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(Different responder.) California companies, in my experience, have a superficial hatred for the East Coast business culture, with the dress codes and expectat

(Different responder.) California companies, in my experience, have a superficial hatred for the East Coast business culture, with the dress codes and expectations of propriety. You wouldn't see people cracking open beers at 2:00 on a "Summer Friday" in a New York shop. So it seems that they're anti-Establishment. In reality, the VC-funded world has become a new Establishment that is making many of the mistakes of the old one. It claims that it is morally superior to all those "bankers and lawyers", but I don't find this to be valid. I've known a lot of bankers, lawyers, and tech executives and the ethics are worst in the third crowd. Perhaps surprisingly, these supposedly stodgy East Coast companies are often more progressive in terms of actual behavior. For example, it's not weird or rare to see a female Managing Director at an investment bank, whereas female tech executives (excluding girlfriends and wives of other hotshots) are extremely uncommon. Or, for another example, take layoffs. Banks have layoffs and they really suck, but banks offer severance and usually give a good reference. VC-funded tech companies, on the other hand, have "low-performer initiatives" (read: witch hunts) so they can avoid the negative press of an honest layoff. The East Coast stodginess, to me, has value because it's better to have documented and defined power relationships to start a discussion (and, one hopes, end it with doing the right thing regardless of who is in power) than having the creepy, undefined power relationships that you see in a VC-funded startup. Power seems to behave the worst when people feel compelled to ignore its existence. Also, banks have a more robust profit-sharing system. Yeah, there's politics in the bonus system and tech is undervalued and traders are often overvalued, but top programmers are treated better by Wall Street than by VC-funded companies, unless they have the connections to make themselves founders. I'd rather be earning "only" $500,000, while traders make $20 million, then get 0.2% of something valuated on paper at $200M ("oh, but it's going to be $75 billion when we rape Google's shit for breakfast!") subject to vesting and dilution and the myriad hazards that can hit you when you're holding an illiquid penny-stock investment in your own employer. Finally, the age discrimination is a lot worse in the VC-funded world. Your earning potential and promotability decline a little bit after 55 or so, but it's a softer landing (you become an consultant or advisor and still make good money) and it's nothing like the "CEO or out by 40" VC-funded culture. The Cali culture has tossed aside the superficial negatives of East Coast stodgy culture, but the moral meat is how people actually treat each other on a day-to-day basis and, on that, the behavior by people in power is a lot worse. In the startup world, you see a lot of empire-building psychopaths who ruin peoples' careers over petty grudges; and, while the movies may tell otherwise, that's astonishingly rare on Wall Street (where people are too busy making money). Wall Street has its flaws, too. There are many things about that culture that I don't like. And technical people are second-class citizens, which is a bit depressing. (That said, in the modern incarnation of the VC-funded world, it's no different; founders are mostly non-engineers and investors are the first-class citizens.) I just think that, on balance, the Silicon Valley world is a lot worse and one hell of lot more deluded about what it is, because it's not socially acceptable to say, "Yeah, I do this CTO thing so my kids can get into expensive, reputable schools."

forkandwait 12y ago
> You wouldn't see people cracking open beers at 2:00 on a "Summer Friday" in a New York shop. And cracking beers at 2:00pm doesn't mean much if you are coding all day from home on Saturday, if you ask me.
cma 12y ago
"it's better to have documented and defined power relationships to start a discussion (and, one hopes, end it with doing the right thing regardless of who is in power) than having the creepy, undefined power relationships that you see in a VC-funded startup." The latter sounds like "open-allocation."
- michaelochurch 12y ago
  Fair criticism, so let me make a few points on that. Startups can't afford full, unconstrained open allocation. They have to give people a high degree of trust and autonomy, but they've also got to be able to meld as a team and hit a target quickly. It's when you're past 20-40 people that the open vs. closed allocation really becomes critical. (VC is causing companies to grow rapidly beyond that 20-40 mark without developing a coherent culture, and if that phase happens poorly or wrongly, you're more likely to get a crappy closed-allocation company.) At 8 people when you're fighting for your life, you just need people to do the work that needs to get done. These beasts fueled by VC aren't really "startups" in the classical sense. They don't offer meaningful, life-changing equity and, while clueless people go all-in, the smarter ones just treat employee positions at them as stepping stones. They're closed-allocation companies that are good at dressing themselves as startups. The true power relationships are intense and harsh, but not stated upfront. Open-allocation companies are subject, of course, to many of the same political problems as closed-allocation firms. I think that they're less likely to fall into certain failure modes, and I think the evidence is strong that, while open allocation isn't a panacea, closed allocation is strictly worse. Let's say that you're running a school and one fistfight breaks out per week. That's not a good thing, and you'll have kids out for hospitalizations. But if you arm a randomly selected 10% of the population with handguns, now you're at risk people getting killed. Adding the guns to a fight-prone environment was a mistake. Similarly, closed allocation adds something that can only be harmful; but the absence of it doesn't guarantee a lack of harm. In banks, the power relationships are more legible; however, there's more of a need for management to lead, perhaps in part because there isn't an army of clueless 22-year-olds (well, except in "analyst" programs; but even those are more selective than employee-level positions in the Valley.) Managers in finance are more likely to treat their positions as mutual and symbiotic than the "I know all of Sand Hill Road and you don't" founders who now run the Valley.

forkandwait 12y ago

> You wouldn't see people cracking open beers at 2:00 on a "Summer Friday" in a New York shop. And cracking beers at 2:00pm doesn't mean much if you are coding all day from home on Saturday, if you ask me.

cma 12y ago

"it's better to have documented and defined power relationships to start a discussion (and, one hopes, end it with doing the right thing regardless of who is in power) than having the creepy, undefined power relationships that you see in a VC-funded startup." The latter sounds like "open-allocation."

michaelochurch 12y ago
Fair criticism, so let me make a few points on that. Startups can't afford full, unconstrained open allocation. They have to give people a high degree of trust and autonomy, but they've also got to be able to meld as a team and hit a target quickly. It's when you're past 20-40 people that the open vs. closed allocation really becomes critical. (VC is causing companies to grow rapidly beyond that 20-40 mark without developing a coherent culture, and if that phase happens poorly or wrongly, you're more likely to get a crappy closed-allocation company.) At 8 people when you're fighting for your life, you just need people to do the work that needs to get done. These beasts fueled by VC aren't really "startups" in the classical sense. They don't offer meaningful, life-changing equity and, while clueless people go all-in, the smarter ones just treat employee positions at them as stepping stones. They're closed-allocation companies that are good at dressing themselves as startups. The true power relationships are intense and harsh, but not stated upfront. Open-allocation companies are subject, of course, to many of the same political problems as closed-allocation firms. I think that they're less likely to fall into certain failure modes, and I think the evidence is strong that, while open allocation isn't a panacea, closed allocation is strictly worse. Let's say that you're running a school and one fistfight breaks out per week. That's not a good thing, and you'll have kids out for hospitalizations. But if you arm a randomly selected 10% of the population with handguns, now you're at risk people getting killed. Adding the guns to a fight-prone environment was a mistake. Similarly, closed allocation adds something that can only be harmful; but the absence of it doesn't guarantee a lack of harm. In banks, the power relationships are more legible; however, there's more of a need for management to lead, perhaps in part because there isn't an army of clueless 22-year-olds (well, except in "analyst" programs; but even those are more selective than employee-level positions in the Valley.) Managers in finance are more likely to treat their positions as mutual and symbiotic than the "I know all of Sand Hill Road and you don't" founders who now run the Valley.