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LA Times Examines Silicon Valley
Richard Finney writes "The Los Angeles Times has a special section on Silicon Valley. Most of the stories focus on the 'survivors struggling through the toughest stretch in tech industry history.' There's also a story on
Five Reasons to Hope -
New technologies that may help Silicon Valley rise again: Biotech, microsensors, nanotechnology, flexible electronics and data mining. We'll see."
Tech boomed, then bust. It happens. It'll happen again. Move on, do something worthwhile, and quit whining about it already.
Five Reasons to blow you life savings.
What is music when you despise all sound?
...is the next big sector according to most business. Naturally, a place like Silicon Valley oriented for the next big thing with all those new building and free space will explode with growth.
Make love, not war:Anal Sex
Join the openly gay Slashdotters club!
#gayslashdot on slashnet,my journal
Too many cooks spoil the broth.
There's way too many IT people nowadays & it's spoiling it for everybody.
wait a minute...
If we all became layers... We could wreck that industry too! GO FOR IT!
My guess is that biotech is going to take twenty years to get to the point of being well understood and used for mass market products.
Not that I would not like another boom sooner, I have a few years experiance of designing electronics and writing embedded software but no degree. I got fired a few weeks ago, my long term plan is to become a plumber. I expect to be doing menial jobs for a few years and do some night classes and self training.
i thought i read somewhere that there's a shortage of silicon, but NOW they're saying that there's an entire VALLEY of the stuff??? anyone want to give the final word? this is pissing me off
A mate of mine lives in San Jose, and as far as he's concerned the valley is dead, and will stay that way for a long time yet(3-5years), he's a very good coder and has everything from mcse to cisco certs.. yet he's still to find a job after the .com crash.. it would be very interesting to hear from other /.'ers that are from the area to comment on this..
moo
You have to realize that the PC boom didn't segway immediately into the Internet boom. Nor was the period between the two a time of consolidation before change in focus. Indeed there was no directed change in focus at all, it was an organic market driven shifting toward e-tech.
The difference between the period of time between the PC boom and the Internet boom, was that the hardware of the PC boom was a springboard for the Internet boom.
I'd be hard pressed to come up with more then a handful of examples where new types of hardware was needed to drive the boom. Of course the increase in processor speeds, and other changes in the tech can't be dismissed out of hand, but these were incremental increases in technology, not true advances.
But with the five items mentioned in the article, with the exception of datamining, require great strides in research before they become truely feasible as the focus of a new boom. Nanotech is still five to ten years away before it's first truely practical uses, as even the most ardent proponent will admit when pressed.
These are hardware advances, and thus we face a slow march toward the next boom, waiting for advances in research and technology.
http://www.santacruzbynight.com/index.shtml Santa Cruz By Night Vampire Larp
In spite of the downturn, the cost of living in Silicon Valley is still way too high. A typical mortgage on a modest three bedroom house (typical middle-class, nothing fancy, under $200K in Omaha) can easily run well over $3000/month in Mountain View. There is absolutely no affordable housing within reasonable commuting distance. The bottom line is that anybody who would consider re-locating to Silicon Valley for fewer than six figures is insane.
Is it important? Is it relevant? Haven't we learned that the power of the Internet is that a design team can be geographically dispersed and still productive? There is still the issue of multi-billion Fabs in the valley, but the people can be anywhere. (probably for less money in Iowa, than in San Jose)
'ta
One of the quotes mentioned above was "survivors struggling through the toughest stretch in tech industry history" - and frankly, this is the wrong way of looking at it.
When I first became interested in Silicon Valley was back in 1980 - back when the valley was a syntonym for technical innovation, the idea was
1). go to the valley
2). make an innovative product
3). Sell product to VC for millions
4). Start all over again.
But the principle here is that it was driven by technical innovation - and turning this innovation to product. Heck, my idea, which was revolutionary 23 years ago was the idea of creating a color lcd TV (Hey, don't laugh, back then, we only had black on silver lcd's, and they bled if you touched them).
But once the internet took off and became what it is today (which was helped by some the valley innovation), people started to look at the valley differently. First - way too many people saw the valley as only internet and computer technology. Second - they viewed running a web site as technology. Having a bunch of dot com startups all based on running web sites and services is not technologically innovative. Third - people fell into the falacy that because there are millions of computer users/internet users, that if they could create something and sell it to 1% of that market, they would make millions.
At this point, it was not about technical innovation or creating interesting and useful products, but it because how fast can we whip something together. It is easy to see why so many dot coms failed. What is really surprising is that so many VC's fell for the trick.
The 'natives' of the valley are still doing the same thing that they have done for years - innovative research and product development. And the products that are eventually produced from this research will be revolutionary. The biotech and nanotech products that people are working on will be revolutionary.
But all of those pretenders that jumped on the internet bandwagon AFTER the techology was already out and in use were just the pretenders that never belonged their in the first place.
Now that they are gone (well, most of them at least), the valley will continue to do what it has done for decades.
"Microsoft has made computing accessible to a population who would otherwise not be able to use computers" - B. Kernigha
That is, until all the jobs get outsourced to India where there are millions of over-qualified people willing to work at slave wages.
I'm graduating with a BS in CS next year, you think I'm all that optimistic?
Feh. Both of these concern me.
:(
Data mining concerns me to no end because it's designing an industry around invasion of privacy. If ever there were a volatile industry, that's it.
Now, even if the above were to cause more IT/IS people to regain employment, re-employing yourself back into a volatile position is barely an improvement, the part that improves is that you get a paycheck for a while.
I count myself lucky, as I had family cross-country, and I was able to find a job near them and just dropped everything and moved to get a job. I feel for those who have not been so lucky, and if anything will incur my wrathe it is those breeding hopes based on things that are not stable.
Karma: Chameleon (mostly due to the fact that you come and go).
And the economic results of a bubble are devastation -- at least, they always have been. Japan went through a bubble in the late 80s. It started to pop in around 1990. 13 years later, they are still suffering; in fact, their stock market, the Nikkei, just hit a TWENTY-YEAR LOW and it's STILL going down. Bubbles create hangovers that are far worse than their preceding highs, and EVERYONE suffers from them, not just the people who benefited from the bubble. The last bubble we had was in the late 1920s, and its bursting resulted in the Great Depression.
Folks, Silicon Valley will not return to what it was. In terms of real purchasing power, salaries will not return to what they were in your working lifetimes, and maybe never. Tech is already suffering from a true Depression, and the rest of the economy is most likely headed there too. We had the biggest bubble in the history of mankind, and if past experience is a guide, we will go through the biggest bust in history as well.
The Fed has cut rates faster and farther than they ever have in their 90-year history. Money is flooding the system via easy credit and a bubble in mortgage finance. We are at 40-year lows in interest rates..... and STILL the economy is failing. States are in the worst fiscal crisis "since the Great Depression" (their words, not mine.) Layoffs are rampant, stores are closing, bankruptcies are steadily rising -- and that's BEFORE the spigot of much-too-easy credit is closed.
The Great Depression left deep scars in this country, and a profound fear of credit and debt. Unemployment rates were around 30%. Healthy, strong men were living in cardboard shacks in great numbers. (which were called Hoovervilles, as people blamed Hoover for the Depression. This wasn't even remotely the case; the Depression was caused by the vast excess and waste of the 20s, not the little bit of nothing that Hoover did.)
The bubble we had this time was far larger, and encompassed much more of the economy... in fact, it sucked the whole world in. Likely results of the ensuing bust left as an exercise for the reader. Hint: it's not going to be fun.
A final suggestion: "buy and hold" is a good recipe for going broke in this environment. Wall Street has indocrinated everyone about 'buy and hold', but remember that they are trying to sell you something. These were the clowns giving you $500 price targets on Amazon. Do you REALLY trust them to manage your retirement savings?
From 1930-1932, the Dow lost over 90% of its value. The Nikkei, from 1990 until now, has lost about 70%. This is not a good way to save for retirement.
--the article to me split it right down the middle. What the author found interesting and I guess exciting in some of the cases I find horrible. Wasp sized flying surveillance drones? Umm, no thankew. Universal data mining? I'd like to pass on that. Smart dust? Tracking chips for all products, and then humans-the "little kid wandering more than 50 feet away from mommy"?
It's like no mention of the abuse potential here. I don't think that should be ignored, we have as humans ignored that in the past, to continue to do so will most likely result in planetary suicide. It's a variant of the short term profits mentality.
This could just as well been in the "how to make science reading more enjoyable" thread. It's a great example of something "close" but no seegar. I would have liked this article better if it was balanced better, show what is promising and the relative merits of it, as opposed to the obvious dangers of developing it without having a grasp of modern social paradigms and realities.
I think humanity needs a bitter reality pill-our hard science is advanced,and advancing much faster than anything else,but our social science is woefully inadequate to use our hard science advancements without abusing it. this isn't a theoretical world, nothing is pure science, you have to always consider the implications of what you are doing. It's like driving a car, really, a simple analogy. You can build a car that goes 200mph, but without some societal norms and without at least a minimum set of rules that are easy to see make some "common sense"and that are followed by most people, the potential for abuse would make universal adoption of the 200mph car a disaster on the roads we have and with the people we have now.
I guess I am a moderate, neither a luddite nor a "build all we can now, now, NOW!" kinda guy.
Hope this makes some sort of sense. When I first read 1984 it seemed farfetched to me, today, all I have to do is go to any large city and it's close, real close. I look at the headlines, the "robotization" of warfare, the reduction of humans to "collateral damage", the impersonality and reduction of the value of LIFE itself to just another commodity, well, it's scary. Then I read an article like this, and I think "heck, we are a year or two away from it being totally "1984" except with a turbocharger and on steroids.
Can we deal with as humans? No idea, I have serious doubts at this time though.
Most of the jobs are being sent to India.
In fact practically every type of job is being sent there, as what Bank of America has done by having their customer service staff based there.
It's duct tape. Silicon valley needs more duct tape. I'm not sure why the people in Silicon Valley did not see this a long time ago! Duct tape will solve all your problems, its even good to bandage up a broken arm.
The number of people who can buy a Mountain
View (Los Altos, Palo Alto, etc) house cash
exceeds the number of houses on the market.
The semi-retired gentry likes the lifestyle
of the area, and 30 years of tech success
has produced a lot of gentry. And in many
many cases, these folks can design prototypes
with their own hands, and think its fun to
do so. I don't think a comeback hinges on
re-locates -- it hinges on lifers.
The valley is too overpriced. It doesn't have that "thinking out of the box" culture anymore. Its more of a consumer-oid culture. My company has an office out there and its strange to walk around.
I think some lean, smart and hungry types will burst ahead - but it will not be in the Valley. Hopefully it will be in the USA but it could very well be in India or China next.
There is a shrinking market for those with postgrad degrees and many years of experience. What's left, is about to be farmed out to East India.
The countries with the most lax labor laws (short of allowing child or prison labor, and I am not even too sure of that) will get all the new jobs, in the near future.
As for those just getting in, there are NO more entry level jobs in the tech sector. Heck, there are no more entry level jobs anywhere except in fast food restaurants.
The party's over.
--- Grow a pair, liberals... stop letting the Republicans bully you!
But it's also a rewarding feeling to be making a go of it as an independant consultant. No silly dot com ideas, just getting paid for work done. It's tough, but I'm happy.
That said, I don't see the long term prospects here as being very good. It's too much of a pressure cooker.
http://www.welton.it/davidw/
The dotcom bubble was a BUBBLE. If you were in the Silicon Vallery because of the bubble, you need to leave. It ain't coming back. I have little sympathy for people who won't leave an area when they can't find a job.
You want chip specs? You download them as .PDFs whether the company is in Sunnyvale or Moscow. You need to ask a development engineer something? You email or phone her whether she's in Santa Clara or Austin, TX. You want programmers? Start here or anywhere.
You want industrial capability near a major university campuses? Lots of that going around these days.
What's left in the Valley for us other than overcrowding and expensive real estate? A chance to hang with over-the-hill high-tech zillionaires? A chance to see industrial parks that look like ghost towns? (no URL, this is based on a friend's e-mail from 2 days ago) All I can really think of is tradition, and that's not something that will help anyone crank out code or improve ROI.
It has some cool high-tech museums. Perhaps the whole area should be declared a "historical monument" to make it official that progress will be coming from somewhere else from now on.
The place for a startup (unless you really are doing nanotech, in which case, why are you here?) is where there's cheap high-quality bandwidth available. The way that gets delivered these days is via CitiLEC... the window on this was closed by the state legislature in exchange for campaign cash from cable companies and telcos, the local power company had their chance to do it themselves and blew it. If I wanted to do a startup in California, I'd look at the City of Alameda (next to Berkeley and across from SF), whose muni power company has rolled out fiber to the home/business... or even the part of LA served by Los Angeles Water and Power.
I'm an ex-resident, I left after the high-tech boom led by the Commie 64 and Apple II... and I can't think of any reason why I'd ever start a company there.
Tech Public Policy stuff
Might I point out something else as well...
What saved us from the Great Depression?
World War.
The grim reality is that the World Wars are what turned the American economy around, and might I be so bold as to say that just about every time the US economy has struggled, it has been war that has turned it around.
That being said, thing long and hard about Bush's motivations re: Iraq.
I actually have no qualms with Bush's arguments. I hate sending people into harm's way, but better we lose some life taking nukes away from Saddam than losing many thousands getting nuked.
But I would be hard pressed to say that the economy isn't a motivator either. Bush Sr. started the recovery from the last recession by starting the Gulf War.
Just a lone opinion.
Karma: Chameleon (mostly due to the fact that you come and go).
The one thing needed the most will never happen: affordable housing. There is plenty of land to build on, but restrictive zoning passed by rich limousine liberals forbid construction which would benefit the hoi polloi. Equality is fine and dandy, "but not in my back yard".
It's the truth, and it's a warning, too.
Nanotech and the CIA based security jobs that are cropping up in silicon valley now, are not the kind of industries where you can get into unless you have a lot of experience (and security clearance, in some cases). And nanotech research and/or development can easily be farmed out to countries where wages are low, and labor laws are lax.
I'd welcome anyone who disagrees, to put up their own points.
--- Grow a pair, liberals... stop letting the Republicans bully you!
Apple was founded by two people with remarkable talents, but they needed highly skilled people to help them fulfill their vision. Companies are built by people with a vision and drive to see that vision come to fruition. They must have a great team of people to help with the building.
What the Valley and tech sector in general are missing is... wait for it... Vision! Microsoft has kicked real innovation in the nards. Microsoft is completely into innovating Microsofts stranglehold on the consumer and business computing environments. What innovations are coming in the near future? Maybe another niche product that runs on Windows you say? The problem here is that too many "tech" people now have windows-tunnel-vision. Their products are conformist with the Microsoft vision and increasingly drab. Very little that is new and exciting, which is what makes people want to spend their money and therefore create jobs for those tech people to work in.
This is just a brief summary of what is currently wrong in the American tech sector, so pick away. It is by no means complete.
Kindness is the language which the deaf can hear and the blind can see. - Mark Twain
"Anyway, what I'm trying to say is that it's truly up to each and every one of us to decide how technology will be applied. We elect the officials (kinda, I suppose) and we can change things if we want to. We just have to have the WILL to act, and not stand by while other interests create a society that we disagree with."
Good point. Now ask ourselves "what does history have to teach us?" Seems we need to make a better "inside", than focus it all on a better outside.
Mod the parent up. Insightful.
Contrary to popular belief, life is not a bitch. It is far far worse.
But it is interesting to see how the evolution of technology is close to the current theories about evolutionary biology (something I know only a little about) in that there are incremental changes and modifications over long periods, interrupted by sudden large changes.
Come on. The one article where it would be *appropriate* to make an Underpants Gnomes joke and there is not one to be seen. I'm disappointed.
And according to the Dept. of Homeland Security it's an effective barrier to a chemical or biological attack! Go out and support the economy by buying these supplies, don't worry, we're not trying to stir up paranoia for our own domestic agenda...
*cough*
PATRIOT ACTS I and II
*cough*
We would never play with the American people like that.
MMORPG fan-boy? Prove your worth
Come on, that's hardly fair. There are all kinds of people who worked in the dot-coms at some point (and no, I am not one such). I would understand your comment if you meant people who only worked in dot-coms, but even that's not fair for people who got their bachelor's 3-5 years ago. What were they supposed to do when dot-coms were more than half of programming job market?
Interview them, give them a chance to tell you what they actually did. Many of them actually worked for successful (*gasp*) dot-coms. Many were lowly entry-level employees who did what they were told and produced quality work within those constraints.
And as for CTOs of failed dot-coms, well those resumes you can probably safely through into trash. They deserve to be judged by the quality of their work.
Or duck tape!!
" Is it important? Is it relevant? Haven't we learned that the power of the Internet is that a design team can be geographically dispersed and still productive? "
Have we? Has technology really done away with face-time? How much of our technological and economic base can we thrust onto the shoulders of the internet? I enjoy technology as much as the next geek, but I'm not foolish enough to belive that we can depend on the internet to save our collective asses. In fact we need more interaction, not less with our fellow humans. Our society is already withdrawn enough. Instead of some sheltered existance, curling up every day with a warm CRT.
Whatever dude. I know for a fact that one of the largest data mining company in the world, located in Boca Raton, FL, uses a sloppy collection of various dos, and c shell scripts to perform its billions of billions and billions of bytes of data mining. If you can get into this field, you will do wonders because the field is so fresh, you can really get quite innovated (its not boring yet)...
News and Girls, Hmm Nice.
I would agree with you...but you are only half right. I was in the middle of everything from before the boom, and still in it.
I know a hell of a lot of engineers that worked their asses off during the bubble. What I saw more of, however, was a lot of barely-got-my-mba types who wanted to drive their Ferrari's and schmooze and didn't know whack about managing a company, or what a business plan was.
It was this class of individual that ruined the economy, not the engineers. So, I would agree with you that the execs should be put in the circular file, but there are still some solid engineers out there looking desperately for work that do have proven track records marred by the dot.com bubble.
I would be careful of putting yourself on such a high pedistal...are you sure that you didn't profit from the bubble too?
Contrary to popular belief, life is not a bitch. It is far far worse.
Maybe so, but the DOTCOM experience that an engineer may have had is IRRELEVANT. You see, it didn't matter if the work that was being done ever amounted to anything. Who knows if the engineering was sound? Nothing mattered.
Yes, I did well during the "bubble". But I wasn't part of the problem.
Best Buy can have you arrested
We see case after case of Dot-Com companies folding because they can't afford to locate their offices in San Francisco, Silicon Valley, Los Angeles, etc. Property taxes throughout the state are through the roof, environmental "taxes" are stiff, all for who's benefit? The politicians? It sure isn't the stockholders...
How about all of these tech companies consider kissing the "Silicon Valley" goodbye by moving out of California? I don't understand why on earth these corporations, much less the citizens, put up with the excessive taxes in CA. These companies have lost their shirt, and now have a chance to start over. Why not start over in a location where your company has the opportunity to cut their costs?
As sad as it is to say, this is not a problem with the tech industry. This is a problem with American society in general. No one actually values innovation, intelligence, or creativity. They value the money those things can get them. So, when it comes time to cut corners at the expense of quality, there are no tears shed. The execs line their pockets with a few extra dollars and everyone else gets the shaft when things start to fall apart.
I blame this on a fairly stupid and extremely greedy general population. Greed drives them to forgo their intelligence in place of an easy dollar. Greed drives them to believe the lies of shady execs, who themselves are just smart enough to capitalize on others' ignorance. Greed leads them down the path to bankrupcy, all the while banking on some manipulative joker's get-rich-quick version of the American dream. By the time they get to the end, they're holding onto ten grand in credit card debt, a house, and a car payment, wondering why everything went wrong.
If you're one of those people, here's something to chew on: Sillicon valley went wrong because you never thought about what the hell you and your company were doing. You didn't really care if what you were doing was useful or could stick it out in the long-term. You had your dumb eyes on the IPO and it made you blind to the fact that you were living a lie. Do I feel bad for you now because you can't get a job? Hell no. You had no skills and and you had no good itentions, you just got lucky.
Instead of trying to get lucky again, why don't you actually get off your ass and do some real work?
"Now that they are gone (well, most of them at least), the valley will continue to do what it has done for decades."
Grow fruit?
"Come on. The one article where it would be *appropriate* to make an Underpants Gnomes joke and there is not one to be seen. I'm disappointed."
Well all the Gnomes have lost their jobs, and their internet connections. However if you like, I can have one, called into you from a pay phone?
"I think some lean, smart and hungry types will burst ahead - but it will not be in the Valley. Hopefully it will be in the USA but it could very well be in India or China next."
Coming to a planet near you, the theatrical cast of Aliens. Playing the "It's an inside job" role will be a formerly hungry (KFC baby) Silicon Valley dot-comer. The roles of "lean and smart" will be played by those who said:"You go first", and "I just bought a new pair of Nikes".
We will strike back. Next week "SF Chronicle" will examine Hollywood!
Data mining isn't just about invading privacy. Data mining is also about "mining" data out of existing databases. When you have a huge enterprise database with thousands of tables and millions upon millions of records... all of which have been added to over the past 20-30 years... There are bound to be all kinds of interesting relationships that have never been discovered. Data mining may be rearranging relationships to better suit the reporting that you want to do TODAY instead of 20 years ago... or writing reports that display data in a novel and interesting way, maybe seeing a correlation between two things that you had never expected... That isn't an invasion of privacy, that's just using the data you already have in a different way.
I wouldn't rate school experience as highly as real-world experience, but I wouldn't disregard it either.
But then, when you get a thousand resumes, you have to do something to cut down the numbers...
Selling Slasdot subscriptions
"If we all became layers... We could wreck that industry too! GO FOR IT!"
Lends new meaning to the phrase "Laying it on thick."
let me corect a little history:
the depression was a result of a few things that date back to WWI. in th teens, with europe at war and no end in sight, wilson and especially the banks encouraged farmers borrow, borrow, borrow, and grow, grow, grow, since WWI was being fought on french farmlands. well, great idea. except, it takes about 2-3 years for the farmers to realize return and so by 1917, US enters the war, and within a year, it is over. (great move wooodrow. sorry, my $.02) so...farmers go bust. banks begin to feel the heat. large migration into the cities, where farmers are now competing with immigrants which drives down wages, etc. industry is doing well, but like today, it was built upon a bubble. so about late 20's, it begins to slip. germany can no longer pay its reparations to france and britain, who can no longer repay their loans to US banks. we decide to pass hawley-smoot tariff, and close off foreign trade. which causes huge banking losses. so...
the stock market was built on a bubble, like today. the collateral for a stock was the stock itself, and the holders had margins of like 10%. so, when the banks called their loans, and the stock was almost valueless, the banks began to fold. as banks began to fold, the stocks nosdived. and thus, october 29, the crash. (which btw, was not as big as the 1987 crash). since the economy was mostly cash based, the banks were way short cash, thus they close. now the good part...
the fed chairman, ben strong, was a student of marshallian economics. big time monetarist. so, there's a formula called the quantity theory of money, or MV=PQ.
#include <econ101.h>
basically, the quantity of money is supposed to be some proportion of the GDP. as GDP fell, ben strong "rightly" shrunk the money supply. then GDP fell, then strong shrunk money, etc., etc., etc. by 1932, the quantity of money was 2/3 of what it had been in 1929. thus, the severity of the depression. that is why some republicans, like jack kemp, have deep seated fears and distrust of the fed. also some democrats, since both see the power over the economy money has. long enough lecture.
My problem? I was perfectly gruntled, until some numbnuts came by and dissed me.
Given your descriptions, I really have to wonder are you assuming we're heading towards World War III.
If that is the case will Malthus' dire predictions come true, where World War III (this time with nuclear weapons) will likely reduce the human population by 30% or more?
Raymond in Mountain View, CA
sucking it back out is called felching.... i'm sure everyone NEEDED to know that
I have two rolls of duct tape in my San Jose-located closet, and I still have a job. Coincidence?
my blog
It's over - the goose is cooked. Silicon Valley is Silicon Detroit. It isn't coming back. Not when cheap engineering and coding labor can be had in India for about $3/hr, "benefits" included, and the US government won't institute tariffs to stop it. What happened to blue collar labor in the US in the '70s and '80s will now happen to those smart, hard working, well-educated white collar boys (and girls). No amount of education or hours on the job will make you competitive with a trained monkey who works for bananas and isn't allowed to talk back to his keepers.
It's purely a race to the bottom. Look for the United States to become the world's most powerful third world nation within a generation, displacing Russia. Kiss your Constitutional rights goodbye - they'll be auctioned off to the highest bidders (corporate America and the religious fanatics).
The good news is, you'll be able to buy a home in California for $50,000. The bad news is, you'll only earn $5,000 a year, half of that will be taken in taxes to support the military and the official state religion, and you'll run a substantial risk of being killed when a gang of religious fanatics lights your train on fire because opposing religious fanatics are allegedly aboard.
If you're lucky, you'll be able to marry a European and emigrate to a country where the utilities are on 24/7, citizens can vote without being shot at (frequently by soldiers), murderous religious fanatics are kept behind bars, healthcare is free, everybody has at least a halfway decent education, plutocrats don't control the media, there's still a substantial manufacturing sector, and workers earn more in a month than you're used to earning in a year.
you may not be able to find a job, but yer student loans will have a really low interest rate at least!
I dont think so.
One thing that has always set this country apart from others, is that when we needed an idea; be it war, or a new gadget that spawned an industry; we got one. I believe that will happen again. No one in America should doubt that we will return from the brink once again.
Debt itself is NOT a bad thing, there is good debt and bad dept. Bad debt is what most Americans have because they cant stand not having the biggest SUV on the block, whether they can afford it or not. Sooner or later, someone (or some hundreds of folks) will go into debt to finance a good idea, which will bring us right back into solvency.
I am doing all I can to stay in debt, buying up all the cheap real-estate I can find, and renting it out at confiscatory prices. Good economy or bad, people will always need a place to live. Buy and Hold is not a bad idea; it just depends on what you are buying and holding.
I wrote it in late October 2000, as the meltdown had already begun to happen but before I had become fully aware of it. I came to a deep understanding of the depth of trouble we were all in when I was out of work the following month, and passed the time by emailing a few thousand resumes without getting any response.
Request your free CD of my piano music.
When I moved to Newfoundland in the spring of 2000 to get married to my Canadian wife, I was paying $1275 a month to live in a 2 bedroom house with a one car garage and a tiny front yard. It was half of a duplex.
I'd lived in Santa Cruz for fifteen years, but I didn't plan to return because the place had got so crowded. I could afford the rent at the time, but what really got me down was that it would take over an hour to drive across town between 3 and 6 in the afternoon. Coming home after work on highway 17 from the valley was maddening - and the main reason I became a consultant, so I could work out of my home.
After our wedding, we decided it would be best to be back in the US but Bonita wanted to live near her friends and family. We decided to buy a house in Maine.
Neither of us had ever been to Maine before we came house hunting. We picked the mid-coast Rockland area out of a tourist handbook.
We ended up with a four bedroom house with an oversized 2 car garage (it has 3 small rooms to the side) on nearly 2 acres of wooded land.
And how much does it cost me? Prepare to puke. The mortgage is $799 a month.
I think the loan officer was a little taken aback at this dot-commer from california coming and wanting a loan to buy what is a pretty upscale house for the area. But from my point of view, it was dirt cheap.
Things got a lot harder for us after the collapse. Many times we've wondered whether we did the right thing to buy a house, and to be away from Silicon Valley.
But only one of my clients have been from the valley since the collapse, and I have saved enough money from what I used to pay in rent on my old squalid hut to pay back the thousands of dollars that it cost to get a moving company to bring our stuff here. (We had it all in storage while we were living in newfoundland.)
I do OK because I work as a consultant for remote clients. There's not a lot of software here, mostly big-company IT stuff. There are a couple of chip plants in South Portland (Fairchild and National Semiconductor.)
I recently had a job interview where I would have had to move back to California. I'd been thinking of giving up consulting.
Before the interview I used a spreadsheet to calculate the salary I would ask for, adjusting the money I made last year upwards to account for the higher housing prices in the Bay Area.
When we discussed the salary, I explained that my request was based on the higher housing prices out there, and I told my interviewers what I paid for a mortgage out here. I planned to rent a considerably more modest place if I took the job.
They were pretty taken aback when I gave them the number. They said it was far more than they could pay, and that they had lots of candidates who would work for much less.
So I guess I'm going to continue being a consultant from Maine.
I feel really bad for everyone who's stuck in the Bay Area still paying those exhorbitant housing prices. Being out of work with a $2k/month rent bill just has to suck.
I probably wouldn't have made it through the last couple years if I hadn't moved to Maine.
Request your free CD of my piano music.
What you suggest is actually happening, and Europe will gain more and more autonomy and become less and less a friend to the US.
The problem is; this has all happened before.
The socialist nature of European nations will prohibit them from redirecting revenues away from social programs in favor of defense. They will be easy prey for the next generation of despots, and just like in times past, they will cry out for help from the US.
And just like in the past, we will help nations with cash and natural resources that we can use, and let those without fall under oppresive governance.
When there is no bully threating Europe, they want the US to leave them alone. When they get crushed because they would rather spend there money insuring a steady supply of truffles than defend themselves. Then of course, more Americans will die liberating those assholes all over again.
Healthy, strong men were living in cardboard shacks in great numbers. (which were called Hoovervilles, as people blamed Hoover for the Depression.
New start-up idea. Sell boxes to all the umemployed techies in Silicon Valley: Bushvilles. They only need to have one perk: Net access.
Table-ized A.I.
Property taxes throughout the state are through the roof, environmental "taxes" are stiff, all for who's benefit? The politicians? It sure isn't the stockholders.
:-P
Yet people keep moving the CA. Why? The weather and access to recreation such as the beach, skiing, themeparks, etc.
They tax it because they can because people still want to pay the premium for these things.
Want cheap land? Go to a place where the weather sucks and is boring as lard. I guess it comes down to this: if you like the outdoors, then live with a small dwelling in CA; but if you like big INdoors, then leave CA.
Also, if you are gay, then SF area probably has more potential partners. Gays tend to like tight quarters
Table-ized A.I.
I have a choice of two bookstores with a decent technical selection, Barnes & Noble in Augusta, 40 minutes away, or Borders in Portland, 2 hours away.
There would be more to do if I lived near one of the cities (there's also Bangor, where Steven King lives) but in Portland at least the housing is much more expensive.
There are a couple nice cafes in Rockland where you can get espresso and stuff. The owner of The Second Read actually graduated from UC Santa Cruz back in the 60's. But The Second Read closes at 5:30 pm. When we asked why they don't stay open later they told us it's because they can't get anyone to work in the evenings.
But you know I'm this california hacker guy. Sometimes when the second read opens at 7 am I come in for a coffee, not because I'm up early but because I'm still up from hacking all night or hanging out /. and k5.
All the good Mainers are up at dawn. My neighbors go to bed at 9 pm.
I think many of the folks stuck in Silicon Valley would get along better economically if they moved elsewhere. But wherever you go, it's not as likely to be such an interesting place.
I long for the days when I used to browse in the Computer Literacy Bookstore and hang out with my friends in all the cafes on Santa Cruz' Pacific Garden Mall.
The other problem is that it's colder than a witch's tit during the winter. This winter has been particularly bad. Money's been tight and heating oil is expensive, so we haven't been able to keep the house as warm as we like.
The icing on the cake is that it's hotter than Hades during the summer. It's just not right after these cold winters. Bonita can hardly stand it. One reason I was looking at moving to California is that I wanted to go back to the mild climate.
Request your free CD of my piano music.
Silicon Valley is now in India where the market is thriving as American employers move their operations oversea's to cut costs. Infact Sun and Microsoft are estimating that the current market will triple as more companies view IT workers as inexpensive and unimportant commidities that need to be valued down at any cost. It seems we are now viewed as or valued as an equal to a highschool dropout who works at Mcdonalds and should be paid as such.
After all the CEO's do the real work and we should be on our knees and begging for forgiveness to live in poverty like our fellow Indians. Microsoft and Sun are laying off programmers left and right and replacing them with cheap Indians working for less then minimal wage. Even Chinese programmers are viewed as too expensive and its getting rediculous.
http://saveie6.com/
Greed is the result of natural selection. You cannot "educate it out of people", at least not in the long run. *Every* society is based on some kind of "currency". In some places it is power, in some places social skills, and in others it is money. This is true from the smallest tribes to the most socialistic of countries etc.
Unless we genetically reingeering people to rip out four billion years worth of evolutionary programming to horde resources, this is the state of humans.
I suggest instead that we form a Geek political action org to lobby for our causes instead of only let the likes of Microsoft own congress alone. We have to stick up for ourselves rather than lambast human nature.
Baboons seek the biggest teeth or the most colorful butts, humans seek SUV's.
Table-ized A.I.
Right now the economy is terribly sick, from unrelenting dollar injection from Sir Prints-A-Lot (Greenspan),
What is wrong with printing more money? Let's look at 3 potential problems:
1. Inflation, which does not (yet) seem to be an issue here.
2. People put it under their matress instead of spending it. But with America's credit-card fast-draw ways, this does not look likely either. How many women do you know who can look at a pile of cash and not have an itching to spend it?
3. Falling value of dollar compared to other currencies. This makes exports cheaper (and Indian outsourcing more expensive.)
So far it looks like cranking out more greenbacks is a good move.
Table-ized A.I.
roflmao! That would be funny, San Jose back 30 years ago! IBM and fruit.
Im one of the lucky ones who still works in the
valley. On my commute to work ( 101 is a breeze
now), I see rows of empty buildings. The place is
becoming a ghost town. Housing is still $$$ but
it is a renters market. I have a friend who owns
a restaurant and his business is down 25%. I have
heard that the new business to be in is repo-ing
luxury cars. No new jobs, lotsa people looking
for work, gas is over $2.30 for premium. The
state of CA is billions in debt. I just had my
first heart attack last week.
Land of the free - home of the brave.
Retirement is only 10 years away. It will be a
tough 10 years.
>Silicon Valley is now in India
I think I would gladly go to India. Or certain parts of Europe. Or maybe Brazil. But do these opportunities really present themselves to Americans in any realistic way?
some dot coms succeeded.
some that failed succeeded as engineering projects, i.e. they handled the load and were designed to spec. Pets.com didn't die because it's ecommerce system was insufficiently engineered.
-pyrrho
---
the pen is mightier than the sword, the sword is mightier than the court, the court is mightier than the pen.
You really took that resume out of context. In fact, all of the bad things you say to look out for, this resume does not do. For instance:
- Hyper-inflated titles: I don't see anything wrong with the titles listed... in fact, they are rather mundane titles that most non-dotcom tech companies use. In addition, you added the title CTO to your example when it wasn't listed on the actual one.
- No college education listed: the actual resume lists his college education, majors, distinctions, and GPA... what more do you want?
- Vague descriptions of work: that's because you removed all of the specific descriptions in your example resume. This resume goes into quite a bit of detail and cites many specific numbers on what this guy contributed.
- Enumeration of skills isn't backed up by experience: again, that's because you removed all of the specific descriptions (and some of the other positions this guy had) in your example resume.
I realize you are trying to make a point, but if you're going to claim this is from an actual resume, then take it from an actual resume. Otherwise, this is just weakening your argument. I actually took you seriously for a bit until I found the actual resume.Poor little babies.
Sorry, I was in Detroit in the 70s and 80s.
Little California kids, go drink your herbal tea.
Europe isn't going to give a shit when America wants Europe to open up its agricultural markets in the next WTO round. That'll cost US farmers plenty. For example.
Any sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from a rigged demo
--Andy Finkel (J. Klass?)
Obviously, you are single and have no responsibilities to a spouse or any children. It's very easy to pick up and move somewhere else when it's just you. Once other people are in the picture, it ain't so easy.
Yes if your willing to work for less then McDonalds would pay.
However if you move to India the corporations will win. You will prove that you are a meaningless whore and that you deserve to be treated as such because you are willing like everyone else. You also prove that what they are doing is moral and perfectly ethical. Your willing to bow down and move right?
I refuse to let them treat me like this and if they won't pay me above minimal wage then I will work elsewhere under a different occupation. They can take away your job but not your self respect. I no its not about me or you but it sure as feels like it is. To say you work less then minimium age to me is saying you are worth less then an highschool dropout mopping the floors. I will say I am worth more and move on.
The only way to be worth more is demand it. sure supply is overboard but like lawyers and doctors they make alot of money because they demand it.
Get involved in meeting with your government leaders. Its the only way to change this. Not to mention millions of angry tech workers could cost them votes vs only a handfull of CEO's. Union doc workers on the west coast have really fucked things up for their CEO's but they used their power and won. We can't form unions unfortunately because it would only justify why they need to base their whole operations in India. We need to be like many blue collar workers who fought back by meeting with politicians and donating to campaign funds. Infact Elizebeth dole won her seat in North Carolina by showing an ad mentioning her opponents wife selling several textile plants in North Carolina and moved operations to Mexico. Infact it was only 3 out of 20 but enough North Carolinians got so enraged that they voted for her vs her opponent.
Voters get real pissed and hopefully the same thing can happen.
That is why it is harder for an American to go do programming overseas, than it is for a 3rd worlder to come here and do programming.
Actually, that is true for immigration in general. I would like to take my saving in about 2-5 years from now, put it in the bank to draw interest, and go move to rural Latin America where the rents are super-cheap.
But it is pretty hard to do that.
Sig:
Navy nuke sub lifestyle?
Companies are only doing this because they are still into big projects with hundreds of people.
Someday, when companies wake up and realize small, focused, skilled teams of three to four people could literally replace a hundred workers with no loss in output quality or quantity (I take that back, big jump in quality), then you might see some of those overseas jobs diminish. There would also be fewer jobs here but more people would really be computer scientists in the true sense than carnival plate-spinners the way it is now.
The biggest gain I think they get by going overseas is stripping away the layers of political BS that keep IT people from actually producing the software the business side of companies so desperately needs.
"There is more worth loving than we have strength to love." - Brian Jay Stanley
....as a high school student planning on going to school in Sunnyvale next year, I'm hoping that the economy (and the job market in SV) will get better by the time I get out of school in a few years.
As a side question, does anyone know of any places near Sunnyvale or Santa Clara that has significantly less rent but are like 5-15 minutes away?
I belong to the ______ generation.
You guys seem not to have RTFA, or surely you'd be commenting on this tidbit:
"Microsoft's antitrust settlement, seen in Silicon Valley as a victory for the software giant, has prompted many venture investors to swear off backing anything in Microsoft's path. That even holds true at Kleiner Perkins Caufield & Byers, the best-known venture firm, which in the past funded Microsoft competitors such as Sun Microsystems Inc. and Netscape. Kleiner Perkins general partner Ray Lane recently spent two hours chatting with Microsoft Chief Executive Steve Ballmer over dinner, trying to feel out safe areas for investing. "We have developed a good relationship," Lane says. "It makes sense to have friends that have scale . . . . You have to recognize that any software entrepreneur will want to write to that platform."
I don't think those two resumes are the same
Do not forget that the Silly Valley's native paper, the San Jose Mercury News, also published a report on how bad things are here. This report was a 4-part series!
0 77356.htm
http://www.bayarea.com/mld/mercurynews/business/5
This was published on 2/9/2003.
It is interesting, as each part showed a different point of view from a person of a different age.
Dr. Demento On The 'Net!
There are industries that need a defined infrastructure. Biotech has a pretty specific set of needs. Locating among other biotech companies makes sense.
Most electronic / computer / software situations need good, cheap bandwidth and hardware you can buy off the shelf or can order conveniently from anywhere in the industrialized world.
Tech Public Policy stuff
Hmmm, hard to say exactly. However, that is the area where the jizz falls. You know,
when it drips off her sweet visage after I've given her a heavy duty facial.
It ain't "segway", it's "segue".
Dog is my co-pilot.
Wow, Dude, I am impressed! That is a MAJOR BURN! This is not slashdot sarcasm, I am genuinely impressed. I bet he never thought someone would look it up! It's further proof that one should think before pontificating.
Personally I loved it because the first post was a real load of shit. And I have never, ever worked for a dotcom.
So after almost 30 years working my ass off as a geek and for the first and only time in my life, I've been unemployed. Since before 9/11.
Gee, I spent 15 years in Silcon valley working as a software geek including an eight year stint at a startup building EDA tools. If you are a chip designer, there's a 90% chance that you may have used one of the design verification tools I developed for guys like you.
So I switched gears after I put my wife's retail store on the web in 1994. Built a site for a home shopping tv show, and a video sales site for local adult film actress, That led to me getting hired by a dot.com startup to build a content delivery network.
And then some self rightous, SOB hardware engineer has the balls to declare that I don't deserve a job?
Did I understand you right, friend??
best regards,
buck