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Silicon Valley - The Geeks Are Back In Charge?
securitas writes "The New York Times' Steve Lohr reports on a fundamental shift taking place in Silicon Valley in the post-dotcom era: the geeks are back in charge. New start-ups and companies that survived the bubble 'are based on innovation and are run by people with deep technical skills.' These companies have real technology and a solid technical base that have historically been the bedrock of Silicon Valley - something that was temporarily forgotten during the dotcom bubble. Profiled companies include Tellme Networks (speech recognition), InterTrust (DRM - digital rights management), VMware (virtual machines) and Scalix (Linux e-mail servers)."
Let's not forget our friends over at IronPort Systems (www.ironport.com). Great product, great team...
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Amazing, first real dot-com I've dealt with that has a real solid shot of being the Big Dog in what they do
1) Everyone fired or laid off post-dot-com was a skill-less, freeloading slacker who got their technical skills from "Learn $TECHNOLOGY in 21 days" books.
False. In fact, middle-management is now finding their IT department unable to do much of anything without a huge budget increase or new equipment. Middle-management, as expected, is still sitting there, having meetings and trying to figure out what to do.
2) Anyone who can't get a job as a programmer now is a skill-less, freeloading slacker who got their technical skills from "Learn $TECHNOLOGY in 21 days" books.
False. There are Masters Degree holders in both engineering and scientific fields of IT study who cant rent interviews, much less jobs.
3) Technical skills are a commodity.
False. Perhaps 10% of the working population has the training, education and experience to build a complete computer program. Middle-management, unable to understand this fact, much less the technologies they are in charge of, continues to presume that ordering a database is no different than ordering new file cabinets.
When these and other myths are no longer givens in the discussion of improving the IT department, then, and only then, will things improve.
Business isn't willing to pay for products, innovation and careers, so we get brands, mortgage commercials and layoffs.
Now you know why they were included.
It's interesting to see a shift this way.
It seems that the tech industry is highly cyclical, and, once the current batch of geeks have innovated sufficiently to create marketable products, slowly business people will come to replace them
Once these products have run their course, and a recession kicks in, the shift happens the other way.
It's a fairly symbiotic relationship, I think, playing to each group's strengths. It's certainly worked for the past 40 years. Long may it continue
((lambda x ((x))) (lambda x ((x))))
I don't know why the New York Times chose them as an example of a "geek company" really the only true example of that was VMWare, which never was a dot-com bubble company in the first place.
Now excuse me if I disagree here, but these appear to be a combination of technical people with decent business people working towards a real solution or product. Technologists don't have to be "geeks", most are not. I'd say that the
Steve Jobs & Bill Gates are not geeks, and its THOSE sort of people, and people like Metcalf @ 3COM, and the founders of the other successful IT businesses that Silicon Valley is founded on. Its people who combine strong technical skills, with an even stronger view on how to make markets.
An Eye for an Eye will make the whole world blind - Gandhi
It's vapourware, there isn't a price or a release date anywhere on their site.
--- Nukes don't kill people psychopathic megalomaniacs do.
I used to work at CSFB, where Quattrone was. A bigger bunch of gung-ho cowboys it would be hard to imagine. I was asked to do such things as fiddle reports to show losses become profits (reasoning was given, but the reasoning was bogus and the guy just wanted to get a bonus). I edited code on live production servers. Systems fell apart on a more than daily basis. Some loon had decided the best way to look productive was to do a release every two weeks, regardless of whether there was anything to release or whether what was being done was actually in a production ready state. I had to argue with a project manager over the importance of primary keys in a relational database (he didn't believe in them. No, really...).
Presiding over all this rubbish was convicted criminal Quattrone. I enjoy that phrase. He shouldn't have been the only one.
Geeks back in charge? Read the whole article. We've been reading "Silicon Valley is back" articles for two and half years now. Initial investors in the companies mentioned will probably never get their money back. Bottom line is that a few dotcom firms are still living off of their IPOs at 10 percent of their staffing levels. The founders are collecting their paychecks and stuffing their 401Ks and outsourcing to India. "Geeks back in charge"? Nope. Business as usual is more like it. The last "geeks in charge" were Bill Gates and Steve Wozniak. One bailed out and the other morphed back into the privledged little rich boy brat he always was.
DRM is certainly a real technology in the sense that it has goals and implementation details. I do think there are ways to see it as not a "real" technology; admittedly, doing so involves adopting some non-textbook interpretations of "real". Suppose that we colloquially choose to say that real technology is that which results in a clear benefit for humankind; arguably DRM doesn't. These issues aren't black and white, but that's the spirit in which I read the original post. Sort of like saying that the HMO industry isn't a real industry because it doesn't add value; yes it does enrich particular people, and yes it employs many and has lots of papers to shuffle around, but its value to humanity is highly questionable and I don't mind dissing it as "not a real industry".
- First they ignore you, then they laugh at you, then ???, then profit.
Last week, I turned down business for the first time this year for lack of available time. I dont think there is going to be a lot of hiring, but for Consultants like me, things seem to be getting good again really quickly.
If things continue like they have been, I may have to hire an extra couple of consultants myself.
bfg technologies striks me as another company like this. If you go to their web site and look around you will see that theya re a group of techie gammers who made a video card company. If you look at the "Why we are different" section of their web site you will see that the
1. offer 24 hr tech support.
2. a lifetime guarantee on all their cards.
3. that the owners of the company are huge gamers who make the cards so that can use them when the play games.
Note: this has been posted by r.future (a person who spends way to much time on the internet!)
I think they fit the rebooting part, if not the geeks take charge part. They used 200 million obtained with a flashy dot-com biz model to build a real one and become profitable. A lot of companies in the valley have done very similar things to survive, regardless of whether the geeks were driving.
I was laid off because I broke the first rule of job retention: never finish your work. I worked for several years on a system I'll call XYZ. It was exciting at first, then frustrating, as I became pigeonholed as the resource for this one system, which produced large amounts of revenue. Bizdev people kept adding nonsensical features, which had to be continuously renegotiated in addition to my regular development tasks. Finally, I worked extra-hard to finish one more version, in the hopes of moving to a different position. Instead, of course, I was shown the door.
When I ran into one of my co-workers a while later. I smiled and said "XYZ is done!".