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One thing I've noticed over my career is that over the past 20 years the cultural gap between typical SV "tech employee" and typical SV "tech leader/founder" ha

One thing I've noticed over my career is that over the past 20 years the cultural gap between typical SV "tech employee" and typical SV "tech leader/founder" has widened dramatically. In my opinion there are a few reasons for this. As the industry has matured, it has moved out of the earlier phase where to a certain extent everyone was a bit of a pioneer. As the industry expanded, it mainstreamed especially amongst employees of bigtech which are now basically blue-chips like the GE and GM of old and now employ all kinds of people. One consequence of this, I think, is that it is increasingly the case that the employees of a business and the leaders of that business don't really understand each other. Without moralizing either side, it is the case that there is a lot of misapprehension regarding what makes the other side tick. I'm not sure what the solution to this is, but absent one we may see conflict in the form of both labor organization (from the workers) as well as more selective hiring (from the bosses).

dsfyu404ed 4y ago
>One thing I've noticed over my career is that over the past 20 years the cultural gap between typical SV "tech employee" and typical SV "tech leader/founder" has widened dramatically. The gap between the average white collar worker and the average blue collar worker seems to have grown as fast if not faster, especially after 08.
- ryandrake 4y ago
  No way it's grown faster. A "spoiled" tech worker who makes even as much as $300K has a lot more in common with a blue collar worker making $30K than he has with an executive making $300M. We're talking 3 orders of magnitude vs. 1. That executive has accumulated generational wealth after working one month. Their lifestyle is outrageously bananas-different than even the highest-paid software developer. We're talking dozens of homes, private jets, chauffeurs, staff that do everything, megawealth that grows in perpetuity without them even doing anything. They can travel anywhere they want on earth on a whim and have anyone in government (sometimes up to and including heads of state) on the phone in minutes. Their children, grandchildren, and grandchildren's grandchildren will never have to work a day in their lives. Meanwhile, the difference between a tech worker and a struggling teacher is that one is 50 missed paychecks away from insolvency, and the other is 2 missed paychecks away from insolvency. It's not even comparable.
  - dsfyu404ed 4y ago
    We're talking about the cultural gap here. Not the money gap.
    - ryandrake 4y ago
      I'm a spoiled tech worker, and I feel I have much more in common culturally with a less well-off guy who works on their own car, shops for their own groceries, and carefully budgets every dollar they earn so their checks don't bounce (which I do, too). More culturally than I have in common with someone who has three nannies for their kids, summers in the Hamptons, takes Luge lessons in the Alps, and is currently deciding whether to buy a fifth home in New Zealand or bankroll their own B-movie.
causalmodels 4y ago
Something that I think is often overlooked when talking about this is a large chunk of tech labor are millennials. These people are now in their thirties or early 40s. Many now have families and want different things from work than they did in their 20s. This is totally natural but it does create new tensions.
- zeroonetwothree 4y ago
  People aren't born in buckets, it's a continuous process. 10 years ago there were many 30/40 year olds in tech as well. Indeed if you look at the average age it's gone down, if anything, so there should be fewer now.
- pnathan 4y ago
  the thinkpieces about how Millenials need to treat Gen Z are starting to flow already, ha. Retreads of what was written about millenials. I remember.
rr888 4y ago
I think in the old days people realized a startup had to sell real products and have real revenue and profits, your stock would only be worth anything at the IPO if the company had solid cashflow. Now there are so many tech companies that will never make any money but somehow are worth millions or billions, most tech workers really dont care about company profits because it doesn't affect them.
robocat 4y ago
> that over the past 20 years the cultural gap between typical SV "tech employee" and typical SV "tech leader/founder" has widened dramatically Maybe something to do with the change in the type of people wanting to work in tech - it used to be geeks and now it is a high status job and attracts status/money seekers. Great discussion on “The cult of conformity in Silicon Valley” https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ia7IKW0yuG0 https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ia7IKW0yuG0 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=34668098 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=34668098 2000’s - “the Dark Ages you and I went to school in the early and mid 2000s” - “it's probably hard for us to explain to a current college kid how uncool Tech was” - “I was a Yale 05 graduate and in my graduating year Yale graduated 10 CS majors in a class of 1200 kids” - “status seeking thing that a gunner should want to go after:” Finance, Consulting, Law, or Medicine (not startups, not tech) 2020’s - “now things have changed you know fast forward um a little less than 20 years and Tech is now attracting conformists” - “college kids today obsess with getting jobs at Facebook and Google. They study how they interview just as much as people study how to interview how to get into Goldman Sachs” - “they want the status they want the money that used to be associated with these Finance or professional jobs: bam, they're all now associated with big Tech” - “at first you see the explosion of CS majors in school and I think you would think to yourself oh man that means that there are a lot more people who are interested in building but that's not actually the case like it's it's it's uh it's deceiving the numbers are deceiving. I remember going to a class and talking to a bunch of kids who are kind of interested in in Tech and startups and so forth and I remember saying to them ‘hey like how many of y'all are studying CS and and write code’ and 90 of the people raise their hands and then I remember asking oh that's amazing like ‘what percentage of you would want to be writing code as part of your job in a startup or a company’ and like 90 of those hands went down”

dsfyu404ed 4y ago

>One thing I've noticed over my career is that over the past 20 years the cultural gap between typical SV "tech employee" and typical SV "tech leader/founder" has widened dramatically. The gap between the average white collar worker and the average blue collar worker seems to have grown as fast if not faster, especially after 08.

ryandrake 4y ago
No way it's grown faster. A "spoiled" tech worker who makes even as much as $300K has a lot more in common with a blue collar worker making $30K than he has with an executive making $300M. We're talking 3 orders of magnitude vs. 1. That executive has accumulated generational wealth after working one month. Their lifestyle is outrageously bananas-different than even the highest-paid software developer. We're talking dozens of homes, private jets, chauffeurs, staff that do everything, megawealth that grows in perpetuity without them even doing anything. They can travel anywhere they want on earth on a whim and have anyone in government (sometimes up to and including heads of state) on the phone in minutes. Their children, grandchildren, and grandchildren's grandchildren will never have to work a day in their lives. Meanwhile, the difference between a tech worker and a struggling teacher is that one is 50 missed paychecks away from insolvency, and the other is 2 missed paychecks away from insolvency. It's not even comparable.
- dsfyu404ed 4y ago
  We're talking about the cultural gap here. Not the money gap.
  - ryandrake 4y ago
    I'm a spoiled tech worker, and I feel I have much more in common culturally with a less well-off guy who works on their own car, shops for their own groceries, and carefully budgets every dollar they earn so their checks don't bounce (which I do, too). More culturally than I have in common with someone who has three nannies for their kids, summers in the Hamptons, takes Luge lessons in the Alps, and is currently deciding whether to buy a fifth home in New Zealand or bankroll their own B-movie.

causalmodels 4y ago

Something that I think is often overlooked when talking about this is a large chunk of tech labor are millennials. These people are now in their thirties or early 40s. Many now have families and want different things from work than they did in their 20s. This is totally natural but it does create new tensions.

zeroonetwothree 4y ago
People aren't born in buckets, it's a continuous process. 10 years ago there were many 30/40 year olds in tech as well. Indeed if you look at the average age it's gone down, if anything, so there should be fewer now.
pnathan 4y ago
the thinkpieces about how Millenials need to treat Gen Z are starting to flow already, ha. Retreads of what was written about millenials. I remember.

rr888 4y ago

I think in the old days people realized a startup had to sell real products and have real revenue and profits, your stock would only be worth anything at the IPO if the company had solid cashflow. Now there are so many tech companies that will never make any money but somehow are worth millions or billions, most tech workers really dont care about company profits because it doesn't affect them.

robocat 4y ago

> that over the past 20 years the cultural gap between typical SV "tech employee" and typical SV "tech leader/founder" has widened dramatically Maybe something to do with the change in the type of people wanting to work in tech - it used to be geeks and now it is a high status job and attracts status/money seekers. Great discussion on “The cult of conformity in Silicon Valley” https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ia7IKW0yuG0 https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ia7IKW0yuG0 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=34668098 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=34668098 2000’s - “the Dark Ages you and I went to school in the early and mid 2000s” - “it's probably hard for us to explain to a current college kid how uncool Tech was” - “I was a Yale 05 graduate and in my graduating year Yale graduated 10 CS majors in a class of 1200 kids” - “status seeking thing that a gunner should want to go after:” Finance, Consulting, Law, or Medicine (not startups, not tech) 2020’s - “now things have changed you know fast forward um a little less than 20 years and Tech is now attracting conformists” - “college kids today obsess with getting jobs at Facebook and Google. They study how they interview just as much as people study how to interview how to get into Goldman Sachs” - “they want the status they want the money that used to be associated with these Finance or professional jobs: bam, they're all now associated with big Tech” - “at first you see the explosion of CS majors in school and I think you would think to yourself oh man that means that there are a lot more people who are interested in building but that's not actually the case like it's it's it's uh it's deceiving the numbers are deceiving. I remember going to a class and talking to a bunch of kids who are kind of interested in in Tech and startups and so forth and I remember saying to them ‘hey like how many of y'all are studying CS and and write code’ and 90 of the people raise their hands and then I remember asking oh that's amazing like ‘what percentage of you would want to be writing code as part of your job in a startup or a company’ and like 90 of those hands went down”