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If you want to understand Silicon Valley, watch Silicon Valley
- localhost 8y agoDan, "Fake Steve Jobs" Lyons also worked as a consultant for Silicon Valley.
- glenrivard 8y agoLove the show and do think pretty realistic in an exaggerated way.
- slivym 8y agoIt's quite amazing how good a job Silicon Valley does considering how badly wrong it could go (I'm looking at you Big Bang Theory). I'm sure there are quite a few industries that could have similar comedies about them from people who really know what the industry is like. W1A is another great example.
- city41 8y agoI think Mike Judge is the difference here. He strikes me as a genius when it comes to understanding human behavior.
- jjuel 8y agoNot to mention how he used to work in Silicon Valley.
- blocked_again 8y agoAlso the people they hired for consulting was top notch. https://blog.ycombinator.com/the-technical-advisor-for-silicon-valley-on-hbo-ed-mcmanus/ https://blog.ycombinator.com/the-technical-advisor-for-silic... https://medium.com/@timanglade/how-hbos-silicon-valley-built-not-hotdog-with-mobile-tensorflow-keras-react-native-ef03260747f3 https://medium.com/@timanglade/how-hbos-silicon-valley-built...
- ryanmercer 8y ago>He strikes me as a genius when it comes to understanding human behavior - Office Space, check! - Idiocracy, check! - Silicon Valley, check! For Silicon Valley it helps he's actually worked for a startup, a hardware one at that.
- ModernMech 8y agoDon't forget King of the Hill. That's a double check right there.
- city41 8y agoeven Beavis and Butthead captured defiant male teens pretty well
- agoodthrowaway 8y agoBeavis and Butthead are hugely underrated. I recall people making fun of me for watching it back in the 90’s. It was almost the only TV I ever watched.
- auntienomen 8y agoThey were the best music critics of the 90s.
- agoodthrowaway 8y agoThe DVDs were disappointing because they cut out all the videos which were the best parts. I loved their commentary.
- ryanmercer 8y agoDid you watch the new season (2011)? It was pretty good.
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- skunkworker 8y agoThis Venn diagram always gets me. https://i.chzbgr.com/full/8291744000/h3159FC59/ https://i.chzbgr.com/full/8291744000/h3159FC59/
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- inscionent 8y agoAll of those shows have an acceptable time, place and use for me.
- ham_sandwich 8y agoThis chart holds only in the sense that the Kardashians play dumb caricatures of themselves. They may cater their brand to the lowest common denominator but they most certainly aren’t dumb themselves. They essentially parlayed Robert Kardashian’s friendship with OJ Simpson into a media empire; there is something to be said for how media savvy they are.
- amyjess 8y agoYou could also make the same argument about Paris Hilton. By all accounts, she's a really shrewd businesswoman.
- Apocryphon 8y agoAnd for our industry, Ashton Kutcher. But it was only his characters who were dumb.
- Ascolta_Pere 8y agoUnrelated, but this reminds me of a saying we have in Spain about our fascist ex-dictator Franco whenever someone claims he was dumb: Look, he was evil, not stupid.
- clairity 8y agohaving money (as you note, the family wealth came from kris jenner's husband) makes it easier to make more money, with no implications about the intelligence of the wealth holder. take trump for example. nytimes detailed about $600+ million in wealth transfer to him from his dad. while we don't have tax returns or financial statements to confirm this, he's probably worth about a billion dollars now. that rate of return is (roughly) less than 2% yearly. he would have been way better off putting that money in an index fund--he'd be worth about $3 billion if he had.
- kohanz 8y ago> Big Bang Theory Oh how I loathed that show, especially at height of its popularity. I got so tired of smiling and nodding (or rolling my eyes, depending on who it was) as non-technical people at work and even my mother-in-law made it clear they thought of me when they watched that show (simply because I was the "smart engineer", so obviously a huge nerd with no social ability). None of these people were my age though, they were all signficantly older and Silicon Valley would have likely been much too sophisticated for them.
- buboard 8y agodid the authors of that show ever apologize?
- toyg 8y agoChuck Lorre? He’s utterly apologetic... all the way to the bank.
- wingerlang 8y agoApologize to who?
- smsm42 8y agoYou know, I was fine with them making fun of the geeks (essentially me) when it was funny. When it stopped to be funny - which is by now years ago - it just became a silly pointless caricature.
- noir_lord 8y agoBest description I've ever seen for TBBT is "geek blackface".
- humanrebar 8y ago> ... I was the "smart engineer", so obviously a huge nerd with no social ability... > I got so tired of smiling and nodding (or rolling my eyes, depending on who it was)... > ... Silicon Valley would have likely been much too sophisticated for them. Not to get personal, and I'm sure you're more empathetic in real life, but your frustrations might seem like geeky egotism to your coworkers.
- wil421 8y agoMike Judge is really great at capturing Americana. Bevis and Butthead was great at capturing the 90s MTV youth, King of the Hill for Texas/country/southern stuff and Silicon Valley has been laugh out loud funny for me.
- blocked_again 8y agoPardon my ignorance but what did big bang theory got wrong?
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- Nerdfest 8y agoThey got too popular.
- dokem 8y agoUsing a laugh track.
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- emsy 8y agoI think TBBT started out fine, but over the time it it went from laughing with and about geeks to just laughing about geeks.
- mturmon 8y agoThe characters, especially the female characters, were just too far off the mark. Also, too many girl-meets-boy plot lines. It got worse as the show went along with no new ideas. "Friends" with nerd jokes. (I live next door to Pasadena and am acquainted with many Caltechers.)
- 24gttghh 8y ago
- buboard 8y agoMike Judge predicted how democracy turns to idiocracy 10 years ago. i wonder what he thinks about the future of tech
- weihanzhang 8y agoAmerica is already there, it's half hull of tarded mud mutts begging the white man to fix everything for them.
- etrautmann 8y agoThis has no place on HN
- rchaud 8y ago> i wonder what he thinks about the future of tech Have you watched SV? Season 1 ends with TechCrunch Disrupt, where founders nervously stammer on stage about how their "mobile-first, local-first social media network" will "make the world a better place".
- buboard 8y agoyeah that's the present. or rather, mo-lo-so is a few years old now
- ocdtrekkie 8y agoAs someone who fits almost all of the boxes for people Big Bang Theory has made fun of, I still enjoy the series immensely, as I have since it started. Sometimes I wonder if it just hits too close to the truth for some people, or if on the opposite end, they are too detached from the sort of people it characterizes and hence don't see where it draws from. Silicon Valley is a very different show, but definitely on solid ground. And it's unique in that it seems quite popular amongst people its blatantly making fun of.
- toyg 8y agoBBT laughs AT nerds, reinforcing stereotypes in non-nerds and reassuring the mainstream about its superiority. SV laughs WITH nerds, satirising the excesses of a culture that is presented as filthy rich and dominant beyond belief. It also deals with the actual wet dreams of the culture in a fairly realistic way. Think about the material that a dim bully could get from BBT (tons), versus what he could get from SV (very little). That’s all the difference.
- dlivingston 8y agoIMHO it doesn't matter who a show laughs at - the essence of comedy is offense. My problem with BBT is that it just isn't funny
- rhino369 8y ago>BBT laughs AT nerds, reinforcing stereotypes in non-nerds and reassuring the mainstream about its superiority. BBT definitely laughs at nerds. But I don't think reassures the mainstream about its superiority. The characters on BBT are depicted as god-tier geniuses that are successful at doing important work. The nerds are the protagonists. SV on the other really sticks it to developers and VC. I don't get a sense the SV writers respect was the valley does at all. SV is just about 20 times funnier though.
- walshemj 8y agoBBT is punching down not up.
- tootie 8y agoI watched a bunch of Halt and Catch Fire. It's trying hard to be an accurate history of the early days of the internet, but at the same time it's a melodrama conveyed by ridiculously good-looking and wildly emotional people.
- derangedHorse 8y agoSometimes I feel like it got out of hand with how emotional they made the characters.
- wwweston 8y agoBBT is a great foil for SV. It's caricature vs satire. BBT is outsiders laughing at the image of a nerd archetype many have in their head. It can be entertaining; it can tell you a lot about their relationship with that archetype. But as with all caricature, the distorted image can be a little ouchy. SV satirizes insider territory with surprising resolution. It can be entertaining; it can tell people a lot about the culture. Where it's ouchy, it's ouchy because the truth can be painful as well as funny.
- derangedHorse 8y agoI don't understand the Big Band Theory hate. Maybe it looks weird and exaggerated to most tech people for people to act like that, but I've definitely seen that type of behavior with the people I've spoken to in academia. It's also a pretty funny show IMO.
- saagarjha 8y agoI mean, he's not really from Silicon Valley, so I guess we should take his viewpoint with a grain of salt ;) > I have friends in Silicon Valley who refuse to watch the show because they think it’s just making fun of them. But yeah, it's good to take a look at satire of yourself once in a while. Often they can tell you stuff that you may have overlooked, and generally they're not too hurtful when doing so.
- corysama 8y agoI love the running joke that the main characters work on fake technobabble, but the background companies (particularly the TechCrunch episode) are babbling about stuff that sounds fake but is real tech. “Making the world a better place through Paxos distributed consensus!”
- saagarjha 8y agoI mean, it would be kind of odd if the show's writers came up with something novel and instead of rushing to patent it decided to make a TV show out of it. Meanwhile, it's OK for the other companies to work on things that already exist–it adds to their run-of-the-mill-ness.
- gkfasdfasdf 8y agoThe "Weissman score" is an actual metric for compression algorithms that was invented for the show: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Weissman_score https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Weissman_score
- elliekelly 8y agoThat hasn't stopped people from trying to make PiedPiper a viable startup though: https://www.wsj.com/articles/actual-silicon-valley-startup-gets-inspiration-from-hbos-silicon-valley-startup-1542391937 https://www.wsj.com/articles/actual-silicon-valley-startup-g...
- geggam 8y agoMy experience in Silicon Valley has me uncomfortably laughing at the show. This startup is laughing at themselves and the valley. It's so absurd that a VC actually funded this it makes me wonder if they aren't laughing too.
- awakeasleep 8y agoA compression algorithm that works well enough to make a P2P Internet practical seems like a ground-breaking technology that is close-to-believable. I challenge any of us to come up with something better or an alternative!
- pier25 8y agoMike Judge, one of the show runners, was in the valley during the 80s so it makes sense that there would be some truth.
- rkho 8y agoDick Costolo and Dan Lyons also worked as consultants for the show.
- imgabe 8y agoKing of the Hill has also resurfaced on Hulu recently after not being available to stream anywhere. Mike Judge has a real talent for nailing essence of a culture.
- wil421 8y agoGlad you made this comment as well. Mike Judge is one of the best at capturing culture and Americana specifically. The voice for Hank was based on some redneck guy who kept calling MTV and complaining about Bevis and Butthead.
- kakarot 8y agoDo you have a citation for that? Hank Hill is ripped straight from Tom Anderson, a character from Beavis and Butthead. AFAIK Tom Anderson appeared on the show very early and the timeline you're suggesting doesn't make sense.
- hnaccy 8y agoHe meant Boomhauer.
- davio 8y agoIt's actually Boomhauer: http://www.ebaumsworld.com/videos/mike-judge-tells-jimmy-kimmel-where-boomhauers-voice-came-from/84022271/ http://www.ebaumsworld.com/videos/mike-judge-tells-jimmy-kim...
- wil421 8y agoAh yes it was Boomhauer. Couldn’t find the video on YouTube. Thanks.
- komali2 8y agoWoah, I had no idea Mike Judge was involved with King of the Hill. Growing up in Texas, I never appreciated how on-point the show was, until I left the state and realized that the subtle culture cues of Texas didn't exist elsewhere, which means that King of the Hill nailed it. I mean, every detail is perfect.
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- felipesoc 8y agoI always like to compare Silicon Valley to The Big Bang Theory. TBBT seems like a parody of the stereotype of the people they are parodying while SV is a true parody. I'm always thinking "haha, that's so true" when watching SV, but never while watching TBBT.
- rchaud 8y agoTBBT is not a "parody". It is your standard-issue broadcast network sitcom about 3 males, 3 females and their friendships as they date and break up with each other, marry each other and have kids. This is a successful premise that has stood for decades in American TV. Friends and How I Met Your Mother followed the same principles almost to a tee. That's how you get a show that runs for 10 seasons in this day and age. Pointing out that TBBT's parody is poor is like saying Will & Grace did not portray a representative picture of gay urbanites.
- InitialLastName 8y agoIt's funny that you compare TBBT to Will & Grace, since they have very different receptions among their subjects. I know lots of gay urbanites who feel well-represented by Will & Grace. I know lots of people in the "trad nerd" set, but none of them see The Big Bang Theory and say "yep, that's me".
- jpm_sd 8y agoThis is a pretty great article on the same subject from the New Yorker in 2016. https://www.newyorker.com/culture/culture-desk/how-silicon-valley-nails-silicon-valley https://www.newyorker.com/culture/culture-desk/how-silicon-v... My favorite part: >>> During one visit to Google’s headquarters, in Mountain View, about six writers sat in a conference room with Astro Teller, the head of GoogleX, who wore a midi ring and kept his long hair in a ponytail. “Most of our research meetings are fun, but this one was uncomfortable,” Kemper told me. GoogleX is the company’s “moonshot factory,” devoted to projects, such as self-driving cars, that are difficult to build but might have monumental impact. Hooli, a multibillion-dollar company on “Silicon Valley,” bears a singular resemblance to Google. (The Google founder Larry Page, in Fortune: “We’d like to have a bigger impact on the world by doing more things.” Hooli’s C.E.O., in season two: “I don’t want to live in a world where someone makes the world a better place better than we do.”) The previous season, Hooli had launched HooliXYZ, its own “moonshot factory,” whose experiments were slapstick absurdities: monkeys who use bionic arms to masturbate; powerful cannons for launching potatoes across a room. “He claimed he hadn’t seen the show, and then he referred many times to specific things that had happened on the show,” Kemper said. “His message was, ‘We don’t do stupid things here. We do things that actually are going to change the world, whether you choose to make fun of that or not.’ ” (Teller could not be reached for comment.) 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. He wobbled to the door in silence. “Then there was this awkward moment of him fumbling with his I.D. badge, trying to get the door to open,” Kemper said. “It felt like it lasted an hour. We were all trying not to laugh. Even while it was happening, I knew we were all thinking the same thing: Can we use this?” In the end, the joke was deemed “too hacky to use on the show.”
- ng12 8y agoI always describe Silicon Valley (the show) as being solidly in the Uncanny Valley (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Uncanny_valley https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Uncanny_valley). It's humorous and absurd, but at the same time so close to reality it's unsettling.
- polartx 8y agoA couple years ago I found myself at a user conference party for the funded SaaS company I worked for. The concert was complete with open cocktail bar, Cirque du Soleil aerial performers, and (you guessed it), Flo-Rida. For a while I couldn't decide if it was life imitating art, or a tongue-in-cheek nod to the stereotype we were seen as. But it wasn't the latter, the founder/president wasn't that self-aware.
- thrav 8y agoFlo-rida has just been smart about capitalizing on that easy valley money. I’ve been to several parties where he performs and gotten on stage with him during Dreamforce.
- dangerboysteve 8y agomaybe easy money but I'm sure he's all about the networking and trying to get into oppertunities to invest in.
- joejerryronnie 8y agoHe’s probably receiving equity in lieu of cash payment for his services.
- screye 8y agoFlo-Rida performed at NIPS. The top academic ML conference. I can't imagine who thought that the community of some of the world's biggest nerds wanted to listen to Flo-Rida !?
- Apocryphon 8y agoIt’s pretty crazy how the real SV has been obligingly giving the real show new material since it first debuted, with ever-increasing excess, quixotic ventures in search of markets, worsening scandals, and externalities everywhere!
- ip26 8y agoThere were also several moments the real show gave the real SV new material.
- Brimstone 8y agoI believe that some of the genius of the show has to go to Dan Lyons as well. He worked at HubSpot for a stint and wrote a book about it called "Disrupted" (https://www.amazon.com/Disrupted-My-Misadventure-Start-Up-Bubble/dp/0316306096 https://www.amazon.com/Disrupted-My-Misadventure-Start-Up-Bu...). Really funny, in a sad way.
- rkho 8y agoI read through this book in a few hours and really couldn't put it down
- bambax 8y agoYes, Dan Lyons is hilarious. He had written a book about Jobs called "Options" that was really excellent, and of course he was the author of the Fake Steve Jobs blog. I'm not sure he has a great personality, and went offtrack during the Linux/IBM/SCO fiasco, but man is he funny.
- rst 8y agoHe's got another one out now, "Lab Rats", on how open offices and other trends are making office work miserable. (Not sure there's much on how unpredictable scheduling of retail workers is making their lives even more miserable, but some of the motives of management are at least broadly similar...)
- Andrex 8y agoHe'll always be Fake Steve Jobs to me. His row with TechCrunch's MG Siegler provided some decent entertainment too.
- wingkongex 8y agoDan Lyons, author of "Disrupted," is also on the writing staff for the show. Not quite Silicon Valley but if you read the book, some of the stuff from his time at Hubspot makes it into the show. Judge surrounded himself with a lot of different perspectives on all of this.
- dudul 8y agoI found that the first few seasons (maybe first 2 or 3) did a great job at parodying the Valley. They were truly uncanny to watch for me sometimes, and I don't even live in SF. The past few years, the quality degraded significantly IMO. It mostly turned into "The Office but with developers and geeks!!" - which doesn't make it a bad show, but not as witty and thought provoking. I wonder if it's past the point where it needs to reach a wider audience, just like any other show.
- mav3rick 8y agoThe Office deliberately has a mockumentary style with the characters breaking the "4th wall" in a very believable way. SV doesn't have that and you don't really know the "real" motivation and feelings of a character till the plot unravels. They couldn't be further apart in structure.
- dudul 8y agoI'm talking about the general plots/storylines, not the structure of the show.
- sergiotapia 8y agoDoes the show get any better? I stopped around the time they hacked the phones in that conference, I think season 2? It was a constant the leader fucking up and the gang coming through at the end - over and over and over.
- agoodthrowaway 8y agoIt’s sad that’s all you got out of it. There’s a quite a bit of subtext in the show, particularly if you’re in SV. I often wonder if people outside the valley pick up on the themes or if it’s jusy slapstick to them.
- russellbeattie 8y agoI haven't watched the show much, as I've lived and worked in Silicon Valley for 20+ years and I don't see much besides a superficial resemblance. I saw a bit of an episode where a few 'brogrammers' were making fun of the main character like it was a 'mean girls' high school, and I thought it was ridiculous. Then I saw another bit where one of the characters was threatening a kid for his Adderall prescription and, again, thought it was moronic. I haven't watched much else. I compare the show to Entourage: Amusing to those outside Hollywood, but completely ridiculous to anyone who actually works in the industry.
- notfromhere 8y agoIt's pretty accurate of tech, especially SV.
- saagarjha 8y agoIt's mainly meant to be a reflection of the startup scene. If you're outside of that, you might not be able to see the resemblance.
- otachack 8y agoMike Judge does his homework. Being in the industry myself, he does many other aspects in the show. I recommend you try another episode, such as one that involves the VCs.
- snowwrestler 8y agoAmazing anecdote from a 2016 New Yorker article on the show: > During one visit to Google’s headquarters, in Mountain View, about six writers sat in a conference room with Astro Teller, the head of GoogleX, who wore a midi ring and kept his long hair in a ponytail. “Most of our research meetings are fun, but this one was uncomfortable,” Kemper told me.... > “He claimed he hadn’t seen the show, and then he referred many times to specific things that had happened on the show,” Kemper said. “His message was, ‘We don’t do stupid things here. We do things that actually are going to change the world, whether you choose to make fun of that or not.’ ” (Teller could not be reached for comment.) > 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. He wobbled to the door in silence. “Then there was this awkward moment of him fumbling with his I.D. badge, trying to get the door to open,” Kemper said. “It felt like it lasted an hour. We were all trying not to laugh. Even while it was happening, I knew we were all thinking the same thing: Can we use this?” In the end, the joke was deemed “too hacky to use on the show.” https://www.newyorker.com/culture/culture-desk/how-silicon-valley-nails-silicon-valley https://www.newyorker.com/culture/culture-desk/how-silicon-v...
- ForHackernews 8y agoNew Yorker, not NYTimes article.
- snowwrestler 8y agoFixed! Thank you
- throw7 8y agoReminds me of Steven Tyler reacting to Spinal Tap: Tyler expounded on his reaction in a rare Library of Congress interview made public back in 2012. "That movie bummed me out," he said, "because I thought, 'How dare they? That's all real, and they're mocking it.'" To be fair, Silicon Valley (the show) never interested me... kinda found it to be boring. But it _is_ hilarious when you run into these art imitates life imitates art things.
- danans 8y agoLove the show partly for how deeply researched its identity and culturally driven jokes are. Here are a few: Erlich passing Dinesh off as Latino to get a deal on a graffiti logo design: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=hSzmVFF58Mo https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=hSzmVFF58Mo Dinesh recounting to a puzzled Gilfolye about how he was a "cool" kid back in Pakistan, and why: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=qKz0M6SmQ8c https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=qKz0M6SmQ8c The latter one, in particular, implies that the writers had a deeper than average understanding of the different youth cultures of the US and South Asian cultures at a particular time in history.
- toyg 8y agoThat’s Kumail Nanjani’s actual experience being used. If you listen to his early material, on podcasts like Harmontown or standup, there are a lot of similar jokes about his youth.
- danans 8y agoMakes sense. As someone who experienced both the Gilfoyle and Dinesh cultural perspectives, the joke really made me laugh.
- screye 8y agoThey ring true. Some moments don't even have to exaggerated to be funny. That is exactly how being "cool" works in parts of India, and just the fact is enough to make a person from the west crack up. Dinesh is one of the few nerdy Indian stereotypes that I do not mind. All the others seem like caricatures and generalizations of South Asians. Dinesh on the other hand, could be sitting right across my table, coding.... If The Big Short is considered a great "documentary" for the 2008 crisis, then SV does even better for the Valley.
- danans 8y ago> That is exactly how being "cool" works in parts of India, and just the fact is enough to make a person from the west crack up. Indeed. In the context of the show, and American culture, it was Dinesh's perspective that stood out as seeming odd or unique. But I wonder if the post-1950s American/Hollywood understanding of "cool" - the glorification of rebel/outcaste that Gilfoyle's personality represents - is itself really the anomaly on the global scale. I'd imagine many/most parts of the world don't develop a romantic cultural trope around the underdog, or the person who doesn't fit in with the mainstream. But I'd be interested to learn otherwise.
- blimey74 8y agoIf you like Silicon Valley check out The IT Crowd, also equally hilarious take on the world of IT.
- rchaud 8y agoAside from the completely overused line "Hello IT, have you tried turning it off and turning it back on again?", the show has almost nothing to do with IT. Apart from a couple of IT-related plotlines, most of the episodes take place outside their office.
- ENGNR 8y agoMoss is a great nerd though and a lot of the jokes are aimed at nerds. Better than the relatively insulting big bang theory
- humanrebar 8y ago> ...the show has almost nothing to do with IT. "The Internet" device. All the tech illiterate coworkers. Jen's imposter syndrome. Moss's on-the-spectrum reactions. Online dating when it was still nerdy. Novelty websites. Viral cultural events. But it wasn't exclusively geek humor. There were broader episodes involving Jen's and Roy's romantic lives too.
- VikingCoder 8y agoSilicon Valley The Internship The Circle It's possible to get a somewhat accurate view from watching these, but you have to know which parts to completely ignore. I kind of wish there were "this is accurate" edits of those shows and movies.
- faizshah 8y agoAny opinions on Startup by Doree Shafrir? I am about to pick it up from the library for this weekend.
- swampthinker 8y agoWired has a fun series where a professional watches scenes from a genre about their industry, then reviews their accuracy. https://youtu.be/vGOL7ZvuGMc https://youtu.be/vGOL7ZvuGMc
- Apocryphon 8y agoThere's also the short-lived Betas, on Amazon Video. It wasn't as good as HBO's show is (the characters are far more grating), yet the younger and scrappier milieu feels like it captures the youth-obsessed, juvenile segment of startup culture better. And it's also based in San Francisco, unlike the South Bay-centered Silicon Valley.
- pkaye 8y agoSilicon Valley is more than just Web 2.0 companies. If you went to an average ASIC company I doubt it would this crazy.
- esmi 8y agoMaybe not today. But we’ve had our moments. https://youtu.be/-P28LKWTzrI https://youtu.be/-P28LKWTzrI
- Nuance 8y agoI wonder what Bill Gates thinks of the character Jack Barker.
- idontpost 8y agoI thought he was more a send-up of Ballmer than Gates, although that might just be the physical resemblance.
- dmschulman 8y agoHe is a Steve Ballmer sendup, but Gates and Ballmer worked closely for many years at Microsoft and had many fundamental disagreements about the direction the company should take. Ballmer refocused Microsoft from software to hardware when he became CEO (hence "The Box" joke on the show). Ballmer himself probably doesn't like the caricature (he's a bit of an internet darling, isn't he? https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=I14b-C67EXY https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=I14b-C67EXY), but would someone who worked with Ballmer find it accurate? Likely. Not to mention, Gates wrote the article about Silicon Valley linked in this thread.
- nathan_f77 8y ago> Somebody gets an idea almost right, but not quite, and their business fails; then someone else does it just a little bit better and they are viewed as a genius for the rest of their life. I'm still thinking about this comment about Fieldbook shutting down [1], and the "What Happened at Fieldbook" [2] article: > In contrast, our closest competitor, Airtable, seems to be getting more traction. Was really sad to read that. [1] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=18461395 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=18461395 [2] https://medium.com/the-fieldbook-blog/what-happened-at-fieldbook-d70bf25b3968 https://medium.com/the-fieldbook-blog/what-happened-at-field...
- Aeolun 8y agoI was thinking about the same thing. Probably because of recent news about Airtable.
- avinium 8y agoRead the same article yesterday, which got me thinking. I'm not familiar with Fieldbook, but I do wonder if they weren't as savvy as Airtable when it came to sales & finance strategy. Products alone rarely make a business. It's a perfectly viable strategy to keep forging ahead at a loss while you slowly gain market share. You obviously need to show revenue growth (sales savvy) to keep the funding coming through (finance savvy). I'm definitely guilty of getting all caught up in product and neglecting the business side of things.
- Aeolun 8y agoI feel like technically Fieldbook had pretty much everything that they needed to compete with Airtable. Airtable probably does a better job of attracting customers with their extensive collection of premade content though. But I cannot get over the ‘candy’ look in airtable.
- PopeDotNinja 8y agoHBO's Silicon Valley isn't a comdedy, it's a documentary. I've met archetype on that show, and have been a couple of them myself.
- coleifer 8y agoThis well-written article has been discussed before, but I figured it was worth posting. It's a bit more in the "black humor" vein than Silicon Valley, but it also just nails the real SV vibe: https://nplusonemag.com/issue-25/on-the-fringe/uncanny-valley/ https://nplusonemag.com/issue-25/on-the-fringe/uncanny-valle...
- smsm42 8y agoI love the show, but there's a lot of things that Silicon Valley is that it does not cover. It's not the fault of the show - it probably would be much worse if it did. But some aspects of SV - like how much it is integrated into the big politics and yet how much they try to downplay it and make it look like their behemoth companies are just young and agile rebels playing this new Internet thing, as if it were the early 90s... Or how monocultural and group-thinky many places are, and how office politics often becomes more important than tech (but don't tell this to anyone, we're not like those old industries!) SV series kinda touches on this, but only lightly, mostly concentrating on things around tech. It probably makes for a much better show.
- waivek 8y agoThey did do an episode on the monocultural aspect in the latest season. Richard unintentionally "outs" a guy as being Christian and some of the programmers feel uncomfortable working with a Christian. The guy later pulls Richard aside saying that he wasn't "openly Christian". The whole episode was hilarious.
- smsm42 8y agoOh yes, I forgot about that one.
- humanrebar 8y ago> ...how office politics often becomes more important than tech... Basically all the Hooli scenes are about that. Also just about the entire careers of Big Head, Jack Barker, and Denpok the "spiritual advisor".
- smsm42 8y agoIn Hooli there's one big player - Benson - who is erratic and egomaniacal, and everybody else does what he says. He is a personification of a jerk (I mean, look at his signature!) and serves as a kind of super-villain that is the source of all evil. But usually there's no super-villain, there's just "culture" and everybody is playing by the set of rules that nobody in particular invented.
- dekhn 8y agoI asked my friend if he watched it (I don't) and he said it hit too close to home. I nodded, then he added "... because I'm a consultant for the show, and every year they meet with us and we give them ideas from our jobs and things to put in scenes"
- kaizendad 8y agoThe fact that this is true just makes it hurt more that I am obviously Jared.
- swampthinker 8y agoMy favorite Silicon Valley anecdote: "During the review process once the footage [of Techcrunch Disrupt] was woven in, another editor criticized the crowd shots for not featuring any women and blamed Berg for the oversight. '...Those were real shots of the real place, and we didn't frame women out.The world we're depicting is f---ed up.' said Berg" https://www.google.com/amp/s/amp.businessinsider.com/hbos-silicon-valley-had-diversity-problems-at-techcrunch-disrupt-2016-3 https://www.google.com/amp/s/amp.businessinsider.com/hbos-si... Sorry for the amp link, the main page was broken.
- danaos 8y ago> Sorry for the amp link, the main page was broken. https://www.businessinsider.com/hbos-silicon-valley-had-diversity-problems-at-techcrunch-disrupt-2016-3 https://www.businessinsider.com/hbos-silicon-valley-had-dive...
- scarejunba 8y agoFunny. When I read this the first time, I looked up the writing credits (including/excluding/only guest writers) and heir genders and there was a picture painted there that was quite amusing :) Not at all surprising considering it’s Hollywood, but amusing nonetheless.
- DoreenMichele 8y agoSurprisingly even-handed piece: There's been debate about whether "Silicon Valley" the show should have more diversity than Silicon Valley the place, but Berg argues that a show made for entertainment not meant to be a "social-action wing" or be a force of change - the show is just satirizing the reality that the tech industry itself needs to take care of.
- BurningFrog 8y agoOne thing that mildly annoys me about the show is how white the cast is. At least in my Silicon Valley career, the "cast" around me has been vastly less so.
- stevewilhelm 8y ago"Conjoined Triangles of Success" and "ruinous empathy." Pure genius.
- dmschulman 8y agoI have a copy of the Conjoined Triangles of Success tacked to my office wall. I don't think anyone I work with has keyed in on the fact yet that it's a joke from a TV show. It captures serious business jargon and corporate culture so well that it doesn't read as anything but.
- garmaine 8y agoI find it hits a bit close to home, so much so as to ruin the comedy sometimes... it’d be funny if it weren’t so true, which is depressing. Still watch it, and love it though. And super impressed that a Hollywood production finally understood Northern California. That never happens (see: The Social Network, Hackers, every Steve Jobs movie, etc.)
- cknoxrun 8y agoI would highly suggest checking out Halt and Catch Fire. It's a period piece, but I think it captures the spirit of Northern California. The first 2 seasons are in Texas before they jump ship to San Francisco.
- devmunchies 8y agoditto. Its starts off with a young ex-IBM executive trying to build the first IBM compatible machine and everything that goes with launching the new product. Later seasons go into things like server farms, early gaming, and social networking. really underrated show.
- ticmasta 8y agoI really like the historical/tech story lines but the soap-opera interpersonal relationships wrecked it for me. The whole "broken imperfection" thing often goes to far and really detracts from the story.
- marshray 8y agoYou might like this documentary on the origins of National Semiconductor: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=DCbRZGDV-ws https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=DCbRZGDV-ws
- jjeaff 8y agoI agree. It feels like it's trying to be a film festival movie about a tumultuous relationship and "complicated" hero/heroine that just has the beginning of the personal computer age as a backdrop.
- tnolet 8y agoPeople who enjoy Silicon Valley should read the book Disrupted. The writer went on join the writers at Silicon Valley.
- selimthegrim 8y agoThe Lena easter egg in plain sight was amusing during a few episodes https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lenna https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lenna
- adtac 8y agoI don't think that was a easter egg given that they work on compression. It's a standard test for image compression, after all.
- newnewpdro 8y agoOffice Space, Idiocracy, and Silicon Valley. It's practically a NatGeo series about the USA.
- samstave 8y agoIn 1999 we were working a very long shift waiting for the batch process on the AS/400 to go through and our FTP "edi" trNsfers to Sun to complete (an ftp script written for us by these four hacks, who founded linuxcare after this episode) (sifry, dibona, etc) We decided to go grab a beer and play pool while we waited for this new thing to execute based on this new language sun was having us convert everything to, XML... While at the pool place these girls in lingerie were walking about selling raffle tickets. We asked what they were for. "We are putting ourselves through school and we are selling raffle tickets for the lingerie we are wearing, for $5 a ticket." "I see, where are you ladies going to school" "Oh, we go to silicone valley college..." ---- I wish this was a scene in Silicon Valley... it was ridiculously funny.
- adoago 8y agoPied Piper has the Conjoined Triangles of Success. Asana has... https://wavelength.asana.com/pyramid-clarity-strategic-alignment/ https://wavelength.asana.com/pyramid-clarity-strategic-align...
- adtac 8y agoBill posted this on /r/SiliconValleyHBO: https://old.reddit.com/r/SiliconValleyHBO/comments/9yh7dp/who_wore_it_better/ https://old.reddit.com/r/SiliconValleyHBO/comments/9yh7dp/wh... I like to think he photoshopped it in his spare time lol.
- joshu 8y agoFun fact: I'm in the background of the basketball court scene in Season 4 (and I am a consultant for the show)
- Stratoscope 8y agoSo how does one subscribe to this show without subscribing to HBO? I looked at their website and don't see anything else I would want to watch. I really want to watch Silicon Valley, but that's the only thing HBO offers that I'm interested in. Can I buy just this one show from them?
- thaas53 8y agoJust subscribe to HBO Now from your choice of providers for one month and binge watch all the seasons. Cancel when done and only paid $15.
- Stratoscope 8y agoThanks, I suppose that would work. It would probably take me a few months to watch all the episodes, but if the show is as good as everyone says, it would be worth it.
- rhino369 8y agoShould be on iTunes or Amazon for 3 bucks an episode.
- Stratoscope 8y agoThank you! I should have thought of checking Amazon. I just bought Season 1. It took 10 seconds and cost 10 bucks, and now I can watch them at my leisure. Exactly what I was looking for. :-)
- Symbiote 8y ago> This kind of back-channel relationship—satirists texting casually with the satirized—is a departure from much of comedic history. _Yes, Minister_, which satirizes the British government, supposedly had close access to several people in government, though it was probably careful rather than casual. The clips on Youtube are all distorted, don't bother with them, but find S01E04 "Big Brother".
- davidwitt415 8y agoI don't think BillG quite got the 'Hotdog Not Hotdog' joke..
- jancsika 8y ago> It’s more fun to root for the underdog. Outside of dumb luck, I don't see a plot arc that favors Richard's team at all. Especially when one of the overarching themes is that over the seasons the "underdog" throws friends under the bus, hacks competitors, rents a botnet, lies, commit fraud, and all kinds of other abuses. What's the difference between Richard dumping a gf because she uses spaces and Gavin screwing over Jack because Jack wanted to get dropped off first from the private plane? The only difference I see is that Richard's narcissism doesn't come with the weight of a $100 billion company behind it. Richard's bad behavior comes off as less jarring because almost all of the time he has considerably less power than Gavin. Richard doesn't have a wall of lawyers who he can casually probe about assassinating a foe. Gavin does. Edit: clarification
- Novashi 8y agoYou know, the show continuing well past where the story makes sense is very much in the vein of Silicon Valley. Plot planning be damned.
- Zelphyr 8y agoMaybe it’s longing for byegone days on my part but it feels like the atmosphere of the Valley and tech in general has changed so much so quickly that my head is spinning. It feels, well, not fun anymore a lot of the time. Development by copy-and-paste and gluing other peoples code together to arrive at a half-baked solution instead of exploring the code to try to understand it as a system so the solution you arrive at is the most effective that time and skill permit. Being more infatuated with nerd culture than building something great. (I see this a LOT!) Chasing dollars instead of knowledge. And, don’t get me wrong; it’s ok to want to make money. Even a lot of it. But that should be the icing on the cake of solving real problems. I feel like we used to do this stuff because it was what we loved to do. But now it feels like too many people do it because they want to look cool and/or they want a lot of money. The romance is dying.
- wturner 8y agoDan Lyons, one of the writers of the show recently wrote a new book titled "Lab Rats: How Silicon Valley Made Work Miserable for the Rest of Us ..."
- r00fus 8y agoAs much as other people didn't like it I really loved Fake Steve Jobs.
- pjbk 8y agoJust like the show, many times the fake Steve was more real than the real Steve, and spot on how some things eventually unfolded. Dan is an excellent journalist and a candid visionary. Finished Lab Rats last week, and contrary to Disrupted which was a very enjoyable modern age tragicomedy-autobiography, it hit home very bad and left me with a sense of despair. IMHO it should be an obligatory reading for everyone in tech these days.
- gcmac 8y agoAlso worth reading his book "Disrupted" - the book is every bit as funny and relevant as Silicon Valley
- deleted 8y ago[deleted]
- Zanni 8y agoI loved Dan Lyons fake Steve Job columns, but Disrupted didn't work for me at all. He presented himself as the lone adult in a sea of misfit children, but came across as a clueless and bitter crank. The same (admittedly keen) observations about the corporate culture would have gone down so much better (for me) if he hadn't tried to crammed every page with so much smug superiority.
- dmode 8y agoAs someone living in the bubble, Silicon Valley felt way too real. Does this apply to tech company culture outside of the valley ?
- justifier 8y ago> Even a huge believer in technology like me has to laugh when some character talks about how they’re going to change the world with an app that tells you whether what you’re eating is a hot dog or not. sorry bill but one could argue in a round about way that andrej karpathy did do just that ;P the hot dog identifying app is one of my favourite examples of how spot on the show is here(o) is a question i asked to one of the show's technical consultants whether the choice of 'not hotdog' was a reference to one of karpathy's early demos(i||ii) timanglade> Ha seems like a fun coincidence. (o) https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=14639161 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=14639161 the yt link is now a dead link.. use either of the below (i) https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=u6aEYuemt0M&t=465 https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=u6aEYuemt0M&t=465 ; Title: Deep Learning for Computer Vision (Andrej Karpathy, OpenAI) ; Desc: The talks at the Deep Learning School on September 24/25, 2016 were amazing. I clipped out individual talks from the full live streams and provided links to each below in case that's useful for people who want to watch specific talks several times (like I do). (ii) https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=eyovmAtoUx0&t=5787 https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=eyovmAtoUx0&t=5787 ; timestamped from the full stream; Title: Bay Area Deep Learning School Day 1 at CEMEX auditorium, Stanford ; Desc: Day 1 of Bay Area Deep Learning School featuring speakers Hugo Larochelle, Andrej Karpathy, Richard Socher, Sherry Moore, Ruslan Salakhutdinov and Andrew Ng. ;
- christophilus 8y agoReminds me of this talk by a reporter turned startup employee turned author: https://youtube.com/watch?v=G7vrCpWbmDw https://youtube.com/watch?v=G7vrCpWbmDw One of the funniest things I’ve seen, while also being sad, because it’s so true.
- ibudiallo 8y agoA few months ago I wrote a certain story here and to my surprise I received a call from Dan Lyons, one of the writers of the show. We had long discussions about silicon valley and his new book coming out (I'm featured in it). A few weeks ago he was in LA and we had another long discussion about the show. Silicon Valley is the show most startup founders will refuse to watch. My startup was featured on TechCrunch Disrupt, we were on stage talking about how we will change the world with our product. Then things didn't particularly go as planed. I discovered the show and started watching it shortly after. It was painful to see that they portrayed our exact journey as it happened. Only the show poked fun of the mistakes we were making. I watched it not only as a comedy, but also as a documentary that would predict our fate. It was eye-opening! My favorite part (and most humiliating) was when we pitched our startup to a non-silicon valley investor and she simply replied: "OK, cut the crap. Which website are you scraping?" All my co-founders were offended by the show. I must admit, its painful to watch someone else make fun of the things you put your heart to. But from time to time, someone has to make fun of you or you start to take yourself too seriously. If you are trying to make it in silicon valley, please watch the show. At best, it will help you make your startup more grounded.
- autokad 8y agoThat's some really interesting insights from a founder, thanks! I'm a huge fan of the show, but one thing I would like to point out is that I don't think everything of the show is negative. sometimes it makes me wish I was developing (data science here). my favorite moments of the show is when they overcome some huge challenge (spoiler like with 2 days of the condor)
- pj_mukh 8y ago"show most startup founders will refuse to watch" Hah! Anecdotally, I've had the opposite experience watching the show and running a startup in the valley. Most of my co-founder friends have seen it and see it as a sort of catharsis. "We aren't the only ones, this happens to everyone, so much so, there's a show about it" And then there's the inspirational, "Let's have the team coalesce around a deadline and jam out something that's never been done before", episodes. Also very real.
- dragonwriter 8y agoThe final instance of “Silicon Valley” should be set in italics as a title (or quoted, if HN titles don't allow italics.) (Would presumably be just as true the other way around, but that's not the title of the piece.)
- draw_down 8y agoI don’t watch it. Not because I’m too sensitive; I don’t even live in CA though I do work for a tech company. Rather the bit of it I did watch was just kinda funny, and from what I’ve read it seems to take the most obvious jabs at SV culture. Probably good content for lots of folks, but I just don’t find that very interesting as a mode of critique. I’m up to my elbows every day in the silliness of SV tech, I don’t really need all that to be recapitulated.
- torgian 8y agoI’ve only seen one episode of the show a couple years ago, and I basically found it boring. Keep in mind I’ve never been to Silicon Valley. All the comments here make it sound like a depressing place to be
- orarbel1 8y agoEverything you need to know about how Silicon Valley funding works in a little over a minute https://youtu.be/BzAdXyPYKQo https://youtu.be/BzAdXyPYKQo
- cutler 8y agoYou might also like "Nathan Barley (2005)" - a savage British TV parody of the mid-2000s startup scene in Shoreditch, London. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Rqfkuc5mawg&list=PLTM-Dbun10Dp86u1TzEKkRkPNqvb0Qt2k https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Rqfkuc5mawg&list=PLTM-Dbun10...
- nmca 8y agoI'd second this recommendation - it's incredible.
- sAbakumoff 8y agoAlso, read "Disrupted: My Misadventure in the Start Up Bubble" that was written by one of the SV script authors.
- zby 8y agoWhat is the best way to watch it online? I have bought Netflix subscription - but I am dissapointed now - the library of historic films available for me (in Poland) is very small and the current productions are kind of mechanistic. And no SV in Netflix.
- jiveturkey 8y agoneeds 2016 tag.