San Francisco and the Silicon Valley tech scene, and as a technologist there’s nowhere else I’d rather be in the world. But we have a lot of serious cultural problems to deal with here, including the following:

Mental Health:

As a VC and the son of dot-com entrepreneurs, one thing I always hated that we didn’t talk enough about in Silicon Valley startups was the crushing difficulty of founding and/or working in an early stage tech startup.

It’s “cool” in Silicon Valley tech to work 60+ hour weeks, dedicated fanatically to your team and your job. It’s also strangely permissible to exhibit some of the darker eccentricities of celebrities like Steve Jobs (e.g.: lashing out at people, etc.) because such practices are supposedly pre-requisite for being a genius or maven at business.

In reality, being an entrepreneur or working in an early tech venture is a brutal task that can take a heavy toll on you regardless of age or experience. But because the culture of Silicon Valley prizes this “work till you die” kind of experience over taking a more thoughtful, healthy, and collaborative approach, there is a startlingly common trend in tech to subject yourself to an extremely unhealthy lifestyle without getting help until it’s too late. Worse, prizing unsocial behavior that may be a red flag of a serious issue further discourages people from seeking help if and when they need it.

Elitism:

Silicon Valley has serious, systemic problems with elitism. One of the biggest areas where this is apparent is in higher education, where the competitive environment of Bay Area colleges lends itself directly to a weird sentiment of “social class” depending on where you graduate.

For example, students graduating from UC Berkeley or Stanford are generally treated very differently for recruiting in entry level software engineering roles than their counterparts at San Jose State or Santa Clara University - despite nearly identical computer science curricula across all of these well-ranked universities.

There is an environment of elitism common in where you work as well. For example, young people who work in well-regarded companies like Facebook or Google are generally treated differently than their counterparts in older, less sexy companies like Oracle or Intel. Some of this varies depending on where you live, and generally its importance socially tends to fade a bit as you get older.

Job role is also a place where Silicon Valley elitism shines. QA (Quality Assurance) generally gets treated like the “bottom of the food chain,” and QA engineers are sometimes considered socially inferior to developers or product managers - especially in large company cultures. Being “technical” in general is seen as a desirable trait, to the point that people in other business roles such as HR or Marketing are sometimes portrayed as “less valuable” to a company’s success.

All of these aspects of elitism tend to work their way into the foundations of SF and Silicon Valley culture.

Wantrepreneurship:

While Silicon Valley prides itself on being a benevolent meritocracy, there is an image culture in the Valley (and especially in SF) that is on par with what you see in places like Hollywood.

For example, to “fit in” in tech and in SF you generally want to be “crushing it.” You want to be an early employee at a great startup that’s making a boatload of money. You want to be a successful entrepreneur who has been courted by VCs for funding. You want to be rich, famous, and in the “in” crowd of other successful tech cognoscenti and startup founders.

A night out in San Francisco at a tech-focused mixer makes it seem like these kinds of people are common. But in reality, the people who actually fulfill this image probably number in the low hundreds across the Bay Area as a whole. Startup success is very rare, and there is a frantic culture of people (especially young people in their early thirties or twenties) who pretend to be successful entrepreneurs to “fit in.”

Wantrepreneurship (and the “fake it till you make it” culture) isn’t just bizarre; it’s socially unhealthy. It promotes an incredulous culture in tech that makes it hard to meet and trust people. Similarly, it misrepresents the brutal difficulty of actually being an entrepreneur, and makes it difficult for entrepreneurs and startup workers who are struggling with the otherwise normally difficult dimensions of their job.

Sexism:

Systemic sexism exists across all parts of high tech and the industries that directly serve it. Whether you’re a recruiter (Why Is Silicon Valley So Awful to Women?), an engineer (Susan Fowler’s Uber post was the first shot in a new war against Silicon Valley sexism), or even a VC (Ellen Pao: This Is How Sexism Works in Silicon Valley), there is absolutely an environment of sexism systemically pervasive to high tech culture that has led to frightening amounts of sexual harassment and sexual assault within the industry.

Racism:

It can be very difficult to be a person of color in high tech. African Americans, Latinos, and other minorities who are also historically underrepresented in STEM or in universities that fuel Silicon Valley’s engineering-focused culture. are underrepresented and frequently stigmatized. There are absolutely racist undertones to much of Silicon Valley’s culture, though they anecdotally tend to take a more subtle route than some of the almost theatrically terrible episodes of sexism in tech’s engineering culture.

Groupthink:

Just as the image culture of Silicon Valley has produced its systemic issues with elitism, sexism, and racism, it has similarly created an environment where simply thinking differently than the Silicon Valley norm is undesirable. As a result, there is a ton of blind fast following that goes on in Silicon Valley to an infuriating degree.

A great example of this is in how fads develop around “hot “ technologies. At the time of this writing, cryptocurrencies are one of the hottest technology areas in the Valley. As a result, bloggers, VCs, and frankly anyone who wants to be part of the tech cognoscenti gush about this horribly complicated synthesis of economics, applied math, and computer science (frequently without expertise or domain knowledge) to remain relevant and at the bleeding edge of conversation.

Blindly fast following technologies is a problem as old as Silicon Valley. Today’s “crypto” was yesterday’s “location-based services”, or even earlier’s “web 2.0” or “e-commerce.” It tends to help propagate poor quality information about the technology area as tech cognoscenti with lots of social influence or reach but little domain knowledge gush about the topic to be cool. And it can make it hard for entrepreneurs in the “hot” space to manage expectations of investors or customers when aspects of that erroneous information become the expected norm.

The flip side of this is that people who do tend to think differently and not fast follow are considered persona non grata. For example, it’s extremely difficult to have traditionally conservative views in Silicon Valley tech. Being openly religious or evangelical is also frowned upon socially. Jessica Su’s answer here on the social consequences of having dissenting political views is definitely worth looking at to dive deeper on this aspect of Silicon Valley groupthink.

This environment of groupthink is almost comically paradoxical given that Silicon Valley prizes itself on being disruptive and seeking a utopian meritocracy. You can’t have either in an environment that suppresses dissenting opinions or encourages everyone to blindly conform just to be “cool.”

Economic Classism:

Basically every other answer to this question already references how expensive Silicon Valley and San Francisco are. But one unique consequence of the blisteringly high cost of living is that the Bay Area is becoming increasingly segmented into “haves” and “have-nots” depending on whether you work in tech and/or live in a tech-dominated region.

For example, areas where tech workers tend to live (Palo Alto, Menlo Park, Foster City, Fremont, parts of San Francisco) will generally receive better social services due to higher local tax revenue and the powerful political clout of high tech on state and local government. But areas where tech workers generally avoid living (East San Jose, Hayward, Vallejo, other parts of San Francisco) will typically get treated like second class citizens as their denizens have less political agency and lower local tax revenue.

Ultimately this helps promote a culture of economic classism and, at scale, societal instability. Bay Area funding of public services is by no means equitable, and non-tech workers tend to find themselves increasingly disadvantaged as the Bay Area economically and culturally crowds them out.

Silicon Valley is a wonderful place. But it is not without its flaws, and it has a long way to go before it can become the utopian meritocracy/technocracy it ultimately aspires to be.