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In this instance the exchange you would have to make would be crippling startups and small businesses, which is where the vast majority of the growth of the eco

In this instance the exchange you would have to make would be crippling startups and small businesses, which is where the vast majority of the growth of the economy happens. As an aside, how many companies do you see actually building Snapchat for Etsy-linked tumblr posts? I see that criticism of Silicon Valley all the time, yet despite being in the heart of it I rarely see that kind of company. I’d guess an order of magnitude more money is going into building human transporting drones and supersonic jets than into the silly stuff people love to rail on the Valley for. Look at the list of startups that just came out of YC and you’ll see maybe one or two companies that fit that kind of mockery.

logfromblammo 9y ago
That's just it. Where I am, I don't see new companies building anything. YC isn't here. I'd love to work for a startup with a like-brand-X-but-for-Y or a word-salad elevator pitch, that also offered a compensation package as good as any found in Silicon Valley. But I don't get options or RSUs, or even cash bonuses. I get billed to a customer at $200-$400/hr and get maybe $50-$60 of that in total compensation. It's hard to tell, really, because my employers keep getting sold to other companies that proceed to change around the benefits plan. The details aren't very important. Those companies are getting a whole lot of money, and they are giving a smaller proportion of it to the leaf node workers, and a larger share to administration, management, business lubricators, and bureaucracy. The tech industry has very little political-economic clout outside of the handful of cities considered to be tech centers. I'd love to have an alternative to that, beyond moving my family at least 500 miles away. Again. But that SV money is mostly staying in SV. It isn't going into helping out the industry in the rest of the country, or the rest of the world. It isn't spreading business opportunities to local economies outside of central California and the Pacific NW. SV has done little for me beyond offering me new things to buy. They have not given me the additional local economic activity that I'd need to buy them. (That's not strictly true. SV has also exported business practices that get cargo-culted everywhere, usually to my detriment.) I have zero reasons to support the small businesses of Silicon Valley. They can go piss up a tree, because even in a hurricane-force gale blowing directly east, it still won't land anywhere near me. I also won't ever be in a position where I'd actually be able to move there, and it seems the culture has an unnatural aversion to spreading itself somewhere else. So choke on it. SV is competitive with my local tech community, rather than cooperative, so crippling its startups and small businesses helps ours, even at the expense of a smaller overall tech economy. I'm fine with a smaller overall pie, if I get a bigger slice on my plate. I'd only care about bigger pie if there are bigger slices for everyone, not just the ones closest to the ovens. So by all means, make options and RSUs untenable, and dry up the H1Bs, and let the major players collude with anti-poaching agreements, and let the NIMBYs drive up housing prices. I want Silicon Valley to fail, because in its success, it has been leaving me behind. It will take my money, but won't give it back by spending it in somewhere in my neighborhood. If the only way to claw that back is to vote it out of someone else pocket, so be it. Edit: Besides that, it's a bit ironic that those working on defense systems like THAAD and Aegis and C-RAM and Iron Dome are largely out of range of North Korean missiles, while the NK propaganda videos depict the atomic destruction of San Francisco and all of its peacetime-tech startups. Pork barrel military-industrial spending might be wasteful, but it does spread the wealth to a lot of people who are otherwise completely ignored by the investment sector.
- pc86 9y ago
  > I'd love to work for a startup with a like-brand-X-but-for-Y or a word-salad elevator pitch Why? I'd much rather actually deliver something to the client, even if... > I get billed to a customer at $200-$400/hr and get maybe $50-$60 of that in total compensation. Then it sounds like everything else around what you deliver is worth at least $140-350/hr. If it's really so easy I'm sure you could offer your services for $100/hr, take a nice big raise and save your clients hundreds of thousands a year. > it seems the culture has an unnatural aversion to spreading itself somewhere else Because even for a culture that bitches and moans about how old school business ways are out dated, they still insist you be within a 2 hour drive of your investors, so that when Ashton Kutcher gets mad at someone he can yell at them in person instead of over ~~email~~ ~~hipchat~~ Slack. > It will take my money, but won't give it back by spending it in somewhere in my neighborhood. Stop buying shit from startups
  - s73ver_ 9y ago
    "Then it sounds like everything else around what you deliver is worth at least $140-350/hr. If it's really so easy I'm sure you could offer your services for $100/hr, take a nice big raise and save your clients hundreds of thousands a year." Not everyone wants to, or is able to strike it out on their own.
    - logfromblammo 9y ago
      Exactly. If I ran a lemonade stand, it could be the best lemonade within 100 miles, but it would also be bankrupt within an hour. I would need a non-technical co-founder that I could trust to not stab me in the back, and an investor willing to give us enough runway to take off without putting any land mines in it. So far, those conditions have never been met. Business around here is very often more about who you know than what you can do, and since I don't know the right people, those customers are simply unavailable, even at a deep discount to $100/hr. All that overhead is necessary to navigate the system that has been set up to favor those that support the system. The bureaucratic hoops are insurmountable barriers to entry to individuals, and very steep even for a hypothetical small company that is 51% owned by a disabled Indian veteran woman. It wouldn't be much of a military-industrial complex if it could be disrupted that easily. The "clients" are far less interested in saving money than with preserving their influence over the nature of the work, an end often pursued by spending every penny of the allocated budget, regardless of need. A union could change it. A U.S. attorney with a forensic accountant, TS/SCI security clearance, and a stack of subpoenas could change it. A political party could change it. A handful of generals and admirals could change it. One software pro, working alone? Not so much. This is really the best deal I can get right now, without dropping everything and moving again. It isn't great, but it is available to me, and I don't have to front capital, work owner-manager hours, or do types of work that I am not comparatively good at doing. Besides that, I have already failed at going it alone once, and once was all I could afford. I didn't make it, and lost everything. The work was good enough, but not enough people wanted to buy it, and not enough customers recommended it to their friends. So that runway is gone, and I'm stuck workin' for The Man until I can retire. In retrospect, I would have been far better off not trying. But that's all anecdotal. You might succeed on your own. Maybe I just didn't work hard enough.
pc86 9y ago
We need to draw a distinction between "startups" and "small businesses." Options and RSUs, as a vehicle for engineering talent, is largely a VC/SV thing. I work on the east coast in a non-NYC city, and options/RSUs simply do not exist, even at what most people would consider tech/software companies, even the ones with venture investment. Certainly, Bill's Hardware down the street does not offer stock options. By and large, taxation of options and RSU at any point will have negligible impact on the SMB sector of the US economy. It's probably very, very damaging for startups if your definition of startup matches Paul Graham's, but if your definition of startup is "new business that happens to use JavaScript for something" this is unlikely to change anything about your day to day competitiveness.
- logfromblammo 9y ago
  And that's why Silicon Valley is on its own for this one. It hasn't loaned me its political power for anything that matters to me, and so for this issue that impacts me not at all, I will not be returning any favors. The collapse of the 2002 bubble hurt everywhere else far more deeply than SV, with a more painful recovery, so I see anything that might curb irrationally exuberant investment in companies that are not likely to ever benefit rust belt economies as a good thing. Furthermore, I am more in favor of simpler employee incentives that do not force people to invest where they work. At the income level of a typical tech employee outside of SV and NYC, any investments should likely be buy-and-ignore in a robot-managed index fund. I don't want all my net worth to be tied up in my employer, especially when we have no contract, no real control over its business strategy or tactics, and I can be fired at will. If you want to pay me $X, pay me $X.

logfromblammo 9y ago

That's just it. Where I am, I don't see new companies building anything. YC isn't here. I'd love to work for a startup with a like-brand-X-but-for-Y or a word-salad elevator pitch, that also offered a compensation package as good as any found in Silicon Valley. But I don't get options or RSUs, or even cash bonuses. I get billed to a customer at $200-$400/hr and get maybe $50-$60 of that in total compensation. It's hard to tell, really, because my employers keep getting sold to other companies that proceed to change around the benefits plan. The details aren't very important. Those companies are getting a whole lot of money, and they are giving a smaller proportion of it to the leaf node workers, and a larger share to administration, management, business lubricators, and bureaucracy. The tech industry has very little political-economic clout outside of the handful of cities considered to be tech centers. I'd love to have an alternative to that, beyond moving my family at least 500 miles away. Again. But that SV money is mostly staying in SV. It isn't going into helping out the industry in the rest of the country, or the rest of the world. It isn't spreading business opportunities to local economies outside of central California and the Pacific NW. SV has done little for me beyond offering me new things to buy. They have not given me the additional local economic activity that I'd need to buy them. (That's not strictly true. SV has also exported business practices that get cargo-culted everywhere, usually to my detriment.) I have zero reasons to support the small businesses of Silicon Valley. They can go piss up a tree, because even in a hurricane-force gale blowing directly east, it still won't land anywhere near me. I also won't ever be in a position where I'd actually be able to move there, and it seems the culture has an unnatural aversion to spreading itself somewhere else. So choke on it. SV is competitive with my local tech community, rather than cooperative, so crippling its startups and small businesses helps ours, even at the expense of a smaller overall tech economy. I'm fine with a smaller overall pie, if I get a bigger slice on my plate. I'd only care about bigger pie if there are bigger slices for everyone, not just the ones closest to the ovens. So by all means, make options and RSUs untenable, and dry up the H1Bs, and let the major players collude with anti-poaching agreements, and let the NIMBYs drive up housing prices. I want Silicon Valley to fail, because in its success, it has been leaving me behind. It will take my money, but won't give it back by spending it in somewhere in my neighborhood. If the only way to claw that back is to vote it out of someone else pocket, so be it. Edit: Besides that, it's a bit ironic that those working on defense systems like THAAD and Aegis and C-RAM and Iron Dome are largely out of range of North Korean missiles, while the NK propaganda videos depict the atomic destruction of San Francisco and all of its peacetime-tech startups. Pork barrel military-industrial spending might be wasteful, but it does spread the wealth to a lot of people who are otherwise completely ignored by the investment sector.

pc86 9y ago
> I'd love to work for a startup with a like-brand-X-but-for-Y or a word-salad elevator pitch Why? I'd much rather actually deliver something to the client, even if... > I get billed to a customer at $200-$400/hr and get maybe $50-$60 of that in total compensation. Then it sounds like everything else around what you deliver is worth at least $140-350/hr. If it's really so easy I'm sure you could offer your services for $100/hr, take a nice big raise and save your clients hundreds of thousands a year. > it seems the culture has an unnatural aversion to spreading itself somewhere else Because even for a culture that bitches and moans about how old school business ways are out dated, they still insist you be within a 2 hour drive of your investors, so that when Ashton Kutcher gets mad at someone he can yell at them in person instead of over ~~email~~ ~~hipchat~~ Slack. > It will take my money, but won't give it back by spending it in somewhere in my neighborhood. Stop buying shit from startups
- s73ver_ 9y ago
  "Then it sounds like everything else around what you deliver is worth at least $140-350/hr. If it's really so easy I'm sure you could offer your services for $100/hr, take a nice big raise and save your clients hundreds of thousands a year." Not everyone wants to, or is able to strike it out on their own.
  - logfromblammo 9y ago
    Exactly. If I ran a lemonade stand, it could be the best lemonade within 100 miles, but it would also be bankrupt within an hour. I would need a non-technical co-founder that I could trust to not stab me in the back, and an investor willing to give us enough runway to take off without putting any land mines in it. So far, those conditions have never been met. Business around here is very often more about who you know than what you can do, and since I don't know the right people, those customers are simply unavailable, even at a deep discount to $100/hr. All that overhead is necessary to navigate the system that has been set up to favor those that support the system. The bureaucratic hoops are insurmountable barriers to entry to individuals, and very steep even for a hypothetical small company that is 51% owned by a disabled Indian veteran woman. It wouldn't be much of a military-industrial complex if it could be disrupted that easily. The "clients" are far less interested in saving money than with preserving their influence over the nature of the work, an end often pursued by spending every penny of the allocated budget, regardless of need. A union could change it. A U.S. attorney with a forensic accountant, TS/SCI security clearance, and a stack of subpoenas could change it. A political party could change it. A handful of generals and admirals could change it. One software pro, working alone? Not so much. This is really the best deal I can get right now, without dropping everything and moving again. It isn't great, but it is available to me, and I don't have to front capital, work owner-manager hours, or do types of work that I am not comparatively good at doing. Besides that, I have already failed at going it alone once, and once was all I could afford. I didn't make it, and lost everything. The work was good enough, but not enough people wanted to buy it, and not enough customers recommended it to their friends. So that runway is gone, and I'm stuck workin' for The Man until I can retire. In retrospect, I would have been far better off not trying. But that's all anecdotal. You might succeed on your own. Maybe I just didn't work hard enough.

pc86 9y ago

We need to draw a distinction between "startups" and "small businesses." Options and RSUs, as a vehicle for engineering talent, is largely a VC/SV thing. I work on the east coast in a non-NYC city, and options/RSUs simply do not exist, even at what most people would consider tech/software companies, even the ones with venture investment. Certainly, Bill's Hardware down the street does not offer stock options. By and large, taxation of options and RSU at any point will have negligible impact on the SMB sector of the US economy. It's probably very, very damaging for startups if your definition of startup matches Paul Graham's, but if your definition of startup is "new business that happens to use JavaScript for something" this is unlikely to change anything about your day to day competitiveness.

logfromblammo 9y ago
And that's why Silicon Valley is on its own for this one. It hasn't loaned me its political power for anything that matters to me, and so for this issue that impacts me not at all, I will not be returning any favors. The collapse of the 2002 bubble hurt everywhere else far more deeply than SV, with a more painful recovery, so I see anything that might curb irrationally exuberant investment in companies that are not likely to ever benefit rust belt economies as a good thing. Furthermore, I am more in favor of simpler employee incentives that do not force people to invest where they work. At the income level of a typical tech employee outside of SV and NYC, any investments should likely be buy-and-ignore in a robot-managed index fund. I don't want all my net worth to be tied up in my employer, especially when we have no contract, no real control over its business strategy or tactics, and I can be fired at will. If you want to pay me $X, pay me $X.