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Silicon Valley Rebirth?
broohaha writes "Using the analogy of fire clearing dead wood and making room for new life in a forest, there's a Newseek article out on the goings on in Silicon Valley these "post-bubble" days. Subjects briefly covered are Intel, Google, and Wozniak's new venture, Wheels of Zeus." It'd be difficult to be literally rebirthed from the thousands of tons of concrete that now seemingly cover the Valley, but hey, as a metaphor, it works.
Yes Silicon Valley is in a low.
No that doesn't mean it will rise again.
SV has relied on waves on new technology being ultra-successful. Ten years ago they were in crisis like today, but lucky for them, the Internet happened. (And a similar 5-10 yr cycle with chips, PCs etc). Will there be another technology rebirth to build companies on anytime soon? That's the real indicator of a rebirth.
I am not trolling but I didn't learn anything, read anything that made me think further, or enjoy this particular article. What am I missing here? Three minutes of my life apparently.
The internet has a major infrastructure component to it that continues to grow. the whole thing probably will continue nicely until moore's law fails.
At that point it will depend a bit on how much that planet has been wired, and how close we are to the "singularity" or machines being "smarter" than humans.
murphy's law, working in reverse, says that this will happen at or before the point that machines achieve human level intelligence, making it impractical to have armies of super intelligent robots develop before humans figure out what to do about it. (hahaha)
"It is a greater offense to steal men's labor, than their clothes"
...The economy rises, and falls. The tech sector also went through another boom, during the 80's (during the cold war era) ...but then there was a massive batch of layoffs due to defense cut backs ... then along comes the proliferation of the internet, and another boom... then a big burst in the bubble from bad investors... now another rise... ad nauseum....
Thats why I laugh when people think the End Is Near (tm). And, I also laugh when they think that these days are 'hard times'. No, hard times was when during the 80's my father would go on strike against Ma Bell for 6 months to a year at a time, and try to support 3 kids at the same time... This current market slowdown is an inconvenience... not the big catastrophe everybody seems to think it is
I lost my concept of community when my community lost all concept of me.
I didn't mention the word union anywhere, I said a professional organization like doctors and lawyers have in the AMA and ABA. How come every time I tell an engineer we need to educate ourselves and organize into a professional association, they start telling me how much they hate unions? Engineers by-and-large don't want a union. Professional associations like the ABA and AMA don't bargain collectively like unions do, they just look out for the profession's interests. If associations are such a bad idea, why are all the IT employers associated within the very well-funded ITAA, which regularly pushed anti-engineer legislation through Washington? The employers know something engineers don't. Engineers need to organize less for "aggressive" reasons, and more for defensive reasons - to defend themselves against all the crap the ITAA gets away with. Unlike John Miano of the Programmer's Guild, I didn't have my epiphany of the murder the ITAA gets away with against engineers until the current slump, he had the foresight to start working against it during the "bubble".
If you were like many of the local workers who were renting and saving up, you simply cannot stay after your job evaporated. I'm not sure if the people are leaving to Seattle, Austin, India or whatever, but don't hold your breath waiting for Silicon Valley to rebloom.
In the long run, don't expect the job providers to stay, either. Other states are giving much better tax incentives to tech firms, who realize that Bay Area workers are much more expensive (and only marginally better), not because they're greedy, but because they have to pay the outregeous living costs.
why would any company try and cripple it's self with the plysical location of being in Silicon Valley?
Because location matters. It matters when you have to get people to move somewhere to work for you. It matters what the culture surrounding your business is. It matters what your employees do when their off work. Are they bing stimulated and engaged by other bright people with hip new ideas or are they at home with a miller high life watching NASCAR?
I personally have a soft spot for High Life, but in all seriousness location is a key factor if you want to have a great company. There's a lot more to making a breakthrough than the bottom line of rents and such. It's the difference between turning a profit and being "insanely great".
Most high tech companies on the cutting edge are going to fail no matter what. The Edge [c.f. William Gibson] that pushes them over the top is not the ability to cut costs on rent and equipment, it's highly talented people that are motivated to work for your company. With all due respect for both geographic regions, that's a hard sell in the Midwest and the South. If you're looking to take an already proven idea and turn some profit, the Midwest, South and Northwest are where it's at. AOL started out in Virginia for a reason.
To conlclude, there's only one Broadway, there's only one Wall Street, and there's only one Sillicon Valley. You're either there, or your not really in the game. It's one of the many things that doesn't make economic sense, (love, charity, punk rock, etc) yet it is a real phenomina.
Howard Dean for president
The rest of the US is a very big place. Atlanta and Dallas have high tech companies with only a fraction of the expenses. Just because you couldn't recruit in one location probably just means you chose a poor location. Set up shop 60 minute drive from a large populated area and you should be OK.
You seem trollish, but I'll take the bait.
"Do you ever wonder why companies bring in people like myself (from India in my case)? It is because they can't afford what American tech employees expect for income and benefits..."
Wrong. They can afford it, they simply would rather pay less. From a business standpoint, it makes sense, but it's still a shitty thing to do while the country is in a recession. Allow me to introduce you to a bit of Western philosophy: Charity starts in the home.
"...because Amercian workers complain if they have to work more than 40 hours, and because American workers are typically not as dedicated or as well educated as their off-shore counterparts (especially in ANY aspect of engineering).
This is a case-by-case scenario. For years I've worked the quirky hours of a network engineer and not once have I ever complained. But yes, I've met the type of people you're referring to. I'll even further agree that foreign IT workers, as a whole, do work harder than their American counterparts.
"I come to American to work, earn money, and send my savings home to support my family."
That's very nice. But because you're here, you are preventing an American from doing the same thing.
"This is a great country, but when people that call themselves US citizens feel infringed, they immediately attack foriegners."
This case is cut and dry. H1B workers take American jobs. Period. If all the H1B workers left, there would be more jobs for Americans. And since it is our country, I'm sure you'll understand that we think Americans should have first access to those jobs.
"Maybe this is why so many countries around the world utterly HATE america?"
Yeah. That's probably it. Because we blame foreigners for everything...
I'll tell you like I told a flock of Europeans I met while traveling: Americans do not care about foreigners. When I say we don't care, I don't mean we hate them. I mean we really don't care. They never enter our minds. I spend more time choosing what movie I'm going to see than I do about the petty causes of some country I've never been to.
And that's the way it should be.
Maybe if these countries spent more time thinking about themselves and unfucking their own lives/governments/economy/etc., they wouldn't even need to come here to work.
Make sense? Of course not. It's much easier to blame America than it is to fix a nation.
In summary, I hope you lose your job to a needy American. It's our country. Deal with it. Once we get stable again, you're welcome to come back.
Knunov
Why do users with IDs under 100,000 or over 700,000 usually have the most worthwhile comments?
It's pathetic that IT worker's are less organized than doctor's, lawyers or even steel workers (who just got a nice present from Bush in terms of tarriffs). Until engineers start educating themselves, and then their fellow engineers, and joining or forming organizations like Washtech, CESO, AEA and the Programmer's Guild, this post-boom slump will last a long, long time. Same old 60 hour weeks and 24/7 oncall, but for less and less pay.
You see the thing with lawyers is that... they're lawyers. By this I mean that, as people who both make and practice the law, they have insinuated themselves into everyday life. For example, it is impossible to buy or sell real estate without a lawyer. There are many other cases in which you have to have a lawyer. Further, the barriers to entry to become a lawyer are quite high; maybe 4 years of work after your bachelors degree.
Incidentally, it's about the same amount of work to become a PE (US) or CEng (UK). And you have to be one of these to, say, sign off on structural drawings. But engineers don't have nearly the same amount of clout with legislators that lawyers do (exercise for the reader: how many of the elected officials in your Congress or Parliament at lawyers?)
The barriers to entry to becoming a programmer are much lower. In fact, I would say that many Slashdotters aren't formally-trained programmers at all, but people who either came into it as a hobby, or program as an aside to their real jobs (say, a physicist who writes numerical code, the code is not the important part of the job, the physics is).
I strongly question whether a return to the days when programmers were "high priests" of technology that was denied to the common man are desirable. Further, competition and innovation are key to the entire high-tech industry, and they would be strangled by heavily regulated committees that "professions" require - see how slowly the legal profession changes, how conservative lawyers have to be to practice, etc.
You mention steelmakers... those people are entirely reliant on government protection, their unions demands have made them uncompetitive with US mini-mills, and with mills in Europe and the UK. A situation in which "foreign code" was taxed before being permitted to be executed in the US would be catastrophic.
Software is rapidly becoming a commodity business, just like steel. That's not a bad thing; it just means that you have to alter the way in which you compete, just like the steel industry's integrated producers can't compete (fairly) with mini-mills.
This case is cut and dry. H1B workers take American jobs. Period. If all the H1B workers left, there would be more jobs for Americans. And since it is our country, I'm sure you'll understand that we think Americans should have first access to those jobs.
Actually, I'm not sure this is accurate. You are assuming that the American education system provides enough workers of sufficient quality to fill the entire demand for highly skilled workers. That simply isn't true (in Europe, either).
Long term, if you care about American jobs, you are far better importing skilled workers from around the world, making them Americans who spend money in the American economy, pay tax to the American govt. etc, than leaving them in foreign countries where the cost of living is so much lower that they can undercut US companies wholesale, and suck value out of the US economy.
I'll tell you like I told a flock of Europeans I met while traveling: Americans do not care about foreigners. When I say we don't care, I don't mean we hate them. I mean we really don't care. They never enter our minds. I spend more time choosing what movie I'm going to see than I do about the petty causes of some country I've never been to.
Well, good for you. Software is a global business these days. You can't hide you head in the sand and hope that "foreigners" will go away - because if you do, Silicon Valley will end up like Detroit.
There are also plenty of other areas that have the combination of nice weather, great universities, and educated populations.
But Silicon Valley is different in that the venture capital community there is not nearly as risk-averse as it is in many other places. While this leads to catastrophic failures (like the dot-bombs), it also leads to successes like Intel and Apple.
Another key factor is that in the Valley, having been involved in a start-up failure is not seen as a black mark - it's seen as proof that you've been tested, and that you've probably learned some lessons.
In my opinion, this willingness to experiment, learn from mistakes, and move on, is a hallmark of Silicon Valley business. I'm no fortune-teller, so I don't know if it will be enough to pull the Valley out of its current probems. But if the Valley recovers, I wouldn't be at all surprised.
Read the EFF's Fair Use FAQ
The only problem with the H1-B visa program is that it unreasonably ties the visa holder to their employer in a manner that puts downward pressure on salaries. If all H1-B visa holders where allowed to easily change jobs they would not be at a competetive disadvantage regarding salaries and thus would not put a downward pressure on salaries in the industry. Immigration and immigrants are not the problem, bad public policy is.
Not to mention the obvious fact that the vast majority of US citizens are themselves descendents of immigrants who sound foolish and selfish when they rail against imigration.
Yes, why would any company want to locate itself in the most concentrated, diverse market for tech talent in the world?
Where else can you hang out your shingle pushing some new-fangled cutting edge tech, and actually have a reasonable expectation of getting a renewable stream of labor that can actually keep up?
Sure you could find a plot of ground in the middle of Kansas for next to nothing, but you are also going to have a hard time getting talent through your door.
As a counter argument, I ask that you name three wildly succesful tech companies that locate themselves in the middle of nowhere.
To all the haters and disbelievers:
To say that Silicon Valley is going to be "reborn" is as obvious as saying that the sun will rise again someday. To say that Silicon Valley will never rise again is as stupid as saying that the sun will never rise again.
OF COURSE SILICON VALLEY WILL RISE AGAIN! How ridiculously obvious is that? Why? Because people want to be rich! Because people want to innovate! Where else are you going to do it, except in Silicon Valley? You have VCs, you have workers, you have the beautiful backdrop, you have the history. The real dreamers, the real entrepreneurs, the real winners aren't just going to drop everything and leave because it's too expensive or because there are no more jobs. THEY CREATE JOBS! If they need more money, they work harder!
I live in the heart of Silicon Valley. Yes, every apartment building has signs up BEGGING for renters. Yes, there are very few jobs, and yes I know many people that have been laid off, and some good friends that have gone back to their homelands like India because they have no hope of finding a job. These are the casualties of any recession.
But give it a year, a few years, and the innovators will rise again. Innovation == wealth creation. Everyone here has dreams of being rich and is willing to work hard for it.
You cannot fine the concentration of highly skilled workers like you can in Silicon Valley. I came from Toronto, Canada's largest city, and everyone there has a middle-class attitude. Work 9-5, get a 3% raise every year, go home and watch TV. I moved here because I was sick of it, and everyone around here has BMWs, $500000+ houses, and absolutely loves what they do. My own personal salary initially tripled upon coming here (as did my rent) and over the past 5 years, my salary has gone up 100% since then. I now work 10-12 hours a day, instead of 6-8 hours a day before, but I fucking love what I do. This is the difference, and this is why Silicon Valley will always rise from the ashes.
When you want to be in the movies, you don't go to Atlanta, or Tampa Bay, or Columbus, or even New York. YOU GO TO HOLLYWOOD, STUPID. If you don't make it in Hollywood, you aren't worth shit. It's exactly the same way with IT. You want to be in Silicon Valley if you want to make it big in technology.
Last time it was the Internet. Next time, who knows what it will be, but there will be a next time!
Charity starts in the home.
And, for you, it would stay there forever, or so the famous quote goes.
Look, you only think you know what you're talking about. The fact of the matter is, so many of the layoffs in this country are due to dot commers with absolutely ZERO real skills to keep them employed after the mountains of completely speculative venture capital were obliterated. It was there choice to work in an industry that had skyscraper intentions but no foundation. That's why so many "techies" are out of work, and the marginalization of businesses due to overprovisioning for future expected business is what hurt and kept down the high-tech industry in the USA. Not high-tech workers from other countries.
But look at it a different way. As a "foreigner", I was on my H-1B, and nearly got my green card but that process got derailed because all I did was switch high-tech jobs, thanks to INS regulations. To me, that isn't fair. But the good thing is this: thanks to NAFTA and the fact that I'm Canadian, I can come back on a TN visa any time I want, as many times as I want. Free trade doesn't just involve the free exchange of capital goods and services, it involves the exchange of skilled workers. If you kick out all those H-1Bs and don't let them back in permanently, they will take the high-tech skills back to their countries and undermine what you have here.
So put your economic protectionist FUD in the trash can. You're only hurting yourself and other Americans in the process in the end. And remember - once upon a time, one of your relatives rode a boat over here from somewhere else too.
What the hell kind of apartment did you live in?!? I have a nice two-bedroom with onsight laundry and a pool in Campbell, and I only back $1275.
I agree that the housing market is still a bit nuts, but that actually locks a lot of the old-school geeks in here (you know, there was business here before 1997).
Every year during my review, I just pray the words "slashdot.org" aren't mentioned.
I find it interesting that out of several paragraphs of diatribe, a single phrase, with the magic word "union" in it, generated the string of responses, while the rest of the message seems to have slipped under the radar.
/. crowd has not.) Still, I've yet to see an organization other than unions or trade guilds or any word that symbolizes collective worker action that *attempts* to protect the individual from the predatory practices of the tool-owners. It's a fundamental truism that there's safety in numbers, and until Man decides that force isn't the best way to conduct his daily affairs, that truism will remain. And while it is true that union bosses are often little more than crooks, as Enron graphically displays, you don't have to wear the union label to rip off employees.
At any rate, I don't prefer unions, either (and I've worked for them in the past, which I imagine most of the
In a nutshell, the whole point is that, after all the preaching about open markets and open opportunity, when push comes to shove, Americans cry when someone else does it better than they do, and quickly circle the wagons to ward off those in "fair competition". The originator of this thread would certainly agree with this assertion, as would any Japanese circa 1985, or any European steel executive today. The fundamental irony of the situation is, most of the people here who are "free agents" working for the Man, can't see that in the Cave, their shadows are just as chained as the poor savages' are.
I don't have any answers for this, but I'm not going to pretend that it's not the way things are. Like you, I'm still taking the money, but the same qualities that make me a "solid information technology performer" absolutely refuse me to allow myself the luxury of cozy, fascistic consumerism that the Lego builders in the cubes around me indulge in.
"The more corrupt the state, the more numerous the laws."--Tacitus, The Histories