As my longtime readers may realize, I file TV shows under "movie review" and even Youtubes sometimes, such as when Tiffany shared that interview of herself and her parents. I bring up Tiffany because Anthropology, the A in STEAM (not Art) is the name of the game.
Silicon Valley is smart and tight, Mike Judge satire. Judge's resume includes Beavis and Butthead, King of the Hill, and most relevant, Idiocracy. I regard him as a genius-polymath. Hey, he makes films, yet he's lived on the inside in engineer world, with "engineer" broadly defined to include such characters as Silicon Valley features. In software engineering world, you're still allowed to be "self taught" as in "self made" although having a CS degree certainly helps.
Big Bang Theory has a different agenda as it's almost exclusively about nerds, not geeks. Geeks have made it out of their larval stage (as nerds, ugly ducklings -- not physically ugly necessarily, there's always the makeover) and actually have excellent communications skills, even if only with each other. They ascend through Gamer World, the focus of military recruiters these days.
The range of characters in Silicon Valley is impressive, from billionaires of different breeding, to VC firms, competing companies and teams with incestuous relationships (lots of spying), and yet the nucleus has many traits in common with the Big Bang crew. The latter core cast is more of a subset of the former, likewise males sharing a common living space, but more confining. One of the principals, Sheldon, is a physics nerd, not a software engineer.
Software engineering is an attractive vocation in India, conventionally for XYs and awkwardness around XXs gets much attention in both shows.
As a Geek, I much prefer the portrayal of my world through the Mike Judge version. However I'm in the Silicon Forest, not the Silicon Valley. An old story about the Oregon Trail recounts a mythical fork in the road whereat some would head for the verdant valleys of the Pacific Northwest, seeking a secure life in real estate and agribusiness, and others would head south to get-rich-quick country, the land of gold diggers and venture capitalism (high stakes gambling).
The way I think of it, my Pacific Northwest tribe was already here, vested in the fish business. The year I was born was the year agribusiness asserted its upper hand, by drowning Celilo Falls behind the Dalles dam. I find dams fascinating and have them at the center of Martian Math. My Martian Math science fiction has a lot in common with WestWorld, as I've always used the "tunnels under Disneyland" motif from engineering (akin to the Control Room trope), and more specifically from The Time Machine by H.G. Wells. We're the Morlocks.
Big Bang Theory had a prime time slot, translating into safe to rebroadcast in rerun slots, so the script has a PG13 flavor, whereas Silicon Valley on HBO was more TV-14, bordering on R for language but without nudity or violence. Congratulations on the lack of gun play in both of these, the blight of American television, reflecting the "eats their own young" parasitical civilizations that have set up tents here.
I believe Big Bang might've had a live audience as the producer denies using any "sweetening" i.e. a doctored laugh track. Silicon Valley does not have a laugh track at all, real or artificial, which frees it to be more "adult" given how these days a laugh track more often than not feels manipulatively condescending, and/or in self parody.
