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.

Comments

ITAA has won too many victories

[nabucco]

With hundreds of thousands of H1-Bs in Silicon Valley, and 200,000 more on their way each year, the ITAA has won it's victory against engineers (aside from their doing away with FLSA overtime requirements for computer professionals, or overturning repetitive stress injury laws). It's never going to be the same for engineers unless they start educating themselves and supporting professional organizations of the like that doctor's (AMA) and lawyer's (ABA) have.

For instance, there's a bill in Congress, HR 3222, which links the number of new H1-B visas granted to the unemployment rate. What professional organizations are pushing to get this bill a hearing? 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.

Re:ITAA has won too many victories

[sql*kitten]

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.

Re:Too optomistic

[klaviman]

The whole reason SV failed is not because there was suddenly no new technology. It's because there were tons of crappy companies that got tons of money and then couldn't make a profit after a few months.

With Wozniak and the like taking time to build companies from the ground up, slowly and with patience & planning, then as these companies will usher in the rebirth of SV as they mature.

A new wave of technology will just bring in over-inflated enthusiasm, which is not what is needed right now.

Moore's law and Silicon Valley

[Alien54]

Given the sheer number of companies, as well as the connections for finance, the attitudes that worked well over the past 20 to 40 years are gfoing to be hard to kill off by the simple collapse of a speculative bubble. There is still some demand for the product, vs the craze, let's say, of the tulip industry in Holland a long time ago. While that is taken as a typical example of a stock bubble, it is very different than what happened with the internet.

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)

Rebirth unlikely in Silicon Valley

[Dr. Spork]

Sure, there is going to be a post-bust feeding frenzy when some of the freed-up talent gets gobbled up by the Silicon Valley survivors, but remember that most of the talented workers never actually owned property there. It's no wonder, when $.5M buys you something only slightly nicer than a shack in a sprawling, lifeless suburb.

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.

Re:Why??

[lysurgon]

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.

Re:Why??

[alen]

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.

Re:Being an American, I find _you_ offensive

[sql*kitten]

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.

Capital and how it is spent

[Infonaut]

Silicon Valley is crowded, expensive, and generally lacking in culture. I think most people who have lived in any major metro area and then have lived in the Valley can attest to that.

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.

Green cards not guest workers

[sigmond]

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.