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How “Silicon Valley” Nails Silicon Valley

504 points by sajid 10y ago

qnk 10y ago
SPOILERS ALERT The article contains several spoilers. You may want to hold off if you follow the show.
- minimaxir 10y ago
  If you follow the show, then nothing should be a spoiler. :p
  - scrollaway 10y ago
    Or I guess if you're familiar with the SV startup scene, not much should be a surprise :)
swampthinker 10y ago
There was an article a while back on The Verge noting the irony in the show being "comedy". It's supposed to be a caracature of startup culture, stories, and the insane numbers that are casually thrown around. But as most people on HN know, Pied Piper would have had a similar path if it was a startup in real life. What I'm getting at is that even in it's attempt to be more insane than what startup life is like, it's strangely... more accurate. And I can't really tell if that's a good or bad thing.
- seizethecheese 10y ago
  This is also true for another current HBO comedy Veep. While it may not be as close to reality as Silicon Valley, many political insiders note that it is much closer than dramatic shows like House of Cards. Maybe similarity to reality is a hallmark of excellent comedy. This is certainly true of one of my favorite comedy shows Louie, which is almost hyperrealistic.
  - khc 10y ago
    "Jokes? There are no jokes. The truth is the funniest joke of all." - Muhammad Ali
  - kirrent 10y ago
    Good comedy can be a mirror. It reflects reality, makes you laugh, and then makes you think. I think all of those shows you mentioned would lose something if they weren't uncomfortably close to what they're making fun of.
    - pilsetnieks 10y ago
      Truth is stranger than fiction, but it is because Fiction is obliged to stick to possibilities; Truth isn't. -- Mark Twain
      - surreal 10y ago
        See also "You couldn't make it up."[0] [0] http://www.oxforddictionaries.com/definition/english/you-couldn't-make-it-up http://www.oxforddictionaries.com/definition/english/you-cou...
  - sliverstorm 10y ago
    Surely you've heard, "it's funny because it's true"
  - tjakab 10y ago
    "Many police officers maintain that the most realistic police show in the history of television was the sitcom 'Barney Miller,' far more so than that father of reality TV, 'Cops.' The action was mostly off screen, the squad room the only set, and the guys were a motley bunch of character actors who were in no danger of being picked for the N.Y.P.D. pin-up calendar. But they worked hard, made jokes, got hurt and answered to their straight-man commander." http://www.nytimes.com/2005/03/01/opinion/watching-the-detectives.html http://www.nytimes.com/2005/03/01/opinion/watching-the-detec...
    - 10y ago
- fernandotakai 10y ago
  i think it's one of the reason it's so hard for me to watch it -- the comedy/cringe parts hit too close to home.
- bertiewhykovich 10y ago
  By far the most unrealistic thing about "Silicon Valley" is the complete lack of technical obstacles and setbacks faced by any team in the show. But that's eminently forgivable -- no one (certainly not I) wants to watch three weeks of harried debugging. Everything else is so on-point that it can be uncomfortable to watch as a denizen of Silicon Valley.
  - nathanvanfleet 10y ago
    Yeah that would be an artificial cliff hanger for sure. It's about the human interaction and politics.
  - jonwachob91 10y ago
    Lets not forget we got the Mean Jerk Time because of a technical obstacle. Obviously not a 3 week debugging issue, but still at least some notion of a technical obstacle...
  - andyjdavis 10y ago
    >no one (certainly not I) wants to watch three weeks of harried debugging Although they could potentially throw in a sequence designed to show that aspect. 2-3 minutes of silence with a stationary camera showing a motionless programmer at their computer, frowning slightly. Eventually they break the silence by swearing. Mind you, you could probably only do that once in the entire run of the show. As you alluded to, the reality of working through difficult problems would not make for good TV.
    - sbierwagen 10y ago
      Mind you, you could probably only do that once in the entire run of the show. HBO is the same network that aired this skit: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=TyrM7GxyzGg https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=TyrM7GxyzGg
    - kbenson 10y ago
      > 2-3 minutes of silence with a stationary camera showing a motionless programmer at their computer, frowning slightly. Eventually they break the silence by swearing. Then you see them slowly click. Press backspace once. press the 3 key. Click again, and their eyes widen as then they exclaim "Finally!"
- the_watcher 10y ago
  Maybe it's just that I've only ever worked for YC companies since my first job (which was owned entirely by one person), but it seems to me that they've given them the world's dumbest board - trying to force them to do things, installing a veteran CEO, and hiring a shitload of salespeople without building the product. Those are all things that I know happen in startups, but a company founded entirely by engineers doesn't seem like it would ever entirely give up on the product. That said, 90% of what I see on Silicon Valley is remarkably accurate.
  - kbenson 10y ago
    > it seems to me that they've given them the world's dumbest board ... hiring a shitload of salespeople without building the product. That wasn't the board, that was the CEO. > a company founded entirely by engineers doesn't seem like it would ever entirely give up on the product. When did they? They fought, they whined, they tried to form a conspiracy, and finally they bargained and compromised. I don't recall them ever giving up.
- bitwize 10y ago
  What I've seen and heard of SV reminds me of when I posted an article by "Fake Lennart Poettering" (me), about getting around lkml hostility to systemd kernel suggestions by building systemd as a unikernel that chain-loads Linux and intercepts some of its system calls and replaces them with more systemd-friendly versions. Someone replied: "This is like the movie Idiocracy: so close to reality that it isn't funny." A dubious vindication of Mike Judge's satirical skills: reality catches up so quickly with his satire that it fails at comedy.
- jghn 10y ago
  That's Mike Judge satire. It's always absurd but yet quite accurate
  - baddox 10y ago
    Isn't this just normal satire? I thought satire generally refers to works which exaggerate with the intention of highlighting the true absurdities of some person or group of people.
    - jghn 10y ago
      Agreed, but for me his satire is always somehow even more perfect.
- kgtm 10y ago
  You should also check out Betas (http://www.imdb.com/title/tt3012184/ http://www.imdb.com/title/tt3012184/), a light-hearted SF startup culture comedy show by Amazon. Sadly, it never got a second season.
  - xsmasher 10y ago
    In SV, one of the characters asks a call girl if she takes bitcoin. She says "I hate this fucking town." It's funny. In an episode of Betas, on character slaps a bitcoin down on a table to place a bet. It showed how well they they did their research.
- auganov 10y ago
  Absolutely. I don't like movies or TV 99% of the time. Especially comedy shows with vulgarity and goofy humor, not my thing at all. But the accuracy and relatability of Silicon Valley make it very enjoyable and funny for me. Every episode has a couple things that hit home.
  - icebraining 10y ago
    Have you looked into British shows? They have a lot of realistic comedy, like The Royle Family, the original The Office, The Thick of It and, in a way, Yes Minister.
    - u02sgb 10y ago
      Related - Veep is based on The Thick of It (Armando Iannucci writing and producing both)
- amelius 10y ago
  At least Pied Piper has some real technology to bring to the table (a compression algorithm). Most real SV startups are, it seems, unfortunately just building a business around a CRUD application (see AirBnB, Uber, to name a few, but there are many many more).
  - function_seven 10y ago
    How is AirBnB or Uber just CRUD applications? Seems to me there's a lot more than that involved in launching a nationwide rental or taxi service with a two-sided market. You have to solve regulatory issues (or ignore them strategically), routing and pricing algorithms, user trust issues, etc. These two businesses in particular highlight that it's a lot harder than you think, otherwise the market would be saturated with clones.
    - bobsil1 10y ago
      That's after it's huge. Uber 0.1 was probably just WhatsApp to a couple of drivers.
      - obmelvin 10y ago
        And early Google was 'just' a search engine, something that already existed in some forms, that looked totally unlike the Google of today. You are correct, but what are you trying to say? All companies are going to be 'lame' early on by definition.
        bobsil1 10y ago
        No, Google 0.1 did something technically nontrivial. These other co's only got technically interesting after scale, which is generically true. Since you don't know whether the startup will succeed, you'd better enjoy the work, eg scraper (FB 0.1) and forum software (0.5). There are any # of co's not lame early on: Google, Adobe, Zee Aero, Joby, Viv/Siri, Cruise, Magic Leap, DeepMind, Vicarious…
- qq66 10y ago
  I think it feels like a "more accurate satire" because it mixes things that are overexaggerated and underexaggerated, and only by a small amount in either direction. So some of the strange realities (an executive Rollerblading into a meeting) are mixed with dialogue and behavior that is only slightly more absurd than reality.
- hbosch 10y ago
  I've often heard the same about Scrubs. In a sea of medical dramas in TV, the light and warm-hearted show Scrubs is considered to be the most true-to-life... Apparently.
jpatokal 10y ago
Great article, with some glorious lines: “It’s capitalism shrouded in the fake hippie rhetoric of ‘We’re making the world a better place,’ because it’s uncool to just say ‘Hey, we’re crushing it and making money.’” “Some of us actually, as naïve as it sounds, came here to make the world a better place. And we did not succeed. We made some things better, we made some things worse, and in the meantime the libertarians took over, and they do not give a damn about right or wrong. They are here to make money.” “In the real Silicon Valley, as on the show, there is a cohort of people who have a real sense of purpose and actually think they’re going to change the world, and then there’s a cohort of people who say farcical things about their apps that they clearly don’t believe themselves.”
- tinalumfoil 10y ago
  In addition to the TV Show a lot of the companies in SV have their own website, which absolutely nails the essence of what they're mocking (Warning: spoilers if you aren't caught up): http://www.piedpiper.com/ http://www.piedpiper.com/ (complete with a blog) http://www.hooli.com/ http://www.hooli.com/ http://www.bachmanity.com/ http://www.bachmanity.com/ http://www.coderag.com/ http://www.coderag.com/ http://raviga.com/ http://raviga.com/ http://www.endframesystems.com/ http://www.endframesystems.com/ http://drinkhomicide.com/ http://drinkhomicide.com/ https://github.com/Stitchpunk https://github.com/Stitchpunk
  - YZF 10y ago
    "Smaller files take up less space on your computer. Less space = more stuff. More stuff = better life!" For some reason I just couldn't suppress my laughter reading this...
  - Steko 10y ago
    Raviga's website is gold, here's hoping Fixxie Tech makes an appearance on the show.
  - namuol 10y ago
    Reviga's website has a bonus Bioshock reference: https://i.imgur.com/Eks4tuu.png https://i.imgur.com/Eks4tuu.png
ModernMech 10y ago
The thing about SV that always gets me is the forced "code" vs "hardware" rivalry between Gilfoyle and Dinesh. "My code can beat your terrible hardware!" "My hardware is terrible because of your terrible code!" That just doesn't happen in my experience. Has anyone else seen this?
- etjossem 10y ago
  From an outsider's perspective, bad collaboration between engineering and ops (or even among engineers, frontend v. backend) might sound like that. They're joking about the "looks good in staging" trope [1] [1] https://cdn.meme.am/instances/500x/22605665.jpg https://cdn.meme.am/instances/500x/22605665.jpg
- etrautmann 10y ago
  I'm not sure I agree - I feel like Gilfoyle writes plenty of code and also builds hardware. They have a natural rivalry, but I haven't seen it break down exclusively at the hardware/software boundary.
  - kirrent 10y ago
    The final couple of episodes of the second season they make it an explicit point of friction between the two. It sounds pretty stupid and I'm glad they stopped it.
    - Apocryphon 10y ago
      I think it led to a good payoff of a server being on fire.
      - kirrent 10y ago
        I mean, that payoff would have been there if the distinction hadn't been made explicit.
- minimaxir 10y ago
  It's not a code vs. hardware dynamic, it's a Gilfoyle vs. Dinesh dynamic. Passive-aggressive bromances are a hallmark of comedy nowadays.
minimaxir 10y ago
If you want proof that the SV producers go the extra mile, a couple episodes ago there was a split-second appearance of a GitHub repository belonging to one of the characters. Turns out it's completely real (https://github.com/Stitchpunk/atari-ai https://github.com/Stitchpunk/atari-ai ) and the owner has accepted pull requests!
- Alupis 10y ago
  Looks like they stuffed the fake account with a bunch of minor commits[1] to give the appearance of a daily coder. [1] https://github.com/Stitchpunk/activity/commit/6b016dec5f52b9e3c6121e21d34d80fca2a3cea8 https://github.com/Stitchpunk/activity/commit/6b016dec5f52b9...
  - balls187 10y ago
    The forks are from https://github.com/emcmanus https://github.com/emcmanus, which seems like a legit githubber. edit: He works for the show, and is legit https://www.linkedin.com/in/emcmanus https://www.linkedin.com/in/emcmanus
    - jsemrau 10y ago
      We live in fantastic times, indeed. Last century there were just waves in an endless stream of names. Now we can check out their Linkedin profiles.
  - puranjay 10y ago
    > Replace all spaces with poop emojis This shit is hilarious!
- jedberg 10y ago
  In fact everything in her account is forked from another GitHub account[0] -- he's one of the lead tech consultants on the show. [0] https://github.com/emcmanus https://github.com/emcmanus
- tajen 10y ago
glibgil 10y ago
Please stop this practice of spoiler alerts. Yes, articles about movies and tv shows talk about what happens. They always have and they always will. Spoilers have been studied and proven to not significantly diminish enjoyment and can even enhance it. Everyone has had the experience of watching something and being blown away by a plot twist. People don't need to have that experience every time they watch something.
- qrian 10y ago
  Spoilers don't diminish enjoyment and possibly enhance it? Any sources to back it up?
  - kwikiel 10y ago
    Even greeks were watching their plays knowing what will happen - that's whole idea of watching somebody struggle against future that will happen no matter somebody will do.
  - glibgil 10y ago
    http://www.wired.com/2011/08/spoilers-dont-spoil-anything/ http://www.wired.com/2011/08/spoilers-dont-spoil-anything/ Google "spoiler study enjoyment" on your own next time to save yourself the trouble of posting
- barrkel 10y ago
  Spoilers deeply upset me and put me in a bad mood for hours, if I care about the topic. I don't watch movie trailers, for example, and even show up 25 minutes late to movies to avoid them. If I do see a trailer, it usually means I won't bother with the movie. This was a useful warning for me, not to read the article. Not because it would impact my enjoyment; it would make me angry. Though a fair portion of my enjoyment comes from trying to predict what's going to happen.
  - glibgil 10y ago
    If you were a kid in the 80s you for sure knew that Darth Vader was Luke Skywalker's father before you had a chance to see Empire Strikes Back. You couldn't get away from it. A good film maker knows this. That's why reveal has a face-off duel and Luke losing a hand and taking a plunge of death. It is enjoyable to watch the character learn and react to the information
timewarrior 10y ago
I completely agree. Silicon Valley talked about the reality. I founded a startup and headed engineering for another. I have seen more than half the things there as follows: Getting money in tranches. Investors making you spend invested money for personal gain. Having a business CEO who has no product insights. Board control issues. Employees trying to overthrow founders and getting fired because of that. Being forced to hire friends and family of investors. Lawyers represent the company and not you. Founding company with someone whom you do not trust. Investors getting involved in day to day running. Luckily each of the startups had an happy ending. But it took a lot of hard work and a few miracles.
- WWKong 10y ago
  This guy FUCKS!!
- timewarrior 10y ago
  One more thing to add. Having a CEO who takes a salary of 180k/year after seed round (which was almost half of the seed round) and apart from this also charges part of his house rent to the company. Those were fun times.
josu 10y ago
I personally didn't like the humor of the show and stopped watching it after 3 or 4 episodes. On a related note, a few days ago [1] Marc Andreessen recommended another show based on startup culture: Halt and Catch Fire [2] I haven't seen it, but I will probably give it a shot. [1] http://fourhourworkweek.com/2016/05/29/marc-andreessen/ http://fourhourworkweek.com/2016/05/29/marc-andreessen/ [2] http://www.imdb.com/title/tt2543312/?ref_=wl_li_tt http://www.imdb.com/title/tt2543312/?ref_=wl_li_tt
- minimaxir 10y ago
  Halt and Catch Fire is definitely not about startup culture: it's a drama about the birth of the tech industry.
  - walrus01 10y ago
    except that it's not set in silicon valley at all, it's set in the early 1980s Texas PC/semiconductor industry
    - minimaxir 10y ago
      Ah right. Fixed.
    - Apocryphon 10y ago
      Silicon Valley isn't the birthplace of all high-tech.
    - rhino369 10y ago
      I think S3 is about them moving to SV.
  - jsprogrammer 10y ago
    Halt and Catch fire is hardly about the birth of the tech industry. It's a character drama centered around a family electronics company being hijacked to produce IBM clones.
f_allwein 10y ago
for a similar satire of high tech culture 20 years ago, check out Douglas Copeland's "Microserfs": https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Microserfs https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Microserfs
- lurkinggrue 10y ago
  Wait, That book was satire??
  - Uhhrrr 10y ago
    I didn't take it as such when I read it. But I can see how someone might think so.
deleted 10y ago
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jewbacca 10y ago
> In 2015, Weissman convened the Stanford Compression Forum, which resulted in a forty-page white paper outlining what middle-out compression might mean. One of his graduate students, Vinith Misra, worked out the math more explicitly in another paper. The paper they link to from there (https://www.scribd.com/doc/228831637/Optimal-Tip-to-Tip-Efficiency https://www.scribd.com/doc/228831637/Optimal-Tip-to-Tip-Effi...) is actually "Optimal Tip-to-Tip Efficiency: a model for male audience stimulation". Not that I'm complaining, that is absolutely incredible, but does the compression paper actually exist?
- vehementi 10y ago
  > whereas naive unsorted schemes have increasingly ﬂaccid perfor-mance. Oh my god
  - j2kun 10y ago
    The chart at the end of the paper is very suggestive.
fataliss 10y ago
I think it's good that people in the actual tech industry and startup eco system can laugh about themselves. It's healthy. The day they/we stop laughing is the day we have a problem.
zw123456 10y ago
It seems to me that "Silicon Valley" is somewhat of a Roman a clef, as such I think it would be great if the HN readers could provide the "key". Anyone out there willing to give it a shot ?
- bobsil1 10y ago
  Hooli = Google Gavin Belson = Marc Benioff Denpak Singh = Deepak Chopra Peter Gregory = Peter Thiel Erlich Bachman = Sean Parker Russ Hanneman = Mark Cuban Laurie Bream = Marissa Mayer Philz Coffee onsite = Facebook Hooli tunnel = Zynga tunnel
  - hbosch 10y ago
    I always thought Russ Hanneman was based on Dan Bilzerian[0] even thought Bilzerian isn't actually an angel or VC. 0. https://www.instagram.com/danbilzerian/ https://www.instagram.com/danbilzerian/ (NSFW)
  - kmiroslav 10y ago
    And who's Monica? OP plz
    - bobsil1 10y ago
      Monica is the associate you messed up the pitch with because she was alarmingly cute.
      - zw123456 10y ago
        Something like that may have happened to me, or I had some responsibility for.
      - drumdance 10y ago
        I remember pitching to her in 1997. Bessemer Venture Partners.
    - whamlastxmas 10y ago
rconti 10y ago
I have a really, really hard time understanding how anyone can watch the show and be offended. OTOH, maybe it's just because I'm neither rich nor important.
- kmiroslav 10y ago
  Hint: nobody ever gets offended, they just get concerned that other people might be offended.
keypusher 10y ago
As someone that works in enterprise storage, the last season has hit very close to home.
- golergka 10y ago
  Have you seen them all?
- rconti 10y ago
  As someone who works for a SaaS company that's trying to provide SaaS on-prem... the mole people are real.
smilbandit 10y ago
For me the most realistic scene, one that only people in the field would understand, is when they made the "box". The lead up from hating the assignment to not being able to do shit work really hit home. I've probably had had a few projects that i hated but spent more time then needed. To either make it work faster or modulerized it even though it was probably never going to be updated, just to keep my interest or to learn something.
gnahckire 10y ago
“A friend of mine who works in tech called me and said, ‘Why aren’t there any women? That’s bullshit!’ I said to her, ‘It is bullshit! Unfortunately, we shot that audience footage at the actual TechCrunch Disrupt.’” Unfortunately, unsurprising.
- carryalls 10y ago
  If that's the case, why aren't there way more Asians in the show?
  - dimal 10y ago
    Dinesh. Jin Yiang.
    - danyim 10y ago
      Both of which have accents, one heavier than the other. Is that fair?
      - zjaffee 10y ago
        among those with Asian origins that I have worked with, I'd say at least half are foreign born, so I don't think its entirely unfair.
      - walrus01 10y ago
        There is no proper English accent, to a New Zealander, people born in California sound weird.
      - dimal 10y ago
        Jin Yiang isn't Chinese-American. He's Chinese. Chinese people who were born in China have accents when speaking English. It would be ridiculous if he was Chinese and didn't have an accent. I haven't noticed Dinesh as having any accent, but if he does have one, it's the actor's actual accent. He's from Pakistan, so maybe he has a trace. Which is completely realistic and completely fair.
rexreed 10y ago
The Silicon Valley show makes me anxious. I laugh but I also feel the pain from experience. And I'm not sure if that's good. I want and need to catch up but I almost dread it. I wonder if it's the same for cop drama shows and cops who watch them.
untilHellbanned 10y ago
Best part: “Some Valley big shots have no idea how to react to the show,” Miller told me. “They can’t decide whether to be offended or flattered. And they’re mystified by the fact that actors have a kind of celebrity that they will never have—there’s no rhyme or reason to it, but that’s the way it is, and it kills them.” Miller met Musk at the after-party in Redwood City. “I think he was thrown by the fact that I wasn’t being sycophantic—which I couldn’t be, because I didn’t realize who he was at the time. He said, ‘I have some advice for your show,’ and I went, ‘No thanks, we don’t need any advice,’ which threw him even more. And then, while we’re talking, some woman comes up and says ‘Can I have a picture?’ and he starts to pose—it was kinda sad, honestly—and instead she hands the camera to him and starts to pose with me. It was, like, Sorry, dude, I know you’re a big deal—and, in his case, he actually is a big deal—but I’m the guy from ‘Yogi Bear 3-D,’ and apparently that’s who she wants a picture with.”
zippergz 10y ago
Silicon Valley is so realistic that I stopped watching a few episodes into the first season. I was going through a rough and very stressful time at work, and the show was reminding me too much of that rather than being an escape (as I usually want TV to be). Thankfully I'm in a better place professionally now, and I recently came back to the show. Now I enjoy it a lot, even though it can hit very close to home.
- jsemrau 10y ago
  For some reason that is the main reason why I watch the show somewhat religiously (and I don't even live in the US). When suffering through push-backs, broken software, and no's frequently, sharing the pain with the Pied Piper team is my quiet way of balancing my mind.
- the_cat_kittles 10y ago
  i had exactly the same experience
- Cshelton 10y ago
  Same reaction, although I have kept up watching it. It's too damn real and too close to what I deal with haha. My partner will refuse to watch it after first seasonal, same reason. It's brutal when you have lived through that before haha.
- curiousgal 10y ago
  >I'm in a better place professionally now Buy a gold chain!
  - chiph 10y ago
    Or if he's doing really well, some Tres Comas Tequila.
    - curiousgal 10y ago
      hummm "Tres Comas", I wonder what that stands for..
deleted 10y ago
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blue11 10y ago
I have really enjoyed watching this show but the last few episodes it seems like the writing has went downhill. There were a number of cringe worthy scenes like "tabs vs spaces".
- mentos 10y ago
  I feel like a lot of the humor in the show came from Erlich Bachman who is no longer in the drivers seat this season.
- kmiroslav 10y ago
  > has went downhill. Speaking of writing going downhill...
- excitom 10y ago
  Seriously? I laughed out loud at the "tabs vs spaces" scene since I have seen it played out exactly like that at several jobs.
- timmyelliot 10y ago
  At my work, that tabs vs spaces ended up being the most discussed scene. I thought it was genius.
- louthy 10y ago
  I wonder if they intentionally got the details of the tabs/spaces argument wrong (by implying that you type the spaces manually, by saying 1 tab can save 8 spaces -- I doubt many coders uses 8 space tabs, if any, ...) as a wind-up for the actual coders watching. It seems weird to have the inside knowledge of such a heated but obscure topic, and then get the detail wrong. I hope it was intentional because it points to them playing with their audience in quite a Machiavellian way.
- robotnoises 10y ago
  Disagree. I laughed out-loud at that scene, and enjoyed talking with my wife about it later. Also, spaces is the correct answer.
- jtmcmc 10y ago
peter303 10y ago
NPR Fresh Air broadcast a similar article today: http://www.npr.org/2016/06/09/481377115/in-hbos-silicon-valley-the-comedy-is-inspired-by-real-life-tech-culture http://www.npr.org/2016/06/09/481377115/in-hbos-silicon-vall...
dang 10y ago
I don't know the show very well, but this is a much better article than I expected. The vignette about online forums is so perfect I can't resist quoting it in full. “Silicon Valley,” a show about computer nerds, has a fan base that is particularly attuned to minutiae, and particularly apt to argue about them on the Internet. If a Post-it, URL, or line of code is legible on the show, it will be screengrabbed and scrutinized. Last year, a few hours after an episode aired, a Reddit user with the handle HeIsMyPossum started a thread called “Why did the writers just obliterate all the good karma they had built up with their core audience?” He made an impassioned argument that a plot point—the accidental deletion of data from Pied Piper’s servers—was implausible. “So the files were being converted live while coming through an FTP? And that affects disk deletion speed?… Come the fuck on guys.” Rob Fuller, a software engineer and a consultant on the show, logged on to Reddit to defend his work, mostly by displaying his own nerd plumage. “Stuff like this happens,” he wrote. “I think even Amazon had an outage because one of the admins fat fingered a DNS or ACL change at one point.” Another user responded to Fuller: “Thanks for engaging us here, we really appreciate it.” The thread amassed nearly three hundred comments. “Sorry for being a dick,” HeIsMyPossum wrote. Edit: well, it's weirdly anticlimactic sitting here. But it was hilarious in the New Yorker.
- kordless 10y ago
  I think the premise of their technology is humorously on target. I mean, there's no limit to how much you can compress things, right? :P It's sort of a metaphysical overarching joke rolled into the show. Anything on the show talking about their compression technology becomes necessarily unbelievable as a result. Causality caused the file to be deleted on both ends!
  - eli_gottlieb 10y ago
    > I think the premise of their technology is humorously on target. I mean, there's no limit to how much you can compress things, right? :P There are of course limits to how much you can compress things, but only for a finite number of possible files can you ever prove that you've hit the limit. For almost all possible files/strings, you can't ever prove you've got an optimal compression algorithm, so if someone's new algorithm appears to work better, well, you've got the burden of proof to show you've already hit the Kolmogorov complexity of the file and they're cheating.
p4wnc6 10y ago
I love the Sweet Valley High series. Glad to see it's enjoying a renaissance of sorts.
mmmBacon 10y ago
The attention to detail on the show is amazing. For example, during their move to the new office I noticed that they had Corovan moving boxes. If you don't know Apple uses Corovan exclusively and if you've ever moved offices chances are high that they moved you. Not sure why but it was amazing to me that they bothered with a detail like that.
- NEDM64 10y ago
  Pretty sure it was product placement.
ben_jones 10y ago
In last Sunday's show they were ramping up to launch a beta of their product and had a closed alpha session where the team could give out access codes to close friends. The three team members, all engineers, got universally positive feedback for how great their user interface was. Well except from Monica, who couldn't quite articulate why it was just off to the casual user [1]. [1]:http://www.piedpiper.com/app/themes/pied-piper/dist/images/interface_large.jpg http://www.piedpiper.com/app/themes/pied-piper/dist/images/i... Essentially everyone in the engineering team's social circle either were engineers themselves who wouldn't recognize good design if it hit them in the mouth, or intentionally did not give criticism of the product in order to suck up to the promising new startup.
- minimaxir 10y ago
  This is likely the plot progression for the next episode. (which is why the UI was hidden to the viewer)
  - golergka 10y ago
    They shown the screen a couple of times, may be not long enough to expose bad UI, but still.
    - minimaxir 10y ago
      No, the editor UI which is teased at the Pied Piper website.
- walrus01 10y ago
  And now the Weissman score is a real thing? https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Weissman_score https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Weissman_score
  - dietrichepp 10y ago
    No, it's universally derided as a bogus metric which doesn't even make logical sense.
jrnichols 10y ago
One of my favorite parts of the show is the opening credits. Being an old Netscape employee, I still get a little sad when I see the Netscape logo fall off that building, only to be replaced by Chrome. tears
deleted 10y ago
[deleted]
joshu 10y ago
I am a consultant on the show. I am super impressed with them. I find it less "funny" and more "accurate" on a regular basis.
- atom-morgan 10y ago
  How did that come about?
  - joshu 10y ago
    I spend too much time cultivating my network...
trhway 10y ago
>“It’s capitalism shrouded in the fake hippie rhetoric of ‘We’re making the world a better place,’ because it’s uncool to just say ‘Hey, we’re crushing it and making money.’” the world does seems to be a better place when you're making a lot of money.
drumdance 10y ago
Just once I'd like to see Dinesh win against Gilfoyle.
- jagermo 10y ago
  Yeah, I guess Dinesh would like that, too.
pyb 10y ago
Does anyone else find that the show is running out of steam ? I think the quality of the writing has gone down in this new series.
- mercer 10y ago
  At times I had that feeling, but then something happens that has in me in stitches in a way that few other shows pull off. My main issue is Bachmann. He's been a bit too much for a while, but judging by the last episode I think the writers did this on purpose.
jagermo 10y ago
My favorite from the article: Teller ended the meeting by standing up in a huff, but his attempt at a dramatic exit was marred by the fact that he was wearing Rollerblades.
- bewatson 10y ago
  On top of that, I loved the irony that it was basically too ridiculous to use on the show.
dccoolgai 10y ago
In a lot of ways, "epochs" of software development track to Mike Judge productions... a lot of things changed after Office Space lampooned the industry the first time... I wonder if Silicon Valley will have the same effect.
nasalgoat 10y ago
One question I'd like answered is how Richard lost controlling interest of his company. The ownership percentages are never really talked about other than Erlich's 10% and the two coders getting 7% each. One minute Richard is majority shareholder while Reviga has 20%, then Reviga has majority? It's the only thing that gives me pause.
- srdev 10y ago
  He sold shares to Russ Hanneman and Reviga bought those shares off of Hanneman.
godgod 10y ago
Tab vs spaces...slayed me.

504 points by sajid 10y ago

qnk 10y ago

SPOILERS ALERT The article contains several spoilers. You may want to hold off if you follow the show.

minimaxir 10y ago
If you follow the show, then nothing should be a spoiler. :p
- scrollaway 10y ago
  Or I guess if you're familiar with the SV startup scene, not much should be a surprise :)

swampthinker 10y ago

There was an article a while back on The Verge noting the irony in the show being "comedy". It's supposed to be a caracature of startup culture, stories, and the insane numbers that are casually thrown around. But as most people on HN know, Pied Piper would have had a similar path if it was a startup in real life. What I'm getting at is that even in it's attempt to be more insane than what startup life is like, it's strangely... more accurate. And I can't really tell if that's a good or bad thing.

seizethecheese 10y ago
This is also true for another current HBO comedy Veep. While it may not be as close to reality as Silicon Valley, many political insiders note that it is much closer than dramatic shows like House of Cards. Maybe similarity to reality is a hallmark of excellent comedy. This is certainly true of one of my favorite comedy shows Louie, which is almost hyperrealistic.
- khc 10y ago
  "Jokes? There are no jokes. The truth is the funniest joke of all." - Muhammad Ali
- kirrent 10y ago
  Good comedy can be a mirror. It reflects reality, makes you laugh, and then makes you think. I think all of those shows you mentioned would lose something if they weren't uncomfortably close to what they're making fun of.
  - pilsetnieks 10y ago
    Truth is stranger than fiction, but it is because Fiction is obliged to stick to possibilities; Truth isn't. -- Mark Twain
    - surreal 10y ago
      See also "You couldn't make it up."[0] [0] http://www.oxforddictionaries.com/definition/english/you-couldn't-make-it-up http://www.oxforddictionaries.com/definition/english/you-cou...
- sliverstorm 10y ago
  Surely you've heard, "it's funny because it's true"
- tjakab 10y ago
  "Many police officers maintain that the most realistic police show in the history of television was the sitcom 'Barney Miller,' far more so than that father of reality TV, 'Cops.' The action was mostly off screen, the squad room the only set, and the guys were a motley bunch of character actors who were in no danger of being picked for the N.Y.P.D. pin-up calendar. But they worked hard, made jokes, got hurt and answered to their straight-man commander." http://www.nytimes.com/2005/03/01/opinion/watching-the-detectives.html http://www.nytimes.com/2005/03/01/opinion/watching-the-detec...
  - 10y ago
fernandotakai 10y ago
i think it's one of the reason it's so hard for me to watch it -- the comedy/cringe parts hit too close to home.
bertiewhykovich 10y ago
By far the most unrealistic thing about "Silicon Valley" is the complete lack of technical obstacles and setbacks faced by any team in the show. But that's eminently forgivable -- no one (certainly not I) wants to watch three weeks of harried debugging. Everything else is so on-point that it can be uncomfortable to watch as a denizen of Silicon Valley.
- nathanvanfleet 10y ago
  Yeah that would be an artificial cliff hanger for sure. It's about the human interaction and politics.
- jonwachob91 10y ago
  Lets not forget we got the Mean Jerk Time because of a technical obstacle. Obviously not a 3 week debugging issue, but still at least some notion of a technical obstacle...
- andyjdavis 10y ago
  >no one (certainly not I) wants to watch three weeks of harried debugging Although they could potentially throw in a sequence designed to show that aspect. 2-3 minutes of silence with a stationary camera showing a motionless programmer at their computer, frowning slightly. Eventually they break the silence by swearing. Mind you, you could probably only do that once in the entire run of the show. As you alluded to, the reality of working through difficult problems would not make for good TV.
  - sbierwagen 10y ago
    Mind you, you could probably only do that once in the entire run of the show. HBO is the same network that aired this skit: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=TyrM7GxyzGg https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=TyrM7GxyzGg
  - kbenson 10y ago
    > 2-3 minutes of silence with a stationary camera showing a motionless programmer at their computer, frowning slightly. Eventually they break the silence by swearing. Then you see them slowly click. Press backspace once. press the 3 key. Click again, and their eyes widen as then they exclaim "Finally!"
the_watcher 10y ago
Maybe it's just that I've only ever worked for YC companies since my first job (which was owned entirely by one person), but it seems to me that they've given them the world's dumbest board - trying to force them to do things, installing a veteran CEO, and hiring a shitload of salespeople without building the product. Those are all things that I know happen in startups, but a company founded entirely by engineers doesn't seem like it would ever entirely give up on the product. That said, 90% of what I see on Silicon Valley is remarkably accurate.
- kbenson 10y ago
  > it seems to me that they've given them the world's dumbest board ... hiring a shitload of salespeople without building the product. That wasn't the board, that was the CEO. > a company founded entirely by engineers doesn't seem like it would ever entirely give up on the product. When did they? They fought, they whined, they tried to form a conspiracy, and finally they bargained and compromised. I don't recall them ever giving up.
bitwize 10y ago
What I've seen and heard of SV reminds me of when I posted an article by "Fake Lennart Poettering" (me), about getting around lkml hostility to systemd kernel suggestions by building systemd as a unikernel that chain-loads Linux and intercepts some of its system calls and replaces them with more systemd-friendly versions. Someone replied: "This is like the movie Idiocracy: so close to reality that it isn't funny." A dubious vindication of Mike Judge's satirical skills: reality catches up so quickly with his satire that it fails at comedy.
jghn 10y ago
That's Mike Judge satire. It's always absurd but yet quite accurate
- baddox 10y ago
  Isn't this just normal satire? I thought satire generally refers to works which exaggerate with the intention of highlighting the true absurdities of some person or group of people.
  - jghn 10y ago
    Agreed, but for me his satire is always somehow even more perfect.
kgtm 10y ago
You should also check out Betas (http://www.imdb.com/title/tt3012184/ http://www.imdb.com/title/tt3012184/), a light-hearted SF startup culture comedy show by Amazon. Sadly, it never got a second season.
- xsmasher 10y ago
  In SV, one of the characters asks a call girl if she takes bitcoin. She says "I hate this fucking town." It's funny. In an episode of Betas, on character slaps a bitcoin down on a table to place a bet. It showed how well they they did their research.
auganov 10y ago
Absolutely. I don't like movies or TV 99% of the time. Especially comedy shows with vulgarity and goofy humor, not my thing at all. But the accuracy and relatability of Silicon Valley make it very enjoyable and funny for me. Every episode has a couple things that hit home.
- icebraining 10y ago
  Have you looked into British shows? They have a lot of realistic comedy, like The Royle Family, the original The Office, The Thick of It and, in a way, Yes Minister.
  - u02sgb 10y ago
    Related - Veep is based on The Thick of It (Armando Iannucci writing and producing both)
amelius 10y ago
At least Pied Piper has some real technology to bring to the table (a compression algorithm). Most real SV startups are, it seems, unfortunately just building a business around a CRUD application (see AirBnB, Uber, to name a few, but there are many many more).
- function_seven 10y ago
  How is AirBnB or Uber just CRUD applications? Seems to me there's a lot more than that involved in launching a nationwide rental or taxi service with a two-sided market. You have to solve regulatory issues (or ignore them strategically), routing and pricing algorithms, user trust issues, etc. These two businesses in particular highlight that it's a lot harder than you think, otherwise the market would be saturated with clones.
  - bobsil1 10y ago
    That's after it's huge. Uber 0.1 was probably just WhatsApp to a couple of drivers.
    - obmelvin 10y ago
      And early Google was 'just' a search engine, something that already existed in some forms, that looked totally unlike the Google of today. You are correct, but what are you trying to say? All companies are going to be 'lame' early on by definition.
      - bobsil1 10y ago
        No, Google 0.1 did something technically nontrivial. These other co's only got technically interesting after scale, which is generically true. Since you don't know whether the startup will succeed, you'd better enjoy the work, eg scraper (FB 0.1) and forum software (0.5). There are any # of co's not lame early on: Google, Adobe, Zee Aero, Joby, Viv/Siri, Cruise, Magic Leap, DeepMind, Vicarious…
qq66 10y ago
I think it feels like a "more accurate satire" because it mixes things that are overexaggerated and underexaggerated, and only by a small amount in either direction. So some of the strange realities (an executive Rollerblading into a meeting) are mixed with dialogue and behavior that is only slightly more absurd than reality.
hbosch 10y ago
I've often heard the same about Scrubs. In a sea of medical dramas in TV, the light and warm-hearted show Scrubs is considered to be the most true-to-life... Apparently.

jpatokal 10y ago

Great article, with some glorious lines: “It’s capitalism shrouded in the fake hippie rhetoric of ‘We’re making the world a better place,’ because it’s uncool to just say ‘Hey, we’re crushing it and making money.’” “Some of us actually, as naïve as it sounds, came here to make the world a better place. And we did not succeed. We made some things better, we made some things worse, and in the meantime the libertarians took over, and they do not give a damn about right or wrong. They are here to make money.” “In the real Silicon Valley, as on the show, there is a cohort of people who have a real sense of purpose and actually think they’re going to change the world, and then there’s a cohort of people who say farcical things about their apps that they clearly don’t believe themselves.”

tinalumfoil 10y ago
In addition to the TV Show a lot of the companies in SV have their own website, which absolutely nails the essence of what they're mocking (Warning: spoilers if you aren't caught up): http://www.piedpiper.com/ http://www.piedpiper.com/ (complete with a blog) http://www.hooli.com/ http://www.hooli.com/ http://www.bachmanity.com/ http://www.bachmanity.com/ http://www.coderag.com/ http://www.coderag.com/ http://raviga.com/ http://raviga.com/ http://www.endframesystems.com/ http://www.endframesystems.com/ http://drinkhomicide.com/ http://drinkhomicide.com/ https://github.com/Stitchpunk https://github.com/Stitchpunk
- YZF 10y ago
  "Smaller files take up less space on your computer. Less space = more stuff. More stuff = better life!" For some reason I just couldn't suppress my laughter reading this...
- Steko 10y ago
  Raviga's website is gold, here's hoping Fixxie Tech makes an appearance on the show.
- namuol 10y ago
  Reviga's website has a bonus Bioshock reference: https://i.imgur.com/Eks4tuu.png https://i.imgur.com/Eks4tuu.png

ModernMech 10y ago

The thing about SV that always gets me is the forced "code" vs "hardware" rivalry between Gilfoyle and Dinesh. "My code can beat your terrible hardware!" "My hardware is terrible because of your terrible code!" That just doesn't happen in my experience. Has anyone else seen this?

etjossem 10y ago
From an outsider's perspective, bad collaboration between engineering and ops (or even among engineers, frontend v. backend) might sound like that. They're joking about the "looks good in staging" trope [1] [1] https://cdn.meme.am/instances/500x/22605665.jpg https://cdn.meme.am/instances/500x/22605665.jpg
etrautmann 10y ago
I'm not sure I agree - I feel like Gilfoyle writes plenty of code and also builds hardware. They have a natural rivalry, but I haven't seen it break down exclusively at the hardware/software boundary.
- kirrent 10y ago
  The final couple of episodes of the second season they make it an explicit point of friction between the two. It sounds pretty stupid and I'm glad they stopped it.
  - Apocryphon 10y ago
    I think it led to a good payoff of a server being on fire.
    - kirrent 10y ago
      I mean, that payoff would have been there if the distinction hadn't been made explicit.
minimaxir 10y ago
It's not a code vs. hardware dynamic, it's a Gilfoyle vs. Dinesh dynamic. Passive-aggressive bromances are a hallmark of comedy nowadays.

minimaxir 10y ago

If you want proof that the SV producers go the extra mile, a couple episodes ago there was a split-second appearance of a GitHub repository belonging to one of the characters. Turns out it's completely real (https://github.com/Stitchpunk/atari-ai https://github.com/Stitchpunk/atari-ai ) and the owner has accepted pull requests!

Alupis 10y ago
Looks like they stuffed the fake account with a bunch of minor commits[1] to give the appearance of a daily coder. [1] https://github.com/Stitchpunk/activity/commit/6b016dec5f52b9e3c6121e21d34d80fca2a3cea8 https://github.com/Stitchpunk/activity/commit/6b016dec5f52b9...
- balls187 10y ago
  The forks are from https://github.com/emcmanus https://github.com/emcmanus, which seems like a legit githubber. edit: He works for the show, and is legit https://www.linkedin.com/in/emcmanus https://www.linkedin.com/in/emcmanus
  - jsemrau 10y ago
    We live in fantastic times, indeed. Last century there were just waves in an endless stream of names. Now we can check out their Linkedin profiles.
- puranjay 10y ago
  > Replace all spaces with poop emojis This shit is hilarious!
jedberg 10y ago
In fact everything in her account is forked from another GitHub account[0] -- he's one of the lead tech consultants on the show. [0] https://github.com/emcmanus https://github.com/emcmanus
tajen 10y ago

glibgil 10y ago

Please stop this practice of spoiler alerts. Yes, articles about movies and tv shows talk about what happens. They always have and they always will. Spoilers have been studied and proven to not significantly diminish enjoyment and can even enhance it. Everyone has had the experience of watching something and being blown away by a plot twist. People don't need to have that experience every time they watch something.

qrian 10y ago
Spoilers don't diminish enjoyment and possibly enhance it? Any sources to back it up?
- kwikiel 10y ago
  Even greeks were watching their plays knowing what will happen - that's whole idea of watching somebody struggle against future that will happen no matter somebody will do.
- glibgil 10y ago
  http://www.wired.com/2011/08/spoilers-dont-spoil-anything/ http://www.wired.com/2011/08/spoilers-dont-spoil-anything/ Google "spoiler study enjoyment" on your own next time to save yourself the trouble of posting
barrkel 10y ago
Spoilers deeply upset me and put me in a bad mood for hours, if I care about the topic. I don't watch movie trailers, for example, and even show up 25 minutes late to movies to avoid them. If I do see a trailer, it usually means I won't bother with the movie. This was a useful warning for me, not to read the article. Not because it would impact my enjoyment; it would make me angry. Though a fair portion of my enjoyment comes from trying to predict what's going to happen.
- glibgil 10y ago
  If you were a kid in the 80s you for sure knew that Darth Vader was Luke Skywalker's father before you had a chance to see Empire Strikes Back. You couldn't get away from it. A good film maker knows this. That's why reveal has a face-off duel and Luke losing a hand and taking a plunge of death. It is enjoyable to watch the character learn and react to the information

timewarrior 10y ago

I completely agree. Silicon Valley talked about the reality. I founded a startup and headed engineering for another. I have seen more than half the things there as follows: Getting money in tranches. Investors making you spend invested money for personal gain. Having a business CEO who has no product insights. Board control issues. Employees trying to overthrow founders and getting fired because of that. Being forced to hire friends and family of investors. Lawyers represent the company and not you. Founding company with someone whom you do not trust. Investors getting involved in day to day running. Luckily each of the startups had an happy ending. But it took a lot of hard work and a few miracles.

WWKong 10y ago
This guy FUCKS!!
timewarrior 10y ago
One more thing to add. Having a CEO who takes a salary of 180k/year after seed round (which was almost half of the seed round) and apart from this also charges part of his house rent to the company. Those were fun times.

josu 10y ago

I personally didn't like the humor of the show and stopped watching it after 3 or 4 episodes. On a related note, a few days ago [1] Marc Andreessen recommended another show based on startup culture: Halt and Catch Fire [2] I haven't seen it, but I will probably give it a shot. [1] http://fourhourworkweek.com/2016/05/29/marc-andreessen/ http://fourhourworkweek.com/2016/05/29/marc-andreessen/ [2] http://www.imdb.com/title/tt2543312/?ref_=wl_li_tt http://www.imdb.com/title/tt2543312/?ref_=wl_li_tt

minimaxir 10y ago
Halt and Catch Fire is definitely not about startup culture: it's a drama about the birth of the tech industry.
- walrus01 10y ago
  except that it's not set in silicon valley at all, it's set in the early 1980s Texas PC/semiconductor industry
  - minimaxir 10y ago
    Ah right. Fixed.
  - Apocryphon 10y ago
    Silicon Valley isn't the birthplace of all high-tech.
  - rhino369 10y ago
    I think S3 is about them moving to SV.
- jsprogrammer 10y ago
  Halt and Catch fire is hardly about the birth of the tech industry. It's a character drama centered around a family electronics company being hijacked to produce IBM clones.

f_allwein 10y ago

for a similar satire of high tech culture 20 years ago, check out Douglas Copeland's "Microserfs": https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Microserfs https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Microserfs

lurkinggrue 10y ago
Wait, That book was satire??
- Uhhrrr 10y ago
  I didn't take it as such when I read it. But I can see how someone might think so.

deleted 10y ago

[deleted]

jewbacca 10y ago

> In 2015, Weissman convened the Stanford Compression Forum, which resulted in a forty-page white paper outlining what middle-out compression might mean. One of his graduate students, Vinith Misra, worked out the math more explicitly in another paper. The paper they link to from there (https://www.scribd.com/doc/228831637/Optimal-Tip-to-Tip-Efficiency https://www.scribd.com/doc/228831637/Optimal-Tip-to-Tip-Effi...) is actually "Optimal Tip-to-Tip Efficiency: a model for male audience stimulation". Not that I'm complaining, that is absolutely incredible, but does the compression paper actually exist?

vehementi 10y ago
> whereas naive unsorted schemes have increasingly ﬂaccid perfor-mance. Oh my god
- j2kun 10y ago
  The chart at the end of the paper is very suggestive.

fataliss 10y ago

I think it's good that people in the actual tech industry and startup eco system can laugh about themselves. It's healthy. The day they/we stop laughing is the day we have a problem.

zw123456 10y ago

It seems to me that "Silicon Valley" is somewhat of a Roman a clef, as such I think it would be great if the HN readers could provide the "key". Anyone out there willing to give it a shot ?

bobsil1 10y ago
Hooli = Google Gavin Belson = Marc Benioff Denpak Singh = Deepak Chopra Peter Gregory = Peter Thiel Erlich Bachman = Sean Parker Russ Hanneman = Mark Cuban Laurie Bream = Marissa Mayer Philz Coffee onsite = Facebook Hooli tunnel = Zynga tunnel
- hbosch 10y ago
  I always thought Russ Hanneman was based on Dan Bilzerian[0] even thought Bilzerian isn't actually an angel or VC. 0. https://www.instagram.com/danbilzerian/ https://www.instagram.com/danbilzerian/ (NSFW)
- kmiroslav 10y ago
  And who's Monica? OP plz
  - bobsil1 10y ago
    Monica is the associate you messed up the pitch with because she was alarmingly cute.
    - zw123456 10y ago
      Something like that may have happened to me, or I had some responsibility for.
    - drumdance 10y ago
      I remember pitching to her in 1997. Bessemer Venture Partners.
  - whamlastxmas 10y ago

rconti 10y ago

I have a really, really hard time understanding how anyone can watch the show and be offended. OTOH, maybe it's just because I'm neither rich nor important.

kmiroslav 10y ago
Hint: nobody ever gets offended, they just get concerned that other people might be offended.

keypusher 10y ago

As someone that works in enterprise storage, the last season has hit very close to home.

golergka 10y ago
Have you seen them all?
rconti 10y ago
As someone who works for a SaaS company that's trying to provide SaaS on-prem... the mole people are real.

smilbandit 10y ago

For me the most realistic scene, one that only people in the field would understand, is when they made the "box". The lead up from hating the assignment to not being able to do shit work really hit home. I've probably had had a few projects that i hated but spent more time then needed. To either make it work faster or modulerized it even though it was probably never going to be updated, just to keep my interest or to learn something.

gnahckire 10y ago

“A friend of mine who works in tech called me and said, ‘Why aren’t there any women? That’s bullshit!’ I said to her, ‘It is bullshit! Unfortunately, we shot that audience footage at the actual TechCrunch Disrupt.’” Unfortunately, unsurprising.

carryalls 10y ago
If that's the case, why aren't there way more Asians in the show?
- dimal 10y ago
  Dinesh. Jin Yiang.
  - danyim 10y ago
    Both of which have accents, one heavier than the other. Is that fair?
    - zjaffee 10y ago
      among those with Asian origins that I have worked with, I'd say at least half are foreign born, so I don't think its entirely unfair.
    - walrus01 10y ago
      There is no proper English accent, to a New Zealander, people born in California sound weird.
    - dimal 10y ago
      Jin Yiang isn't Chinese-American. He's Chinese. Chinese people who were born in China have accents when speaking English. It would be ridiculous if he was Chinese and didn't have an accent. I haven't noticed Dinesh as having any accent, but if he does have one, it's the actor's actual accent. He's from Pakistan, so maybe he has a trace. Which is completely realistic and completely fair.

rexreed 10y ago

The Silicon Valley show makes me anxious. I laugh but I also feel the pain from experience. And I'm not sure if that's good. I want and need to catch up but I almost dread it. I wonder if it's the same for cop drama shows and cops who watch them.

untilHellbanned 10y ago

Best part: “Some Valley big shots have no idea how to react to the show,” Miller told me. “They can’t decide whether to be offended or flattered. And they’re mystified by the fact that actors have a kind of celebrity that they will never have—there’s no rhyme or reason to it, but that’s the way it is, and it kills them.” Miller met Musk at the after-party in Redwood City. “I think he was thrown by the fact that I wasn’t being sycophantic—which I couldn’t be, because I didn’t realize who he was at the time. He said, ‘I have some advice for your show,’ and I went, ‘No thanks, we don’t need any advice,’ which threw him even more. And then, while we’re talking, some woman comes up and says ‘Can I have a picture?’ and he starts to pose—it was kinda sad, honestly—and instead she hands the camera to him and starts to pose with me. It was, like, Sorry, dude, I know you’re a big deal—and, in his case, he actually is a big deal—but I’m the guy from ‘Yogi Bear 3-D,’ and apparently that’s who she wants a picture with.”

zippergz 10y ago

Silicon Valley is so realistic that I stopped watching a few episodes into the first season. I was going through a rough and very stressful time at work, and the show was reminding me too much of that rather than being an escape (as I usually want TV to be). Thankfully I'm in a better place professionally now, and I recently came back to the show. Now I enjoy it a lot, even though it can hit very close to home.

jsemrau 10y ago
For some reason that is the main reason why I watch the show somewhat religiously (and I don't even live in the US). When suffering through push-backs, broken software, and no's frequently, sharing the pain with the Pied Piper team is my quiet way of balancing my mind.
the_cat_kittles 10y ago
i had exactly the same experience
Cshelton 10y ago
Same reaction, although I have kept up watching it. It's too damn real and too close to what I deal with haha. My partner will refuse to watch it after first seasonal, same reason. It's brutal when you have lived through that before haha.
curiousgal 10y ago
>I'm in a better place professionally now Buy a gold chain!
- chiph 10y ago
  Or if he's doing really well, some Tres Comas Tequila.
  - curiousgal 10y ago
    hummm "Tres Comas", I wonder what that stands for..

deleted 10y ago

[deleted]

blue11 10y ago

I have really enjoyed watching this show but the last few episodes it seems like the writing has went downhill. There were a number of cringe worthy scenes like "tabs vs spaces".

mentos 10y ago
I feel like a lot of the humor in the show came from Erlich Bachman who is no longer in the drivers seat this season.
kmiroslav 10y ago
> has went downhill. Speaking of writing going downhill...
excitom 10y ago
Seriously? I laughed out loud at the "tabs vs spaces" scene since I have seen it played out exactly like that at several jobs.
timmyelliot 10y ago
At my work, that tabs vs spaces ended up being the most discussed scene. I thought it was genius.
louthy 10y ago
I wonder if they intentionally got the details of the tabs/spaces argument wrong (by implying that you type the spaces manually, by saying 1 tab can save 8 spaces -- I doubt many coders uses 8 space tabs, if any, ...) as a wind-up for the actual coders watching. It seems weird to have the inside knowledge of such a heated but obscure topic, and then get the detail wrong. I hope it was intentional because it points to them playing with their audience in quite a Machiavellian way.
robotnoises 10y ago
Disagree. I laughed out-loud at that scene, and enjoyed talking with my wife about it later. Also, spaces is the correct answer.
jtmcmc 10y ago

peter303 10y ago

NPR Fresh Air broadcast a similar article today: http://www.npr.org/2016/06/09/481377115/in-hbos-silicon-valley-the-comedy-is-inspired-by-real-life-tech-culture http://www.npr.org/2016/06/09/481377115/in-hbos-silicon-vall...

dang 10y ago

I don't know the show very well, but this is a much better article than I expected. The vignette about online forums is so perfect I can't resist quoting it in full. “Silicon Valley,” a show about computer nerds, has a fan base that is particularly attuned to minutiae, and particularly apt to argue about them on the Internet. If a Post-it, URL, or line of code is legible on the show, it will be screengrabbed and scrutinized. Last year, a few hours after an episode aired, a Reddit user with the handle HeIsMyPossum started a thread called “Why did the writers just obliterate all the good karma they had built up with their core audience?” He made an impassioned argument that a plot point—the accidental deletion of data from Pied Piper’s servers—was implausible. “So the files were being converted live while coming through an FTP? And that affects disk deletion speed?… Come the fuck on guys.” Rob Fuller, a software engineer and a consultant on the show, logged on to Reddit to defend his work, mostly by displaying his own nerd plumage. “Stuff like this happens,” he wrote. “I think even Amazon had an outage because one of the admins fat fingered a DNS or ACL change at one point.” Another user responded to Fuller: “Thanks for engaging us here, we really appreciate it.” The thread amassed nearly three hundred comments. “Sorry for being a dick,” HeIsMyPossum wrote. Edit: well, it's weirdly anticlimactic sitting here. But it was hilarious in the New Yorker.

kordless 10y ago
I think the premise of their technology is humorously on target. I mean, there's no limit to how much you can compress things, right? :P It's sort of a metaphysical overarching joke rolled into the show. Anything on the show talking about their compression technology becomes necessarily unbelievable as a result. Causality caused the file to be deleted on both ends!
- eli_gottlieb 10y ago
  > I think the premise of their technology is humorously on target. I mean, there's no limit to how much you can compress things, right? :P There are of course limits to how much you can compress things, but only for a finite number of possible files can you ever prove that you've hit the limit. For almost all possible files/strings, you can't ever prove you've got an optimal compression algorithm, so if someone's new algorithm appears to work better, well, you've got the burden of proof to show you've already hit the Kolmogorov complexity of the file and they're cheating.

p4wnc6 10y ago

I love the Sweet Valley High series. Glad to see it's enjoying a renaissance of sorts.

mmmBacon 10y ago

The attention to detail on the show is amazing. For example, during their move to the new office I noticed that they had Corovan moving boxes. If you don't know Apple uses Corovan exclusively and if you've ever moved offices chances are high that they moved you. Not sure why but it was amazing to me that they bothered with a detail like that.

NEDM64 10y ago
Pretty sure it was product placement.

ben_jones 10y ago

In last Sunday's show they were ramping up to launch a beta of their product and had a closed alpha session where the team could give out access codes to close friends. The three team members, all engineers, got universally positive feedback for how great their user interface was. Well except from Monica, who couldn't quite articulate why it was just off to the casual user [1]. [1]:http://www.piedpiper.com/app/themes/pied-piper/dist/images/interface_large.jpg http://www.piedpiper.com/app/themes/pied-piper/dist/images/i... Essentially everyone in the engineering team's social circle either were engineers themselves who wouldn't recognize good design if it hit them in the mouth, or intentionally did not give criticism of the product in order to suck up to the promising new startup.

minimaxir 10y ago
This is likely the plot progression for the next episode. (which is why the UI was hidden to the viewer)
- golergka 10y ago
  They shown the screen a couple of times, may be not long enough to expose bad UI, but still.
  - minimaxir 10y ago
    No, the editor UI which is teased at the Pied Piper website.
walrus01 10y ago
And now the Weissman score is a real thing? https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Weissman_score https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Weissman_score
- dietrichepp 10y ago
  No, it's universally derided as a bogus metric which doesn't even make logical sense.

jrnichols 10y ago

One of my favorite parts of the show is the opening credits. Being an old Netscape employee, I still get a little sad when I see the Netscape logo fall off that building, only to be replaced by Chrome. tears

deleted 10y ago

[deleted]

joshu 10y ago

I am a consultant on the show. I am super impressed with them. I find it less "funny" and more "accurate" on a regular basis.

atom-morgan 10y ago
How did that come about?
- joshu 10y ago
  I spend too much time cultivating my network...

trhway 10y ago

>“It’s capitalism shrouded in the fake hippie rhetoric of ‘We’re making the world a better place,’ because it’s uncool to just say ‘Hey, we’re crushing it and making money.’” the world does seems to be a better place when you're making a lot of money.

drumdance 10y ago

Just once I'd like to see Dinesh win against Gilfoyle.

jagermo 10y ago
Yeah, I guess Dinesh would like that, too.

pyb 10y ago

Does anyone else find that the show is running out of steam ? I think the quality of the writing has gone down in this new series.

mercer 10y ago
At times I had that feeling, but then something happens that has in me in stitches in a way that few other shows pull off. My main issue is Bachmann. He's been a bit too much for a while, but judging by the last episode I think the writers did this on purpose.

jagermo 10y ago

My favorite from the article: Teller ended the meeting by standing up in a huff, but his attempt at a dramatic exit was marred by the fact that he was wearing Rollerblades.

bewatson 10y ago
On top of that, I loved the irony that it was basically too ridiculous to use on the show.

dccoolgai 10y ago

In a lot of ways, "epochs" of software development track to Mike Judge productions... a lot of things changed after Office Space lampooned the industry the first time... I wonder if Silicon Valley will have the same effect.

nasalgoat 10y ago

One question I'd like answered is how Richard lost controlling interest of his company. The ownership percentages are never really talked about other than Erlich's 10% and the two coders getting 7% each. One minute Richard is majority shareholder while Reviga has 20%, then Reviga has majority? It's the only thing that gives me pause.

srdev 10y ago
He sold shares to Russ Hanneman and Reviga bought those shares off of Hanneman.

godgod 10y ago

Tab vs spaces...slayed me.