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Ask HN: Based on your experience is the series Silicon Valley close to reality?
Now i know that this is only a comedy series and merely meant for entertainment. But as someone who really doesn't know how the business side of development work, i'd like to know if it'is close to the real thing. And if so, i have to say, it's pretty terrifying
- aaronbrethorst 11y agohttp://www.nytimes.com/2015/05/05/opinion/joe-nocera-secrets-doomed-script.html http://www.nytimes.com/2015/05/05/opinion/joe-nocera-secrets...
- DigitalSea 11y agoObviously being a comedy TV show, there are certain elements of fiction to make it entertaining. However, the show in many ways actually does highlight the state of Silicon Valley or any startup tech mecha area like San Francisco. It is a perfect parody of the current state of startup culture and tech investment. After a recent stint with a large startup in Seattle, I can honestly say there are a heap of elements from the show that mimic real life (from incubators to work until you pass out culture).
- codeonfire 11y agoThe business side in my opinion is much more harsh. If only it were a fun comedy. Many companies are much bigger and don't have comedic actors working there. Somewhere between SV and Breaking Bad is real life. Sometimes though I have felt like Jesse Pinkman chained to a desk when someone robots me. Robotting someone is a term I just made up to describe people that treat you like total shit, twisting every screw, but at the end of the day still robotically desire you to develop a product for them. You walk out of the deal or job and their mind breaks because it doesn't compute that their bad behavior is not liked.
- staunch 11y agoIt's about as accurate as Office Space. The inaccuracy is in the exaggeration, which is what makes it funny. The technical details and terminology are nearly flawless. It does notshow the thousands of quiet hours of work required in the real world.
- michaelochurch 11y agoSpoiler Warnings ahead. The TV show is (paradoxically?) more vulgar but also more good-natured (being a comedy) than the real thing. For example, no one would call a VC a "choad-gargling fuck toilet" in a pitch-- VCs share notes more than is appropriate or legal, and have black-balled people for less-- and I doubt that a group of typical startup engineers could pull off a flawless 3-minute dick joke like the one in Season 1's finale. So, the TV version of the Valley is more overtly vulgar. The real thing tends to be crass and exclusionary, but you're not going to hear words like "shit-riddled anal wasteland" or nicknames like "Cunty" very often. The show focuses on superficial abuses that are funny rather than the long-lived, subtle, and often subversive ones that characterize the actual Valley. Another discrepancy: when Richard achieves a record-breaking "Weissman score", the entirety of TechCrunch disrupt is in awe. In the real Valley, 95% of them wouldn't know what a Weissman Score is. The technical literacy of the people in the show is actually much higher than in the real Silicon Valley. At one point, there's a reference to a "DFT" (Discrete Fourier Transform, I presume) and I'd bet that only 1% of investors and 5% of SV founders know what a Fourier Transform even is. The show gets far more right than I would have expected, and more right than it gets wrong. One of the things that is true to life is the purely political promotion of Bighead (an incompetent engineer who gets a great job because the CEO of Hooli wants to fuck over Pied Piper). That happens a lot and I'd love to see his career grow and for him to become a VP, a founder, or even get promoted into the investor ranks. The part that isn't true to life (or, at least, very common) is his humility and self-awareness. He knows that he's mediocre; whereas most people who benefit from political or aggressively aspirational promotions tend to believe they actually deserved it, and get quite arrogant. Another thing that's true to life is Russ Hanneman's unethical use of information, when he poaches an engineer that Pied Piper wants for another company. That may be the core ethical flaw of Silicon Valley: a complete lack of respect for the idea that there are things that one should not do with others' information. That sort of ethical looseness is common and spot-on. Likewise, the herd mentality of the VCs around Pied Piper hits reality exactly. Finally, you have Erlich Bachmann and Russ Hanneman (inspired by Sean Parker and, some have said, Mark Cuban). Bachmann is a jerk, superficially, but still a bit too good-natured to be a real player, as we've seen in the recent episodes. Russ Hanneman hits the archetype of the Silicon Valley billionaire ("three comma") on the nose. That said, even he's more self aware than most real SV billionaires.