4 ms·
Silicon Valley has already "fixed" this by creating a locus of economic and mental capital, unparalleled in the United States in the last few decades, attractin
by niftich 10y ago
Silicon Valley has already "fixed" this by creating a locus of economic and mental capital, unparalleled in the United States in the last few decades, attracting job-seekers from all rungs of the socioeconomic ladder from CEOs and CTOs through front-line workers in the service industry.
In the process, it is struggling with the area's incumbent zoning laws, not enough new construction, high cost of living, and, higher than average gap between the rich and the poor. They've concentrated so much capital and opportunity that it doesn't translate well to other places, despite attempts to incubate the same thing in Austin, Seattle, Raleigh, and the like. And if you were referring to "app-based" solutions as opposed to proven injection of capital, you're in uncharted waters.
Before Silicon Valley, the miracle non-extraction-based economic engine of the country was Detroit; before then it was Akron, Pittsburgh, Chicago, Buffalo, Rochester, and New York. If history is of any lesson, in the future we'll fondly remember Silicon Valley's "IT boom" of a couple decades, before the circumstances and realities of the situation changed and the next big thing after automobiles, rubber, steel, railroads and meatpacking, electricity, and shipping (respectively) came along.
- protomyth 10y ago> attracting job-seekers from all rungs of the socioeconomic ladder We've had quite a lot of articles on HN about how bad the filter of using certain University enrollments to select a companies job seeks is for diversity in general. Economic diversity is also problematic when you only hire from top 25 schools.
- twblalock 10y agoNot every company has that filter. Many don't care if their employees went to college at all.
- protomyth 10y agoDoes Google, Apple, Facebook, and Microsoft care? I know Microsoft targeted specific schools for specific areas. Google is biased towards PhDs from certain schools according to many articles. All that may have changed, but the big corps have their influence on the majority of hires.
- twblalock 10y agoMost of the companies which target specific schools do so only for new grads. Once you have a decent résumé in the industry, it doesn't really matter where you went to school, or even if you did.
- protomyth 10y ago> Most of the companies which target specific schools do so only for new grads. Ok, so their new hires go through a filter that has some serious diversity problems. This means that the culture of the company skews towards the demographic they are hiring. > Once you have a decent résumé in the industry, it doesn't really matter where you went to school, or even if you did. How exactly does one get that decent resume when the bigger players are off limits? How does the culture of the company favor more new hires from selected institutions versus these upstarts. Let's also remember that our industry has a rather large ageist streak. A person who starts at Google is going to have a lot better prospects than someone working their way through smaller, probably local to their state, players.
- twblalock 10y agoYou don't need to work for the big players to get a good resume. I know plenty of people who are in very high demand who have never worked for any of the big companies.
- rayiner 10y agoSilicon Valley employs very few people relative to the number of people employed by the industries it is disrupting.
- twblalock 10y agoI don't believe that. Do you have any data to back that up?
- rayiner 10y agoKodak at its peak needed 10,000 workers to generate a billion dollars in revenue. Google needs less than 1,000. The Bay Area only represents 4.5% of US GDP, so the impact on employment is small so far, but as software eats the world and companies become less like Kodak and more like Google, that's going to put a lot of people out of work.