Silicon Valley Is Not a Fad

https://medium.com/@duncanr/silicon-valley-is-not-a-fad-5979bd950615

by Elof • 7 years ago

121 100 7 years ago

medium.com

quickthrower2• 7 years ago

"You read a lot. We like that." meh!

gnicholas2• 7 years ago

In the late two-thousands, at a party in the Mission District

Do people refer to the first decade of this century as "the two thousands"?

unstatusthequo• 7 years ago

Better than "the naughts" or "the dub dubs" is it not? What do you call it?

learc83• 7 years ago

My personal favorite is "the noughties".

etrautmann• 7 years ago

Never heard the dub dubs but I’ll start using that immediately

tspike• 7 years ago

I do

RandomBacon• 7 years ago

It's the best term I've seen for it so far. What term do you use?

gnicholas2• 7 years ago

I've seen "aughts" used and understood that fine. When I read this, I thought it referred to the entire century.

parrellel2• 7 years ago

Despite many people's best efforts "the oughts" never quite caught on like they did turn of last century.

cgriswald3• 7 years ago

It’s “aughts”, which is a term for zero, but rarely used outside certain contexts. I prefer it, but it’s not surprising it didn’t catch on.

Otherwise I greatly prefer “the early 2000s”. It’s not very precise, but it’s more precise than “the 2000’s” which can include the year 2999.

chrisco255• 7 years ago

Personally excited to enter the twenties so we can refer to decades by standard nomenclature again!

cylinder2• 7 years ago

Wow I hadn't thought about that. I also think most people haven't yet realised this is the last year of the current decade!

hnzix• 7 years ago

Noughties, teens, twenties.

falsedan6• 7 years ago

two thousand and X (200x) here

Izkata• 7 years ago

Either that, or occasionally I just roll "nineteen-nineties" into "twenty-hundreds" or "twenty-ohs".

11thEarlOfMar• 7 years ago

Yeah, I recently watch a German-produced special about Silicon Valley that concluded Google engineers learn how to network by attending Burning Man. [0]

It's obvious to identify the product of Silicon Valley companies because they generally are marketed globally. But it's really hard to convey what it's like to live and work here. Generally, it's nothing like you might imagine. The architecture is mundane, the weather is great, the traffic stifling. That can describe many places, so then you have to talk about housing costing more than anywhere in the world (at this scale), and $12,000 bottles of Cognac at Costco.

In the end, it's the people who live here. Generally well paid, disproportionately wealthy (but not nearly everyone), probably from another country, not here to show off what they have, but rather, what they can achieve.

[0] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=YQy0ZCx3UCY

01100011• 7 years ago

The architecture is mundane

I take issue with this. For most of my career I worked in a standard office building. False ceiling tiles, cubicles, rectangular concrete 'tilt and pour'. It served the job well. It was relatively quiet, comfortable, intimate and fostered my productivity.

Now I work in an architectural masterpiece of modern green engineering. It is loud, impersonal, distracting, and not at all conducive to actually getting work done. It's like the people who designed the building hated engineers and typical engineering personalities and set out to design a building to torture them.

Apple has a similar problem. Apple's senior vice-president of hardware technologies Johny Srouji refused to move his team into their new, piece of shit exercise in architectural masturbation.

AstralStorm2• 7 years ago

The main thing to blame is open plan... Read: cheaping out on walls. This includes undamped glass walls and doors.

goldenchrome• 7 years ago

The vast number of Teslas, Audis, BMWs, and Porsches makes me think that many people aren't just here to show what they can achieve.

falsedan6• 7 years ago

Maseratis too, leased from the Ferrari dealership in SF

ralph84• 7 years ago

I just wish finance would take off again so all the mercenaries looking for a quick buck but with no personal affinity for technology would have somewhere else to go.

BadassFractal• 7 years ago

When is this sentiment justified and when is it just gatekeeping?

pm90• 7 years ago

Look at the cohorts of Product Managers, Security "Specialists" (Disclosure: they're not engineers, experts, its a totally made up title), Certified Buzzy Buzzwordingtons etc. Its not very hard to see, as the OP pithely pointed out, that Tech seems to be the only place today where its possible to strike gold.

jayd162• 7 years ago

I thought that's why we invented Bitcoin.

axaxs• 7 years ago

I don't mean to insult a PHD, but this piece reads like a middle school persuasion piece. It's pure 'why my city is great', with little objective evidence.

avinium• 7 years ago

A PhD is a piece of paper, not something that elevates the holder to the position of a deity. I don't think it should even be mentioned as something that might temper your criticism.

(General comment only, I haven't actually read the article yet).

geggam2• 7 years ago

PhD's who do silly things deserve more criticism because they are supposed to know better, and its funny watching their reaction that you dare.

opsiprogram• 7 years ago

Yea but that's okay right... people can write that. It's actually probably more effective than an "objective" piece. It's persuasive because the author's clearly loves the vibe, and describes it in a weirdly beautiful way. Which got me to buy into it, as a software developer myself. And the contrast with how the valley is portrayed normally is refreshing. (FD I don't live there, but I did really like this piece.)

FartyMcFarter• 7 years ago

Exactly what I would expect from a lot of the crowd who flaunts their PhD title as part of their name.

sumanthvepa• 7 years ago

Silicon Valley is not a fad, but not quite a place either. As the author describes it, the drab office complexes are not quite what makes Silicon Valley what it is. In my opinion, a person living half a world away, Silicon Valley is a collective state of mind in a place with the right resources and context. It has talent, capital, and the infrastructure, both physical and intangible. It has free markets, great universities, rule of law, safety, democracy, and most importantly an acceptance of a certain kind of risk taking. This combination is surprisingly hard to recreate. As an Indian living half a planet away, I look upon the place with a mixture of admiration, awe and envy.

ido4• 7 years ago

    It has free markets, great universities, rule of law,
    safety, democracy, and most importantly an acceptance 
    of a certain kind of risk taking. This combination is
    surprisingly hard to recreate.

These all exist to a large extent in a lot of major (and not so major!) western cities. Not that unique.

AstralStorm2• 7 years ago

The unique thing here is the same thing that is unique in Shenzhen in China - how much of everything is packed close together reducing externalities and improving communication.

If the is business in the category, you're liable to find it in the SV, even more likely to find it in the Chinese city.

throwaway713• 7 years ago

I have always been interested in computers and programming since I was little and made it a goal to move to Silicon Valley when I graduated from high school 11 years ago. Now that I’m here and working at my dream job, it’s funny how “mundane” it is (in a good, engineering sort of way). Wake up, go to work, program and talk about technical things, then go home. Repeat the next day. My day to day life is very unlike the TV show this place is based on (although that craziness definitely exists around here for those looking for it, but it’s not difficult to avoid). Sometimes it’s hard to believe this is the tech capital of the world because the infrastructure is just so ordinary and suburban looking.

Weirdly enough, I think my favorite thing about living here is the vegetation. The quirky trees, the rolling hills, and the funky plants are just so different than what you find in the rest of the U.S. My favorite pastime is just driving around here on the weekend looking at it all.

mattnewport• 7 years ago

My day to day life is very unlike the TV show this place is based on

I always thought the show Silicon Valley was based on the place but your way round actually explains a lot.

jayd162• 7 years ago

It's based on real life like Dilbert is based on real life.

westoque• 7 years ago

It's not really the infrastructure that makes it Silicon Valley. In my 15 years of living here, it's the people. The concentration of tech companies here and talent is astounding! This is the only place where every week there's an interesting meetup with whatever tech of your choosing, be it Rails, Clojure or with management, with how to design/UX, and agile. This is the only place where a cafe is filled with tech people talking about their startups, pitch, their stack, etc.

I have been to many places including different tech metropolitans, like Berlin, but there's still nothing quite like Silicon Valley in terms of what I said above.

Now, my only gripe is that the housing market is crazy. It's funny how only the tech crowd get to afford to live here. I've seen families bunch together just to afford rent.

hogu• 7 years ago

NYC has a similar meetup culture and a great tech community. I'd bet Seattle, Austin, and Chicago do to.

The difference is that other cities have diversified economies with multiple hot industries.

navigatesol3• 7 years ago

This is the only place where a cafe is filled with tech people talking about their startups, pitch, their stack, etc.

How many people actually find this appealing?

To an outsider, this is the joke of the Silicon Valley show: everybody is always "talking business" and "crushing it", while the vast majority of "engineering work" being done is mostly useless. The Silicon Valley lifestyle is to me the other side of coin as the Wall Street lifestyle.

jswizzy• 7 years ago

Chinese investors probably buy more houses than the actual Silicon Valley crowd. They love investing in homes in CA and NY.

mastazi• 7 years ago

Suggested reading: a long-form article about the history of Silicon Valley seen through the lives of the author's own family (Kim-Mai Cutler, 2014): https://techcrunch.com/2014/01/04/silicon-valley-lost-and-fo...

freddref• 7 years ago

The last paragraph includes this about Y Combinator: "in my opinion it’s also incubated a lot of nonsense." and "tends to produce great innovation with a generous pinch of bullshit."

Is there some backstory missing here?

dnautics• 7 years ago

biased, since I know the author. Think it's a rather mediocre piece, but I liked this quip a lot:

"It's easy to say silicon valley is full of 'tech bros' if that's the cohort you surround yourself with"

navigatesol3• 7 years ago

It's easy to say silicon valley is full of 'tech bros' if that's the cohort you surround yourself with

Everyone hates tech bros, but I don't think tech bros know they're tech bros.

burger_moon• 7 years ago

Silicon Valley where diversity and inclusion is welcomed, unless you look like someone we don't like, then we hate you, and get out.

networkimprov4• 7 years ago

There's another characteristic that's apparent to only some of us who live here, but many of those who don't...

How out of touch many here are with the rest of the nation's and world's concerns, aspirations, feelings, values, and needs.

For example, we now know that the Internet has a corrupting influence on civil society that's stronger than its capacity to uplift it.

Judgmentality• 7 years ago

For example, we now know that the Internet has a corrupting influence on civil society that's stronger than its capacity to uplift it.

You believe the Internet is a net negative for society? I think it's easily one of the greatest inventions in all of history.

ido4• 7 years ago

I think it's all too easy to take the positive aspects for granted.

rjf72• 7 years ago

I'd assume he meant the "internet" in this regard. It's hard to see things such as Facebook, Twitter, and the increasingly dystopic efforts to get people to click on ads driven by companies such as Google, as being anything but a serious net negative for society. And these sites for many people, and I think it's probably safe to say the majority, effectively are the internet.

Obviously it's an unprecedentedly amazing invention. You have access to an infinite amount of information that is mostly free or can be made to be free. For instance if you want to learn astrophysics in your spare time, you can - for $0. And not just learn it but receive access to instruction from the most well regarded instructors at the most well regarded institutions, alongside supplemental materials. And all for $0. That is just such an incredibly radical shift in society.

But most people don't do things like this. The internet is also a source of endless mindless entertainment, the ability to engage in echo chambers based on your preferred views, and to otherwise engage in pointless bickering and gossip. And this behavior is heavily driven by companies who profit extensively off this form of "engagement." Who's making money when you download and sit around watching Susskind's videos and engaging in the corresponding course work? Nobody. Thus, there is a strong disincentive by many to discourage this sort of behavior in lieu of passively consuming crap interleaved with as much advertising and 'messaging' as can be jammed into it.

It's ironic. The internet was going to be the great equalizer in society. But I think it's probably driving a bigger divide in society than ever before. Because now for those with intelligence, drive, and motivation there's less than ever stopping them from achieving great things. At the same time for those who do not have drive or are easily distracted there are now more ways to mindlessly waste an unlimited of time in self indulgence - and mostly for free!

networkimprov4• 7 years ago

Granted it's a great invention for the highly educated and computer literate. I rather depend on it myself!

But that is a tiny slice of the world. Which, as I said, is largely out of touch with the rest of it.

flohofwoe• 7 years ago

The internet is great, the problem is mostly ad-networks and so-called "social media" riding on it.

Let's not blame the road for the idiot-drivers ;)

nikofeyn• 7 years ago

it certainly is possible. in the old days, the elite kept power over people using things like religion, and still do although to a lesser degree. however, now the internet has provided the power to control and manipulate like no other thing before.

sure, the internet has enabled some huge things. but if i step back to my life before the internet was a central component of daily life, i can't say definitively whether the internet has provided a net positive effect on my life or not. and i feel more and more that it has kept me from fulfilling myself by capturing my attention and time.

look at the way youtube has progressed. it used to be a platform filled with authenticity. now, it's been overwhelmed by what is described by leeches that try to manipulate and siphon off its users.

much of this is covered by adam curtis in his documentaries, and i would start by watching "all watched over by machines of ever loving grace". the internet started out as an authentic place but not has turned against its users in its powder to control and manipulate.

ctz• 7 years ago

I think it's easily one of the greatest inventions in all of history.

Really? I'm surprised you rank it above inventions which allowed the agricultural, industrial or transport revolutions to happen.

Personally the Internet as an invention would rank way below the automobile, wheel, plough, spinning jenny, telegraph, telephone, broadcast television, aeroplane, etc.

gaze• 7 years ago

I think it was a wonderful thing until people figured out how to efficiently exploit people with it. It just turns out to be incredibly good for exploiting people, and I think this bell can’t be unrung.

falsedan6• 7 years ago

It can be both.

asdff3• 7 years ago

Oh stop with the gloom, this is like using tabloids as an example of how the printing press ruined us all. Ignore the tabloids, or in the case of the internet, low effort ad content. You can read good journalism from around the world if you put in the minuscule effort it takes to vet a source. The academic internet never went away, in fact it gets exponentially more powerful every year, and nearly all of human knowledge is at your fingertips for free* from Wikipedia or tools like pub med (everything funded by the NIH becomes open access after a year).

The internet has only ever been one thing: a time sink. Why waste your free time making someone else money? Cut out the commercialized internet from your life. Sink your time by learning something, keep your neck well above the irrelevant noise of social media, keep your eyes fixed on well written information from good journalists and experts in their fields, and suddenly the internet is beautiful and everything that everyone hoped for.

Nasrudith• 7 years ago

Is there /any/ part of the nation in touch with the rest if the nation's concerns, aspirations, feelings, values and needs? I seriously wonder who would rank best there given the fact the nation is a big place and even those who travel a lot are in their own bubbles. Are farmers out of touch for considering owning many acres normal when they are less than 2% of employement - let alone that most don't own their own land?

As for the corrupting influence I must disagree.

networkimprov4• 7 years ago

Many groups try to keep a finger on the pulse everywhere: journalists, filmmakers, politicians, manufacturers (e.g. automakers), retailers, social scientists...

Many of these groups are concentrated in a handful of locales, e.g. Hollywood, D.C., Madison Avenue.

Apocryphon2• 7 years ago

Cheery optimism and pride in a place are all well and good. This article feels like it's from a different time, perhaps a decade before. Certainly, there has been a lot of negative press of Silicon Valley in recent years. Much of that has been well-deserved. For years, engineers have pretended to be above the petty tribalism of politics (even as we bikeshedded and fought our editor holy wars), only for the revelations of the last few years of SV lobbying and collusion with the surveillance state to come out.

Of course, this article is more about SV as a cultural place and ideal, and not a political force, more about Manhattan than Wall Street. But it still brushes off high rents as normal, something ever-present. Meanwhile, a San Jose city councilman and his family are evicted because of high rents:

https://sanjosespotlight.com/san-jose-housing-crisis-council...

I grew up in San Jose. (I remember when we were the capital of Silicon Valley, not San Francisco.) We now live in a very different Bay Area from that of the irrationally exuberant '90s. I think positive profiles of SV have to be tempered by realistic coverage of the many, many problems this place is experiencing. At the very least, acknowledgement of these problems- and not breezy dismissal- can spur change to make things better. So we can build a Silicon Valley worthy of these utopian fantasies.

rdiddly2• 7 years ago

There are tons of those articles though. This one was refreshingly detached from all that.

Apocryphon2• 7 years ago

Which makes it somewhat anachronistic, no? Imagine an article that cheerleads the traditional college experience at all cost. Might've been fine fifteen years ago, now it would sound dated in the era of crushing student debt.

ido4• 7 years ago

I still don't quite understand how it's economical for all these huge companies to hire engineers in SV/SFBA for 2-3x as much as in other western markets, and probably more like 10x of non-western markets when the internet to a large extent mitigates a lot of the down- and upsides of geography.

By that I don't necessarily mean everything should be outsourced to India - even Vancouver (same language, same timezone, similar cultural background) has drastically lower developer wages than SFBA & plenty of talent.

nradov• 7 years ago

It's not economical. But the investors and executives who make decisions on corporate locations enjoy living in SV/SFBA, so here we are.

dfrage• 7 years ago

& plenty of talent.

Unconstrained by non-competes?

The theory is that the Bay area has a huge liquid pool of talent, and that not being able to hire critical talent at all is even less "economical", in that you're less likely to be able deliver your product or service to market.

kitsunesoba• 7 years ago

I think it has to do with desired quality. Hiring high quality engineers can be a difficult task even in the massive talent pool present in SV, and it’s only going to be more difficult in cities with smaller pools. That’s not to say that quality doesn’t exist in these places, but it’s certainly not as readily available.

asdff3• 7 years ago

Because there is value in having people in personal contact, especially if they are expected to work in a team. I don't know what I'd do if I didn't have the option of dropping by a coworkers office for a 5 min quick chat or a 3 hour informal meeting on a whim, where we might pull out our notebooks and pull up relevant files and email threads. Deep thinking can't happen on a slack channel, it happens during the skull session.

California is also a powerhouse of a state. It has the 5th largest economy in the world, and the most productive state government in the U.S. Ambitious projects actually get attempted and built in California unlike so many of the stagnant states in the U.S. Another reason of why SV and not Idaho is the academic research environment of the bay area and the ease of recruiting the excellent talent that comes out of California's universities every spring.

sureaboutthis• 7 years ago

I've always said that Silicon Valley is the Hollywood of the tech industry. When one wants to make a film in Hollywood, and the script calls for a special piece of equipment or prop that's never been made before, one can walk down the street and find three people who can make one for you in an hour because Hollywood is where the movie people congregate.

The same is true for the Valley.

bentossell• 7 years ago

“Y Combinator, like Silicon Valley itself, tends to produce great innovation with a generous pinch of bullshit.”

Interesting way to round off the post!

coleifer• 7 years ago

Nice read, thoughtful.

Another thoughtful read, from the other side: https://nplusonemag.com/issue-25/on-the-fringe/uncanny-valle...

dblock• 7 years ago

This article makes me sad. While not a fad, Silicon Valley is the ultimate manifestation of a place where Americans and contagiously the rest of tech workers value work over life.

purplezooey• 7 years ago

If we could put a dent in the housing thing, it would be a wonderful place. ATM we are helpless before it.

erikpukinskis• 7 years ago

The prime question for me, as it relates to real estate, is:

"Will the majority of Silicon Valley's economic activity ever move to virtual locations?"

I.e., will over half of the meetings at Facebook, Google, etc, ever happen in a game world, with participants logging in with HMDs?

It's hard to make a conclusive prediction, but I have an extremely difficult time justifying a "NO" with even 51/49 odds. I would put the odds at least at 10/1 "YES" but again that's pure speculation.

The only real justification for a strong "NO" is something like "It has been tried before with other telecom tech and it didn't work" but we don't even had access gaze tracking yet, which science shows is crucial for language. We seem assured to have a blistering release of body tracking tech over the next 10 years, and the claim "none of it will change teleconferencing materially" seems impossible to justify.

The counterclaim, "teleconferencing will hit feature parity with in-person meeting for 90% of corporate interactions within 10 years" to me is very easy to entertain.

And if the counterclaim is true, what does that mean for Bay Area real estate? I can't justify a million dollar mortgage if there's even a 50/50 change of this outcome.

HMD teleconferencing vs. meetings in conference rooms seems like a classic disruptive technology situation. Right now HMDs are unacceptably poor in comparison. But they have key advantages the incumbent tech (in-person meetings) can never match: no commute, exponentially more and cheaper housing options, muting, easier and better access to data and visualization in the meeting space, faster transition between workstation and meeting, can include people on other continents, infinite meeting spaces available at all times, etc.

This seems to me the biggest looming change to Bay Area culture, period. I am surprised it's not more discussed.

thorwasdfasdf• 7 years ago

and a lot of it has to do with people's willingness to use those remote methods, and the culture at those companies. Right now there's a lot of young people working in tech that don't have much incentive to be remote. But, in the coming decades, some of them will want families of their own. At that point a desire to move out of the bay area may overcome their resistance to working remotely.

Silicon Valley Is Not a Fad

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