[kyro]

I take issue with the quick denial of having a Grindr account and it is this very type of discrimination that is ruining the valley.

Nah, kidding. Best part was PG, though, clearly unaware of the appropriate way to make it rain. In fact, I suggest someone make a gif of just that part and it be made the background of HN every time a YC company is acquired.

[nbashaw]

✔ Gif http://i.imgflip.com/dk9r.gif

[nbashaw]

And here it is on Maxgif (my personal favorite gif viewing service) http://maxgif.com/99i

[rhizome]

javascript-dependent. the whole point of anigifs is pretty much opposed to that.

[chimeracoder]

I'm always surprised that the LGBT community doesn't intersect more with the engineering community, given that both San Francisco and New York are major hubs for both.

I know several gay men (and a few lesbian women or transgendered people) who work in the startup world, but even then they tend to be non-engineering positions. A former co-worker of mine and I started an NYC meetup for this exact purpose - we're actually having a game night tonight if any engineers are interested: http://www.meetup.com/Identity-Hackers/ [0]

Speaking only for myself, I've never felt any kind of discrimination, though I imagine if I were female or transgender, that experience may be different. I was also pretty lucky, though - my first experience working as a startup was at an incredibly gay-friendly dating website, so when your job is to work on posts like these[1], it's pretty easy to feel comfortable.

That doesn't really solve the problem of getting people in the door, though, and I've often wondered why more LGBT people go into engineering in the first place. I went to a very gay-friendly school, and even there the LGBT crowd seemed underrepresented in the engineering classes. I imagine this is related to the question of why we don't have more female engineers (whether straight/cis or not), but that's a much larger discussion.

[0] I hope the timeliness and relevance is enough to forgive this shameless plug! [1] http://blog.okcupid.com/index.php/gay-sex-vs-straight-sex/

[rdl]

I know a lot of gay people in the tech community in both SF and NYC (and at MIT). Not many lesbians, but that's due to lack of women overall (and they are probably well represented in the overall small number of female engineers).

A surprisingly large number of transgendered people. My first contact with a transgendered person was finding out the ~40 year old female IRCop on EFnet who was married to a woman was originally a man. Really confusing for a 13yo, but it was great to first encounter someone that different from me in a safe setting where I already respected that person's technical competence and general reasonableness.

It's kind of funny that in the military, where the whole LGBT rights thing was a big issue, one of the biggest predictors of "would you be ok with LGBT openly serving" was "did you know someone who was LGBT and a good soldier otherwise" -- if the first gay person you met was some horrible example of humanity independent of being gay, it was pretty easy to assume all gay people would be like that. If the first one was a great soldier (like 1LT Dan Choi), you'd be more likely to support gay soldiers as a class.

I think part of the problem with it is that most LGBT people are basically invisible about sexuality in their work settings -- which is awesome. I don't want to know about coworkers who have weird fetishes for objects, or blondes, or whatever. If it comes up in the context of "oh, I can work late, my husband will take the kids..", that's a great way to learn a coworker is gay. It isn't something you need to hide, but in a work setting, there's no reason to flaunt any traits unrelated to work.

[marquis]

There are quite a number of interesting LGBT projects happening in the valley. My favourite is my cab service when I'm in town (I prefer this to a usual cab late at night as a solo female traveller): http://www.yelp.com/biz/homobiles-san-francisco. If you'd like to hear some genuine discrimination stories order a cab here sometime, they are unbelievably friendly and happy to discuss why this service exists. There's an unpublished NPR interview out there also, not sure if it's made it to the airwaves.

[Finbarr]

This hasn't been my experience so far working as a software engineer in the valley. I've worked with/know several gay engineers and startup folks. To be fair, I don't know whether the proportion is representative of the wider population or not.

[chimeracoder]

Anecdotally, I feel like it isn't, though I don't live in the Bay Area. San Francisco has the highest GLBT population (by percentage) in the nation. Even if we even it out and use 10%, a number that GLBT organizations sometimes use when referring to the general population, that would imply that most startups with a 10-person engineering team would have a gay engineer.

In my experience, that's certainly not been the case, at least in NYC (though it seems to be true about SF as well). It's even more bizarre because Silicon Alley overlaps with most of the gayborhoods in NYC. At a startup I used to work at, our local dive bar happened to be a gay bar, even though only one member of the team was openly gay[0]!

[0] Backstory: the old dive bar got bought and turned into a gay bar, so people just kept going to the same place anyway.