Silicon Valley: The Lady

May 4, 2015 10:13 AM - Season 2, Episode 4

The Pied Piper team interviews potential new hires and makes two offers, one of which is to a woman engineer, but "the 'woman' part of that statement is irrelevant." Erlich and Richard are at odds over the other candidate: a technical cyborg also named Jared who burned Erlich at Aviato. Russ Hanneman wants $30K worth of swag.

Carla Walton joins the team as the first woman employee, which is only problematic for Dinesh and Gilfoyle (who already know her and admire her code), because they worry she is making more money than they are. Jared is sweating about hostile work environments, but has made peace with being called "OJ" (for "Other Jared"), because he has turned it into a compliment by pretending "OJ" is for "Original Jared." Erlich is angry at the approval to hire Jared Patakian, and revenge-votes with Russ and his girlfriend Nastia at the board meeting to approve the purchase and production of more Pied Piper swag. Jian Yang keeps burning trash, and someone is using all of Erlich's reserved-for-my-Fage-yogurt spoons.

Meanwhile, back at Hooli, Gavin Belson continues to bolster his case against Pied Piper by promoting Bighead--or, rather, "Baghead"--as co-head dreamer of Hooli [xyz] to Bighead's utter bewilderment.

posted by joan cusack the second (16 comments total)

It seems as if the new hire is going to throw everybody into a tailspin, which should be interesting to watch, but I must admit my main fascination is with Nastia. I keep expecting her to suddenly turn into some mega-corporate genius who, after getting all the insider intel she needs and stops playing dumb, scoops the boys' companies out from under them and makes a killing on the market. But then I have remind myself that she's hanging around with Russ, who isn't exactly A-level (or B- or C-level) CEO material, so that kind makes me doubt that theory.
posted by sardonyx at 11:21 AM on May 4, 2015

Carla's expert trolling makes Dinesh and Gilfoyle look like amateurs.
posted by ob1quixote at 12:15 PM on May 4, 2015 [13 favorites]

I was thinking Richard would approve of her trolling Dinesh and Gilfoyle as long as it pissed them off at her and not him.
posted by Pope Guilty at 12:26 PM on May 4, 2015

“Headline: Here’s That Profile Of Big Head From Silicon Valley,” K.M. McFarland, Wired, 04 May 2015
posted by ob1quixote at 3:42 PM on May 4, 2015 [3 favorites]

Carla is fucking perfect.
posted by radioamy at 9:20 PM on May 4, 2015

Here's the new hire announcement on the Pied Piper blog.
posted by Catblack at 10:01 PM on May 4, 2015 [2 favorites]

Carla out-trolls the trolls. But on first look she seems modelled on Cameron from H&CF.

These episodes just get better with all-out asshole-war.
posted by arzakh at 4:02 AM on May 5, 2015 [1 favorite]

Catblack - that blog (and actually the whole Pied Piper site) is awesome; thanks for sharing. I particularly liked this part from a post on Peter Gregory's passing:

While details of his death on safari with Lorne Michaels and Kanye West remain murky, in Peter’s honor we have forbidden the use of the Safari browser in the Pied Piper offices, Mac-compatible or not.

posted by noneuclidean at 5:21 AM on May 5, 2015 [3 favorites]

Facebook yesterday had a Piped Piper ad looking for developers. I lolled at the effort.
posted by [insert clever name here] at 6:34 AM on May 5, 2015 [1 favorite]

That blog is great. I actually saw a Facebook ad the other day that said "Pied Piper is hiring" which was also quite funny.

Speaking of browsers, when I watched the last ep I happened to pause right when they were showing the computer monitor during their Googling of Russ (I wanted to read the autocomplete suggestions). My eagle eye somehow noticed that although they're clearly using Safari (based on the look of the browser and the open icon on the dock), it says "Chrome" in the top right.
posted by radioamy at 7:23 AM on May 5, 2015

Mike Judge has precedent of doing that in his work. The computers in Office Space were a hybrid of Apple/Microsoft interfaces.
posted by Green With You at 7:37 AM on May 5, 2015

http://www.hooli.xyz
posted by radioamy at 9:18 AM on May 5, 2015 [3 favorites]

"Self-driving cars? Flying cars? Self-flying cars? A space elevator? A cure for the AIDS virus? A non-polluting engine that runs on the AIDS virus? Are these things even possible? Well…at HooliXYZ, we are in active discussions about the long-term feasibility of these, as well as many other projects"

From the HooliXYZ site.

They will be crushing it in 2016. They're taking a break from crushing it in 2016.
posted by aabbbiee at 9:22 AM on May 6, 2015 [2 favorites]

Piper Pied
posted by So You're Saying These Are Pants? at 4:03 PM on May 6, 2015

Umm, I would kind of expect Techcrunch to at least know what lossless means. I would think that "technically lowering the quality in a way that is not noticeable to the human eye" fails the you-keep-using-that-word test.
posted by TwoWordReview at 4:36 PM on May 12, 2015

"Self-driving cars? Flying cars? Self-flying cars? A space elevator? A cure for the AIDS virus? A non-polluting engine that runs on the AIDS virus? Are these things even possible? Well…at HooliXYZ, we are in active discussions about the long-term feasibility of these, as well as many other projects"

I almost un-computered myself after I saw

HooliXYZ = who? A select team of “XYZeniuses.”

but that was icing.
posted by psoas at 1:36 PM on May 18, 2015