Silicon Valley’s finest are finally developing a code of ethics

Resistance begins at home. For Silicon Valley, that means transforming an unprecedented protest movement against US President Donald Trump’s young presidency into something more than signs and slogans. To do so, software engineers and executives in the Valley are writing a set of civic values they hope will become the minimum standard by which companies are judged as a place people want to work.

“It’s not about workplace rights as much as what are some shared values related to government that we want our companies to endorse,” says Sam Altman, president of the Y Combinator seed fund, who sponsored a Tech Workers’ Values meeting to launch the process. The April 9 meeting, held in a swank startup office in San Francisco’s SOMA district, was off-the-record, but the results are being shared as a Google document among attendees. When ready, it will be circulated in the larger tech community. Paralleling pledges such as Never.Again, Altman plans additional meetings to agree on shared values broad enough to unite software engineers—a disparate, libertarian-minded crew—and specific enough to extract real action from major technology companies.