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Silicon Valley's Tech Employees Are Getting Nervous (vanityfair.com)
An anonymous reader quotes an article on Vanity Fair: Private tech companies are feeling a contraction in Silicon Valley. The funding that venture capitalists have thrown at start-ups is dwindling, in small seed rounds and mega-rounds alike. There's a new postmortem written weekly about a start-up that's run out of cash and shut its doors. Start-up executives are sobering up, realizing that their companies actually need a path to profitability. Now, not wanting to be stuck on a sinking ship, tech employees are thinking about the bubble, too, as they plan their career moves.
Get Nervous!
Give those special little snowflakes a taste of what everybody else has been living with for the last eight years.
the preceding comment is my own and in no way reflects the opinion of the Joint Chiefs of Staff
Their own Senator plans to leave a smoking crater where the Valley was. Maybe they can plant orchards again.
http://thehill.com/policy/cybe...
My God, it's Full of Source!
OUTSIDE_IP=$(dig +short my.ip @outsideip.net)
This bubble needs to pop. Venture capital needs to go out of business.
Never again. I value my personal time with my wife and children too much to devote it to a mere job, no matter how "good" that job may be. I'm interested in working with interesting tech, primarily things relating to command line tools, regexp, pattern matching, you get the picture. I left the startup culture for good and went to non-profits. Why? Because I have more latitude with how I work and what I work with than I ever did following some young, inexperienced founder(s) hellbent on getting rich. I work 40 hours a week, 8-5, Monday-Friday. These are normal, healthy hours. Anything else is for monkeys and those foolish enough to believe working 70 hours makes a difference.
You have one life. The time you have is precious. There is no rewind button. Do what you love, but do it largely for yourself or your family if you are married and have children.
They're all too young to remember the dot-com bubble bursting 15 years ago. We're living in the same times.
It's like the late 90's again except we have cooler mobile phones.
Trolling is a art,
This is why, once upon a time, executives were middle-aged men who'd had enough time to learn why profits are required for business to function.
"I don't know, therefore Aliens" Wafflebox1
It's funny that these start-ups don't understand that eventually the money dries up from VCs. You can only carve up a company so many times and dilute previous investors so much until you become worthless. It amazes me that the concept of a path to profitability completely misses some of these start-ups and usually the VCs are the ones pushing that from the beginning or are we talking Angel investors here?
Harrison's Postulate - "For every action there is an equal and opposite criticism"
Unless you are an executive, favor cash compensation, not equity. Make the decision for yourself how you want to invest your cash, if at all.
Work for a company that is making something legitimate today.
Work for a company that is making a profit, not wasting naive investors' money.
Factor in cost of living increases for the amount of time that you expect to work at the job. Let's say for example that you're moving to a city in the Silicon Valley region. If rents are going up 10% per year in that city then what they're paying you is going down 5-10% per year in real terms. (As rents increase, the cost of everything else increases, too. As rents climb even higher, the cost of living is completely dominated by what you spend on rent.)
F*ck Silicon Valley. It seems like no matter how high you get paid, you're screwed. Work somewhere where making $60,000 will allow you to live comfortably, in other words, virtually anywhere else in the United States.
If you can't save any money, you're not living comfortably. You're just getting by.
If these companies weren't hemorrhaging millions of dollars a month to lease office space, and attempting (if they even are) to pay their employees enough to live in $5000 a month apartments, maybe that capital would have a little more staying power, no? I'd be very afraid of investing in any startup who claims they have to be located in the most expensive real estate in America. "Silicon Valley" is a deprecated concept. The smart companies are setting up shop in flyover states, hiring employees who work remotely.
I read about Spoonrocket. It is nothing but a restaurant that delivers food in San Francisco. In at least one review it was just not that good.
I doubt that it's tanking is an example of downturn. It may just be that the margins where way too small for it to ever expand past a small number of cities.
See my blog http://ilovecookes.blogspot.com/ for light hearted technical information.
For those of you who don't read The Wall Street Journal in the morning, companies are hiring in San Francisco.
More companies in San Francisco plan to add new jobs in the next six months than in the last half year, according to a new report, bucking concerns about a tech slowdown and its impact on the region's economy.
http://blogs.wsj.com/digits/2016/03/17/what-slowdown-san-francisco-execs-plan-more-new-hiring/
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Silicon Valley's recent host of me-too social media apps promoted by startups that end in 'ly' are due for immolation, but if you're working on one of the large scale development efforts that have a good chance of transforming society in as basic a way as the smartphone has, you don't have to worry about your job. An example: autonomous cars.
You realize that when their bubble bursts, it will get worse for everybody else to a lesser extent too, right?
I'm not sure why all the surprise. This is exactly what happened in the last tech bubble, people suddenly realizing they had to produce something which earned them money. They couldn't keep leeching off someone else to get their paycheck.
"Those who cannot remember the past are condemned to repeat it" couldn't be any more clear.
Looks like those smug, hipster millennials are suddenly having to face reality and they don't like it. Too bad.
We will bankrupt ourselves in the vain search for absolute security. -- Dwight D. Eisenhower
I think that considering just California and then labeling this a "tech bubble" that's bursting is myopic at best. The tech industry everywhere else in the country, nay, the world, is booming. The analysis is off--this isn't VC being less willing to risk, this is VC finding enough promising ventures outside of CA that they have to broaden their horizons to stay competitive.
Too many people think taking an old tired idea and adding an app to the mix will somehow make it fabulous.
Laws are rules for the court, but merely a bottom bar to hit for life. Think beyond laws in your actions always.
Haven't we seen this before? Tech bubble, "we need to actually turn a profit," etc.?
Fickle venture capital dollars avoid human payroll and other operational costs at all times. Its about buying a golden goose, but only needing the golden eggs. If that makes you nervous then you're lucky to be working until they can lay some eggs. Once apon a time, people were valued assets, but now they've become a liability that increases with time.
The market is fickle and income is increasingly unreliable. A 30 year mortgage will out live most any job or marriage 5 times over. Its absurd to not be nervous when you are part of a system that values money more than people - whether you are earning or spending. If you efforts can be owned in a patent or trade mark or a market brand or copyright or intellectual property, then all the better for faceless shareholders.
Conversely, the people who continue to live beyond their employment should be nervous about the fact that when the music stops playing anyone left standing loses their seat in the game. I hate musical chairs. It's a cruel way to make kids nervous about attrition: certain death is inevitable. Winner take take all...of none....all by themselves...
This is no way to run a society or a kindergarten unless you like the beautiful California weather on a nervous dystopia, of a highly skilled, transient population of dispensable indentured servants with big student loans and little spare time or strength to invest in their community. Grads slavishly rake in the cash for as long as it suits a bottom line in an anorexic economy predicated on perpetual growth in a very finite world. If this is scenario is the best incentive or conceptual model we can offer those participants in prosperity, then we should be very nervous. Silicon Valley careers are just like musical chairs, but the rest of life is like Monopoly: do not pass go, do not collect $200, but rent is due, just the same. We can't all be on top.
Land lords have lived well since feudal times when life was grounded in the land of the lord of the manor. Serfs occupy land while they work for its bounty, and living was job your security. The fruits of labor were never used to eliminate jobs or people because there was little money involved in the equasion. When Capital is the fruit that we seek, then suddenly people are much more expendable. We need to value the rest of our reality or we will loose perspective and prosperity, overall. Its better if we can keep the music going and not all grab chairs all at once.
Life has existed and evolved for billions of years before money grew on trees
...so you're telling me that Twitter isn't actually worth $15 billion dollars?
Phht.
Next, you're going to tell me Uber's not worth $62 billion.
-Styopa
Oh my gosh, we feel so bad for them....
Signed,
No one in Detroit.
Maybe instead of begging for VC capital, these hot shot developers should focus on delivering actual products and turning a profit.
It's you know, just a thought though.
Please bring this back. I miss this site and all it's wonderful gory detail about the crap that went on during the glory and dying days of the dot com bubble.
Wheel of Time: Book by Book and Sumview (summary review) Bigdady92 style: http://bigdady92.blogspot.com/
So in other words, it's 2001 all over again?
Tech is a cyclical bubble; fueled by VCs who post huge gains on paper. The trick is to spot the "unwinding" when investors slowly cash out. Once they're out, they pull the plug and actual market forces take over and the tech sector tanks.
This round is over folks, come back in 6-8 years when it starts up again.
http://autopsy.io/
The picture in the TFA looks like it's from the 90's, giant CRT and all. I think that's a freaking Gateway computer one of the guys is on. Weird.
Chance favors the prepared mind.
Perfect is the enemy of good.
The new techies on the block didn't know before postmortems on tech crunch, we had an entire freaking website that posted/explained the flame outs in silicon valley as well as the dot bust in general.
Good times they were. And here we are again!
clicking the postmortem link, one sees the headline
SpoonRocket shuts down amongst on-demand apocalypse
should one bother to read a webpage where the writers are so inept or careless as ? (I think they mean't amidst)
Profit or Perish needs to be the standard for raising capital.
Currently there are few consequences for executives that have a long history or failure. There seems to be too much emotion in the funding process and pie-in-the-sky thinking, and not enough rational analysis. When analysis does occur, the wrong weights are put on the projections, weights that help satisfy the wants and desires of the founders and investors and don't necessarily line up with history or economic models.