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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."
My cynical predictions:
1) Bush continues buildup.
2) Bush does quick + fairly clean war. A few Americans die. Iraq is offically 'cleaned up'.
3) Bush rises in polls. The (US, short-term) economy recovers on the positive effects of the war. (Long term world economy predictions are nebulous.)
4) Bush is voted to another term.
5) Midway through next term, Bush proposes war against another country.
6) World condems attack. World pressures said country into capitulation.
7) Bush goes with world opinion and is praised for peaceful solution to problem.
8) Bush exists office, hailed as great leader in both times of war and peace.
9) Everybody else is pissed.
-Brett
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.
I spent a year in the Valley looking for work... unsuccessfully. I'm now back in Australia and will try again in a few years. Jobs in the Valley are very much Cutting Edge Tech jobs, and i think it's very difficult to get into them unless you have recent experience working with them. (I'm talking software here - there are plenty of Verilog/VHDL/FPGA/etc jobs.) The software jobs almost all demand recent and extensive experience in J2EE/.NET/etc. The only jobs i ended up getting interviews for while i was staying there were in Fresno (central California/redneck zone) and in and around LA... and they were your average Linux/UNIX/C/VMS/etc jobs - exactly the stuff i am skilled and experienced in.
I think the Valley is trying too hard to be "cool" and ahead of the curve, at the expense of seeing that innovation can happen in other areas. Linux is a perfect example of something that is based on OLD technology and paradigms, but is still doing pretty cool stuff. Hell, even Windows app development is relatively old tech and "traditional" software paradigms, but there is a lot of flexibility available and a lot of Windows apps are far from "uncool". I don't know if we can blame this on the Dot Com boom... but it's frustrating that most developers who have honed their skills in other countries or even other states - or even OTHER CITIES IN THE SAME STATE can't find work because they weren't working with "hip" technology. It seems like Apple is about the only place in the Valley still doing interesting stuff with software. Hell, most of the game development houses are in LA, Microsoft is mostly in Seattle, Amazon is too... Linux development is distributed across the whole world, and IBM closed down its San Jose operations... All we can hope is that a few REAL visionaries end up in charge of companies there soon and start hiring people who have real-life skills rather than just a collection of certifications and J2EEE/.N3T/L33TPROGRAMMER!@23$ acronyms in their resumes.