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Comment by bertiewhykovich | Hacker News Reader

By far the most unrealistic thing about "Silicon Valley" is the complete lack of technical obstacles and setbacks faced by any team in the show. But that's eminently forgivable -- no one (certainly not I) wants to watch three weeks of harried debugging.

Everything else is so on-point that it can be uncomfortable to watch as a denizen of Silicon Valley.

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>no one (certainly not I) wants to watch three weeks of harried debugging

Although they could potentially throw in a sequence designed to show that aspect. 2-3 minutes of silence with a stationary camera showing a motionless programmer at their computer, frowning slightly. Eventually they break the silence by swearing.

Mind you, you could probably only do that once in the entire run of the show. As you alluded to, the reality of working through difficult problems would not make for good TV.

  Mind you, you could probably only do that once in the 
  entire run of the show.

HBO is the same network that aired this skit: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=TyrM7GxyzGg

> 2-3 minutes of silence with a stationary camera showing a motionless programmer at their computer, frowning slightly. Eventually they break the silence by swearing.

Then you see them slowly click. Press backspace once. press the 3 key. Click again, and their eyes widen as then they exclaim "Finally!"

> and their eyes widen as then they exclaim "Finally!"

I think you mean:

> and their eyes widen as then they exclaim "Oh my god I am such a fucking idiot."

No, that's when Gilfoyle, who's been watching from the side, says "You are such a fucking idiot."

If you want a bit realism there you might casually show the clock to make the user realize that while it was 2 minute on camera the actual time was much more.

You could pretty much do it as a B-plot for an entire episode, and just end it with someone walking by the screen and saying something like: "find" "what?" "you wrote fond."

Add profanity as necessary.

For me it's more like "FUCK! ME!" when I notice a typo'd variable name or what-have-you.

And that one 2-3 minute clip would be passed around every year after the holidays when yet another relative asks if your startup life is anything like Elon Musk or The Social Network.

Lets not forget we got the Mean Jerk Time because of a technical obstacle.

Obviously not a 3 week debugging issue, but still at least some notion of a technical obstacle...

Yeah that would be an artificial cliff hanger for sure. It's about the human interaction and politics.

Yeah, but networks are keen to air bullshit debugging sessions: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_CtzaSzO2cE

They did kinda sorta almost delete everything. (ok, less realistic than a fencepost error or something. Just sayin')

Their servers did catch on fire.

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