First, read this.
No, all of it.
Done? Good.
It’s real, and it’s discouraging. I noted online today that when you factor in the bus that picks you up in the morning, the free snacks, the open-plan space with everyone around their shared table – the major Millenial contribution to Silicon Valley is turning it into kindergarten. But it’s not like it was in the late 1990s – when Po Bronson could strike up a conversation on the sideline of a rec-league soccer game and almost instantly be asked “do you want a job?” Employers are still being picky about who they hire, and employees are being picky about where they want to go, and in the meantime, Zuckface takes time out from bitching about the NSA usurping his exclusive right to violate privacy and lobbies both sides for more H1-B visas so cheaper foreign talent can alleviate runaway salaries…
There is a holiday on December 25 called “Christmas” that is the observation in Western Christianity of the birth of Jesus of Nazareth. There is also a holiday on December 25 called “Christmas” which is a heavily-Americanized secular celebration of the end of the year and the coming of winter, heavily leavened with consumerism and a general sense that we should take a couple of minutes to pay lip-service to the idea of being nice to people. A lot of confusion and conflict comes from people who conflate these two holidays and think they are the same thing.
By the same token, there is a Silicon Valley tech sector that dates back to the aerospace/microprocessor days of the Wagon Wheel era and has gone from military-industrial electronics to personal computing to the Internet to a revolution in digital media and communication. There is also a “Silicon Valley tech sector” whereby the dream is to drop out of Stanford at 20, Tinkertoy together some APIs with a kicky interface and a whimsical name, host the whole thing on a cheap AWS instance, collect $20 million in VC funding and ultimately sell out to Google or Facebook within a year. And too many people have come to conflate the latest get-rich-quick scheme for arrested adolescents with an industry that still has a lot of problems to solve more complex than a better way to get that co-ed to send you topless pics.
And most of all, the tide isn’t rising. The money isn’t getting spread around. Unless you do a huge deal while you’re still small, the big acqui-hire dollars are going to the engineers and the CxO-level staff and the VCs who funded you. If you’re a secretary or a QA guy or the IT support, don’t count on the massive upfront equity position – in fact, the only time you’re going to get equity up front is if they don’t have cash on the barrelhead to pay you. And there are people out there complaining about it, but in classic Valley fashion, they’re doing it in the most tone-deaf ignorant-ass way possible. Sigh.
Basically, the “Silicon Valley tech sector” is the latest version of the Wall Street of the 80s. It’s a double-bubble economy; the economic bubble grows on the back of lucky guesses, personal connections and VCs and investment banks with more money than sense hoping one of the darts strikes gold, while the participants exist in their own bubble away from, you know, reality. Live in the Mission or Marina, take the sealed bus to work without ever dropping off the Wi-Fi, get your dry cleaning done on campus, borrow an electric car to drive home if you like, enjoy the free food everywhere, never grow up, never grow old, and don’t think about how the ride can’t last because obviously Candy Crush will be popular forever and a $7 billion IPO is only sensible.
Meanwhile, the startup mentality goes haywire everywhere in the Valley. So now we all get to sit in the big open-plan offices, we all get to answer our work email 24/7, and we all get our projects managed in the style of ready-fire-aim, and never mind that an organization of thousands of employees doesn’t work like your eight-man social-app company upstairs at Red Rock. Everyone is chasing the “tech sector.” In the meantime, the actual tech sector suffers by it.