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.
Wonder how Elon Musk (Score:3)
would reply to this
Re:Wonder how Elon Musk (Score:4, Insightful)
would reply to this
With a 5 page rant-blog? That seems to be his default response to criticism.
Re:Wonder how Elon Musk (Score:4, Insightful)
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).
Re:Wonder how Elon Musk (Score:5, Insightful)
The extent of our machine learning has been to fake a conversation as a brain damaged teenager who does not speak English, to "pass" the Turing test. We're doing busy work in low earth orbit, when anyone in the 80's would have thought we'd be working in the outer planets by now. We still have to steer our cars and punch buttons for the elevator.
The problem is that everyone's doing incremental work. More gigs cheaper. No imagination beyond that.
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I am with you, but keep in mind, these projects are hard. They need years of a dedicated team working together on the problem. I always think of Dragon Dictation and how they were on the path to decent speech to text. We still haven't gotten past that hurdle yet due to semantics, grammar, accents etc....
I do marvel at handheld devices with 1080HD cameras capable of video editing, GPS, accelerometer, flash memory, digital audio capability, unbelievable fast with decent battery life. To me the iPhone is a
Re:Wonder how Elon Musk (Score:4, Insightful)
There is, apparently, a flapping bird game, that is, apparently, all the rage. Or was that last week? That's right, technology so amazing, you stop caring about it when it is replaced in a few weeks. Right.... :)
I'm only playing along with you. In truth, I love what technology has available for us now. Our lives are faster, easier, and possibly improved, by the tech sector. I say possibly because we may find that virtual-mindedness is detrimental to a superior lifestyle that involves less or no virtualism. Who knows. But within a realm of trying to appreciate something, technology is highly appreciable right now as compared to even 20 years ago. I think if technology development just froze as a whole, we would still grow at least a bit more, on accident, due to the momentum of what we have now. We're doing great. Imagine all of the plausible combinations of current technologies and compare that to the present; that's the spread of the most immediate technological next step that will happen in the immediate future. And so it continues.
I can tell you this.... Video Games, today, are as beautiful as I imagined they would be when I watched games develop early on, 20 years ago . They aren't more or less than I had thought -- they're right on the money. Back then it was river city ransom. Back then, F-Zero and Doom2 looked great.
Everything is having a snowball effect. Kurzweil is basically correct in his thesis of the future.
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https://www.youtube.com/watch?... [youtube.com] Apparently. :)
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140 characters comes from Europe, 30 years ago, FWIW.
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From Europe, check.
30 years ago, hmm...
For a minute there I thought you were describing a Tolstoy novel.
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I wonder if big ego is a reason or an unfortunate side effect. After all, what you absolutely do need to change the world is the ability to keep going in the face of hardship, which is just another way of saying you need to be able to ignore negative feedback - and that'll make it harder to fix any personality flaws you have, too.
Re:Wonder how Elon Musk (Score:4, Insightful)
If that's the case, he's a terrible scam artist. He's taken money from investors and turned it into function products and services. Which, I've been told, is very expensive and really cuts into a scam artists profits.
You sound like a (Score:2)
woman/man who was refused by Elon.
Tech workers in Silicon Valley (Score:5, Funny)
are like the posters on Slashdot. They're some of the most fairest, open-minded, most professional people around, willing to look hard at both sides of any issue before coming to a conclusion.
Just ask them.
Re:Tech workers in Silicon Valley (Score:5, Funny)
I'm as open minded as the next guy.
It's just the unwashed masses and redneck mouthbreathers who are too stupid to understand it!
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I can't pick up private friends using public stops. Nobody but the tech scum bro grammars have that type of access to public resources for private gain.
So instead of having 20 to 30 people in a Google bus during rush hour, you want those 20 to 30 tech scum brogrammers on the road driving their own car?
I'm sorry, but these types of agreements are nothing new. Private car pools often get preferential treatment. For a couple of hours they can get their own lanes and their own pick up/drop off areas (areas which are usually public parking spaces the rest of the time). Not to mention, school buses, university shuttles, and even private university shuttles, ofte
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He is mad, because a corporation is being given a free pass to do something a private citizen would be ticketed for, which is a legitimate bitch, if somewhat petty.
Now, if Google paid for and built their own bus stops, or more reasonably, paid a fee to the city and worked with the existing public transit system to set up a schedule for using the existing bus stops? That would be ideal.
Bus stops on public roads, are for public use (Score:2)
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Isn't it true that a bus stop may be used by any conveyance, public or private?
Not in my town, bus stops are for city bus use only, period, no exception; they made a big deal about it in the local media about a year ago. Pull into one with your personal vehicle, you're going to be looking at a minimum $250 fine.
So what is the problem?
Your concept of legality, apparently. FWIW, there is no universal, federal law regulating bus stops, as far as I'm aware.
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Re: Tech workers in Silicon Valley (Score:4, Insightful)
by doing so they are lowering emissions by taking cars off the road
they are lessening traffic, by taking cars off the road
there really is zero reason to be complaining, im sure if they wanted to start a ride shareing program and rent busses to drive their neighbors around and pay the city millions, they could use those stops as well.
Re: Tech workers in Silicon Valley (Score:3)
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Are those private shuttles ferrying people to work?
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Under an 18-month pilot program that launched on Friday, the shuttle services will be allowed to use bus stops at over 100 locations throughout the city and in exchange they will pay at least $3.55 each time they pick up or drop off passengers, officials said.
and that through this program it will raise $3.7 million to cover costs for making sure they run smoothly.
so no, its not a dollar, its 3.55 PER stop. thats 3.55 cents for about 35-60 seconds of parking.
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Re: Tech workers in Silicon Valley (Score:5, Insightful)
Except it is paid for. The buses pay the city to use the infrastructure. What is this infrastructure you ask? It's a space on a street. When it is vacated, the city bus, on the rare occasions it's right behind a google bus, will move in and "use the infrastructure." More often than not it's the other way around because city buses are slow, ponderous, and take a long time to get people on them.
I'm assuming you have no issues with taxicabs or Uber drivers using "infrastructure" to pick up passengers for private gain, do you? Right? Do you understand?
Re: Tech workers in Silicon Valley (Score:5, Informative)
Except it is paid for. The buses pay the city to use the infrastructure. What is this infrastructure you ask? It's a space on a street. When it is vacated, the city bus, on the rare occasions it's right behind a google bus, will move in and "use the infrastructure." More often than not it's the other way around because city buses are slow, ponderous, and take a long time to get people on them.
Clearly you have not actually experienced this first hand.
First, there's the google bus, then the yahoo bus, then the apple bus, then the facebook bus and then the ea bus, and then the ebay bus, and during rush how it's a mess (according to a friend of mine who used to live near Van Ness and worked near the Financial district and used to take Muni)
In the southbay, in Sunnyvale near me, a particular Gbus is parking in a VTA bus stop and waiting for a Caltrain connection nearly every day. Sometimes they get their early and wait jamming up traffic while they wait for googlers to try to get off Caltrain and attempt to make a timed transfer** I've seen VTA busses stuck in the long line of traffic behind me and I wonder if every time they did this they might cause a VTA passenger to miss their Caltrain connections. I guess it's tough shit for the VTA bus rider in this situation, because they Gbus schedules aren't public knowledge...
AFAIK, SF is currently charging $1/day for a stop. If you happen to be an uber or a tour bus operator, you would have to pay a $279 dollar ticket for doing something like this [uberpeople.net]. To scale this, it's $2/person to ride muni, but only a $100 fine if you are caught by one of the 2 fare inspectors checking 1000 busses (okay, that's an exaggeration). Not that $4/stop would break their bank, but to say they these busses paying their fair share is a bit farcical, they are getting a golden deal that most uber and tour bus operators could only dream about...
The VTA (in the south bay) hasn't started charging google yet. Probably because google bribed Mountain View with some free shuttle busses (however, they only agreed to pay for the shuttle busses for 2 years). I imagine that will turn out to be even net worse because now people will get used to the shuttle, and demand that it not be terminated after the 2 years is up leaving MV footing the bill. Meanwhile, google is probably banking that all the furor of the busses will die off by then...
FWIW, here's a purported map [trulia.com] of the problem areas on the SF side...
***note VTA doesn't have timed transfers, so if Caltrain is late, you miss the bus and have to wait for the next one. Likewize if you bus is late...
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You understand taxicabs, which belong to private companies, use those same streets. They pay for the use of those streets with their tax dollars. Are you opposed to taxis?
The funny thing is people who support the Google buses point out the similarities between those buses and taxis all the time and I've never heard a cogent response from people who oppose the buses.
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It's not. It's a bunch of tech-hate from activists who live in the city. They are livid at the 1$ a stop fee, although that has gone up somehow to 4$.
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You are aware of Google's policies against working from home? If those massive amounts of workers were forced to live somewhere where there was less traffic, then they would need to drive further to work, thus creating...traffic.
Steve Jobs set the standard... (Score:2)
...for others to follow.
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."
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I dunno if I'd have left. It would have been an interesting change to work for someone who is very obviously more insane than me.
Re:Steve Jobs set the standard... (Score:5, Insightful)
It would have been an interesting change to work for someone who is very obviously more insane than me.
Insane, eccentric, egotistical, and dick can be shades of the same color. Steve simply sounds like a dick in that story.
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Steve simply sounds like a dick in that story.
He certainly does, especially when he feels the need to have the last word and has to say "this interview's over" when the guy'd already stated as much (kind of like telling your boss that you quit and then being told you're fired)...
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Was this before he was kicked out of Apple for running it into the ground, or after he spent years in the wilderness learning how to actually manage a company?
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Was this before he was kicked out of Apple for running it into the ground, or after he spent years in the wilderness learning how to actually manage a company?
Before.
This is likely from folklore.org [folklore.org] which has all sorts of early Apple history.
Re:Steve Jobs set the standard... (Score:4, Interesting)
Found it [folklore.org].
Re:Steve Jobs set the standard... (Score:5, Interesting)
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Monty Python did it.
"FIVE Four Three Two ONE!"
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If only the guy had made the decision to ditch the interview a few questions earlier and given an answer that made Steve feel like the dick he was being: Well, I was about 6 when he started coming into my room at night...but I guess I didn't technically lose my virginity until later, when was it?... [starts rocking in chair and flinching as he thinks harder]...
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...for others to follow.
You mean they should all get cancer and die?
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No, Jobs alienated himself from his peers and spent the next few decades doing acid while Apple ran itself into the ground. Meanwhile, Silicon Valley was already establishing their reputation for pushing boundaries, engaging in barely-legal business practices, and working to change the industry as fast as possible.
Jobs came back from his acid trip and turned Apple around, but the industry's attitudes and culture were well-established by that point.
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.
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Steve Jobs seems to represent Silicon Valley to the clueless media, but he was unique. The media seems to think that Silicon Valley is overflowing with entrepreneurs when this is not at all the case. Most tech workers here don't come up with new ideas every day, and they most certainly are not thinking about new business paradigms, they're just workers. And media also seems to be confused into thinking that San Francisco is related to Silicon Valley. New York City has more arrogance than Silicon Valley.
Ingrates (Score:4, Insightful)
Re:Ingrates (Score:4, Insightful)
There is just no pleasing this people: 'undesirable element' moves in - they complain about falling property value, 'highly paid tech professionals' move in - they complain about increasing property value.
No, they're talking about rent and taxes. When you concentrate that much wealth in one area, it starts a feedback loop in wages. Rent goes up, taxes go up, even gas and groceries go up. Then the lower income people are forced out... the local service industry has to pay more to get people to work, so prices go up even more, until everyone making under $100k/yr has to commute 2hrs just to get to work. The city panics and start enforcing rent control so people can at least afford an tiny apartment. For an example, see Manhattan.
Re:Ingrates (Score:5, Informative)
the local service industry has to pay more to get people to work, so prices go up even more, until everyone making under $100k/yr has to commute 2hrs just to get to work. The city panics and start enforcing rent control so people can at least afford an tiny apartment. For an example, see Manhattan.
NYC has come up with a solution to this issue: Poor Doors [npr.org], so the goodly rich inhabiting luxury apartments don't have to sully their eyes with visions of the lowly proles who serve them.
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San Francisco has had rent control for decades. The Mission, despite all of the recent histrionics, is still a primarily lower-wage Hispanic area.
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Rent control? No wonder there is a shortage of affordable housing.
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"the local service industry has to pay more to get people to work, so prices go up even more" surely you jest, sir. The glorious left have given us their assurances that forcing an increase in pay will do absolutely nothing to prices as the two share no relationship whatsoever.
SF Rents (Score:2, Insightful)
The whole mentality is dumb. No one DESERVES to live in a particular place. Pay the rent or move. Pay the taxes, or move and rent out your place to someone who can afford to pay the taxes for you.
Are they going to change what SF is? Of course. But SF isn't what it was 50 years ago, or 100 years ago. These things constantly change. At least it is going upward. It could be changing like Detroit.
.
Re:SF Rents (Score:4, Insightful)
if you dont OWN something, you cant complain when someone else buys said item
Re:SF Rents (Score:4, Insightful)
That is true, except that it is incredibly difficult to afford to rent in SF, let alone enough for a mortgage. You people in the rest of the country, unless you live in Manhattan, don't really have much of a clue. "Saving up" to buy a 1.5 million $ home is very difficult here unless you have a very very good job.
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Yes, we do have a clue. That is why we don't live in those places, dumbass.
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Do what my friends did. (not SF but another city where single family homes can cost over $1 mil). Three of them pooled their savings, put 10% down on an older larger house. It's at the fringes of a gentrifying area, not far from downtown. They live in the basement, and rent out the upstairs. The rent pays over half the mortgage. In a year or two they will have enough equity to put a down payment on another house. Moral of the story - pay yourself rent, not a landlord.
$1,000,000 In Cash (Score:2)
perhaps if these people saved up and bought their own homes rather than renting, they wouldnt be in this mess.
The median price for a new or existing single family home or condo in San Francisco is one million dollars.
The median is the price for which half of homes sold for more and half for less.
The nosebleed price is a result of limited inventory and an influx of cash buyers willing to pay whatever it takes.
Many are tech workers with stock compensation from an initial public offering or takeover. Realtors call them "Google" kids even if they are 40 years old and work on biotech.
A secondary group of cash buyers are [mostly Asian investors] who see San Francisco as a relative bargain.
$1 million city: S.F. home price hits seven figures for the first time [sfgate.com] [July 17, 2014]
The median household income in the U.S. is $53,000. State & County QuickFacts [census.gov] [2008-2012]
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The Industrial Era disagrees (Score:2)
Henry George looked from a high hill toward the growing San Franscisco in the 1870's and realized that rising land prices were a bug in in the industrial economy. They punished success.
His book sold more copies than any other in the 19th century in the United States: Progress and Poverty.
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It's still frustrating for the residents here.
I, for one, know that the narrative is far more complicated than just VC-funded rich dudes conspiring with greedy landowners to drive up rents. Also, I am well aware of the laws of supply and demand. The supply does not match the demand at all. It's much worse this time than last time, the dot-com bubble of the 1990's.
I'm even aware of a little-discussed wildcard: China. The financial system there is corrupt, and the people have no safe way to invest for retirem
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Are they going to change what SF is? Of course. But SF isn't what it was 50 years ago, or 100 years ago. These things constantly change. At least it is going upward. It could be changing like Detroit.
I was walking around SF with my grandma a few years ago, and she said, "oh, SF used to be such a beautiful city, and look what's happened to it." Change happens.
Tech Community (Score:5, Insightful)
Can we, perhaps, not refer to the entire tech community as one thing? Let's have the tech community, and then have the community that makes parking space auctioning apps, social websites, and "break-through" instant messaging apps who think they're on par with Tim Berners-Lee or Packard or Wozniak, because they made an iphone app where you can leave reviews for your favorite pigeon feeding seat in the park.
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try again. not an example. it's barely a real fallacy anyway.
No real fallacy would be caught dead in that argument.
Beware of the Gift of Pride (Score:3, Insightful)
San Francisco mentality... (Score:5, Insightful)
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No we're not. That's why we have guns and money.
Silicon Valley is overrated (Score:5, Informative)
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.
Also a difference in law. (Score:5, Insightful)
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.
Actually, the big difference is a little-known aspect of California intellectual property law:
If you, as an employee, invent something, on your own time and not using your employer's resources, and it doesn't fit into the employer's current or foreseeable future product line, you own it. If the patent assignment agreement in your employment contract says otherwise, it's void.
This means that, if you invent something neat and your employer doesn't want to productize it, you (and a couple of your friends) can rent a garage across the street and found a new company to develop and sell it.
Employees in California can NOT be ripped off the way Westinghouse ripped off Nikola Tesla.
The result is that companies in silicon valley have "budded off" more companies, like yeast budding off new cells. And once this environment got started, thousands of techies have migrated to the area, so there are plenty of them available with the will and talent to be the "couple of your friends" with the skills you need to fill out the team in your garage.
Lots of other states have tried to set up their own high-tech areas on Silicon Valley's model. But they always seem to miss this one point. They need to clone that law to have a chance at replacing or recreating the phenomenon. Result: They might get a company to set up a shop, but they don't get a comparable tech community to build up. Research parks of several companies, generally focused on some aspect of tech, might form, but you don't get the generalist explosion.
Of course, like any network, the longer it accumulates, the more valuable it is to be connected to this one, rather than another that is otherwise equivalent. (This is what the parent poster already alluded to.) Thus there's only one Silicon Valley in California, with the resources concentrated within driving distance, though the law is statewide. Even with the law change, and a couple decades to let the results grow, other states might have a tough time overcoming California's first-mover advantage.
But California keeps fouling things up for techies and entrepreneurs in other ways. So if some other state would TRY this, they might become a go-to place when groups of people in Silicon Valley get fed up and decide to go-forth.
Silicon Valley is overrated (Score:2)
I agree. Most of the tech universe is outside the valley. Who would want to live in a giant overpriced suburb? And who would want to work in a field in which moving to one area was a must?
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Well enlighten us, Big Sexy Joe, what's so awesome about wherever it is that you live that you can so easily look down on the clueless 8 million or so that can't possibly have a good reason for living in the SF bay area?
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I think SV is just convenient if you lose your job, but is overrated by the media. I'd say one person in ten thousand is an entrepreneur, yet the media thinks that all anyone ever does is think up cool new ideas and every company is still a startup. Most people are just trying to finish the projects they've been assigned to. However because of all the companies here, if you stick to jobs in your core area then you have a good chance of seeing the same people somewhere down the road and there's a lot of
Cmmon bubble, Just pop already. (Score:5, Insightful)
Tired of these fuckers thinking they are the promised people guiding us out of ignorance.
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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.
Bro, u jelly? (Score:2)
I like how you recognized that the "brogrammer" stereotype contradicts the "socially maladjusted" stereotype, so you had the presence of mind to frame the "brogrammers" as only managers.
Is it Wipro? I have heard such good things about Wipro.
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Nope. Our customers have experienced all of the bad things you've heard about with Wipro and their ilk.
And yes, there are plenty of stereotypical brogrammer worker bees as well. I was just highlighting the fact that putting these types in charge just breeds more of them over time as they try to act like the boss.
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What I find amusing is the idea that people think all techies work at startups in SF. There are a ton of people who work in tech who handle Hospital IT, or work for a legal firm, or manage the servers for a real estate company, who are in tech but have nothing in common with the new wave of techies moving in. And that is all it is, a wave.
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it's all about advertising, page views and the sale of your personal data.
I've attempted to coin the term "surveillatizing" for this; but I'm not famous. Many companies are on the spectrum between surveillance and advertising. Anything labeled "security" tends to get corrupted into surveillance. It has become a cliche that when the product is free, you're the product. Most of the casual gaming, cute little app companies are shoving ads at you in some way. IMHO, there's no such thing as pure advertisi
Arrogance is bad even if it is true (Score:5, Insightful)
I call it the "Dr. House" excuse. Basically it goes "Look, who do you want treating you, the a$$hole who's brilliant, or the above average guy who's nice?"
And the honest truth is that 99% percent of the time, we want the above average guy who's nice.
Yes, if you have something incurable, (or something that no one else can figure out what it is in the case of the TV show's Dr. House), then you want the genius no matter how arrogant he is. But in every day issues, you want someone that is going to be nice and do a reasonably good job - not a genius that is going to cure your wart while calling you an idiot and revealing to your wife that you sleep around.
Genius is NOT an excuse to be arrogant. Especially as sometimes the guy you are insulting is actually smarter than you (i.e. look at at Edison and Tesla - 2nd brightest man of his time refused to pay the first brightest man what he was worth and screwed himself ).
Part of being smart is having social skills. Part of being in business is using those social skills. If you can't or won't gain them and use them,
Re:Arrogance is bad even if it is true (Score:5, Insightful)
One of the greatest geniuses I've even had the pleasure of meeting, who has won a Nobel Prize in a physical science which certainly proves his particular genius, is a down to earth person and very respectful of everyone, unless of course you are a poser, then you might experience the wrath of his genius as understandably, nobody likes to suffer fools.
What's different from the last quarter century? (Score:2)
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.
That was decades-old news in Silicon Valley when I moved here in the late '80s. (A couple who'd gone there for the same project a few years earlier had bought, rather than rented, had the price of their mortgaged house skyrocket over a couple years, and bailed out of H
Comment removed (Score:5, Insightful)
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
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Yes, a culture ripe for the next phase of disruption. Instead of the next social app that's slightly different from last week's social app, I hereby dare Silicon Valley to take on two challenges:
1. On a ship adjacent to SF in international waters, set up the first fully open-market hospital. Staff it with real doctors who prescribe conventional medicines, procedures and devices, but all of it operating in open competition instead of under the thumb of medical boards whose real purpose is to protect incumben
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2. Virtually every state capital city on the Aussie mainland now has a massive desal plant, they were all commissioned and built in the final years of our last major drought. Sure they come with higher costs than just collecting rainwater but when your reservoirs of drinking water are hovering at around 10% capacity and there's not a cloud in the sky, it become
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Small California cities like Morro Bay are doing this too, using reverse osmosis tech at about twice the cost of groundwater. Their hedge is the one you describe: if there is an ultimate drought and there just isn't any water, they at least have a minimal supply.
I'm proposing going beyond this by having Silicon Valley apply new technology like graphene, which in small-scale experiments at MIT has been shown to desalinate water at much lower pressures than R-O. We need to find out whether this will scale to
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While I think many of the programmers in my group could do many of these things most are not young. Also most of the positions we open are for more senior people since we need people who can do things like write compilers, kernel developers, bootloader developers, etc. who understand the details of CPU architecture. When I talk with young people getting a CS degree I tell them that there is a huge demand for people with these skills. Few software people have a good grasp of hardware.
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In 2006/2007, you had two large fads in computing -- Web sites and Windows apps. There were billions of other things, but they were the big ones with high visibility. Today, add in 'remote virual hosted' (AKA developers are now the IT guys *shudder*) and mobile apps (A marketplace which is only now getting good tooling / support from more than a handfull of vendors) sure things may be crap compared to desktop/web which have many years of established practices and trained staffing. Look at the web in 2001 vs
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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.
It's worse than you think -- this has been going on for as long as we can remember.
Do not say, “Why were the old days better than these?” For it is not wise to ask such questions. -- Ecclesiastes 7:10, about 1000 BC
The rate of decline over the past 3000 years is astronomical -- it's amazing our young still learn to walk. Why, I hardly dare to imagine what programming geniuses people must have been even one thousand years ago!
On a more serious note, I think the problem is a combination of natural selection (we only remember the stuff that wasn't crap) plus nostalgia (we think it was better than it really was). Go ahead, dig up some of yo
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Ive noticed this. Bad. It shows up with the flocks of NJ, NY license plates. But true computer science genius is a rare commodity now days. Part of the reason it doesnt pay. The secretary at Microsoft made a buttload of money. Nowdays, with scamming, outsourcing, part timing and contracting along with strategic dilution and Steve Jobs Pixar stunts, most regular nerds are not setup to make it big. Its a few elite non-engineers that get together and fleece the talent for every cent its worth. I am lucky to wo
This is not new (Score:2, Troll)
In the 90s, I worked on a project in San Francisco
As I walked around the city, I saw angry rants pasted on various surfaces around town
The ranters were denouncing the "yuppie invasion" and claiming that it was ruining the neighborhood
It seemed to me, that if you replaced every occurrence of the word "yuppie" with the word "nigger", it would have fit perfectly into a KKK rant from the 50s
Re:It's not arrogance if... (Score:5, Insightful)
As the old saying goes "It's not arrogance if you can back it up."
Which the overwhelming majority of them can't. That's kinda the point.
The culture in tech hubs today is in a very real sense based on gambling. VCs bet 7-8 figures on a company that might be the one to make 10 figure returns. It's a high variability strategy that rarely pays off, but pays out staggering amounts of money when it does. And because any VC always has a pool of investments on the go, they can stand to play the long game knowing their mean return is always going to be astronomical.
Many founder/entrepreneur types are playing the same game, just with fewer zeroes and one big shot at a time. Some will make it. Most will fail. Some of them will come back and try again. Many of them won't. It's just like the VCs, but a whole lot more personal, because VCs are the house that always wins, while first-time founders are more like the whales who bet it all on number 3.
Almost everyone else working at these businesses is just along for the ride, because the amount of money they're making is relatively good and they have a chance for a nice windfall if their employer's exit strategy does work out. Neither the founders nor the VCs much care because the salary and perks for decent technical staff are just table stakes in a much bigger game.
But you only have to look at the kind of recruitment processes and qualifications some of these big name SV firms advertise/leak, and then look at the quality of the software they actually produce and/or what some people who used to work there can (or can't) do when they move on, and you can see that having Google or Facebook on your resume doesn't actually prove that you're some sort of super-elite 10x genius geek demigod. Unfortunately, a significant proportion of the people working inside the bubble didn't get the memo.
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...
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Its a sad first world problem when you complain about possibly earning > 250K (gross) in property appreciation and then complain about how you can't claim 100% of a tax break that you're no longer entitled to (because you make too much). Dumb laws they may be, but you sir, complain for the wrong reasons.
I'd also address the note on savings accounts, but frankly its way to factual, boring and irrelevant to bother. Go look it up online if you want to know why your savings accounts are worth penuts these da
Re:It's not arrogance if... (Score:4, Insightful)
Hi!
I don't think you understand what he said entirely.
He said that he can't actually sell his place without incurring a very large tax penalty that would come out of his pocket and affect his ability to buy another property. In short, he's stuck at the level he is without being able to move up or sideways. He's being forced to move /down/ in the property market. He didn't mention how much he earned and it's mostly irrelevant here - the money he'd lose in the gains tax would result in nowhere near enough money to buy another place in that area.
So yes, it's a shitty situation - it's /making/ property speculation and renting the fiscally responsible thing to do. That's just plain stupid.
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Except that another place, even another comparable place, would now cost a lot more than $249,999 more than what he paid for his current place.
So if he wants to move to a different but comparable house in a different but comparably priced location, he has to lose a whole lot of money in the process. Meanwhile, people moving frequently to slightly more valuable places continuously over the time he's lived in this one place don't lose anything.
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while first-time founders are more like the whales who bet it all
Can we please have a car analogy to explain the casino analogy?