The secret guild of Silicon Valley

http://medriscoll.com/post/9117396231/the-guild-of-silicon-valley

by Luyt • 14 years ago

177 48 14 years ago

This is a pattern you see repeated many times, at many levels. Stuff like blogs, HN comments, or just any form of public discourse has a heavy bias (one might say it optimizes) towards people that use it the most. By definition heavy use of such media is time consuming, leaving less time for learning, coding, or doing more productive things in general. So the discourse becomes dominated by not the best and brightest that practice their trade the most, but rather those that talk the most about it.

reneherse• 14 years ago

Not only that, but all these short-form media tend to be playgrounds for the extraverted, who are more comfortable putting themselves "out there".

petegrif• 14 years ago

Very true.

marcusf• 14 years ago

The point he's trying to make isn't really served by the slightly derogatory tone. I've known two-three really great engineers in my day, people that could carry a company, and I doubt any of them would take the link as a compliment though some parameters certainly fit (none blog, tweet, comment on HN or apply for jobs for example...)

praptak• 14 years ago

This is similar in spirit to Orson Scott Card "How Sofware Companies Die" piece: http://www.zoion.com/~erlkonig/writings/programmer-beekeepin...

relaunched• 14 years ago

Unfortunately, the person who wrote this missed the point, as far as I'm concerned. These people do exist. But, it's not about an engineering culture, it's about a culture of respect and emphasis on learning. It's also about building friendships and relationships and allow people to express themselves and their interests.

Most startups don't attract these people because when you approach a great engineer when you want something, they can smell it on you. They don't need your job and they don't want to work for someone who sees them as a means to an end.

stcredzero3• 14 years ago

Words of wisdom for a founder who wants to establish a culture of "Good People."

kstenerud• 14 years ago

At first I thought we managed to make such amazing hires because we were good at hiring. We weren't; we sucked at hiring, but we're learning and trying to improve.

Then I thought we managed to get such amazing people because we were lucky. That explained some of it, but nowhere near all of it.

Now I realize that great people are attracted by something they can believe in.

birken• 14 years ago

(I realize this was written 8 months ago and the addendum tries to take away the bite, but I'll comment nonetheless)

I hate articles that make it seem like there is some magical cult of amazing engineers that have an untouchable and unattainable aura. I remember how intimidated I was after I graduated college and was coming into the workforce due to it.

Well, I used to work with the men and women who "who keep Google’s servers running" and at one point in time I was one of them. I can tell you that none of the stereotypes listed apply to any sizeable percentage of them, and their variety and skills were incredibly diverse. Some had years of experience and were grizzled veterans, some of them were right out of college. Some of them lived in the south bay, some lived in the city. Some dressed more fashionably than others. Some were men, some were women.

They, like many, liked working on interesting problems. They, like many, cared about engineering and improving their skills everyday. But, there was no magical guild which encompassed them. It is just a bunch of engineers with different skills, different interests, different personalities, who all just enjoyed engineering. Just like you and me. Your company doesn't need people from this magical guild to succeed, because this magical guild doesn't exist.

I certainly agree that any engineer would like working at a place where their work will have a huge impact and will be appreciated, but who wouldn't? If your company is marginalizing some percentage of your employees, whatever their job title is, then you certainly aren't going to be able to attract quality candidates for that position. That really has nothing to do with engineers or some magical guild though.

lifeisstillgood• 14 years ago

Well said, there is enough FUD around how to translate programming into engineering that adding some unknowable mystique to it will not help.

dasil003• 14 years ago

I agree the stereotypes can be a little offputting, but I think the OA is motivated by a similar annoyance at stereotypes that you are experiencing.

It's a response to the effect the consumer web has had on silicon valley, namely the tabloidism, the hollywoodization, and the explosion of self-promotion. The bloggers, the pundits, "brogrammers", "ninjas", etc.

When you read articles about using Github as a way to screen prospective employees, or not hiring people who don't have a blog, you realize that the core practice of software engineering that underlies all the most innovative aspects of what's happening in tech today has the potential to get lost in a sea of signaling.

The delivery of this message may not be the most tasteful, but I think it's a point worth making.

appleaintbad• 14 years ago

> I hate articles that make it seem like there is some magical cult of amazing engineers that have an untouchable and unattainable aura. I remember how intimidated I was after I graduated college and was coming into the workforce due to it.

I think that the point is that typically in startups, people revere the company founders, the MBAs, the VCs, etc. and not the quiet experienced engineers that just make things happen. You're right that it isn't a secret guild, however there is a range of experience and talent, and some are on the higher end of that. Not everyone can easily attain the level of experience and talent that some of these people have; it is a mix of education, natural ability, hard work, and luck. But, you are right that getting a lot closer to the level these people are at is not impossible.

untog• 14 years ago

I think that the point is that typically in startups, people revere the company founders, the MBAs, the VCs, etc. and not the quiet experienced engineers that just make things happen

I disagree. I think that engineers get a huge amount of attention, far more than they would in any other industry. But at a base level you need to be outgoing and sociable- it seems that proportionally fewer engineers are, when compared to MBAs, VCs and the like.

pohl• 14 years ago

I'm surprised that anybody took the 'secret guild' thing so literally. To me it reads as a metaphor for the iceberg of interconnected talent hidden below the surface.

alexchamberlain• 14 years ago

There is different way to read the article. It says that the current fashion for rapid development using Ruby/Javascript/PHP/<insert interpreted language here> is great, but eventually, to enable you to scale effectively rather than just buying more EC2 instances, you will have to identify your bottlenecks and reimplement them in more efficient languages. This involves hiring experienced software developers who can develop secure C/C++ (I might as well mention Java, I don't like it) without the code being available to everyone.

guard-of-terra3• 14 years ago

I don't see those people pushing to github. The amount of hard code on github is low. Those people are probably pushing to svn of their mature open source project. Sourceforge or self-hosted.

stephencanon5• 14 years ago

> Their tools of choice are C, C++, and Java

Definitely, maybe, and absolutely not, respectively.

> They wear ironic t-shirts, and that is the outer limit of their fashion sense

True.

> They’re not hipsters who live in the Mission or even in the city; they live near a CalTrain stop, somewhere on the Peninsula

True.

> They meet for Game Night on Thursdays to play Settlers of Catan

False. SoC is for hipsters. The neck beards are playing something much more obscure, which probably hasn't been translated from German yet.

> They are passive, logical, and Spock-like

Logical, absolutely, but they are anything but passive. It's just that the set of things they really care about has almost zero overlap with the set of things that you really care about, which looks like passivity to you.

jbooth5• 14 years ago

Absolutely not? I'm sorry if Java's too unfashionable for you to be caught using, but what language are Hadoop, Cassandra, Zookeeper, etc written in? Google wrote their equivalents in C++, and java's garbage collection has it's problems, but nobody's writing those platforms in Ruby.

If you have such a bias against any language that delivers the goods in the real world like Java does, you're probably not a systems guy. Let me guess, you have a problem with some clumsy aspect of the language or other? As if C is graceful?

stephencanon5• 14 years ago

It's not a question of what's "unfashionable" for me to be caught using [However: I write C and Assembly, thank you very much]. The question is "what languages do the neckbeards use?" In my experience, writing Java is a shaving offense. They might even make you wear a suit.

angersock2• 14 years ago

So, in my experience, one of the big issues with the Java ecosystem is that you've got to use all these frameworks and tooling and all this other stuff in an enterprise setting (and once you scale, you're enterprise). This is somewhat abhorrent to systems guys/C neckbeards because, honestly, it reduces your role to cleverly linking together AbstractPipeEnterpriseBeanVisitorFactory objects.

Moreover, once you scale, you get big money, and then you hire IBM or Oracle or whoever to come in with consultants and give you the bespoke blessed Java stack. I have a friend in ecommerce right now (who is also an excellent low-level neckbeard) and his company bought top-of-the-line storage and things just to support the log spew from this stuff.

This isn't wrong, mind you...it's just that, at some point, it's better to just spend money on bigger iron, and then the neckbeards say "Fuck, this is boring and dumb" and leave for a challenge elsewhere.

kayoone• 14 years ago

stereotypes FTW!

stcredzero3• 14 years ago

they have quietly, steadily built the infrastructure behind the world’s most successful companies. When they leave — as they have places like Netscape, Sun, and Yahoo — the firms they leave behind wither and die.

Reminds me of one Korean woman I knew in South Carolina. She would start cooking at a restaurant and it would flourish. Then the owner would alienate her, and she'd leave and the restaurant wouldn't be so popular anymore. Eventually, she started cooking Korean food at her husband's cuban sub shop and the sub shop became one of the most popular places to get Korean food. Seriously, the place was often packed with Korean students from the university.

However, the sort of insider culture described in the article makes me think of the insider culture portrayed in the beginning of "Moneyball." I suspect that, given more open statistics, the industry would benefit from a more quantitative evaluation of technical people, as opposed to the stone age reputation mechanisms of Homo sapiens at play during shop talk. (Which work pretty well, but we can do better.)

This is one place where large companies currently have an advantage over the market at-large, as they can gather this sort of quantitative information about their own population of employees, with a uniform set of standards to enable measurement.

An organization like Y Combinator could do something similar. Even better, startups and incubators in worldwide could start doing this.

I've advocated "guilds" here in the past, and HN members have downvoted me. Really, that's just poor marketing, as what I was advocating wasn't anything like a medieval guild. What the industry needs more of are 1) mentoring at levels above the "pop-culture" of programming 2) better and more open quantitative measures.

Really, 2) is the same thing as pro athlete's stats or MPG figures on a car's sticker. Better flow of information would result in a better market.

jbooth5• 14 years ago

The thing about moneyball is you're evaluating a player based on a few thousand iterations of the same thing: Up to bat, get a hit, walk, strike out, or fly/ground out.

Every software project tends to be different. Lots harder to quantize.

hkarthik2• 14 years ago

I've been speaking to a few of the more established startups in the Bay Area that built apps on Rails and have started migrating the performance hotspots to the JVM. There's definitely a pattern I've seen.

1) First version of the app is built in Ruby, Python, or PHP and the lightweight stack helps the business stay nimble as it finds its market position/niche. During this time, there are a LOT of inexperienced, younger engineers working on the code.

2) Once the right market position is found, the app takes off and scaling problems abound as the lightweight stack starts to fall down at massive scale.

3) Funding is secured and more experienced, older talent (the Guild) is brought in (at much higher salaries) to help fix the hot spots. This is usually done using a combination of using the JVM or unmanaged C/C++. The engineering demographic often switches here as you see a lot of 30-something veterans from Yahoo, Google, etc come in and bring their tools with them.

4) Scaling isn't an issue anymore, but the culture has changed a bit as the business has become more established. Many of the early folks have moved on or gone into leadership roles. A few have been absorbed into the Guild and will move on.

It's very interesting. I've worked mostly in the midwest and the South during my career, and this lifecycle of talent is not something I've really observed outside of the Valley.

stcredzero3• 14 years ago

I've worked mostly in the midwest and the South during my career, and this lifecycle of talent is not something I've really observed outside of the Valley.

I suspect that this "lifecycle of talent" is a part of SV's secret sauce. As manufacturing becomes even more amenable to rapid prototyping, this sort of culture could be applied to that domain. (Is it already?)

hkarthik2• 14 years ago

I've wondered the same thing about whether this is a differentiator that makes SV companies successful. Observing it is part of the reason I'm even interesting in speaking to these companies, despite the unrealistic outlook I have on actually living there.

I do wonder if the Makerbot/3D Printing thing will lead to the same thing. I certainly think it could, but it'll be hard to make shippable products using 3D Printing at home. The production cost for volume will be too high to leave it to the consumer based machines.

mdakin• 14 years ago

I've observed this phenomenon/pattern in both California and Massachusetts. Also by direct experience, I've found that there are certain niche subfields of software engineering that seem to be practiced long-term only by people of this "Guild" sort.

endymi0n• 14 years ago

This is a repost from 8 months ago... back then I had the following to say ;-)

http://www.growinup.org/2011/11/the-right-tool-for-the-job/

rbanffy• 14 years ago

> Their tools of choice are C, C++, and Java

I have serious issues with labeling people according to their tools of choice (disclaimer - I'm a known pythonista with a rather strong opinion on both C++ and Java). A good software engineer will use the right tool for a job much like a mechanical engineer will pick the right material for the job. The analogy above shows an engineer with a preference towards titanium, A53 steel and lead.

ChuckMcM• 14 years ago

I found it amusing, and do think that it can feel like there is a secret guild sometimes. However, there is a more interesting truth hidden in there.

People talk. Not really too surprising but Silicon Valley, like Hollywood, or Washington D.C., or any community being warped by a common theme, is at its heart people. And I don't know it if it part of our genetic heritage or what, but many people love to talk about other people, and so there is the undercurrent of a social fabric (made more visible by LinkedIn or Facebook but its the same fabric).

What Hollywood, Silicon Valley, and Washington DC share is a very low viscosity when it comes to job change. People move around, some move around a lot, and so the stories of people, and opinions about people, move with them.

Finally there is an external valuation that gets applied to folks, that is part who they are, what they are doing, what they have done, and who they have helped or hindered.

This isn't rocket science, but its good to be aware of it if you're working here, or thinking of working here because it can and does affect how you experience things.

So a new college graduate goes to work for a company. They come to know the people around them, and may develop opinions about their relative value to the company. After a few years they move on. The next company is looking for help and they ask you to 'reach out to your network' meaning "Let's see if we can poach the 'good' people from your previous job." This cycle repeats ad-infinitum.

Within that repeating cycle you will discover a truth which I learned from Bob Lyon at Sun which is this "There are no bad employees, only bad fits" which you may or may not believe, but it is true, that people who perform poorly in one environment can be superstars in another. And the flip side is "There are no good employees, only good fits." which is a scarier thing. At some point you will experience hiring some person who was a superstar at X and they join your company/group and don't get anything done.

Over time, and we're talking decades, you find people who are good to very good in most environments, and those who are poor to very poor in most environments. The latter tend to move on (either out of the valley or into different roles), the former become 'targets' for being recruited.

The interesting aspect though is that someone has done well in a wide variety of roles, that usually means there are lots of people who know them from interacting with them. Further they often know others who are good in a wide variety of roles. Sometimes it seems like there is a secret society somewhere, but there isn't.

When you encounter this phenomena for the first time, you might feel like they are a secret guild, folks who know the other 'good' people who can get things done. And yes, they can demand, and get, a higher than nominal salary (see today's front page story on 'pay'). But that comes from the probability they will do well, regardless of their role.

Three things to take away from this:

1) If you think your co-worker is a 'loser' consider they may just be in a bad role, if your managing them put them into a different role to see if they are better.

2) Track records can only be created over time, so don't worry that you're not 'a superstar' in 3, 5, even 10 years. Get to know people, try different things, test your own boundaries.

3) Recommendations and criticisms of someone by a former co-worker who has only seen the subject in one role, can be misleading. It only tells you about them in that one role. If several people have worked with a candidate in different roles and you are getting feedback that is both 'great' and 'skip this one' consider the roles at the time and weight based on your proposed role.

EternalFury• 14 years ago

This article is slightly inaccurate. Members of the Guild are totally technology-agnostic.

We do not prefer C, C++, and Java over Python, Ruby, JavaScript or any other cool language of the week.

We LOVE to build things and solve problems. We LOVE to start with nothing and end up with something USEFUL to much more than ourselves.

In order to achieve our goals, we will pick up any technology or tool available, based on their suitability to the task. Coldly.

But, yes, we smile a lot when we see the way the business world and entrepreneurs repeat the same mistakes over and over.

neworbit• 14 years ago

I dunno, I think a lot of us love LISP :)

it• 14 years ago

This article would have been more convincing if it had some examples of Guild members, even if it's not meant literally. So it's a story. OK, then go with that and make some people up.

lani• 14 years ago

while this is definitely cool,bbut i probably am not in one , so this is definitely not cool. sorry for the grammar.

iamleppert• 14 years ago

Can we finally close the book and depart from old and untrue stereotypes that have done such a disservice for the industry? Intelligence comes in all shapes and sizes, races, genders, types of people, etc.

The secret guild of Silicon Valley

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