10 ms·

Silicon Valley Then and Now

111 points by steven 11y ago

OldSchool 11y ago
No doubt the Valley will survive and thrive. However it will continue its path toward the business culture lead of Hollywood: further concentration of power and capital, more emphasis on acquaintance-level connections (something innately technical people don't often do naturally), and an ever-increasing cost barrier to entry. Hollywood of course has had the time to take this to the extreme, but the "work for free and hope to get noticed" effect is probably already upon us. I have to wonder how many startups are formed now with the intent to turn a profit from operations, rather than simply on the hopes of a large acquisition after obtaining some measurably significant social relevance.
jolan 11y ago
PBS has a great documentary covering the rise of Silicon Valley: http://www.pbs.org/wgbh/americanexperience/films/silicon/ http://www.pbs.org/wgbh/americanexperience/films/silicon/
- gdubs 11y ago
  Based on an excellent essay by Tom Wolfe: http://www.brightboys.org/PDF/Wolfe_Noyce.pdf http://www.brightboys.org/PDF/Wolfe_Noyce.pdf
michaelochurch 11y ago
The interesting question, and I have no idea what the answer is, is whether Silicon Valley will recover from what's been done to it. There have always been douchebags everywhere, but it used to be something that one was ashamed of. If you funded someone like Evan Spiegel, you didn't talk about it. You just pretended that it didn't happen and called it a learning experience. Now, we have a culture that values material success at the expense of all else, isn't really about technology or progress, and views Sean Parker levels of douchebaggery as a positive trait. The Bay Area used to be for misfits who chose to go off and do their own thing: live among the redwoods, play with circuits and computers, go mountain biking. Now it's full of self-marketers who create the impression that they do all of that stuff, while actually being unimaginative corporate drones even worse than the last generation's kind. All of that said, Silicon Valley has a long history and it's not going to be ruined forever by a few bad years. If Silicon Valley gets back to a culture of invention, and if we fix the culture by regulating VCs a bit (a start would be to block the anti-competitive back-channelling and social proof checking; we couldn't eradicate all of it de facto but making it illegal would change behaviors enough to give us a chance at fixing the place) it could return to its old promise. Another thing that Silicon Valley needs to do in order to save its character is fix the cost-of-living issue by crushing some NIMBYs. I think that the federal government needs to step in and crush every anti-development policy, unless there is a legitimate environmental issue. I sincerely hope that the Valley does survive, because if you take the long view and look over the past 50 years instead of the past 5, you see that it has done more good than bad for the world.
- dang 11y ago
  This is a fine historical article. Your comment does not engage with it. Please stop using HN threads as pasting walls for ideological boilerplate.
  - michaelochurch 11y ago
    The open question of Silicon Valley's moral survival is a matter that does engage with the history of the place. We can't make serious attempts at fixing it without understanding where it has been.
    - oldmanjay 11y ago
      The imposition of your morals is not a "serious attempt" to fix anything. You offer nothing but negative rants and it's tiring, to be frank.
      - michaelochurch 11y ago
        I'm critical, not negative. Maybe they're considered to be the same thing in California but, where I am, the difference is still recognized.
        dang 11y ago
        That's a red herring. There are two problems with your harangues. First, there's nothing substantive in them—no factual basis or evidence or even experience. You're simply making things up. Second, they're utterly predictable and you recycle them through every tangentially related thread. That makes them noise, not signal. Once or twice would just be normal bullshit of the kind we all post from time to time. That's part of conversation. But inundating HN with some weird simulacrum of a political campaign is an abuse of this site. It's beginning to dawn on me that it is a form of trolling. It is clearly not what HN threads are for, and it needs to stop.
        11y ago
garrykopf 11y ago
The article seriously reads like it was written by a 15 year old, and not a 15 year old who is excelling at writing. Ouch.
- chmaynard 11y ago
  Note to dang: add a new feature to permanently block comments from a list of HN accounts that I specify in my profile.
  - raldi 11y ago
    Negative filtering is bad for reddit-like communities. We need people like you to see these comments and downvote them, for the benefit of all other readers.
- raldi 11y ago
  DH2: http://www.paulgraham.com/disagree.html http://www.paulgraham.com/disagree.html
sherlock_h 11y ago
Interesting article. I agree with the conclusion that the ability to attract talent is one of the secrets behind the Valley's success. Which is why I see US immigration policy as a major impedance to its' continued success. I am subject to US immigration policy's myself and have to fear for deportation in about a year's time when my current visa runs out. I will be moving to the West Coast after graduating from school in Boston precisely because of this unique mix of talent, creativity, courage and craziness that are going on in the Valley. With the huge surge in housing prices and the above mentioned immigration policies, I am not sure however how long this trend is currently still sustainable. Nonetheless looking forward to the experience.
- jmspring 11y ago
  One thing that occurred in the 60s and 70s that doesn't happen now is that companies actually invested in their employees and had significant amounts of training available. Hell, even in the 80s, before divestiture, I recall AT&T sending my parents (who both worked for the phone company) to classes on a regular basis. My dad sometimes teaching a class or two in Illinois (he'd be gone for a week). Then and now, it takes curiosity, drive, as well as time and availability to continue to learn. For some of us, it is easy, for others that may have significant commitments, etc, taking time to learn something during what may be private/family time is hard -- people similar to this group had the opportunity to learn as part of their job back in the day. My problem with US immigration policy isn't about those that come here to study, get an advanced degree and then start at a good role at a company (or start something). The problem I have is that many many companies are looking for a capable body at the lowest possible dollar and don't want to invest in their employees. IBM is a classic example of going from the former to the latter. Before I am comfortable opening the doors wider, I'd like to see a bit of balance brought back. We already see the fraud of the private "for profit" universities -- Heald (for instance) -- making promises, taking money, and not amounting to much. We aren't going to go back to the day of companies investing as much in their employees as they did in the 60s-80s, primarily because we are at a different point in time and a number of people move around regularly. All that said, we are missing methods and structures to help those I mentioned above (those hardest hit in the various bubbles) to facilitate growth and learning.
- 11y ago
WalterBright 11y ago
> The drive to build another Silicon Valley may be doomed to fail This reminds me that there have been many attempts to duplicate Lockheed's "Skunkworks". They've all failed. I suspect they failed because they always tried to create a skunkworks by fixing perceived "shortcomings" of the original, not realizing that those shortcomings were what made it work. It takes a lot of guts to create a skunkworks, because it defies all conventional notions of how to do things. Lockheed is very commendable for having those guts, but they remain the only one. It also reminds me of Caltech, which remains the only university to have a pervasive honor system. Nobody else has the guts to even try it.
- mi3law 11y ago
  Great comment. Can you point to any more info about Caltech's honor system? I haven't heard of it before and you piqued my curiosity. (Couldn't find much on Google.)
  - WalterBright 11y ago
    I don't have a link, but here's one aspect of it that'll give an idea: Exams are not proctored. They are usually take home. It is up to the student to honor the rules of the test, such as time constraints and whether it is open or closed book. This has interesting results. It turns the students and professors into collaborators rather than adversaries, it's simply a much nicer atmosphere. It's so easy to cheat that there's no status for it. In fact, if you're going to cheat, you'd better be damn sure your fellow students don't find out about it, because they'll ostracize you. The students like the honor system, and they're not going to tolerate anyone undermining it. Also, students often simply left their dorm rooms open. In my four years there, I never heard of any incidents of students stealing. Not once. It was pretty obvious that the students simply would not tolerate other students stealing. Policy was that the campus security was not allowed in the dorms unless invited by the students. I hope that gives some idea of how it worked.
    - akiselev 11y ago
      https://deans.caltech.edu/documents/55-hch2012.pdf https://deans.caltech.edu/documents/55-hch2012.pdf Just to emphasize how pervasive this is among the community: I have had several locked bikes stolen from Pasadena City College which is just blocks away, while at Caltech I left my bike unlocked every day for six months without a single incident. Regarding the exams, the professors (and I believe TAs as well) are straight up forbidden from being near the students during any exams and the result is one of the lowest rates of cheating across all surveys. The vast majority (if not all) of the classes I sat in on very much encouraged collaboration between students (even on exams in some aerospace classes) and the only request from professors was that each student write the names of their collaborators on each problem set. Absolutely incredible culture that shows how treating someone as a responsible adult can reinforce mature and honest behavior.
xnull6guest 11y ago
The other way to understand the present is to be read up on current events. The current DoD involvement in Silicon Valley is not a callback to the ARPANET so explicitly - the analogies are rough. But it's true that now, like then, the DoD sees the US in extreme danger of collapsing as a superpower like its old soviet rivals due to the huge changes and the challenges of the 21st century. Today it is China, the Eastern tip of Eurasia and the Asia-Pacific arena that concerns the United States. Having been overtaken as the largest economy by China, and having grown only 0.2% this quarter compared to China's 7+%, and facing existential threats by China's ambitions to build the Chinese Dream of a New Silk Road and to become a great nation, the US is doing everything it can muster to arrange economic and security conditions in the world to maintain its order and its position at the top. The Defense Department investment in cyber and the partnership with Silicon Valley is just one of many of these investments.
jmspring 11y ago
I'm possibly a bit of a dinosaur in my thinking, but of the three "2000s" areas outlined -- social, mobile, cloud. Cloud will have the longer legs (it is basically open, scalable timesharing). Mobile is broad and has a lot of avenues, but social really seems to basically fall back to "advertising". All three of these areas are dominated by software. 70s (well more 80s) to 2000ish, the valley was a healthy mix of software and hardware. HN seems to focus mostly on the software aspect of recent times, there are still hardware companies out there. The peaks that get attention, popular investment, and trigger the large growth help the valley, but a balance of disciplines, technologies, and platforms (hardware/software), really do help the valley. An area trying to be "the next silicon valley" that ignores the unsexy things happening in low industrial areas in Fremont or Alamaden Valley aren't ever going to be the same. Yes, we are known for the wild successes, but there are a lot of little no names that have helped companies big and small (that became big) here along the way.
- dredmorbius 11y ago
  Social might, and that's a hugely stressed "might", have legs as _media_ and the future of it, or at least a portion. We've been watching the accelerating descent of traditional text and audio media, and more recently video, for the past 20 years. I've had a few epiphanies on this myself in the past year or so: 1. "New media" actually is a pretty decent term. Much of tech -- pretty much most of it that concerns person-to-person exchange (as opposed as machine-to-machine systems controls and feedback) is effectively media. We should think of Facebook, Google, and Apple as largely media companies. Amazon straddles this line more with a focus on commerce, it's also quite directly a media player through books and music. 2. Magazines were created in the 19th century as aggregators of short-form narrative (fiction and non) as a crossover between individual pamphlets and full-length books. Improved print and distribution mechanisms promoted their spread, and by the first quarter of the 20th century several major periodicals still surviving (somewhat) had emerged. In a sense a magazine was a large bundle you could buy for a single set price. The individual items might or might not all appeal, but many or most would. It was stepping back the purchase boundary from the individual piece to the collection. 3. One thing that's happening now is that we're both disaggregating individual periodicals, and creating new aggregations at a larger scale. Hacker News is one of many options for selecting individual items pulled from diverse publishers. The concept's been around as long as there've been mailing lists and newsgroups -- comp.risks has cited various articles and news pieces since the mid-1980s. RSS syndication, Slashdot, Digg, and reddit, Facebook or G+ or Ello feeds, etc., all do much the same thing. What they don't generally do is directly compensate authors. We're starting to see some changes in that regard, with Facebook apparently negotiating directly with publishers such as The New York Times to publish material directly to Facebook. I'm not sold (I don't do FB), but it's an interesting development. I've been suggesting a broadband tax or similar automatic payment syndication scheme as a major, if not necessarily the only compensation model (see also Phil Hunt of Pirate Party UK and his broadband tax proposal). Google or major ISPs might also enter into this (or be forced to). The negative on the future of Social is that social media networks seem to be awfully fragile and capritious. Facebook's fall could well be as fast as Myspace's was.
ivan_ah 11y ago
More on the history of SV: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ZTC_RxWN_xo https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ZTC_RxWN_xo TL;DR: lots of tech started in SV during WWII -- radio research, radars, anti-radars, anti-anti-radars, etc...

111 points by steven 11y ago

No doubt the Valley will survive and thrive. However it will continue its path toward the business culture lead of Hollywood: further concentration of power and capital, more emphasis on acquaintance-level connections (something innately technical people don't often do naturally), and an ever-increasing cost barrier to entry. Hollywood of course has had the time to take this to the extreme, but the "work for free and hope to get noticed" effect is probably already upon us. I have to wonder how many startups are formed now with the intent to turn a profit from operations, rather than simply on the hopes of a large acquisition after obtaining some measurably significant social relevance.

jolan 11y ago

PBS has a great documentary covering the rise of Silicon Valley: http://www.pbs.org/wgbh/americanexperience/films/silicon/ http://www.pbs.org/wgbh/americanexperience/films/silicon/

gdubs 11y ago
Based on an excellent essay by Tom Wolfe: http://www.brightboys.org/PDF/Wolfe_Noyce.pdf http://www.brightboys.org/PDF/Wolfe_Noyce.pdf

michaelochurch 11y ago

The interesting question, and I have no idea what the answer is, is whether Silicon Valley will recover from what's been done to it. There have always been douchebags everywhere, but it used to be something that one was ashamed of. If you funded someone like Evan Spiegel, you didn't talk about it. You just pretended that it didn't happen and called it a learning experience. Now, we have a culture that values material success at the expense of all else, isn't really about technology or progress, and views Sean Parker levels of douchebaggery as a positive trait. The Bay Area used to be for misfits who chose to go off and do their own thing: live among the redwoods, play with circuits and computers, go mountain biking. Now it's full of self-marketers who create the impression that they do all of that stuff, while actually being unimaginative corporate drones even worse than the last generation's kind. All of that said, Silicon Valley has a long history and it's not going to be ruined forever by a few bad years. If Silicon Valley gets back to a culture of invention, and if we fix the culture by regulating VCs a bit (a start would be to block the anti-competitive back-channelling and social proof checking; we couldn't eradicate all of it de facto but making it illegal would change behaviors enough to give us a chance at fixing the place) it could return to its old promise. Another thing that Silicon Valley needs to do in order to save its character is fix the cost-of-living issue by crushing some NIMBYs. I think that the federal government needs to step in and crush every anti-development policy, unless there is a legitimate environmental issue. I sincerely hope that the Valley does survive, because if you take the long view and look over the past 50 years instead of the past 5, you see that it has done more good than bad for the world.

dang 11y ago
This is a fine historical article. Your comment does not engage with it. Please stop using HN threads as pasting walls for ideological boilerplate.
- michaelochurch 11y ago
  The open question of Silicon Valley's moral survival is a matter that does engage with the history of the place. We can't make serious attempts at fixing it without understanding where it has been.
  - oldmanjay 11y ago
    The imposition of your morals is not a "serious attempt" to fix anything. You offer nothing but negative rants and it's tiring, to be frank.
    - michaelochurch 11y ago
      I'm critical, not negative. Maybe they're considered to be the same thing in California but, where I am, the difference is still recognized.
      - dang 11y ago
        That's a red herring. There are two problems with your harangues. First, there's nothing substantive in them—no factual basis or evidence or even experience. You're simply making things up. Second, they're utterly predictable and you recycle them through every tangentially related thread. That makes them noise, not signal. Once or twice would just be normal bullshit of the kind we all post from time to time. That's part of conversation. But inundating HN with some weird simulacrum of a political campaign is an abuse of this site. It's beginning to dawn on me that it is a form of trolling. It is clearly not what HN threads are for, and it needs to stop.
        11y ago

garrykopf 11y ago

The article seriously reads like it was written by a 15 year old, and not a 15 year old who is excelling at writing. Ouch.

chmaynard 11y ago
Note to dang: add a new feature to permanently block comments from a list of HN accounts that I specify in my profile.
- raldi 11y ago
  Negative filtering is bad for reddit-like communities. We need people like you to see these comments and downvote them, for the benefit of all other readers.
raldi 11y ago
DH2: http://www.paulgraham.com/disagree.html http://www.paulgraham.com/disagree.html

sherlock_h 11y ago

Interesting article. I agree with the conclusion that the ability to attract talent is one of the secrets behind the Valley's success. Which is why I see US immigration policy as a major impedance to its' continued success. I am subject to US immigration policy's myself and have to fear for deportation in about a year's time when my current visa runs out. I will be moving to the West Coast after graduating from school in Boston precisely because of this unique mix of talent, creativity, courage and craziness that are going on in the Valley. With the huge surge in housing prices and the above mentioned immigration policies, I am not sure however how long this trend is currently still sustainable. Nonetheless looking forward to the experience.

jmspring 11y ago
One thing that occurred in the 60s and 70s that doesn't happen now is that companies actually invested in their employees and had significant amounts of training available. Hell, even in the 80s, before divestiture, I recall AT&T sending my parents (who both worked for the phone company) to classes on a regular basis. My dad sometimes teaching a class or two in Illinois (he'd be gone for a week). Then and now, it takes curiosity, drive, as well as time and availability to continue to learn. For some of us, it is easy, for others that may have significant commitments, etc, taking time to learn something during what may be private/family time is hard -- people similar to this group had the opportunity to learn as part of their job back in the day. My problem with US immigration policy isn't about those that come here to study, get an advanced degree and then start at a good role at a company (or start something). The problem I have is that many many companies are looking for a capable body at the lowest possible dollar and don't want to invest in their employees. IBM is a classic example of going from the former to the latter. Before I am comfortable opening the doors wider, I'd like to see a bit of balance brought back. We already see the fraud of the private "for profit" universities -- Heald (for instance) -- making promises, taking money, and not amounting to much. We aren't going to go back to the day of companies investing as much in their employees as they did in the 60s-80s, primarily because we are at a different point in time and a number of people move around regularly. All that said, we are missing methods and structures to help those I mentioned above (those hardest hit in the various bubbles) to facilitate growth and learning.
11y ago

WalterBright 11y ago

> The drive to build another Silicon Valley may be doomed to fail This reminds me that there have been many attempts to duplicate Lockheed's "Skunkworks". They've all failed. I suspect they failed because they always tried to create a skunkworks by fixing perceived "shortcomings" of the original, not realizing that those shortcomings were what made it work. It takes a lot of guts to create a skunkworks, because it defies all conventional notions of how to do things. Lockheed is very commendable for having those guts, but they remain the only one. It also reminds me of Caltech, which remains the only university to have a pervasive honor system. Nobody else has the guts to even try it.

mi3law 11y ago
Great comment. Can you point to any more info about Caltech's honor system? I haven't heard of it before and you piqued my curiosity. (Couldn't find much on Google.)
- WalterBright 11y ago
  I don't have a link, but here's one aspect of it that'll give an idea: Exams are not proctored. They are usually take home. It is up to the student to honor the rules of the test, such as time constraints and whether it is open or closed book. This has interesting results. It turns the students and professors into collaborators rather than adversaries, it's simply a much nicer atmosphere. It's so easy to cheat that there's no status for it. In fact, if you're going to cheat, you'd better be damn sure your fellow students don't find out about it, because they'll ostracize you. The students like the honor system, and they're not going to tolerate anyone undermining it. Also, students often simply left their dorm rooms open. In my four years there, I never heard of any incidents of students stealing. Not once. It was pretty obvious that the students simply would not tolerate other students stealing. Policy was that the campus security was not allowed in the dorms unless invited by the students. I hope that gives some idea of how it worked.
  - akiselev 11y ago
    https://deans.caltech.edu/documents/55-hch2012.pdf https://deans.caltech.edu/documents/55-hch2012.pdf Just to emphasize how pervasive this is among the community: I have had several locked bikes stolen from Pasadena City College which is just blocks away, while at Caltech I left my bike unlocked every day for six months without a single incident. Regarding the exams, the professors (and I believe TAs as well) are straight up forbidden from being near the students during any exams and the result is one of the lowest rates of cheating across all surveys. The vast majority (if not all) of the classes I sat in on very much encouraged collaboration between students (even on exams in some aerospace classes) and the only request from professors was that each student write the names of their collaborators on each problem set. Absolutely incredible culture that shows how treating someone as a responsible adult can reinforce mature and honest behavior.

xnull6guest 11y ago

The other way to understand the present is to be read up on current events. The current DoD involvement in Silicon Valley is not a callback to the ARPANET so explicitly - the analogies are rough. But it's true that now, like then, the DoD sees the US in extreme danger of collapsing as a superpower like its old soviet rivals due to the huge changes and the challenges of the 21st century. Today it is China, the Eastern tip of Eurasia and the Asia-Pacific arena that concerns the United States. Having been overtaken as the largest economy by China, and having grown only 0.2% this quarter compared to China's 7+%, and facing existential threats by China's ambitions to build the Chinese Dream of a New Silk Road and to become a great nation, the US is doing everything it can muster to arrange economic and security conditions in the world to maintain its order and its position at the top. The Defense Department investment in cyber and the partnership with Silicon Valley is just one of many of these investments.

jmspring 11y ago

I'm possibly a bit of a dinosaur in my thinking, but of the three "2000s" areas outlined -- social, mobile, cloud. Cloud will have the longer legs (it is basically open, scalable timesharing). Mobile is broad and has a lot of avenues, but social really seems to basically fall back to "advertising". All three of these areas are dominated by software. 70s (well more 80s) to 2000ish, the valley was a healthy mix of software and hardware. HN seems to focus mostly on the software aspect of recent times, there are still hardware companies out there. The peaks that get attention, popular investment, and trigger the large growth help the valley, but a balance of disciplines, technologies, and platforms (hardware/software), really do help the valley. An area trying to be "the next silicon valley" that ignores the unsexy things happening in low industrial areas in Fremont or Alamaden Valley aren't ever going to be the same. Yes, we are known for the wild successes, but there are a lot of little no names that have helped companies big and small (that became big) here along the way.

dredmorbius 11y ago
Social might, and that's a hugely stressed "might", have legs as _media_ and the future of it, or at least a portion. We've been watching the accelerating descent of traditional text and audio media, and more recently video, for the past 20 years. I've had a few epiphanies on this myself in the past year or so: 1. "New media" actually is a pretty decent term. Much of tech -- pretty much most of it that concerns person-to-person exchange (as opposed as machine-to-machine systems controls and feedback) is effectively media. We should think of Facebook, Google, and Apple as largely media companies. Amazon straddles this line more with a focus on commerce, it's also quite directly a media player through books and music. 2. Magazines were created in the 19th century as aggregators of short-form narrative (fiction and non) as a crossover between individual pamphlets and full-length books. Improved print and distribution mechanisms promoted their spread, and by the first quarter of the 20th century several major periodicals still surviving (somewhat) had emerged. In a sense a magazine was a large bundle you could buy for a single set price. The individual items might or might not all appeal, but many or most would. It was stepping back the purchase boundary from the individual piece to the collection. 3. One thing that's happening now is that we're both disaggregating individual periodicals, and creating new aggregations at a larger scale. Hacker News is one of many options for selecting individual items pulled from diverse publishers. The concept's been around as long as there've been mailing lists and newsgroups -- comp.risks has cited various articles and news pieces since the mid-1980s. RSS syndication, Slashdot, Digg, and reddit, Facebook or G+ or Ello feeds, etc., all do much the same thing. What they don't generally do is directly compensate authors. We're starting to see some changes in that regard, with Facebook apparently negotiating directly with publishers such as The New York Times to publish material directly to Facebook. I'm not sold (I don't do FB), but it's an interesting development. I've been suggesting a broadband tax or similar automatic payment syndication scheme as a major, if not necessarily the only compensation model (see also Phil Hunt of Pirate Party UK and his broadband tax proposal). Google or major ISPs might also enter into this (or be forced to). The negative on the future of Social is that social media networks seem to be awfully fragile and capritious. Facebook's fall could well be as fast as Myspace's was.

ivan_ah 11y ago

More on the history of SV: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ZTC_RxWN_xo https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ZTC_RxWN_xo TL;DR: lots of tech started in SV during WWII -- radio research, radars, anti-radars, anti-anti-radars, etc...