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Silicon Valley Is Not a Fad
- quickthrower2 7y ago"You read a lot. We like that." meh!
- gnicholas 7y ago> In the late two-thousands, at a party in the Mission District Do people refer to the first decade of this century as "the two thousands"?
- unstatusthequo 7y agoBetter than "the naughts" or "the dub dubs" is it not? What do you call it?
- learc83 7y agoMy personal favorite is "the noughties".
- twic 7y agoThis is the only one i've heard in normal use.
- etrautmann 7y agoNever heard the dub dubs but I’ll start using that immediately
- theandrewbailey 7y agoGoes well with Dubya. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_nicknames_of_Presidents_of_the_United_States#George_W._Bush https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_nicknames_of_President...
- tspike 7y agoI do
- RandomBacon 7y agoIt's the best term I've seen for it so far. What term do you use?
- gnicholas 7y agoI've seen "aughts" used and understood that fine. When I read this, I thought it referred to the entire century.
- parrellel 7y agoDespite many people's best efforts "the oughts" never quite caught on like they did turn of last century.
- cgriswald 7y agoIt’s “aughts”, which is a term for zero, but rarely used outside certain contexts. I prefer it, but it’s not surprising it didn’t catch on. Otherwise I greatly prefer “the early 2000s”. It’s not very precise, but it’s more precise than “the 2000’s” which can include the year 2999.
- parrellel 7y agoAh, spelling, old foe. What contexts do you generally see it used in, out of curiosity? I'm assuming it still appears in places besides revivals of "The Music Man"
- cgriswald 7y agoThis is the first thing that comes to mind: https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/.30-06_Springfield https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/.30-06_Springfield I’ve only ever heard this pronounced thirty aught-six.
- geggam 7y agoand for the sophisticated redneck https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/.25-06_Remington https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/.25-06_Remington
- mieseratte 7y agoAlso double-aught buckshot.
- dasil003 7y agoThat'll sort it itself out over the coming decades; but the other interesting one to me is that a sizeable group (majority?) of people are still saying "two thousand nineteen" instead of "twenty nineteen". I'm pretty sure I stopped using the former shortly after 2009 ended. I wonder if that'll stick for the whole century. In the other language I speak fluently (Portuguese) there never was an abbreviation, it was always the full "one thousand nine hundred ninety" as opposed to "nineteen ninety". In that case "two thousand" is already an improvement, but for some reason it bothers me in English.
- chrisco255 7y agoPersonally excited to enter the twenties so we can refer to decades by standard nomenclature again!
- cylinder 7y agoWow I hadn't thought about that. I also think most people haven't yet realised this is the last year of the current decade!
- falsedan 7y agowait what happened to March-Dec of 2019? Since there was no 0 AD, we count decades from 1 - 10, not 0 - 9. yes that's stupid
- acheron 7y agoNo. Nobody ever does that. We count centuries that way, because we say "1st century", "20th century", "21st century". (That is, "20th century AD".) Ordinal numbers, based on the year 1 AD. Nobody says "178th decade", or "213th decade". Decades are cardinal numbers. Nobody starts "the decade" in the 1 year.
- falsedan 7y ago> Nobody start "the decade" in the 1 year. wow rude, I do. I think the 60s started 1961-01-01 and understand that people usually mean "the years that give a quotient of 196 when divided by 10". I understand that we use ordinals to refer to centuries, also I understand how that's unrelated to which specific years are in a decade/century/millennium fun fact the Australian constitution came into force on the 1st of January, 1901, aligning with the starting boundary of the 20th century.
- cylinder 7y agoSo if someone mentioned something nice happening in 1960 you'd say "yeah the Fifties were great!" ?
- falsedan 7y agotwo thousand and X (200x) here
- Izkata 7y agoEither that, or occasionally I just roll "nineteen-nineties" into "twenty-hundreds" or "twenty-ohs".
- 11thEarlOfMar 7y agoYeah, I recently watch a German-produced special about Silicon Valley that concluded Google engineers learn how to network by attending Burning Man. [0] It's obvious to identify the product of Silicon Valley companies because they generally are marketed globally. But it's really hard to convey what it's like to live and work here. Generally, it's nothing like you might imagine. The architecture is mundane, the weather is great, the traffic stifling. That can describe many places, so then you have to talk about housing costing more than anywhere in the world (at this scale), and $12,000 bottles of Cognac at Costco. In the end, it's the people who live here. Generally well paid, disproportionately wealthy (but not nearly everyone), probably from another country, not here to show off what they have, but rather, what they can achieve. [0] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=YQy0ZCx3UCY https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=YQy0ZCx3UCY
- 01100011 7y ago> The architecture is mundane I take issue with this. For most of my career I worked in a standard office building. False ceiling tiles, cubicles, rectangular concrete 'tilt and pour'. It served the job well. It was relatively quiet, comfortable, intimate and fostered my productivity. Now I work in an architectural masterpiece of modern green engineering. It is loud, impersonal, distracting, and not at all conducive to actually getting work done. It's like the people who designed the building hated engineers and typical engineering personalities and set out to design a building to torture them. Apple has a similar problem. Apple's senior vice-president of hardware technologies Johny Srouji refused to move his team into their new, piece of shit exercise in architectural masturbation.
- AstralStorm 7y agoThe main thing to blame is open plan... Read: cheaping out on walls. This includes undamped glass walls and doors.
- Cthulhu_ 7y agoAnd I just can't figure out if it actually IS cheaper - I mean you're dealing with interior architects after all, as well as the glass walls which can't be cheap either. Plus, personnel costs (especially in Silicon Valley) are a multiple of floor space, so I can't understand that argument either. But then, so far, I've never had someone who calls the shots on the open office model go public on why they went for it. I mean the cynic in me thinks it's about cutting costs (but then why do they have developers in SV instead of outsourcing it?) or showing off (open offices look good on pictures / when the manager walks around in it).
- ralph84 7y agoI just wish finance would take off again so all the mercenaries looking for a quick buck but with no personal affinity for technology would have somewhere else to go.
- BadassFractal 7y agoWhen is this sentiment justified and when is it just gatekeeping?
- pm90 7y agoLook at the cohorts of Product Managers, Security "Specialists" (Disclosure: they're not engineers, experts, its a totally made up title), Certified Buzzy Buzzwordingtons etc. Its not very hard to see, as the OP pithely pointed out, that Tech seems to be the only place today where its possible to strike gold.
- jayd16 7y agoI thought that's why we invented Bitcoin.
- 0db532a0 7y agoRalph is still clutching onto the idea that there is any sort of objective meaning in life. The idea of mercenaries and men who pursue good money for good money’s sake greatly challenges the coping mechanisms which he has built to justify his objectively meaningless existence with his relatively underpaying startup job where he gets to play around with self-testing NoSQL-Elasticsearch-Kubernetes-Golang-Elixir-Node.FU spaceships all day.
- axaxs 7y agoI don't mean to insult a PHD, but this piece reads like a middle school persuasion piece. It's pure 'why my city is great', with little objective evidence.
- avinium 7y agoA PhD is a piece of paper, not something that elevates the holder to the position of a deity. I don't think it should even be mentioned as something that might temper your criticism. (General comment only, I haven't actually read the article yet).
- geggam 7y agoPhD's who do silly things deserve more criticism because they are supposed to know better, and its funny watching their reaction that you dare.
- opsiprogram 7y agoYea but that's okay right... people can write that. It's actually probably more effective than an "objective" piece. It's persuasive because the author's clearly loves the vibe, and describes it in a weirdly beautiful way. Which got me to buy into it, as a software developer myself. And the contrast with how the valley is portrayed normally is refreshing. (FD I don't live there, but I did really like this piece.)
- FartyMcFarter 7y agoExactly what I would expect from a lot of the crowd who flaunts their PhD title as part of their name.
- sumanthvepa 7y agoSilicon Valley is not a fad, but not quite a place either. As the author describes it, the drab office complexes are not quite what makes Silicon Valley what it is. In my opinion, a person living half a world away, Silicon Valley is a collective state of mind in a place with the right resources and context. It has talent, capital, and the infrastructure, both physical and intangible. It has free markets, great universities, rule of law, safety, democracy, and most importantly an acceptance of a certain kind of risk taking. This combination is surprisingly hard to recreate. As an Indian living half a planet away, I look upon the place with a mixture of admiration, awe and envy.
- ido 7y agoIt has free markets, great universities, rule of law, safety, democracy, and most importantly an acceptance of a certain kind of risk taking. This combination is surprisingly hard to recreate. These all exist to a large extent in a lot of major (and not so major!) western cities. Not that unique.
- AstralStorm 7y agoThe unique thing here is the same thing that is unique in Shenzhen in China - how much of everything is packed close together reducing externalities and improving communication. If the is business in the category, you're liable to find it in the SV, even more likely to find it in the Chinese city.
- navigatesol 7y ago>If the[re] is business in the category, you're liable to find it in the SV This in an interesting take. My understanding is that SV caters to a very particular business: software. Sure that business is growing (eating the world), but Silicon Valley doesn't strike me as "all business friendly", especially when everyone is trying to grow at all costs, while the rest of the country (and world) operates on small, sustainable businesses.
- deleted 7y ago[deleted]
- throwaway713 7y agoI have always been interested in computers and programming since I was little and made it a goal to move to Silicon Valley when I graduated from high school 11 years ago. Now that I’m here and working at my dream job, it’s funny how “mundane” it is (in a good, engineering sort of way). Wake up, go to work, program and talk about technical things, then go home. Repeat the next day. My day to day life is very unlike the TV show this place is based on (although that craziness definitely exists around here for those looking for it, but it’s not difficult to avoid). Sometimes it’s hard to believe this is the tech capital of the world because the infrastructure is just so ordinary and suburban looking. Weirdly enough, I think my favorite thing about living here is the vegetation. The quirky trees, the rolling hills, and the funky plants are just so different than what you find in the rest of the U.S. My favorite pastime is just driving around here on the weekend looking at it all.
- mattnewport 7y ago> My day to day life is very unlike the TV show this place is based on I always thought the show Silicon Valley was based on the place but your way round actually explains a lot.
- jayd16 7y agoIt's based on real life like Dilbert is based on real life.
- westoque 7y agoIt's not really the infrastructure that makes it Silicon Valley. In my 15 years of living here, it's the people. The concentration of tech companies here and talent is astounding! This is the only place where every week there's an interesting meetup with whatever tech of your choosing, be it Rails, Clojure or with management, with how to design/UX, and agile. This is the only place where a cafe is filled with tech people talking about their startups, pitch, their stack, etc. I have been to many places including different tech metropolitans, like Berlin, but there's still nothing quite like Silicon Valley in terms of what I said above. Now, my only gripe is that the housing market is crazy. It's funny how only the tech crowd get to afford to live here. I've seen families bunch together just to afford rent.
- mastazi 7y agoSuggested reading: a long-form article about the history of Silicon Valley seen through the lives of the author's own family (Kim-Mai Cutler, 2014): https://techcrunch.com/2014/01/04/silicon-valley-lost-and-found/ https://techcrunch.com/2014/01/04/silicon-valley-lost-and-fo...
- freddref 7y agoThe last paragraph includes this about Y Combinator: "in my opinion it’s also incubated a lot of nonsense." and "tends to produce great innovation with a generous pinch of bullshit." Is there some backstory missing here?
- dnautics 7y agobiased, since I know the author. Think it's a rather mediocre piece, but I liked this quip a lot: "It's easy to say silicon valley is full of 'tech bros' if that's the cohort you surround yourself with"
- navigatesol 7y ago>It's easy to say silicon valley is full of 'tech bros' if that's the cohort you surround yourself with Everyone hates tech bros, but I don't think tech bros know they're tech bros.
- burger_moon 7y agoSilicon Valley where diversity and inclusion is welcomed, unless you look like someone we don't like, then we hate you, and get out.
- networkimprov 7y agoThere's another characteristic that's apparent to only some of us who live here, but many of those who don't... How out of touch many here are with the rest of the nation's and world's concerns, aspirations, feelings, values, and needs. For example, we now know that the Internet has a corrupting influence on civil society that's stronger than its capacity to uplift it.
- Judgmentality 7y ago> For example, we now know that the Internet has a corrupting influence on civil society that's stronger than its capacity to uplift it. You believe the Internet is a net negative for society? I think it's easily one of the greatest inventions in all of history.
- ido 7y agoI think it's all too easy to take the positive aspects for granted.
- TheOtherHobbes 7y ago...while ignoring the negative aspects and pretending they don't matter. But it's not really the Internet as an abstract mechanism, it's the fact that the Internet is a very effective tool for algorithmically propagating and enforcing political, social, and economic conformity - camouflaged as this freewheeling anarchic thing that will save us all from exactly the things it's promoting.
- lotsofpulp 7y agoPeople want conformity, and they rewarded the vendors who gave it to them, no one forced it upon them. People choose to gravitate towards like minded people, and choose to consume things most other people like. The only reason it didn’t happen before on such a scale was that it wasn’t as economical. The positive of being able to communicate with anyone at any time and/or lookup information almost instantaneously are worth the downsides (which we need to collectively fight against) in my opinion. It’s like any other tool, it’s made life a hell of a lot easier, but you can also cause damage with it, but that’s up to the person.
- Apocryphon 7y agoCheery optimism and pride in a place are all well and good. This article feels like it's from a different time, perhaps a decade before. Certainly, there has been a lot of negative press of Silicon Valley in recent years. Much of that has been well-deserved. For years, engineers have pretended to be above the petty tribalism of politics (even as we bikeshedded and fought our editor holy wars), only for the revelations of the last few years of SV lobbying and collusion with the surveillance state to come out. Of course, this article is more about SV as a cultural place and ideal, and not a political force, more about Manhattan than Wall Street. But it still brushes off high rents as normal, something ever-present. Meanwhile, a San Jose city councilman and his family are evicted because of high rents: https://sanjosespotlight.com/san-jose-housing-crisis-councilmember-raul-peralez-evicted-from-his-home/ https://sanjosespotlight.com/san-jose-housing-crisis-council... I grew up in San Jose. (I remember when we were the capital of Silicon Valley, not San Francisco.) We now live in a very different Bay Area from that of the irrationally exuberant '90s. I think positive profiles of SV have to be tempered by realistic coverage of the many, many problems this place is experiencing. At the very least, acknowledgement of these problems- and not breezy dismissal- can spur change to make things better. So we can build a Silicon Valley worthy of these utopian fantasies.
- rdiddly 7y agoThere are tons of those articles though. This one was refreshingly detached from all that.
- Apocryphon 7y agoWhich makes it somewhat anachronistic, no? Imagine an article that cheerleads the traditional college experience at all cost. Might've been fine fifteen years ago, now it would sound dated in the era of crushing student debt.
- rdiddly 7y agoNot so much anachronistic as trans-chronistic, if there's such a thing. All he's doing is focusing less on what has changed, and more on what has stayed the same over time. I'm sure having grown up there, you can probably spot some of the same things. But I would also wager that it's the changes that tend to jump to the front of your mind, because they're the more noticeable and obvious part - they're intrusive, annoying, costly, and even traumatic for some. Still I appreciated two ideas buried in this: One, that he is (maybe slyly) pointing out that this bubble is a lot like the last bubble. And two, that for every Jobs who shows up hell-bent on a meteoric rise (and who either succeeds or crashes spectacularly) there are always plenty of Wozniaks quietly and steadily moving the actual work along. I would tend to agree that higher ed seems to be in a dangerous upheaval or crisis. For SV I don't see it... not yet anyway. But I'm watching from afar so whadda I know? Either way, I wouldn't worry too much about the effects though... either of this piece or all the ones rightly pointing out the downsides. Seems like (maybe sadly) they tend to have no effect either way.
- sureaboutthis 7y agoI've always said that Silicon Valley is the Hollywood of the tech industry. When one wants to make a film in Hollywood, and the script calls for a special piece of equipment or prop that's never been made before, one can walk down the street and find three people who can make one for you in an hour because Hollywood is where the movie people congregate. The same is true for the Valley.
- bentossell 7y ago“Y Combinator, like Silicon Valley itself, tends to produce great innovation with a generous pinch of bullshit.” Interesting way to round off the post!
- coleifer 7y agoNice read, thoughtful. Another thoughtful read, from the other side: https://nplusonemag.com/issue-25/on-the-fringe/uncanny-valley/ https://nplusonemag.com/issue-25/on-the-fringe/uncanny-valle...
- dblock 7y agoThis article makes me sad. While not a fad, Silicon Valley is the ultimate manifestation of a place where Americans and contagiously the rest of tech workers value work over life.
- purplezooey 7y agoIf we could put a dent in the housing thing, it would be a wonderful place. ATM we are helpless before it.
- erikpukinskis 7y agoThe prime question for me, as it relates to real estate, is: "Will the majority of Silicon Valley's economic activity ever move to virtual locations?" I.e., will over half of the meetings at Facebook, Google, etc, ever happen in a game world, with participants logging in with HMDs? It's hard to make a conclusive prediction, but I have an extremely difficult time justifying a "NO" with even 51/49 odds. I would put the odds at least at 10/1 "YES" but again that's pure speculation. The only real justification for a strong "NO" is something like "It has been tried before with other telecom tech and it didn't work" but we don't even had access gaze tracking yet, which science shows is crucial for language. We seem assured to have a blistering release of body tracking tech over the next 10 years, and the claim "none of it will change teleconferencing materially" seems impossible to justify. The counterclaim, "teleconferencing will hit feature parity with in-person meeting for 90% of corporate interactions within 10 years" to me is very easy to entertain. And if the counterclaim is true, what does that mean for Bay Area real estate? I can't justify a million dollar mortgage if there's even a 50/50 change of this outcome. HMD teleconferencing vs. meetings in conference rooms seems like a classic disruptive technology situation. Right now HMDs are unacceptably poor in comparison. But they have key advantages the incumbent tech (in-person meetings) can never match: no commute, exponentially more and cheaper housing options, muting, easier and better access to data and visualization in the meeting space, faster transition between workstation and meeting, can include people on other continents, infinite meeting spaces available at all times, etc. This seems to me the biggest looming change to Bay Area culture, period. I am surprised it's not more discussed.
- thorwasdfasdf 7y agoand a lot of it has to do with people's willingness to use those remote methods, and the culture at those companies. Right now there's a lot of young people working in tech that don't have much incentive to be remote. But, in the coming decades, some of them will want families of their own. At that point a desire to move out of the bay area may overcome their resistance to working remotely.