Silicon Valley Is Not a Fad

Re:Silicon Valley Is Not a Fad by Apocryphon on Tuesday April 30, 2019 @03:26AM (#19785810)

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.

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Re:Silicon Valley Is Not a Fad by ido on Tuesday April 30, 2019 @03:58AM (#19785944)

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.

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Re:Silicon Valley Is Not a Fad by dfrage on Tuesday April 30, 2019 @09:58AM (#19787944)

> & 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.

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Re:Silicon Valley Is Not a Fad by asdff on Tuesday April 30, 2019 @03:30PM (#19791102)

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.

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Re:Silicon Valley Is Not a Fad by kitsunesoba on Tuesday April 30, 2019 @01:46PM (#19790190)

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.

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Re:Silicon Valley Is Not a Fad by ido on Tuesday April 30, 2019 @01:54PM (#19790264)

These other major tech-centers have less well-paying competition than SV as well. As someone who has done hiring in several companies in Berlin & Vienna the difficulty mostly lies in the fact companies don't want to pay much.

If you are willing to pay 10-15% above market rates (which is still 1/2 of SFBA market rates) there is no shortage of senior engineers in Berlin.

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Re:Silicon Valley Is Not a Fad by nradov on Tuesday April 30, 2019 @09:12AM (#19787566)

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

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Re:Silicon Valley Is Not a Fad by rdiddly on Tuesday April 30, 2019 @03:34AM (#19785852)

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

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Re:Silicon Valley Is Not a Fad by Apocryphon on Tuesday April 30, 2019 @03:37AM (#19785862)

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.

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Re:Silicon Valley Is Not a Fad by rdiddly on Tuesday April 30, 2019 @08:20PM (#19793345)

Not so much anachronistic as trans-chronistic, if there's such a thing. All he's doing is focusing less on what has changed, and more on what has stayed the same over time. I'm sure having grown up there, you can probably spot some of the same things. But I would also wager that it's the changes that tend to jump to the front of your mind, because they're the more noticeable and obvious part - they're intrusive, annoying, costly, and even traumatic for some.

Still I appreciated two ideas buried in this: One, that he is (maybe slyly) pointing out that this bubble is a lot like the last bubble. And two, that for every Jobs who shows up hell-bent on a meteoric rise (and who either succeeds or crashes spectacularly) there are always plenty of Wozniaks quietly and steadily moving the actual work along.

I would tend to agree that higher ed seems to be in a dangerous upheaval or crisis. For SV I don't see it... not yet anyway. But I'm watching from afar so whadda I know?

Either way, I wouldn't worry too much about the effects though... either of this piece or all the ones rightly pointing out the downsides. Seems like (maybe sadly) they tend to have no effect either way.

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