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Silicon Valley Doesn't Have an Attitude Problem, OK?
Nerval's Lobster writes: In Silicon Valley they think differently, and if that leads to arrogance, so be it. At least that's what Bloomberg Businessweek's Joel Stein implies in his long meditation on the area's outlook on technology, money and changing the world. Stein set out to examine the underlying notion that Silicon Valley's and San Francisco's tech entrepreneurs are feeding a backlash by being, in a word, jerks. His conclusion seems to be that they may well be jerks, but they're misunderstood jerks. He doesn't deny that there's sexism and boorishness at play in the young tech community, but he sees the industry trying to make itself better. He sees a lot of egotism at work, too, but he says if you're setting out to change the world, you're probably going to need a big ego to do it. But tell that to other people in Northern California: undoubtedly, you've read about the tempest in San Francisco recently, where urban activists are decrying the influx of highly paid tech professionals, who they argue are displacing residents suddenly unable to keep up with skyrocketing rents.
would reply to this
by TheSpoom (715771) Uncaring Linux user here. I have nothing to add to this but please continue. *munches popcorn*
are like the posters on Slashdot. They're some of the most fairest, open-minded, most professional people around, willing to look hard at both sides of any issue before coming to a conclusion.
Just ask them.
As the old saying goes "It's not arrogance if you can back it up." Granted, Twitter and Facebook might not exactly be the sort of change we're all excited about but it's undeniable that Silicon Valley and other tech hubs are changing the world.
...for others to follow.
You can't be ahead of the curve, if you're stuck in a loop.
There is just no pleasing this people: 'undesirable element' moves in - they complain about falling property value, 'highly paid tech professionals' move in - they complain about increasing property value.
No.
The whole mentality is dumb. No one DESERVES to live in a particular place. Pay the rent or move. Pay the taxes, or move and rent out your place to someone who can afford to pay the taxes for you.
Are they going to change what SF is? Of course. But SF isn't what it was 50 years ago, or 100 years ago. These things constantly change. At least it is going upward. It could be changing like Detroit.
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Can we, perhaps, not refer to the entire tech community as one thing? Let's have the tech community, and then have the community that makes parking space auctioning apps, social websites, and "break-through" instant messaging apps who think they're on par with Tim Berners-Lee or Packard or Wozniak, because they made an iphone app where you can leave reviews for your favorite pigeon feeding seat in the park.
It's the first gift the Gods give you before they start to F' you up.
They are all about 'diversity', 'inclusiveness', and 'peace'... until you try to move into their area and don't think, talk, and act just like them. Then they start slashing your tires and blocking your buses. Say, didn't school segregationist use the same bus-blocking techniques to try and keep those 'others' out of their wholesome little schools? Oh, the irony...
Having almost passed the 90-day mark at my first Silicon Valley job, my experience has been that it's a highly overrated (and overpriced) place to start a new tech company. Compared to where I'm from (and currently still reside), Austin, I haven't really been wowed with the talent over there vs over here. The big difference I've seen is that the people over in Silicon Valley just seem more big-headed about what they do.
Tired of these fuckers thinking they are the promised people guiding us out of ignorance.
They're misunderstood alright. People think they're just awkward around other people because they spend their time staring at a computer screen all day. Everyone else just calls them assholes.
Sounds like the East coast is moving to the West coast...
Sounds like the residents in the vicinity want all the benefits of living around Silicon Valley without any of the challenges.
Entitlement is alive and well in The Bay Area!!!
It basically boils down to "cool" people mad that the "uncool" people have more status than them.
And they wouldn't dream of "occupying" Apple or Google, it's too far from the city and they'd look like hypocrites. Hippies tend to have more iPhones than mutual funds.
Hmm, let's put thousands and thousands of socially maladjusted techies together in one region, appoint a bunch of hypersocialized "brogrammer" types as their bosses, and see what happens. What could possibly go wrong???
I work in the "tech industry" but I work for a specialized IT services firm, which is almost the polar opposite of a bubble-fueled Internet startup. I watched the dotcom bubble inflate and pop, and now this one's on the way out too. By contrast, the people I work with are totally normal. Some have their quirks, but we have very few jerks. Steve Jobs may be the poster child for "tech visionary" but people conveniently forget that he was an absolute jerk and people hated to work for him. In my mind, anyone who emulates that is someone I definitely don't want to work with.
The "techie asshole" personality really does feed on itself. Take a bunch of recent grads with no real world experience and put them under someone trying to channel Jobs, Zuckerberg or similar. Pretty soon, everyone starts acting like that. I'm not surprised at how much sexual harassment goes on in these environments given this fact. It doesn't help that the press is falling all over itself to pump these guys up and give them superhuman status. Yes, smartphones are cool. Yes, people are walking around with $800 touchscreen computers in their pockets that let them do more than they used to. But in my mind, all these late-bubble-stage startups are doing is creating one-off websites competing for everyone's attention. No one's really inventing much new -- it's all about advertising, page views and the sale of your personal data. Some stuff that has come out in the last few years is extremely cool, but a lot of it seems a lot like the very late 90s when the bubble was the frothiest it had been and everyone is piling on hoping to cash out before the big pop.
I call it the "Dr. House" excuse. Basically it goes "Look, who do you want treating you, the a$$hole who's brilliant, or the above average guy who's nice?"
And the honest truth is that 99% percent of the time, we want the above average guy who's nice.
Yes, if you have something incurable, (or something that no one else can figure out what it is in the case of the TV show's Dr. House), then you want the genius no matter how arrogant he is. But in every day issues, you want someone that is going to be nice and do a reasonably good job - not a genius that is going to cure your wart while calling you an idiot and revealing to your wife that you sleep around.
Genius is NOT an excuse to be arrogant. Especially as sometimes the guy you are insulting is actually smarter than you (i.e. look at at Edison and Tesla - 2nd brightest man of his time refused to pay the first brightest man what he was worth and screwed himself ).
Part of being smart is having social skills. Part of being in business is using those social skills. If you can't or won't gain them and use them,
excitingthingstodo.blogspot.com
Isn't it true that a bus stop may be used by any conveyance, public or private? If you are loading or unloading passengers, you may use one, you just can't wait there. So what is the problem?
I like how you recognized that the "brogrammer" stereotype contradicts the "socially maladjusted" stereotype, so you had the presence of mind to frame the "brogrammers" as only managers.
Is it Wipro? I have heard such good things about Wipro.
Bill Shockley was the originator of the Silicon Valley arrogant genius archetype. One of the co-inventors of the transistor, he convinced an electronics entrepreneur in the Los Angeles area to pay him to set up a semiconductor laboratory near his mother's home in Palo Alto, staffed with young geniuses. Then his abrasive management drove them away, leading them to found Fairchild Semiconductor, followed by Intel, AMD, and other, less important, electronics companies in the area. In the meanwhile, Shockley went into eugenics.
HP was already around, and Fred Terman of Stanford was encouraging entrepreneurship, but Shockley brought the "silicon" to Silicon Valley. And the arrogance.
Have a nice time.
undoubtedly, you've read about the tempest in San Francisco recently, where urban activists are decrying the influx of highly paid tech professionals, who they argue are displacing residents suddenly unable to keep up with skyrocketing rents.
That was decades-old news in Silicon Valley when I moved here in the late '80s. (A couple who'd gone there for the same project a few years earlier had bought, rather than rented, had the price of their mortgaged house skyrocket over a couple years, and bailed out of High Tech to start a new career as landlords.)
I thought Hi Tek had been doing the same to Berkeley and (to a lesser extent) SF since before then, as well. SF prices have always been high - though perhaps not as high as mid-peninsula around the Stanford tek-lek.
So what's new? Did Hi Tek start buying spaces in the slums and drive the prices further up than SF's already astronomical highs? Did public assistance not rise to track the new rents?
This is SO last millenium...
Bantam Dominique roosters crow a four-note song. Once you've heard it as "Happy BIRTHday" you can't NOT hear it that way
This is the same douchenozzle behind the Time Magazine "The Me Generation" slander piece against the millennial generation.
We've had this for decades in New York.
Stock/Bond traders are the most arrogant, drug-addled S.O.B.'s you've ever met. They are the platonic ideal of "prick."
But they are forgiven, because they spend money like crazy (often on activities that would make Charlie Sheen blanche).
They also don't save a dime. I know folks that made seven figures for five years, burned out, and now paint houses for barely enough to make the mortgage.
Congratulations California, now you know how Oregonians have felt for the last 20 years. Obnoxious jerks with too much money moving here and driving up prices beyond what the locals can afford, sounds familiar doesn't it?
I agree. Most of the tech universe is outside the valley. Who would want to live in a giant overpriced suburb? And who would want to work in a field in which moving to one area was a must?
Democracy Now! - your daily, uncensored, corporate-free
SF is extremely hostile to new property development that would increase the supply of housing in the city.
-jcr
The only title of honor that a tyrant can grant is "Enemy of the State."
He's a prime example of what the tech industry has turned into.
We have now had an entire generation of programmers raised on walled garden apps, cookie-cutter scripting libraries, and above all a wave of cheap VC funding and hardware. How many people are left out there that can build the likes of Bittorrent, Bitcoin, a language like C, a game like Elite, or even a site like Slashdot? How many people, young people, are there who can write an OS kernel, design a basic circuit, and at a more pertinently serious level, reliably write software to implement mathematical encryption algorithms. Reading this I'm inclined to believe that recent meme post about how the programming/silicon valley community has been taken over by "brogrammers", "hipsters" and "neckbeads", which to my mind are simply constitute cultural re-skinnings of the infamous Visual Basic programmers of old. I worry that the unglamorous, mostly uncompensated, and largely intellectually driven practice of pure software programming and creation has been left behind in recent years. I personally have noticed little progression and indeed in many areas a general regression in the quality and reliability of software since approximately 2006/7. While I would attribute this to my general "civilization is in decline" zeitgeist worries, my frustrations with software, UIs, and websites in particular has undoubtedly increased manifestly in the last 2-3 years or so. Maybe I'm just getting old -- or maybe programmers really are getting worse.
-- ObsessiveMathsFreak
"Politicians and diapers must be changed often, and for the same reason."
And a whole company of them doesn't either. Silicon Valley is so screwed up they don't realize that their biggest problem with them not changing the world like they think they are going to is diversity and a safe environment where diversity can be made use of. I'm not talking about safe as in no conflict, but safe as in if you offer an alternative solution and it will be measured on it's merits (or results from an experiment) vs inter office politics.
Will claim that's how capitalism works. If there is a problem, the market will correct itself... long after any long term residents have been priced out of the market, that is.
Henry George looked from a high hill toward the growing San Franscisco in the 1870's and realized that rising land prices were a bug in in the industrial economy. They punished success.
His book sold more copies than any other in the 19th century in the United States: Progress and Poverty.
woman/man who was refused by Elon.
by TheSpoom (715771) Uncaring Linux user here. I have nothing to add to this but please continue. *munches popcorn*
So, does Betteridge's law of headlines apply here?
There is zero difference in talent. The difference is one of leadership and money. The money is already there, so there is where people go.
Actually, the big difference is a little-known aspect of California intellectual property law:
If you, as an employee, invent something, on your own time and not using your employer's resources, and it doesn't fit into the employer's current or foreseeable future product line, you own it. If the patent assignment agreement in your employment contract says otherwise, it's void.
This means that, if you invent something neat and your employer doesn't want to productize it, you (and a couple of your friends) can rent a garage across the street and found a new company to develop and sell it.
Employees in California can NOT be ripped off the way Westinghouse ripped off Nikola Tesla.
The result is that companies in silicon valley have "budded off" more companies, like yeast budding off new cells. And once this environment got started, thousands of techies have migrated to the area, so there are plenty of them available with the will and talent to be the "couple of your friends" with the skills you need to fill out the team in your garage.
Lots of other states have tried to set up their own high-tech areas on Silicon Valley's model. But they always seem to miss this one point. They need to clone that law to have a chance at replacing or recreating the phenomenon. Result: They might get a company to set up a shop, but they don't get a comparable tech community to build up. Research parks of several companies, generally focused on some aspect of tech, might form, but you don't get the generalist explosion.
Of course, like any network, the longer it accumulates, the more valuable it is to be connected to this one, rather than another that is otherwise equivalent. (This is what the parent poster already alluded to.) Thus there's only one Silicon Valley in California, with the resources concentrated within driving distance, though the law is statewide. Even with the law change, and a couple decades to let the results grow, other states might have a tough time overcoming California's first-mover advantage.
But California keeps fouling things up for techies and entrepreneurs in other ways. So if some other state would TRY this, they might become a go-to place when groups of people in Silicon Valley get fed up and decide to go-forth.
Bantam Dominique roosters crow a four-note song. Once you've heard it as "Happy BIRTHday" you can't NOT hear it that way
In the 90s, I worked on a project in San Francisco
As I walked around the city, I saw angry rants pasted on various surfaces around town
The ranters were denouncing the "yuppie invasion" and claiming that it was ruining the neighborhood
It seemed to me, that if you replaced every occurrence of the word "yuppie" with the word "nigger", it would have fit perfectly into a KKK rant from the 50s
Attitude it one thing, disrespect should never be tolerated ever. Its something we teach our kids.Looks like some parents did really poor job. Nothing new but to me this is nothing more then revenge of the nerds.
Jack of all trades,master of none
Really. There's nothing wrong with San Francisco a few neutron bombs couldn't fix.
I'm not sure I trust Bloomberg on what is acceptable behavior for folks with a lot of money flowing around.
I submit getting rid of the long term residents *is* solving the problem.
perhaps if these people saved up and bought their own homes rather than renting, they wouldnt be in this mess.
The median price for a new or existing single family home or condo in San Francisco is one million dollars.
The median is the price for which half of homes sold for more and half for less.
The nosebleed price is a result of limited inventory and an influx of cash buyers willing to pay whatever it takes.
Many are tech workers with stock compensation from an initial public offering or takeover. Realtors call them "Google" kids even if they are 40 years old and work on biotech.
A secondary group of cash buyers are [mostly Asian investors] who see San Francisco as a relative bargain.
$1 million city: S.F. home price hits seven figures for the first time [July 17, 2014]
The median household income in the U.S. is $53,000. State & County QuickFacts [2008-2012]
It takes confidence to say that you have an idea that no one else has thought of, and that what other people are doing isn't as good as your way. But you don't have to be obnoxious about it.
Einstein and Woz were/are nice enough people.
We have all had ideas that we mentioned at work, and when these ideas were accepted, they changed the way things were done. But we can be polite when we tell our ideas.
I guess there are three keys to presenting new ideas the right way:
1) You're trying to help other people, not show off how smart you are.
2) You're polite when you tell your idea.
3) You genuinely respect other people. Maybe your customers don't know as much about software as you do, but they have their own skills.
Are not the feelings thought words and deeds of others, their right to determine? Does what others do or any of the rest of it matter? I don't think so, provided whoever is on one's team and in one's ecosystem benefits sufficiently to tolerate you...
The bulk of technology that people claim silicon valley has been creating for the last 15 years is mostly nothing more than getting more people to their creation and less to other peoples. All of it is easily replaceable by another company if you can get the masses to follow. For you to stand out above the crowd for that, you have to be 100% positive or your creation and very cocky. Swing the masses into thinking you ARE right and you ARE better and get the herd to follow. It doesn't matter if you are actually better or right as long as people think you are.
This is actually a trend outside of silicon valley too. I'm getting a little older now but I can see it with candidates I have been interviewing more and more recently. People are more cocky and instead of solving actual problems I am giving them with specific answers or a specific method, they lean towards how they could solve it or what they would do to solve it or how they solved something similar in the past which often is a bunch of gibberish. I actually have to repeat and say, okay... what is the actual answer or how do you get the answer. They just assume I should hire them based on their confidence and attitude but when I dig deeper, many are just not ready for my positions..
I am all about being positive and saying failure is not an option, and this will work but damn, eventually technology and a plan has to actually be there and work instead of just talking about how is should work.
Why do they allow foreigners to buy all our land and then charge us rent to live on it?
Groundhog-day anyone?
Windows 2000 - from the guys who brought us edlin
it isn't the douchebaggery of the people who are going to change the world. It's the douchebaggery of the other 99.9999999% who THINK that they are going to change the world.
The wealthy love nothing more than to pat each other on the back (or hold a circle jerk, if you prefer) over how awesome and hard-working they are and therefore how much they totally deserve to be so much wealthier than everyone else (who is just as hard-working, and in some cases, also just as educated).
And that's what's being done again here. Get a room guys.
"When information is power, privacy is freedom" - Jah-Wren Ryel
The best thing that came out of silicon valley was the intel microprocessor and nothing more. I don't consider facebook, twitter, and the google search engine technology worthwhile.
I live in the South Bay pretty close to Google HQ. There are absolutely big ego companies full of themselves, but they are not the majority. We have companies here known for douche baggery like Google, Apple, and Zynga. But we also have Rambus, Ericsson, Brocade, Motorola, Cisco, and countless others that are no different than companies elsewhere.
I saw the same thing in Detroit where every company was compared to one of the Big 3. The supply chain employed way more people than the Big 3, but they operated differently. In fact supply chain would not be successful if they acted like one of the "Big 3". Articles would always claim that they were the same because the stereotype suited someone's purposes, even when it was not true.
-The wise argue that there are few absolutes, the fool argues that there are no probabilities.
I wonder how a guy who bought some property in san francisco to rent it now at the new prices must think ;)
answer
you should have been that guy!!!!
grammatically it sounds like you already left ... freidien slips? hmmmm? ;) ;) ;)
Please look up the definition of treason you stupid xenophobe.