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> Most Silicon Valley startups don't need top talent. They're marketing experiments with a small bit of technology and a lot of painful support work (due to massive, accumulating technical debt) that can only be done out of VC-istan dues-paying as young people take on pager duty for the job they think will get them investor connections in 6 months so they can do their own gigs (ha!)

The same thing is true about lots of Google (your favorite company) jobs. For many positions, they don't need brilliant people hacking Lisp, but rather they need competent Java or C++ programmers to make sure that their code base is "good enough". The result is that you get things like Google Calendar. What's wrong with Google Calendar? John McCarthy put it best:

"Now of course Emacs is merely and editor but nevertheless is does permit significant user modifications and the modern operating systems do not. Let me give an example: one thing that I have done is to add a feature where you can put in a file, the name of another file and even also a location in that file. And then with a single key press it will search forward till it finds its file name and go to that filename in place. And I use it for putting references to email messages in my calendar file. That's just one of the uses of it and I asked about the new Google calendar file. Can you put a reference to email messages in there? And the answer is not only can't the user do it, but even the implementers can't do it, but to me anyway it's very useful. When I receive email about a meeting or a seminar, or something like that, to be able to put a link to the email itself into the calendar file and Emacs permitted me to do that myself, without my even having to become a real expert in the inners of it, and I think this will be important. "

http://www.infoq.com/interviews/mccarthy-elephant-2000

The quote is from clickbox 9. That page has a horrible layout.

The same thing is true about lots of Google (your favorite company) jobs. For many positions, they don't need brilliant people hacking Lisp, but rather they need competent Java or C++ programmers to make sure that their code base is "good enough".

Yeah. It seems that most of the large technology employers want to hire the best people to do middling work, ignoring the unhappiness that ensues when people are over-leveled for what they're asked to do.

Closed-allocation needs to die in a fire, in other words.

You often refer to something called "VC-istan". That name implies that the VCs have some sort of scam going on where founders/employees are the victims. Am I correct?

I've always understood that term as a play on Turkmenistan, Uzbekistan, etc...i.e. implying a distasteful regime.

VC-istan is the hypothesis that the VCs and the companies they support function more like a postmodern corporate entity than a fleet of competing investors and companies.

The name itself doesn't imply anything negative. "-stan" just means country. I could just as easily have called it "VC-land" but that sounds light.

Of course, my view of the existing VC-istan is negative-- and the culture of co-funding and note-sharing is both unethical and illegal-- but there could be a good VC-istan.

"Dickensian" is right, I once knew a poor soul that were making 1/3 what I was in a startup. I've known several that were ~1/2.

I'm not sure being full-stack really accounted for the full difference. Probably more to do with being viciously acquisitive and enjoying sales and negotiation.

Also, I'm not working on the fashion thing anymore, thought of a better marketing experiment to try.

Startups will pay well if you know how to negotiate and have leverage, but if not, you'll get screwed. Usually the equity is pretty pathetic too. They're much more likely to exploit transient weakness than larger corporations, which have lower bounds on salary range as well.

The corporations benefit from stability more.