Silicon Valley Doesn't Have an Attitude Problem, OK? 262
Nerval's Lobster writes: In Silicon Valley they think differently, and if that leads to arrogance, so be it. At least that's what Bloomberg Businessweek's Joel Stein implies in his long meditation on the area's outlook on technology, money and changing the world. Stein set out to examine the underlying notion that Silicon Valley's and San Francisco's tech entrepreneurs are feeding a backlash by being, in a word, jerks. His conclusion seems to be that they may well be jerks, but they're misunderstood jerks. He doesn't deny that there's sexism and boorishness at play in the young tech community, but he sees the industry trying to make itself better. He sees a lot of egotism at work, too, but he says if you're setting out to change the world, you're probably going to need a big ego to do it. But tell that to other people in Northern California: undoubtedly, you've read about the tempest in San Francisco recently, where urban activists are decrying the influx of highly paid tech professionals, who they argue are displacing residents suddenly unable to keep up with skyrocketing rents.
Re:Steve Jobs set the standard... (Score:5, Interesting)
"How old were you when you lost your virginity?", Steve asked
The candidate wasn't sure if he heard correctly. "What did you say?"
Steve repeated the question, changing it slightly. "Are you a virgin?". Burrell and I started to laugh, as the candidate became more disconcerted. He didn't know how to respond.
Steve changed the subject. "How many times have you taken LSD?"
The poor guy was turning varying shades of red, so I tried to change the subject and asked a straight-forward technical question. But when he started to give a long-winded response, Steve got impatient again.
"Gooble, gobble, gobble, gobble", Steve started making turkey noises. This was too much for Burrell and myself, and we all started cracking up. "Gobble, gobble, gobble", Steve continued, laughing himself now.
At this point, the candidate stood up. "I guess I'm not the right guy for this job", he said.
"I guess you're not", Steve responded. "I think this interview is over."
Re:Silicon Valley is overrated (Score:4, Interesting)
I grew up there and moved away. There is zero difference in talent. The difference is one of leadership and money. The money is already there, so there is where people go. The difference in leadership is, that's where they choose to live. My current company is based out of Boise Idaho. All the top execs I can think of have homes in the San Jose area because they like the weather. So naturally, they've opened a few more offices over there to justify their move to San Jose away from Boise. This costs the company a great deal of money as the techs they hire are paid twice as much as here due to cost of living. They don't care though.
Re:Steve Jobs set the standard... (Score:5, Interesting)
Watching Bubble 2.0 deflate... (Score:5, Interesting)
Hmm, let's put thousands and thousands of socially maladjusted techies together in one region, appoint a bunch of hypersocialized "brogrammer" types as their bosses, and see what happens. What could possibly go wrong???
I work in the "tech industry" but I work for a specialized IT services firm, which is almost the polar opposite of a bubble-fueled Internet startup. I watched the dotcom bubble inflate and pop, and now this one's on the way out too. By contrast, the people I work with are totally normal. Some have their quirks, but we have very few jerks. Steve Jobs may be the poster child for "tech visionary" but people conveniently forget that he was an absolute jerk and people hated to work for him. In my mind, anyone who emulates that is someone I definitely don't want to work with.
The "techie asshole" personality really does feed on itself. Take a bunch of recent grads with no real world experience and put them under someone trying to channel Jobs, Zuckerberg or similar. Pretty soon, everyone starts acting like that. I'm not surprised at how much sexual harassment goes on in these environments given this fact. It doesn't help that the press is falling all over itself to pump these guys up and give them superhuman status. Yes, smartphones are cool. Yes, people are walking around with $800 touchscreen computers in their pockets that let them do more than they used to. But in my mind, all these late-bubble-stage startups are doing is creating one-off websites competing for everyone's attention. No one's really inventing much new -- it's all about advertising, page views and the sale of your personal data. Some stuff that has come out in the last few years is extremely cool, but a lot of it seems a lot like the very late 90s when the bubble was the frothiest it had been and everyone is piling on hoping to cash out before the big pop.
Re:Steve Jobs set the standard... (Score:4, Interesting)
Found it [folklore.org].
Bill Shockley set the standard (Score:5, Interesting)
Bill Shockley was the originator of the Silicon Valley arrogant genius archetype. One of the co-inventors of the transistor, he convinced an electronics entrepreneur in the Los Angeles area to pay him to set up a semiconductor laboratory near his mother's home in Palo Alto, staffed with young geniuses. Then his abrasive management drove them away, leading them to found Fairchild Semiconductor, followed by Intel, AMD, and other, less important, electronics companies in the area. In the meanwhile, Shockley went into eugenics.
HP was already around, and Fred Terman of Stanford was encouraging entrepreneurship, but Shockley brought the "silicon" to Silicon Valley. And the arrogance.
The problem is hipsterism, not engineer culture (Score:2, Interesting)
We have now had an entire generation of programmers raised on walled garden apps, cookie-cutter scripting libraries, and above all a wave of cheap VC funding and hardware. How many people are left out there that can build the likes of Bittorrent, Bitcoin, a language like C, a game like Elite, or even a site like Slashdot? How many people, young people, are there who can write an OS kernel, design a basic circuit, and at a more pertinently serious level, reliably write software to implement mathematical encryption algorithms. Reading this I'm inclined to believe that recent meme post about how the programming/silicon valley community has been taken over by "brogrammers", "hipsters" and "neckbeads", which to my mind are simply constitute cultural re-skinnings of the infamous Visual Basic programmers of old. I worry that the unglamorous, mostly uncompensated, and largely intellectually driven practice of pure software programming and creation has been left behind in recent years. I personally have noticed little progression and indeed in many areas a general regression in the quality and reliability of software since approximately 2006/7. While I would attribute this to my general "civilization is in decline" zeitgeist worries, my frustrations with software, UIs, and websites in particular has undoubtedly increased manifestly in the last 2-3 years or so. Maybe I'm just getting old -- or maybe programmers really are getting worse.
-- ObsessiveMathsFreak
Re:It's not arrogance if... (Score:4, Interesting)
Exactly. And it's not just the SV tech sector that's engaged in winner-take-all gambling posing as productive business. US tax policy is slated to encourage it. And it's not all just the Mitt Romney vs his secretary scenario.
Case in point. It used to be that capital gains from the sale of a home could be rolled over into a new one, and taxes would only need to be paid at the end of the line when you finally downsize or cash out, at which time gains over 250K would be taxed. Sometime in the 90's this changed so that you could take the 250K exemption on each sale - effectively eliminating the capital gains tax on real estate, with one catch. You need to sell every time your home appreciates by 250K or more, and because they eliminated the roll-over feature, you get penalized if you stay in your home long enough for it to appreciate beyond that. I only know this, because I bought a New York City apartment in '92, and have lived there ever since. Now I want to move, but because of the crazy run-up in NYC housing prices, I can't - that is, not without incurring a big tax bite, leaving me unable to afford a new place. So in the rush to reward housing speculators, the incentives in the housing market (which in part, dictate the pricing - whether you think those incentives should exist or not) have lined up to punish non-speculators.
And don't get me started on bank account interest rates. Used to be, you could leave your cash in the bank and at least keep rough pace with inflation. Now, you effectively get no interest at all - and are taxed full freight on even that pittance. Meanwhile more incentives to feed the stock market bubble that everyone will claim was obvious - after it bursts...
Re:Wonder how Elon Musk (Score:5, Interesting)
Only a corner of Silly Valley is working on "Web 2.0" BS. There's a lot of real work going on too. The products offered by the likes of Facebook and Google may seem frivolous, but the backends needed to offer those products are changing the (back-end) world. As they knowhow to work reliably at a scale of 10k, 100k, 1M servers gets productized and offered in AWS and Azure (OK, those 2 are Seattle, but still) we see the beginning of the end of needing your own data center.
As a back-end guy, the fact I can now write three-tier web service that scales indefinitely as a hobby project, by plugging together AWS parts is pretty amazing. If I need 10000 cores for a few hours to model that flying car, space elevator, or machine learning system, I can not only get that easily on a moments notice, I can get it cheaply (a penny per core-hour cheap - that's something).