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Silicon Valley as a Religion
NineNine writes "CNet just posted this story likening Silicon Valley both to a religion and to the Middle Ages. " Personally I find the valley to be a catch 22: the food is great, but the culture leaves a bad taste in my mouth. Case in point: the slides before the movie are all want ads for tech jobs for pre-IPO companies. Dozens of them. Everything revolves around it. I'm not having a hard time at all staying in the middle of michigan (despite all the snow we got today!)
I spent last summer in the Valley. It was interesting, yes -- but I'm now telecommuting from Chico, CA, and don't particularly want to go back.
There was quite a bit to leave a bad taste in my mouth -- the traffic, the cost of living, the overall size of the place. The funny part, though, is how I didn't really appreciate what I was missing 'till I came back and spent some time going for a walk through Bidwell Park (one of California's largest municipal parks, including lots of excellent mountain biking area, starting just a block away from my home!) and watching the reactions of my friends from work on seeing the size of the house I and a few friends are renting for less than a Silicon Valley one-bedroom apartment.
However, the Valley's proponents do have one thing right -- it *is* where everything happens, and there's a lot of good talent there; prior to my visit I'd never met so many skilled engineers in one place. That's why, if I were running a tech company, I'd have an office in the valley, and another (large) engineering center or two off in a smaller, cheaper area like Chico. I'm making less than half what I made in the Valley right now, but my quality of life is far better. I suspect there are others who'd be glad to make the same kind of choice.
(Not that there aren't tech jobs that pay better than half Valley wages in Chico -- I'm just doing the part-time telecommuting thing for a bit).
Having grown up in Silicon Valley... it's really sad to see the changes that have gone thru the area in the last 10 or so years.. People have become more and more obsessed with money. I've never seen such a concentration of luxury cars, sports cars, where 10 years ago, maybe 1 in 10 cars you'd see on the road was a BMW or mercedes, nowadays they are more prevalent(not counting SUV's). Money and status have become the driving force here in Silicon Valley. What's weird also the reputation that we have outside the valley, when most of these people that give Silicon Valley a bad name (as far as greed and such) are not really from here, this is just where they made their money.
And this obsession with money has driven the cost of living way up in the area, so much so, that even the cream of the crop, coming out of the great schools in the area can't afford to live in the neighborhoods they grew up in.
(Anyone know of a nice 3 bedroom+2bath in Santa Clara county for under $360k?)
I haven't seen it, but there is an independent film called "I Want To Blow Up Silicon Valley" that attempts to capture the feeling of Bay Area locals being run out of their own town.
The film shows a local perspective of the technology culture which has overwhelmed Northern California. Rob Logan returns to this place he grew up in to find an old flame. Instead, he finds a place he doesn't recognize quickly becoming a place he doesn't like. He decides he has to set up a "super highway" roadblock to disrupt this "progress" from being transmitted any further. The green hills overlooking the rapidly expanding concrete jungle of Silicon Valley were once the stomping grounds of hippies and Hell's Angels on Harleys. Now they are overrun by latte-drinking, keyboard tapping yuppies on their ten-speeds."
cpeterso
I'm not having a hard time at all staying in the middle of michigan (despite all the snow we got today!)
Well, no shit, Taco. You've got millions of SlashBucks(TM).
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I live and work in the Bay Area - though not actually in Silicon Valley, but my experience still fits the Valley experience.
The Bay Area has the highest cost of living in the country, having surpassed Hawaii this year.
Rent is too damn high. I pay more than $1600/month for a two bedroom apartment. I would love to live closer to The City, but I can't afford it unless I lived in a neighborhood that would be dangerous at night. No thanks.
Don't bother driving. Can you say "parking lot". I made it a point to find a apartment near BART (Bay Area Rapid Transit - the train). My commute is 1 hour and 15 minutes or more. It costs $4.05 each way. That's $8.10 per day or $40.50 each week. Which averages about $175/month.
If I drove in, my commute would be at least 2 hours each way, probably more. I would have to pay for parking. About $175 to $200 per month.
Gas for the car is outrageous. I pay about $2.00 per gallon. When I heard on the news that the average gas price had gone up to $1.50, I could only dream of paying so little. Insurance is also overpriced - and required by law.
I would love to buy a house, but don't see any chance of it happening here. The medium home price is half million dollars - that's right $500,000. Two blocks from my work are new condos that are starting at $700,000.00. I have no idea how many rooms that gets you. When we are ready to buy a house, we will probably move to another state (if I can find the right job).
On the plus side: Great restaraunts, clubs, theaters. But don't try smoking inside of any building except a private home - not even bars.
I love living here and my company is great, but I can't afford to work for them anymore. I either need to find a better paying job or move to another city.
-- Will program for bandwidth
I've lived in the SF Bay Area for 13 years now and I can very much agree that the '.com' crowd have had a negative impact on the region.
Having multi-millionaires move in next door bragging about their stock options has had a somewhat unpleasant impact on my little street (we're normally a very neighborly crowd; summer block parties, etc, but that doesn't seem to mix well with niveau riche.) And the outrageous housing prices are almost intolerable for anyone who isn't already in a home.
But it isn't all negative. Before the net gained its preeminent importance the valley was already a great place to work. There is a culture here that encourages people to move from job to job spreading technology and ideas much faster than would otherwise be possible.
Rather than have to work 20 years on writing and maintaining a single project you are free to move around and find the projects that are most interesting to you, in the part of their life cycle that is most interesting. In 13 years I've worked on half a dozen projects myself, and I'm a relatively stationary person.
And the projects themselves can be stunningly interesting. I was able to work with CORBA in its infancy, I've worked on distributed applications development from the time I moved out here, and got my first Internet account back in '88.
The only real key to living here is to get a place out of the rat race where you can spend evenings and weekends without thinking about technology. The local music scene is excellent, the symphony is excellent, there are lots of museums, it is easy to get to the theatre for an evenings entertainment, and there are still affordable places to live if you are willing to be a bit adventurous.
So maybe the sense of community is getting lost, and that is certainly a hard thing to rebuild, and something that frequently bothers me; but I wouldn't write us off just yet.
LibBT: BitTorrent for C - small - fast - clean (Now Versio
While I love the Bay Area (let take a moment to point out that San Francisco, not Silicon Valley, is the cultural and intellectual center of the region - the digerati of the Valley mostly live and almost all party in SF), and am in the eyes of many qualified to be a technocrat myself, I must say that this cheerleading and propagandizing for the leaders of the "technoculture" really does underline how irrational and cultish this supposedly rationalist society really is.
/. postings but do little to achieve real dialogue.
This includes not only blindly uncritical social science theses (a bizarre reversal of the "noble savage" trend in favor of techno libertarianism as the guiding ideal of (unattainable) utopian perfection)... my irritation also extends to the followers of the cults of personality which have sprung up around people like Linus Torvalds and Bill Gates. For such a supposedly libertarian community, there certainly is an awful lot of idol worship in the Open Source and Internet worlds.
By painting our culture with these mythological overtones we can conveniently cast issues, and ourselves, in unrealistic, broad strokes and self-congratulatory rants about our positions in the fights between good and evil - which are entertaining for
For the most part is irrational, and it is not wise for technologists to get into the habit of not rationally questioning their work. Cultish, unquestioning devotion to ideas (or technologies, or products) stifles creativity and innovation, and can promote lousy, even dangerous, ideas and technologies over reasonable and better alternatives. (Feel free to Microsoftie-bash here, but this is far from the only case...) It also promotes a culture in which those who do not uphold some status-quo are marginalized, and this can be seen increasingly in the "religious wars" about OSes, programming languages, browsers, even games...
Rather than patting ourselves on the back about a new, irrational system of devotion, we should be wondering why we can't advance past these archaic notions of fundamentalism and how we can expect to trust ourselves with powerful new technologies when we can't shake old patterns of irrational behavior.
Even the notion of promoting the techno "way of life" over all else is divisive, and promotes an attitude where all technology is unquestioningly considered "better" than whatever was before and anyone who dares question this is a "neo luddite"
It is part of a familiar, and insidious, pattern of behavior which keeps the powerful entrenched, builds a separate status for a priesthood which can choose between doing the bidding of the leadership or being cast to the confused and "left behind" polity as sorcerers of evil intent... in short, it is no good for anyone, except maybe the very powerful and the very mercenary...
There are lots of good things about the "techno revolution" but religious devotion to technobaubles, technocratic ideology, and various new party lines are not them... If you want to read a serious and interesting discussion of the subersive nature of the techno revolution and how it can be seen philosophically as a means to oppose entrenched power structures, I highly recommend the works of Andrew Feenberg
o/~ we are pissed, we are pissed, we have to resist... o/~ - ec8or
You could run a sed script against this, & it would end up describing what has happened in Oregon over the last 2 decades. Probably Washington & Arizona too.
This shock of drastic change seems to be common to too many Western USers. One farm I picked strawberries on is now a subdivision covered with tract mansions & I expect is full of newcomers who wonder (1) what happened to all of the native wildlife, & (2) why they can't find a decent plate of angelhair pasta at 2:00am.
Geoff
I think I see a trend here. Maybe for them it really would be easier to muzzle the entire internet than to produce p
It's easy enough to understand why. I'm a California native brought up a stones throw from the SV and I can tell you that California has changed drastically in the last 20 years. California has long been seen as the land of "cool people", where everyone has a good tan and says "Dude" a lot. The reality is that up until the last two decades, the vast majority of the state (outside of LA and the Bay Area basin) was rural farmland and desolate, empty foothills. The economic growth here over the last 20 years has caused vast amounts of farmland to be built over in the name of "economic growth" (anyone else remember the cherry orchards around San Jose?), which pretty much destroyed the rural lifestyle enjoyed by much of the state. Some adapted to the growth, some even thrived on it, but a LOT of Californians packed up and moved elsewhere to find the slower paced rural lifestyles they were used to. Most of them ended up in Nevada, Oregon, Idaho, and Washington, and without realizing it, they created the exact same situation they were trying to flee. The locals in those states became resentful of the major influx of "those damned Californians", and the development explosion they brought with them, and aren't afraid to show their disdain.
:)
I still live in California because I'm a programmer and this is where the money is, but I can tell you that it isn't the same state I grew up in. When I move elsewhere after I retire, I will understand it if the locals don't like me (I'm thinking Alaska...I love the cold
There is nothing so pathetic as seeing a beautiful young theory roughed up by a tough gang of facts.
Trappists make great beer -- because they've had centuries to perfect it, and the nature of beer is not changing. Likewise, the linux monks have made a great unix and over time it may become the ultimate unix -- assuming we will continue to need any unix. But I don't expect them to make the first great PDA, or make any other stunning technological breakthroughs. The monastic pursuit of knowledge has it limits
Yeah... alot of my ex-bosses seem to think they are Gods ... I didn't, and left.
"Can of worms? The can is open... the worms are everywhere."
Having lived in San Jose (the self-proclaimed 'Silicon Valley') and San Francisco, I can say they are totally different.
:) Night life is incredible, dozens of very happening dance clubs, bars on every block. The big clubs stop at 5am or 7am, and clubs like the endup open at 7am so you can keep going for the whole weekend if you are immortal. Fashion is more up-scale. Young people here don't wear collars, striped shirts, sport coats, or ties (i.e. no NY style). Lots of leather skirts and 6" high heals for women. Both guys and gals wear pretty tight clothing so you better get in shape. The work scene is composed of a lot more smaller startups. You run into a lot of people. Cell phone coverage is excellent - I don't have a home or work phone and no one ever knows the difference. SF is more expensive than SJ for housing, but it's so worth it.
SF is compact with excellent public transport, a large number of people here are 20-30. Women are everywhere and it's common for me to have 2-3 different dates a week. Lots of gay guys makes the odds better for straight guys.
SJ is more spread out. Almost no public transport. Most people are 30+. Perfect weather. A good place to raise a family, but a shitty place to be 20 something and single. There are a few nightclubs, but not compared to SF. In SJ everything shuts down at 2am and the only place to go is home. SJ has a lot of big mega-corps where you aren't very likely to meet someone new. Despite being "Silicon Valley" I couldn't DSL or cable modem access where I lived. Cell phone coverage is sporadic. Parking isn't that big of a problem, because the city is so spread out. Women? Pretty hard to find. I was luckily to have 1 new date a month there. Fashion is more "business-like" during the day. I.e. ties and suits, and at night. Fairly conservative stuff compared to SF. Lot more porches, Z3s, etc. It's a yuppie town.
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-- Virtual Windows Project
Having lived here for the last year, I'd have to vote Blowfish as the best sushi resturant around here :-)
--BlueLines "The cost of living hasn't affected it's popularity." -anonymous
Having lived there for 4 years, I can say that they have the best sushi (The best sushi restraunt? Sushi Expo in San Jose where Hillsdale and Camden meet, a little north of I85).
On the flipside, I can say the housing situation sucks. My apartment, while I worked at TurboLinux, was in Pacifica. It was a very cool town, just 10 minutes from San Fran. 25 minutes from Brisbane, where TL was. Right near the ocean, easy walk to a organic store where I could get the best veggies and fruits.
However, it leaked like crazy all rainy season (winter) and cost about $2000/mo. and was a 2 bedroom 800+ sq/ft. apartment.
I decided to move to San Antonio after leaving TL to work for RackSpace. My apartment is now 1600sq/ft for only $800/mo.
Double the space for half the price. :)
Some data points for those who don't know:
Ciao!
The Doctor What (KF6VNC)