As a place for innovation, Silicon Valley is dead. It's now a cross between Hollywood for ugly people and Wall Street for people who can't hack winter. Acquisi

As a place for innovation, Silicon Valley is dead. It's now a cross between Hollywood for ugly people and Wall Street for people who can't hack winter. Acquisitions aren't the problem. If the alternative is hard-stop failure, meaning the work and acquired knowledge is effectively thrown away, I think M&A is far better. What is a step down is the replacement of R&D by M&A, but that's the fault of shortsighted executive fuckheads all over the country-- not limited to the Valley. If you see the Valley as another Wall Street-- with a similar corporate ladder (engineer -> VP/Eng -> CTO -> founder -> investor)-- it will piss you off less. But you will also realize that it's a much crappier Wall Street-- worse pay and bonus structure, less prestige outside of the Bay Area echo chamber, more project-management bullshit (e.g. "iterations" and extreme closed allocation and "story points"), less autonomy, and more age discrimination-- and wonder why the fuck anyone would go into the startup game (unless born into VC connections). The danger of startups (by the way) is that if you play that game for too long, you end up stuck in it because the "job hopper" stigma makes it hard to move back to hedge funds. This might have been OK when engineering roles at startups had real upside, but now that engineer equity allotments are in the pathetic 0.01-0.1% range, it's a shameful and wasteful trap.