Silicon Valley Then and Now
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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.
This has more or less been the secret to the US becoming the most powerful country in the world as well, not just SV. It's a shame that our attitudes towards immigrants has changed so dramatically in the past 20 years.
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.
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.
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.
> 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.
Except for Boeing's Phantom Works, NASA EagleWorks, various "advanced concepts" or "preliminary design" groups across other aerospace companies, and various small aerospace firms operating with minimal overhead and extremely talented engineers (Karem Aircraft's head actually specifically cited Kelly Johnson's original rules for a SW-type organization, plus there's Joby Aviation, Makani/Google, Zee.Aero). Sure, none of them have produced anything like an SR-71 yet, but neither has the original Skunkworks since then. The SW legacy of a tightly knit group of elite engineers operating with minimal overhead and freedom to try radical concepts is alive and well in aerospace though.
The JSF, sadly, is certainly not an example. (SW produced a lot more than the SR-71, they produced an unparalleled series of unique and spectacular aircraft.)
You've piqued my curiosity. Got any references to these comparing them to the original?
Violations are punished very harshly. Most violations are reported by other students. And students serve on the Honor Council for deciding how violations of the Honor Code should be handled (and if a violation had in fact occurred).
Another unusual Caltechism is that all classes could be placed out of by taking an exam - and if you passed the exam, you even got credit for it.
Professors were not allowed to take attendance nor have attendance be any part of the grade (except for PE). This had the nice effect of the only people in the lecture hall were people who wanted to be there. Cut ups and disruptive students simply didn't attend.
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.)
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.
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.
The neat thing is I've applied these ideas in my subsequent life, and by and large it's been very successful. People tend to rise to your expectations of them. For example, I refused to put copy protection on the software I sold in the 80's, and never had any problems with piracy.
I also run the D programming language forums, and the D Conference (along with Andrei). We refuse to put a code of conduct on either. We simply assume professional behavior, and that's what happens.
[x] It was also really weird. People would steal your bike to ride across campus (it was very rural), then someone else would probably bring it back a week later.
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.
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.
(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).
To be fair, one of HN's functions is pretty much the repetition of ideological boilerplate to help encourage entrepreneurship and startup stuff.
For a counterpoint to the "intellectually interesting" function, consider the relative quantity and staying duration of articles and "Ask HN" and whatnot around the time of YC letter announcements, or the Nth "why we ditched x javascript framework for y", or whatever your favorite example of blase soul-searching/growth-hacking business article is.
Look, I'm not saying that you're wrong--I'm saying that your summary and idea of the purpose and function of HN is a subset of what it is actually used for, day to day.
Your moderation is appreciated by everyone, but yours is not the only valid opinion of what HN is and what it does and how it functions.
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.
Instead of saying "No, you stupid douchebag", why not phrase your argument in terms of "Yes, and..."? Instead of posting screeds about how early employees of startups get screwed, why not phrase it as "Startup founders could solve many of their hiring problems by offering meaningful equity - not just a few percent, but enough that a successful exit is life-changing for all their early employees. This would also fix incentive alignment problems and ensure that employees keep working hard even when they're not in the same room as the boss." You might find some unlikely allies, even among the likes of Sam Altman [1] or Andrew Mason [2].
Or instead of complaining about how Evan Spiegel is an undeserving twat who represents everything wrong with the VC industry, why not highlight the startups whose products you believe are deserving, evangelize them to friends and acquaintances, intro them to people who may help them, and help ensure that the next founder who ends up with a unicorn deserves it?
As you've said before, negative information never gets erased, you have to "flood the channel" [3]. The connection that you didn't make is that negative information (and its ensuing push-back) also reflects negatively on the person who posted it, since most readers are intelligent and can assume that there's more to the story than the side that was posted. Flood the channel with positive information, not negative. You'll find that it becomes much, much easier to achieve your goals.
[1] http://blog.samaltman.com/employee-equity
The issue is procedural. HN threads are for conversation. Showing up with a bullhorn and blasting everybody over and over with regurgitated rhetoric and whole-cloth fantasy is not conversation. The problem would be the same if the content were the opposite.
Channel-flooding HN and treating it as a platform for a campaign—imaginary or not—goes completely against the intent of the site. Liking or disliking the cause is beside the point. I happen to partly agree with it; I have for years. It doesn't matter.
1. I suppose I should add that at the extremes, some views can run into difficulty on HN, though not because we personally disagree with them. But we're nowhere near that in this case.
[0] Which is much more prevalent than reflected on HN and I meet a lot of hackers/makers/entrepreneurs. From Portland to Shenzhen. [1] From what I hear, HN definitely isn't seen as "a place for intellectual stimulation" or conversation outside the people who frequent it. [2] State something against the prevalent HN narrative in your first 10 comments and you most likely end up hellbanned.
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.
Occasionally I also wish that I didn't have to read the smackdowns as well, but HN has no private messaging feature.
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.
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.
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%.
Fast iterations and "marketing experiments" happen because technology (the Internet) enables that, not because people are culturally different now.
> and an age discrimination culture that (stupidly) discards people just around the time when they start to develop a deep expertise.
Then show us all these age-discriminated people that are out of work.
> People just go to the Bay Area to make money.
No, they go for lots of reasons. The weather, the people (or they'd be in SoCal), the wide variety of jobs to choose from (for developers), and that there are meetups and groups for any imaginable software-related activity is a perk.
> 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.
So, in other words, you're saying they prioritize investing "locally" not at all. They also prioritize investing in companies that start with the letter "Z" (which is a cool letter) just as much. Not sure why you feel the need to mention this imaginary desire of Ohioans (that you made up entirely in your own head). More practically they might want to invest in companies that aren't evil. (There's an actual profit non-maximizing decision you see in reality.)
> 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.
Are you saying it was different before? If it was, then how so?
For an imaginary problem it sure has a lot of press:
http://www.reuters.com/article/2012/11/27/us-valley-ageism-i...
http://www.bizjournals.com/sanjose/news/2015/01/05/silicon-v...
http://anewdomain.net/2014/12/11/dont-hire-anyone-30-ageism-...
http://www.newrepublic.com/article/117088/silicons-valleys-b...
You just asked for numbers and stories, so I found you numbers and stories.
Life is choices. Some are harder than others.
See you in Austin!
1. http://www.menloparkmuseum.org/history/thomas-edison-and-men...