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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 dou

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.
        Diamons 11y ago
        The man stated his opinion. Stop getting your panties in a bunch and move on.
        waterlesscloud 11y ago
        I'm disappointed in your response. It's well over the line of what feels appropriate to me.
        a8da6b0c91d 11y ago
        I don't think anyone would even care a bit if he learned the art of brevity but it's an endless stream of meandering 500 word screeds that visually take up a lot of space.
- ryandvm 11y ago
  Man, I really wish there were a way to tag meta-commentary (like this) so I could avoid reading complaints from the comment guideline police.
  - nostrademons 11y ago
    Dang is the moderator for the site, an employee of YCombinator (I think; I'm not sure whether it's a paid position). He quite literally is the "comment guideline police". Occasionally I also wish that I didn't have to read the smackdowns as well, but HN has no private messaging feature.
- kansface 11y ago
  The current system of down-voting and flagging is (evidently) insufficient to discourage comments like these. michaelochurch's comment is tantamount to trolling - it is spawned a acrimonious chain of vile and meta-vile. Nobody comes to HN for this. Nothing has been gained by engaging him. I'd go so far as to say nothing would be lost if the entire thread starting with OP's comment were removed. Perhaps HN could implement this feature?
  - IsaacL 11y ago
    I actually opened this thread just to ctrl-F "michaelochurch". I find him consistently interesting, and I strongly agree with him that Silicon Valley culture has weakened, though I strongly disagree with him on the root cause. (He's basically way more left-wing than I am. I don't think the answer is "government regulation". The root cause of the corporatism creeping over SV is conformism, not capitalism. This isn't the thread for a detailed breakdown of my theory so I'll just note that both Jobs and Wozniak cited Ayn Rand as one of their biggest inspirations).
    - zeruch 11y ago
      I think I'm pretty much in agreement with you, particularly on the 'conformism' part. There is a certain sameness to the "failure" and "disruption" these days.
- angersock 11y ago
  "HN threads as pasting walls for ideological boilerplate." To be fair, one of HN's functions is pretty much the repetition of ideological boilerplate to help encourage entrepreneurship and startup stuff.
  - dang 11y ago
    I don't agree. HN's function is to be intellectually interesting. Boilerplate isn't.
    - michaelochurch 11y ago
      You missed his point, which is the double standard with regard to what is classified as "intellectually interesting" and what is "boilerplate", based not on the quality of how something is said but rather on how a few influential people like what is said. It's completely natural to like some opinions and not others. What people find off-putting is your false objectivity, not your stance itself. Even many people who disagree vehemently with my opinions would not classify them as "ideological boilerplate" or trolling. Not to speak for grandparent, but he seems to be commenting on the systemic pro-startup bias (for which you are not necessarily at fault) of this site. It does get repetitive, because the presentation is so one-sided. A lot of encouragement is given to a strictly positive view of venture-funded startups: that they're the future, that they're the best way to work, that anyone who isn't in one is missing out, and that while there's some ugliness it's better to rely on evolutionary improvement than revolutionary overthrow, as if you can analytically solve The Problem, sit down and talk to it and tell it that it's been solved, and it will go away. What's also left out, systematically if not intentionally, is discussion of what happens to people who don't eventually win the startup lottery. Failure is presented here as a temporary setback on the way to inevitable success, which ignores the fact that for some kinds of failure are worse than others and sometimes people aren't as forgiving as they should be. Finally, there's very little attention given on Hacker News to the extreme disparity of equity between founders and employees, and the fact that the reasons for those discrepancies are almost entirely sociological. Encouraging people who have the social resources to become founders, to do so, is one thing. Encouraging 22-year-olds to become startup employees without advising them on how to become something else 10 years down the road (when they don't win the startup lottery and need to find stable, adult job positions that come with respect, remuneration and authority) is, if not irresponsible, at least negligent of the bias it upholds.
- deleted 11y ago
  [deleted]
- monkeynokey 11y ago
  Who the fuck are you to determine the rules of engagement? Actually, michaelochurch is one of the few interesting and insightful commenters left on this board, whose opinions I respect though I may not always agree with them. I would like to see more outlandish ideological rants and honest mind-bending views into the inner workings of other weird minds posted here. I would like to see less of the hyper competitive YC startup kool-aid drinking, mindless circle-jerking that saturates this board and the rest of Silicon Valley. Your job as a moderator will never, and should never, be respected. Remember that, and keep up the good work flagging, downvoting, and renaming post titles, in the march towards a false local maximum of community.
- zeruch 11y ago
  I don't see how it doesn't engage, inasmuch as it does beg a question about the changing makeup of who is polevaulting into the valley. I say that as someone who is a native and has indeed watched some striking changes in the last 5 years (compared to the quarter century preceding it). While I don't have the same ire that the previous commenter does, I don't think his rhetoric lacks merit in terms of questioning what has been happening (either as a progression of or a departure from, the roots of SV)
teacup50 11y ago
> 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. Perhaps the future isn't in the Valley (or recreating the Valley) at all? I'm disappointed you're being downvoted; for anyone that's been in this industry for more than a decade, it's pretty clear that whatever technical meritocracy existed has long-since been replaced with a marketing game of style and posturing, and no actual substance. As rude as the term "douchebaggery" might be, it runs rampant, and the glorification of the people perpetrating it reminds me more of Hollywood than of the real hacker ethos that created the technology industry now being squandered.
- michaelochurch 11y ago
  I think that's right. On the other hand, I don't want the place to just die. That would be bad for the world. Predicting where the future "is", if there is such a place, is harder. In 1975, I think that the concentration of investment made sense because it followed the same principle as academia: smart people want to stick together, and smart people with esoteric specialties usually want to be near others in the same specialty. Now, the model of a large city is taking over. Smart people want to be around a heterogeneous set of smart people, and use the Internet and conferences for in-specialty interactions. So New York and Chicago and even Boston are more compelling. People just go to the Bay Area to make money. No one under 40 wants to be there (and almost no one over 40 can afford to be there) because, while the talent level is high, it's monoculture. In 2015, the Valley makes a lot less sense when you consider what people are building out there. It's not technical excellence any more. Marketing experiments using technology have driven out actual technology, the latter being too long term to gel with two-week "iterations" and an age discrimination culture that (stupidly) discards people just around the time when they start to develop a deep expertise. The 2015 Valley story is different. What we have is a lot of passive capital tied up in pension funds and retirement accounts, and some sliver of it gets thrown into higher-risk asset classes like VC firms. The passive capitalists, above all, want the highest returns on their investment. They'd probably also prefer (as a tie-breaker) that the jobs be created locally (i.e., in Ohio if it's an Ohio state employee pension fund) rather than in California... but if the returns were better in CA, they'd want their money put there. VC has become a conveyer belt that sucks up a huge amount of passive capital from all over the country and funnels it into a few people in Northern California. This would be defensible if VC were a high-performing asset class. The problem is that it's not. It works very well for the careers of a few hundred very well connected people, but the passive investors get shitty returns and the engineers building the stuff are lucky to get 0.01%.
loudmax 11y ago
Is there some context to being ashamed of funding Evan Spiegel? I don't use Snapchat, but I guess some people find it useful, so it's presumably a good thing. I don't know that I would be proud of having funded Snapchat, but I don't see why I would be ashamed of it. Are Snapchat's founders particularly obnoxious?
SamReidHughes 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. You're using language to pretend there's some agency behind the changes it undergoes. > There have always been douchebags everywhere, but it used to be something that one was ashamed of. This is not true at all. > 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. So you're saying (a) this guy is a douchebag (what does that have to do with anything?) and (b) in the past, VC's or angels would fund cool people, friendly hackers, and they didn't care about money. Actually, that's not true. They invested with the goal of making money. > 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. I claim investors don't invest based on douchebaggery levels. Do you have reason to believe otherwise? > 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. No it didn't. It was an industrial wasteland that created countless superfund zones, and people (real people, not the ones you read about in stories) moved here to work (or spy for Russia). That's why there's no orchards anymore. > 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. Most people I talk to (in the industry) aren't self-marketers, they're just random developers. As for people making companies and such, do you think those people in the past, also, were not self-marketers? If they weren't self-marketing, how do you think they got funding? VC's were cold-calling? > If Silicon Valley gets back to a culture of invention I love all the ways you come up with encoding your worldview into your posts via premises behind other things you say. That way, it takes more effort to reply to you because it requires unwinding back to those premises, which means you don't have to see as many people disagreeing with you. It's a lot like arguing with a megaphone. In this case, it's your assumption that Silicon Valley had a culture of invention, which also assumes that it had a (in the singular form) culture. Actually, it was a bunch of people trying to make money, and they were all different people with different personalities. It always has been about making money. That's the history of America. > 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 Not sure what this has to do with the presence of so-called douchebags that you started your post with, or why, but thanks for sharing your opinion. > 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. This has nothing to do with any aspect of its character that you've mentioned. Software developers and silicon valley people and the like don't have trouble paying the rent. It's everybody else that just happens to be living here.

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.
      - Diamons 11y ago
        The man stated his opinion. Stop getting your panties in a bunch and move on.
      - waterlesscloud 11y ago
        I'm disappointed in your response. It's well over the line of what feels appropriate to me.
        a8da6b0c91d 11y ago
        I don't think anyone would even care a bit if he learned the art of brevity but it's an endless stream of meandering 500 word screeds that visually take up a lot of space.
ryandvm 11y ago
Man, I really wish there were a way to tag meta-commentary (like this) so I could avoid reading complaints from the comment guideline police.
- nostrademons 11y ago
  Dang is the moderator for the site, an employee of YCombinator (I think; I'm not sure whether it's a paid position). He quite literally is the "comment guideline police". Occasionally I also wish that I didn't have to read the smackdowns as well, but HN has no private messaging feature.
kansface 11y ago
The current system of down-voting and flagging is (evidently) insufficient to discourage comments like these. michaelochurch's comment is tantamount to trolling - it is spawned a acrimonious chain of vile and meta-vile. Nobody comes to HN for this. Nothing has been gained by engaging him. I'd go so far as to say nothing would be lost if the entire thread starting with OP's comment were removed. Perhaps HN could implement this feature?
- IsaacL 11y ago
  I actually opened this thread just to ctrl-F "michaelochurch". I find him consistently interesting, and I strongly agree with him that Silicon Valley culture has weakened, though I strongly disagree with him on the root cause. (He's basically way more left-wing than I am. I don't think the answer is "government regulation". The root cause of the corporatism creeping over SV is conformism, not capitalism. This isn't the thread for a detailed breakdown of my theory so I'll just note that both Jobs and Wozniak cited Ayn Rand as one of their biggest inspirations).
  - zeruch 11y ago
    I think I'm pretty much in agreement with you, particularly on the 'conformism' part. There is a certain sameness to the "failure" and "disruption" these days.
angersock 11y ago
"HN threads as pasting walls for ideological boilerplate." To be fair, one of HN's functions is pretty much the repetition of ideological boilerplate to help encourage entrepreneurship and startup stuff.
- dang 11y ago
  I don't agree. HN's function is to be intellectually interesting. Boilerplate isn't.
  - michaelochurch 11y ago
    You missed his point, which is the double standard with regard to what is classified as "intellectually interesting" and what is "boilerplate", based not on the quality of how something is said but rather on how a few influential people like what is said. It's completely natural to like some opinions and not others. What people find off-putting is your false objectivity, not your stance itself. Even many people who disagree vehemently with my opinions would not classify them as "ideological boilerplate" or trolling. Not to speak for grandparent, but he seems to be commenting on the systemic pro-startup bias (for which you are not necessarily at fault) of this site. It does get repetitive, because the presentation is so one-sided. A lot of encouragement is given to a strictly positive view of venture-funded startups: that they're the future, that they're the best way to work, that anyone who isn't in one is missing out, and that while there's some ugliness it's better to rely on evolutionary improvement than revolutionary overthrow, as if you can analytically solve The Problem, sit down and talk to it and tell it that it's been solved, and it will go away. What's also left out, systematically if not intentionally, is discussion of what happens to people who don't eventually win the startup lottery. Failure is presented here as a temporary setback on the way to inevitable success, which ignores the fact that for some kinds of failure are worse than others and sometimes people aren't as forgiving as they should be. Finally, there's very little attention given on Hacker News to the extreme disparity of equity between founders and employees, and the fact that the reasons for those discrepancies are almost entirely sociological. Encouraging people who have the social resources to become founders, to do so, is one thing. Encouraging 22-year-olds to become startup employees without advising them on how to become something else 10 years down the road (when they don't win the startup lottery and need to find stable, adult job positions that come with respect, remuneration and authority) is, if not irresponsible, at least negligent of the bias it upholds.
deleted 11y ago
[deleted]
monkeynokey 11y ago
Who the fuck are you to determine the rules of engagement? Actually, michaelochurch is one of the few interesting and insightful commenters left on this board, whose opinions I respect though I may not always agree with them. I would like to see more outlandish ideological rants and honest mind-bending views into the inner workings of other weird minds posted here. I would like to see less of the hyper competitive YC startup kool-aid drinking, mindless circle-jerking that saturates this board and the rest of Silicon Valley. Your job as a moderator will never, and should never, be respected. Remember that, and keep up the good work flagging, downvoting, and renaming post titles, in the march towards a false local maximum of community.
zeruch 11y ago
I don't see how it doesn't engage, inasmuch as it does beg a question about the changing makeup of who is polevaulting into the valley. I say that as someone who is a native and has indeed watched some striking changes in the last 5 years (compared to the quarter century preceding it). While I don't have the same ire that the previous commenter does, I don't think his rhetoric lacks merit in terms of questioning what has been happening (either as a progression of or a departure from, the roots of SV)

teacup50 11y ago

> 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. Perhaps the future isn't in the Valley (or recreating the Valley) at all? I'm disappointed you're being downvoted; for anyone that's been in this industry for more than a decade, it's pretty clear that whatever technical meritocracy existed has long-since been replaced with a marketing game of style and posturing, and no actual substance. As rude as the term "douchebaggery" might be, it runs rampant, and the glorification of the people perpetrating it reminds me more of Hollywood than of the real hacker ethos that created the technology industry now being squandered.

michaelochurch 11y ago
I think that's right. On the other hand, I don't want the place to just die. That would be bad for the world. Predicting where the future "is", if there is such a place, is harder. In 1975, I think that the concentration of investment made sense because it followed the same principle as academia: smart people want to stick together, and smart people with esoteric specialties usually want to be near others in the same specialty. Now, the model of a large city is taking over. Smart people want to be around a heterogeneous set of smart people, and use the Internet and conferences for in-specialty interactions. So New York and Chicago and even Boston are more compelling. People just go to the Bay Area to make money. No one under 40 wants to be there (and almost no one over 40 can afford to be there) because, while the talent level is high, it's monoculture. In 2015, the Valley makes a lot less sense when you consider what people are building out there. It's not technical excellence any more. Marketing experiments using technology have driven out actual technology, the latter being too long term to gel with two-week "iterations" and an age discrimination culture that (stupidly) discards people just around the time when they start to develop a deep expertise. The 2015 Valley story is different. What we have is a lot of passive capital tied up in pension funds and retirement accounts, and some sliver of it gets thrown into higher-risk asset classes like VC firms. The passive capitalists, above all, want the highest returns on their investment. They'd probably also prefer (as a tie-breaker) that the jobs be created locally (i.e., in Ohio if it's an Ohio state employee pension fund) rather than in California... but if the returns were better in CA, they'd want their money put there. VC has become a conveyer belt that sucks up a huge amount of passive capital from all over the country and funnels it into a few people in Northern California. This would be defensible if VC were a high-performing asset class. The problem is that it's not. It works very well for the careers of a few hundred very well connected people, but the passive investors get shitty returns and the engineers building the stuff are lucky to get 0.01%.

loudmax 11y ago

Is there some context to being ashamed of funding Evan Spiegel? I don't use Snapchat, but I guess some people find it useful, so it's presumably a good thing. I don't know that I would be proud of having funded Snapchat, but I don't see why I would be ashamed of it. Are Snapchat's founders particularly obnoxious?

SamReidHughes 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. You're using language to pretend there's some agency behind the changes it undergoes. > There have always been douchebags everywhere, but it used to be something that one was ashamed of. This is not true at all. > 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. So you're saying (a) this guy is a douchebag (what does that have to do with anything?) and (b) in the past, VC's or angels would fund cool people, friendly hackers, and they didn't care about money. Actually, that's not true. They invested with the goal of making money. > 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. I claim investors don't invest based on douchebaggery levels. Do you have reason to believe otherwise? > 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. No it didn't. It was an industrial wasteland that created countless superfund zones, and people (real people, not the ones you read about in stories) moved here to work (or spy for Russia). That's why there's no orchards anymore. > 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. Most people I talk to (in the industry) aren't self-marketers, they're just random developers. As for people making companies and such, do you think those people in the past, also, were not self-marketers? If they weren't self-marketing, how do you think they got funding? VC's were cold-calling? > If Silicon Valley gets back to a culture of invention I love all the ways you come up with encoding your worldview into your posts via premises behind other things you say. That way, it takes more effort to reply to you because it requires unwinding back to those premises, which means you don't have to see as many people disagreeing with you. It's a lot like arguing with a megaphone. In this case, it's your assumption that Silicon Valley had a culture of invention, which also assumes that it had a (in the singular form) culture. Actually, it was a bunch of people trying to make money, and they were all different people with different personalities. It always has been about making money. That's the history of America. > 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 Not sure what this has to do with the presence of so-called douchebags that you started your post with, or why, but thanks for sharing your opinion. > 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. This has nothing to do with any aspect of its character that you've mentioned. Software developers and silicon valley people and the like don't have trouble paying the rent. It's everybody else that just happens to be living here.