As for your TL:DR; i thought it was a bit unfair to the author... they write really well and I think there is a huge shadow side in terms of tech capitals impact on the culture that, by definition, if you're in it, you're going to see as them as "out group" ... "obviously they aren't a good X... they failed"... ah, the fallacy of ad failuralum non VC-ium. :) ;) :)

What sort of cultural valuea are there where the notion of being "uninvestible" can get your ideas crushed without question? Is not a culture that values high technology, reason or the plethora of values that make something worthwhile and good

Sounds like a brill idea. We could cut those pesky developers out of the loop. I imagine that the AI would need some kind of detailed specification to guide it. To avoid ambiguity, the spec should have a very clear syntax. We'd need people to translate from human language to spec language, of course. And to remove unforeseen consequences, and to change the spec as business requirements evolve. And when unsupervised, these people would argue over indentation or write comments on HN ...

Hey, wait ...

:^)

It's an outsiders' take on what seems to have grown into a disconnected, insular culture. While under most circumstances one could dismiss such commentary as "he doesn't understand us and made little effort to get to know us," when that culture exists primarily to make stuff (products, software) for the masses it would do well to pay heed to its criticism, don't you think?

I don't think it's harsh. If anything it's falling for the author's narrative.

The author was clearly there solely to write a hatchet job on the SV startup culture. The stuff about getting rich is just there to make him sound a bit less parasitical.

I'm sure some of what he says is valid but the dystopia is just as fake as the idea that SV is paved with gold.

I'd go further and, given these kinds of articles usually follow a template, it's quite interesting what he didn't say. Usually the author will find people who are disillusioned/downtrodden to interview i.e. show the rotten underbelly.

It's noticeable that the only negative commentary came from a barman and a musician, and they were of the basic change is bad variety. As a consequence, he's stuck with painting everyone as a witless man-child.

So either he's an incompetent journalist or he didn't find a rotten underbelly. As I've never been to SV, I can't comment on which it is but I can be pretty confident that this article won't help me find out.

Bay area housing is atrocious, SF has a homeless problem, and the tech industry has been hopelessly corrupted by money. (Not that there weren't con men before.)

Hopefully that's not news to anybody here.

Tech, like any other profession, has its own sociolect or variation from daily conversational English. Not everybody can appreciate that, especially those that grew up monolingual.

Short of giving unsolicited advice to the writer about leaving the confines of whatever monocultural bubble they grew up in, I'm not sure what there is of us to heed in that part of the critique. Shall we all stop using words they know in ways they don't like?

Realistically, the author's target market is not HN, and we're just experiencing marketing for their book. Judging by the article, it's a story book for adults that want to feel secure that they made the right choice by not moving to experience California (both its positives and negatives), even for few months. If the author would like to question all of the lingo; the "metrics", our "spaces", this is not that book. (I would be interested in reading that book!) If they want to take their shot at taking down the sharing economy, this is not that book.

You're right, we should heed criticism, but the article is light on that and instead pushes a familiar offensive narrative.

Why do think so many of these outside stories seem the same? The short answer is tropes. These don't only concern the forms any story can take, but also actually shape how one conceives of things.

Besides, the Bay Area employs more than 1M people just in sw/hw connected roles (engineers, product managers, project managers, operations, and testing). The outsiders look at a subgroup that represents less than 5% and equate that the tech industry out here.

At least The Circle didn't pretend not to be fiction, this seems like it wants to be journalism. And that's, frankly, a problem.

But his criticism is valid, IMO. It's not like Silicon Valley is a concentration of brains trying to solve the world's problems, it's a concentration of brains doing silly shit, like the billionth app that will let you order pizza or some algorithm so your video stream loads faster, or as he quoted: "what is my mother no longer doing for me?". What's their (SVers') goal? Success, within monetary terms? If that's your religion, and you're in IT, of course SV is your mecca.

I wrote "solving the world's problems" above, I'm inspired by this TEDx criticizing the shallowness of TED Talks (video is embedded: https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2013/dec/30/we-nee...), why are we just making the next pizza delivery app instead of thinking how to fix problems like climate change or food shortage?

> They knew that well-paid programming jobs would also soon turn to smoke and ash, as the proliferation of learn-to-code courses around the world lowered the market value of their skills,

The complains about outsourcing are complains about exactly this. And complains about jobs going to cheaper young people. And the complains about young people not being as awesome or passionate or obsessed natural geniuses or whatever as we all supposedly were. And complains about people who went to school and have degree, but don't have experience yet. There seems to be a lot of insecurity going around.

And logically, learn-to-code courses that makes it easier to learn to people who would not even know where to start or that it is possible to learn programming easily are bound to lower the marker value of our skill.

"Now the tower’s largest tenant was a website that allows anonymous semi-literates to post critiques of local establishments."

"there were not enough applicants to fill all the openings for “Java Legends, Python Badasses, Hadoop Heroes”, and other gratingly childish classifications describing various programming specialities."

Very classy.

Although I must say, I have noticed that there is a great deal of Silicon Valley hate in many places in Europe.

Really? Haven't noticed that. There is a lot of mistrust of some companies because of privacy (Google, Facebook, Twitter) and market disruption (Amazon). But SF appears popular as a tourist destination and I haven't heard of anyone here in Europe hating SV as such. I think Wall Street still has a far worse reputation than SV.

Where it exists, its mostly schadenfreude/jealousy. SV culture is probably closer to european than a lot of the US.