How Hurricane Sandy Reminded Me Why I Love the Tech Industry

http://www.patrickambron.me/how-hurricane-sandy-reminded-me-why-i-love-the-tech-industry/

by patrickambron • 14 years ago

20 19 14 years ago

lallouz• 14 years ago

First off, great post. Although it is pretty awesome to see how the community comes together when people are in need, during the storm and aftermath I couldn't help but think about our industry vs others in rebounding efforts. While most startup founders / employees I know were eager, almost rabid to get back to work, a lot of my friends in other industries were very happy to have the few days off, no questions asked.

So my question (which I've been asking myself), do you think that it's an attitude thing? A certain NEED to get back to the grind that our industry has that others don't? Or do you think we are operationally that much better at coming together?

MortisMortavius• 14 years ago

Perhaps it could also be that the tech industry knows how important time is. Everything changes so ridiculously fast that being out of the game at all makes people start to feel nervous... other more well established industries don't have their technology change nearly as fast.

themckman• 14 years ago

Slightly more cynical view on this whole matter is that taking some time off due to your city being in shambles doesn't make for the greatest blog post.

patrickambron7• 14 years ago

This is such a good comment, and something I've wondered about too. I think there are three parts of the equation

1) StartUp people, especially founders, have a heightened appreciation of Time. Big organizations build in redundancy and shared responsibility. If something doesn't get done, it's not your fault and it's not the end of the world. The business goes on. In a startup, the buck stops with you, and if you don't get it done, it doesn't' happen. Time can not be wasted

2) Startup people generally love what they do. They aren't looking for a day off. Contrast that with most people. A day off is welcome.

3) The tech industry has an "us vs the world' mentality that separates it form othe rindustries. Even my friends who wanted to work--because they had deadlines, etc--were left with no recourse. Our industry wants everyone to succeed. It's empathetic. Most people understand the pain and joy of building something, so they do everything they can to help others succeed as well. That doesn't exist (in my experience) in other industries, and it creates a community that other industries don't have. I think that's part of what we saw last week.

MattGrommes• 14 years ago

There's also the great story about Squarespace, FogCreek and Peer1 employees doing a bucket brigade of fuel up to their generators to keep things up. That's awesome commitment to their customers and business.

patrickambron7• 14 years ago

I actually wasn't aware of this. Sounds cool Can you elaborate?

jchook• 14 years ago

Here is an article detailing the valor of the Squarespace team. Honestly I'm a little startled by how many sloshing buckets of fuel their infrastructure must consume per day. http://techcrunch.com/2012/11/01/squarespace-fog-creek-peer1...

JeremyBanks• 14 years ago

If you're up for a listen, they discuss this on the latest episode of the Stack Exchange podcast, with Anthony Casalena (CEO and founder of Squarespace) and Fog Creek/Stack Exchange employees.

http://blog.stackoverflow.com/2012/11/se-podcast-36-we-got-h...

It's quite a story.

dave_chenell• 14 years ago

Crazy stuff. That was a good recap. The tech scene is awesome.

kl4555• 14 years ago

So true! Lallouz's comment is also so point on. In most other industries people were acting like children on a snow day. Go Tech!

patrickambron7• 14 years ago

Yea that was really surprising to me. It's another reason I feel lucky to be in this industry. It became obvious people love what they do more than any other industry.

swohns• 14 years ago

Great post, and couldn't agree more. I think Bloomberg and Rachel Sterne also deserve credit for their amazing rallying and general scrappiness, which enabled alot of these companies to step up with supportive offers (AirBNB & Uber stand out).

patrickambron7• 14 years ago

Absolutely. It was pretty amazing to see how the whole city came together, especially leaders – from Obama to Bloomberg to Governor Christie to Sterne to many others.

entropy_2• 14 years ago

Whenever I read about power outages in the states and the kind of mayhem they cause I think about how different the situation here is -- Lebanon that is.

We haven't had enough power to run the entire country ever since the end of the civil war in '90 so there's a rationing scheme whereby you get power during certain times of the day depending on where you live. People have just gotten used to having generators that kick in automatically about a minute after the power goes out and using UPSs to bridge the gap.

I just bought an apartment in a Beirut suburb and one of the main advantages the owner was touting was that the building has its own generator(so you don't have to deal with a distributor as those tend to have insane prices because they know that people need the electricity anyway).

Our startup just moved in to a proper office a couple of days ago. One of the problems we are now dealing with is that the A/C in that office is too power-hungry to run on a generator and we're having split units installed so we don't have to work in a sauna-like environment for the ~6hrs/day when there's no power.

I'm actually not complaining, you get used to this stuff and it's not that much of an inconvenience once you know how to deal with it. I know this was off topic, but this is what I'm reminded off every time a story like this comes up.

patrickambron7• 14 years ago

That's a really interesting point. I think a big part of anything like this is how prepared you are. For example, Florida routinely gets hit with much stronger storms, but they are much better prepared. New York doesn't deal with many Hurricanes, so our infrastructure--that millions have learned to depend on--failed. To your point, it's amazing how places and people can adapt to different conditions. I'd love to hear more about running a startup in Lebanon

entropy_2• 14 years ago

Well, it's not easy to say the least. There are essentially two big problems we have.

One, anything telecom related tends to be much more expensive here than almost anywhere else in the world. For example the best home connection I can get right now is 1Mb/s down 128Kb/s up with a 12GB/mo data cap for ~35$/mo. And that's DSL, for 3G(whose coverage is spotty at best) it's a 100MB/mo cap for 10$/mo(above and beyond the 20$/mo just to have a cell phone line). My cell phone bill regularly ends up in the 80-100$ range and I don't talk that much on the phone, people who do end up closer to 150$.

Two, and this flows from one and the fact that salaries here are about 1/3rd of US ones with comparable cost of living; any talented people that have options will just say "fuck this"(possibly turn over a table as they get up) and just leave. I regularly half-joke with foreigners I meet that our main export is engineers. Through college I met about 5 people who I'd consider co-founding something with. Of those 5, one is now in new york, another is at Intel, a 3rd is in france doing graduate studies and the other two left but I've lost touch with them. This even extends no non-computer fields and basically anything that requires high skill-level(so any engineering field, business consulting, finance, etc...).

The startup I'm working at now is actually based in the states. The founder is Lebanese-American and a mutual friend introduced us. We're trying to start something here(we're currently only 2 guys). My hope is that people eventually realize that programming can be done from anywhere and they don't have to go to SV and we might have a viable startup culture at some point. We're still very far from that point though.

PeterisP• 14 years ago

An important factor may be that in other industries generally all companies provide competing services, but in the tech(startup) industry most companies don't compete, and even provide complementary goods/services.

If other local tech startups succeed, it generally helps your tech startup succeed; but if other local ad agencies or pizza shops succeed, then it hurts your ad agency/pizza shop.

How Hurricane Sandy Reminded Me Why I Love the Tech Industry

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