Ashton’s plight, fight or flight or "self-righteous metropolitan exceptionalism"

http://cemerick.com/2010/12/11/ashtons-plight-fight-or-flight/

by fogus • 16 years ago

41 29 16 years ago

tptacek4• 16 years ago

I totally agree that there's nothing inherently wrong with working in Zeeland, MI. It's beautiful country.

But, working dev at Herman Miller is genuinely not a great role for a dev career. It's a textbook dead-end job. It's not "exceptionalism" to point that out.

Yes, he should have gotten in his car and headed to Chicago, instead of hopping a plane for SF. He'd even be able to keep his car. But he was right to leave.

cemerick4• 16 years ago

So, one can get a good software development job in the midwest only if one is in Chicago?

I think you missed the point of the post.

tptacek4• 16 years ago

No, I get the point of the post. I disagree with part of it, and I object to its tone.

The notion that you will do just as good with a software job in Zeeland, or Grand Rapids, or even Ann Arbor as you will in a major metro area is simply false. Below some threshold, you will do worse in lower-populated areas than in larger ones, because of labor mobility issues and reduced competition. Employers in small cities get better deals than employers in larger ones; that is, in fact, a good reason to start a company in a smaller city.†

I cited Chicago because it's less than an hour and a half away from Zeeland. You could do just as well in Indy, in Cleveland, Minneapolis, or Des Moines.

My tonal objection is simple: Spolsky was dead on in this post. If you are a junior developer in a back office job at Herman Miller and you are asking questions that indicate you're trying to do career planning, you need to get the hell out of Herman Miller and into a real software shop. They're all over the place in the US, but, sorry, they're not so much in Grand Haven or Davenport or Carbon County, PA.

† Just to head off a tangential debate: if you're at a point in your career where you're asking how to impress your boss, starting a company is probably not your best next move.

metageek2• 16 years ago

>But, working dev at Herman Miller is genuinely not a great role for a dev career.

My rule of thumb: if the software is a cost center, stay away. Profit centers get treated better.

smalter• 16 years ago

I sympathize with both sides of this. I'm a guy who grew up in College Station, Texas, and couldn't wait to get out. Now I live in SF and NYC.

But most of my closest friends to this day are the ones I grew up with in College Station who couldn't wait to get the hell out. Some of them left, and some of them stayed (nearby). I think we're all making the right decisions for ourselves.

I appreciate what I take as the main point of the article: there's nothing special about you just by virtue of the fact that you're here (SF/NYC). I think I relate well to people like myself (small town -> big city) but that doesn't make us better than anyone else. There's beauty in staying where you're from and making that place better and telling its story. I admire guys like Guy Maddin, the Valley Forge, PA startup guys, etc.

cemerick4• 16 years ago

A P.S. (to counter the acerbity of my comment in reply to tptacek):

It's a really, really big world, filled with really bright people. They can't all be in SV/NYC/Bos/Chi/Aus/whatever…and if they were, the world would be worse off for it. There's important work to be done in every locale, and there's no sense in implying that one is lesser because of where one sleeps.

jamesaguilar• 16 years ago

> there's no sense in implying that one is lesser because of where one sleeps

I think the intended implication is not one of personal value, but that aspiring engineers might have an easier time living in proximity to large pools of talent and opportunity.

rayvega• 16 years ago

Yes, but network effects are not limited to just social media and the internet as a whole. Physically clustering together smart, ambitious individuals produces tremendous side effects in opportunities and innovation that are difficult to impossible to recreate with today's technology. This might change but, for now, they are not on equal ground.

A good read on the subject:

http://www.paulgraham.com/cities.html

mikeryan• 16 years ago

When I read Spolsky's story to me the "where from" and "where to" parts didn't really mean anything.

For me its about someone smart enough to realize they are running in place and brave enough to do something about it. So many people get stuck in a rut and let it rule their life instead of the other way around. Ashton made the move.

Anecdotally, I've spent pretty much my whole life living between SF and Palo Alto, and realized about 2 years ago that I had to do something different so I quit my good job at a large software company to branch out on my own. Took a huge pay cut the first year, but I couldn't be happier. Getting stuck can happen anywhere.

danilocampos• 16 years ago

I grew up in suburban, then rural New Mexico. I spent a decent chunk of my adult life in Central Florida. I even lived in tiny, beautiful Bend, OR.

There's not a single one of these places that can hold a candle to the SF Bay Area in terms of opportunity, smart people and great employers. As a tech hub, it's an optimal destination for someone with technical skills.

"Bigger cities have more opportunities" isn't self-righteous. It's just common sense.

So, yeah, you can make it happen for yourself anywhere. But why would you struggle to extract juice from the oil shale that is nowhere, USA when enormous wells of real opportunity have bullseyes painted right on the map? Why make it needlessly hard?

grammaton• 16 years ago

I think the author is attacking a bit of a strawman. It seems that the discussion of "major metropolitan areas" assumes either San Francisco and the Valley, New York, or Boston. Now it's true they're the main tech hubs, but they are far from the only decent sized cities with a booming software market. Here in Philadelphia, for instance, I've never had undue trouble finding a job. However it's generally true that you'll do better in New York than you will in Philly - and a lot better in Philly than you'd do in the middle of the state. It's a simple fact of life that software development, by and large, tends to cluster around the nearest large population center. You'll have an easier time finding a job in the city for a fairly wide range of careers, for that matter, simply because there's more employers around. That's neither exceptionalism or arrogance - that's just how it is.

To lay my cards on the table - I grew up in a small town in boondocks, PA, and live in Philadelphia, which is not exactly a speck on the map. So, I've had it both ways, and I wouldn't even entertain the notion of moving back to where I came from and still being able to have any kind of real career in development.

leviathant• 16 years ago

Pardon my echo, but moving from York, PA to Philadelphia instantly at-least-doubled my income, and (in 2006, when I moved), there were roughly 40x the weekly opportunities available in the greater Philly area than there were in Central PA (along rts 30 & 83), and immensely more variety in those opportunities than what you can find, or even create for yourself back in central PA.

nickpinkston• 16 years ago

Did you look at Pittsburgh? I'm there and always wondering how it is out east.

jdietrich• 16 years ago

OP is wrong, dead wrong.

In my home city there are a few software companies, even a major games studio, but no real community - there's a Linux User Group peopled by beardy academics, but nothing more.

In the next nearest city, there are tech events every night of the week. There's a hacker space open and another being planned, startups sharing offices and the general buzz of stuff happening. The networking opportunities are absolutely immense - in any given week you could meet the founders of two dozen startups, easily.

What do you think my odds are of getting a great job in each city?

OP is wrong, absolutely dead wrong. Yes, there are opportunities outside of major cities, but they're much fewer and further between. There's an argument that competition is less fierce outside of metropolitan areas, but it's a bad argument for two reasons. First, it smacks of a poverty of ambition, a "good enough" attitude that no young developer should sink to. The other is that it isn't true. There is absolutely massive demand for good developers. Recession or not, most firms are desperate for people who really can write software.

While I'm sure you can build a good career in software anywhere, it's going to be an uphill struggle if you're not surrounded by people who are doing the same. There is a reason that companies are still spending fortunes building skyscrapers - proximity matters.

warren_s• 16 years ago

What have you done to improve your networking opportunities and the community in YOUR city? I started a monthly lunch group where a bunch of us get together and just talk tech. Some of us are devs, some are sysadmins, others designers, we even have a couple of academics from the CS dept of the local university.

Because it's a small city, it's a diverse group, but this is a strength as much as it's a weakness.

So before you throw your hands up and complain that there's "no real community", at least have a go at creating one.

kragen• 16 years ago

Chas Emerick might be right, but my experience is very different.

I moved to Silicon Valley in 1996 to take a job as a sysadmin. My previous job: bottling bubblebath in a bubblebath factory in Ohio. I managed to stay in that job for the year it took to pay off my moving expenses, which is a testament to the fact that I already knew some stuff, and moved back to Dayton, Ohio, to be with my wife.

BAD MOVE. Ended up working at Keane on a Y2K remediation project, wrote a Perl script that allowed us to do a text-scanning task in an hour that previously took days with the Keane Assessment Tool (written in COBOL), got reprimanded in writing for suggesting to a customer contact that we remove some unused and incorrect code from their software, was yanked off the client site and sent to their management training course where I was indoctrinated in their explicitly-described-as-waterfall methodology, and was fired at the end of my three-month probationary period.

At this point, Keane, despite making nearly a billion dollars a year writing software to automate its customers' business processes, had a timesheet process that worked as follows:

1. Download the Excel spreadsheet from the Keane website onto the client computer and fill in your hours.

2. Print it out on the client's printer.

3. Fax it to the Keane office on the client's fax machine.

4. At the Keane office, the receptionist would type the hours from the printed, faxed spreadsheet into the timesheet system, which I never saw.

From later 1997 to 2000 in Dayton, I worked at ERIM, a government contractor developing software for hyperspectral image analysis. The level of competency was higher there than at Keane, but essentially the project was to reimplement in C++ a bunch of algorithms that were already implemented in ERDAS Imagine, with the stated objective of improving their usability, but with no human-factors people on the team. The real objective was to get the taxpayers to foot the bill for a reimplementation of these algorithms whose copyright would be held by the prime contractor, Ball Aerospace and Technologies Corporation.

At one point, our team lead (Teresa Cloud, of BATC) declared a policy against using the C++ keyword "this", because she thought it was bad style. On another occasion, I got reprimanded for using "assert" statements in my code — not for creating the bug that triggered the assertion failures, which was also my fault, you understand, but for the statements that detected it. As you can tell from these stories, my technical and political savvy was quite limited at the time, and my productivity was even worse.

During this time, you understand, I was hanging out in bookstores, talking to people there, taking classes at WSU, going to Linux user groups and the Dayton Microcomputer Association and Hamvention and Computerfest, occasionally doing volunteer work with a computers-for-the-poor project whose name I forget now. There are probably a dozen or more interesting high-tech companies there in Dayton, but I never succeeded in finding them.

In 2000, I took a job at a startup in Seattle. It challenged me like nothing ever had. After three months I visited Dayton, and I was astonished to find that nothing had changed. It was like visiting Brigadoon. Time just moved so much slower there.

When Kleiner funded us late that year, we moved to the SFBA, and I spent the next six years working for a variety of interesting tech companies, in the SFBA. In 2006, I moved to Buenos Aires, and although there's some interesting stuff going on here, it's a pale shadow of the SFBA, despite having about the same total population. The free software and contact improv communities here, however, are amazing. But the environment does encourage me to get lazy and slow down instead of staying ahead of stuff.

Ashton’s plight, fight or flight or "self-righteous metropolitan exceptionalism"

Related Stories