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Other challenges to SV’s preeminence are more fundamental than the tech diaspora

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Re: Other challenges to SV’s preeminence are more fundamental than the tech diaspora

#71

Post by e_y_ »

onethought wrote: post #11
ping_pong wrote: post #5

Im so tired of random writers, even if it's O'Reilly himself, trying to predict that Silicon Valley is doomed. That's like saying Hollywood is doomed, or Wall Street is doomed. I've been around long enough to know that nothing will unseat Silicon Valley as the tech capital of the world. Silicon Valley has the critical mass of talent, VC money and greed that can't be replicated anywhere else in the world. There's a re…

> the best the world could do is China which just stole US ideas and then built a firewall to keep others out. So where was WeChat and ubiquitous QR codes for everything stolen from? Silicon Valley still haven't figured out how to do Ubiquitous contactless payment... it's like going back in time every time I travel there, and I have to swipe a credit card and sign with a pen. Or Taiwan's COVID/PPE Supply tracking sys…

Crappy payments isn't a tech problem, it's a market problem. Consumers and merchants can't be bothered to adopt contactless technologies that were introduced half a decade ago.

Companies have tried QR codes and other payment schemes long before that (including the unfortunately named ISIS), but again, no traction.

Re: Other challenges to SV’s preeminence are more fundamental than the tech diaspora

#72

Post by opportune »

pottertheotter wrote: post #51
baby wrote: post #45

I’m one of them. Left San Francisco due to the shitty weather, high crime, high rent, not much to do there, everybody is absorbed by their work, etc. I’ve been travelling and I’m currently wondering if I should come back or not...

There's a lot more to Silicon Valley than San Francisco. It's just as expensive with a lot of people absorbed in their work, but does away with the bad weather and crime. I've never understood why so many tech companies over the last decade went up to SF. Before that most were down the peninsula and in San Jose. I'd pick the lower peninsula over SF no question.

The South Bay is either boring or very expensive. SF still feels very genuine and has a lot more going on compared to Sunnyvale. Not to say there is no reason to live there, but it seems to mostly attract families who like suburban living

Re: Other challenges to SV’s preeminence are more fundamental than the tech diaspora

#73

Post by jandrewrogers »

ping_pong wrote: post #5

Im so tired of random writers, even if it's O'Reilly himself, trying to predict that Silicon Valley is doomed. That's like saying Hollywood is doomed, or Wall Street is doomed. I've been around long enough to know that nothing will unseat Silicon Valley as the tech capital of the world. Silicon Valley has the critical mass of talent, VC money and greed that can't be replicated anywhere else in the world. There's a re…

Many places have plenty of talent, capital is increasingly global, and greed is a human constant. None of these are meaningfully unique to Silicon Valley these days. What traditionally has been unique is the culture, the importance of which should never be underestimated. Unfortunately for Silicon Valley, that culture now exists in many pockets outside of Silicon Valley, often brought there by former denizens of The Valley. And those people are bring a lot more wealth with them due to making loads of money.

To your point, I do think the amount of money being thrown at employees in Silicon Valley (and Seattle, and...) has been detrimental to the ability to build hardcore technology startups. The cost of building a critical mass of highly qualified employees has made doing so effectively unachievable in many domains that require such employees to have any chance of executing successfully. This has created an arguably pathological selection bias for the kinds of startups that can be funded or the kinds of founders that can plausibly start a given company.

Silicon Valley isn’t dead but as a place to build a tech company it is looking less differentiated with each passing year. Some critical future software deep tech is now developed almost entirely outside of Silicon Valley (cloud, AI, etc) even at companies headquartered in the Valley.

Re: Other challenges to SV’s preeminence are more fundamental than the tech diaspora

#74

Post by betwixthewires »

I don't think a lot of people quite grasp how big of a scam silicon valley is. I've pieced most of the information together from articles that I have seen here.

Do you know who owns the majority of rental properties in silicon valley? East coast and Midwest pension funds or investment firms using their capital. This includes office space and residential areas. Care to take a guess who's capital the majority of VC firms are investing? If you guessed east coast and Midwest pension funds, you're right.

Moving to silicon valley to get a good paying job? Prepare to spend most of it on rent, basically paying a significant portion if not the majority of your salary to the very individuals that own controlling interest in the company paying you. Going to silicon valley to start a company? Prepare to pay a significant portion of that funding you got right back where you got it for office space.

Imagine if you could take a significant share, potentially a controlling interest, in every major tech startup basically for free. You create an engine to suck productivity out of some of the most creative, technically proficient innovators in the US by owning land in northern California and convincing them that they have to go there and rent from you to get your money to make their big ideas happen. Now you get to own some of the most productive people on the planet. That's one hell of a profitable scam. And the funny thing, we all forgot why you had to go there in the first place, that the silicon was made there, and we just take it as gospel that you have to go there to work in tech, even though the silicon is all made in Taiwan, Japan, South Korea and China now. And let's not even get started on the hypocrisy of pension funds that exist due to union lobbying doing this.

Now, if you're still considering going there, as an added bonus consider that you'll be surrounded by people that step over homeless people on the way to work where they will write social media posts about income inequality.

Re: Other challenges to SV’s preeminence are more fundamental than the tech diaspora

#75

Post by ehnto »

onethought wrote: post #12
ehnto wrote: post #8

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Open source is an entirely different movement. OSS is written the world over, yet SV is where everyone is busy extracting orders of magnitude of value from it. From plenty of experience, SV open sources because it provides a business advantage, because it costs them nothing or because it's part of the business model of OSS+Support. Individual contributors are the heroes here, people doing it for the love of the softw…

Oh really... So the open source code that contributed/drove the delivery of that comment wasn't written in SV? edit: To the second part of your comment... so why are the browsers all open source (at least at their core)? What's the business advantage? The non-organisational contributors are hardly the "heroes" of those projects. And they have contributed a ridiculous amount of free value to world.

There is no doubt that the vast majority of open source software comes out of the software industry in SV. The arguing point I have is that it isn't out of an egalitarian view from the industry to provide for others and make the world better, generally speaking. Exceptions abound, sure. But the industry is busy making money, the fact that say Chromium and Webkit are open source is a very good example of how a company can use open source to leverage a competitive advantage.

My main gripe with the article is that it tried to conflate the technology movement and the software industry. Tied tightly together no doubt, but they are different. The very nature of the industry is to make money and that is totally fine, but let's not pretend the industry was some utopian ideal from the outset. As I said in my first comment, the industry specifically, grew out of the attempt to extract value from the technology. That's fine. It hasn't been twisted over time, it just is what it is.

I may have been flippant in my commentary.

Re: Other challenges to SV’s preeminence are more fundamental than the tech diaspora

#76

Post by nmfisher »

ping_pong wrote: post #5

Im so tired of random writers, even if it's O'Reilly himself, trying to predict that Silicon Valley is doomed. That's like saying Hollywood is doomed, or Wall Street is doomed. I've been around long enough to know that nothing will unseat Silicon Valley as the tech capital of the world. Silicon Valley has the critical mass of talent, VC money and greed that can't be replicated anywhere else in the world. There's a re…

> There's a reason why we have never seen a world leading tech company come out from anywhere except the US.

Probably the most ignorant comment I've ever seen on HN.

Re: Other challenges to SV’s preeminence are more fundamental than the tech diaspora

#77

Post by axaxs »

baby wrote: post #45

I’m one of them. Left San Francisco due to the shitty weather, high crime, high rent, not much to do there, everybody is absorbed by their work, etc. I’ve been travelling and I’m currently wondering if I should come back or not...

I can't figure it out. I'm fairly well travelled in the world, and San Francisco is my least favorite of any city I've ever encountered.

But some tell me I just don't understand, which, in fairness, is also a true statement.

Re: Other challenges to SV’s preeminence are more fundamental than the tech diaspora

#78

Post by Apocryphon »

The article reminds me somewhat of an earlier O’Reilly piece, which taught me that the man’s got a bit of social consciousness in his critiques of SV:

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=23657403

I suspect the Pollyanna tone is why people aren’t actually engaging with the material in it. Applying machine learning to medical science is indeed exciting, but it’s hard to envision what exactly is the product that causes “The nexus of machine learning and medicine, biology, and materials science will be to the coming decades what Silicon Valley has been to the late 20th and early 21st century.” Not to mention, I would wager most commentators are not equipped to address his point about SV being unable to deal with medical regulations, seeing as there’s been medtech startups that have already attempted to flout FDA regulation.

> The hubs where that knowledge can be found are not the special province of Silicon Valley

Isn’t South SF a biotech hotbed?

His points about regulators actually doing able something substantive towards big tech platforms, and the end of “casino capitalism” also feel too Pollyannaish for our current lamentable moment. Maybe it has to all get worse before it’s foreseeable.

O’Reilly certainly calls it out as he sees it with the social commentary:

> When the “superstar firms” ruthlessly compete with smaller firms that come up with fresh ideas, not only starving them of talent but often introducing copycat products and services, there is decreased innovation from the market as a whole. Cities are dominated by a new class of highly paid big-company employees driving up housing costs and forcing out lower wage workers; wages and working conditions of workers in less profitable industries are squeezed to drive the growth of the giants. Their very jobs are made contingent and disposable, with inequality baked in from the beginning of their employment. Governments are starved of revenue by giant companies that have mastered the art of tax avoidance. The list is far longer than that.

Honestly, this article’s a great read.

Re: Other challenges to SV’s preeminence are more fundamental than the tech diaspora

#79

Post by selimthegrim »

dataking wrote: post #62
ping_pong wrote: post #5

Im so tired of random writers, even if it's O'Reilly himself, trying to predict that Silicon Valley is doomed. That's like saying Hollywood is doomed, or Wall Street is doomed. I've been around long enough to know that nothing will unseat Silicon Valley as the tech capital of the world. Silicon Valley has the critical mass of talent, VC money and greed that can't be replicated anywhere else in the world. There's a re…

> There's a reason why we have never seen a world leading tech company come out from anywhere except the US. Spotify, ATI, ARM, BlackBerry?

Canonical and the part of AWS built in SA?

Re: Other challenges to SV’s preeminence are more fundamental than the tech diaspora

#80

Post by ulfw »

pottertheotter wrote: post #51
baby wrote: post #45

I’m one of them. Left San Francisco due to the shitty weather, high crime, high rent, not much to do there, everybody is absorbed by their work, etc. I’ve been travelling and I’m currently wondering if I should come back or not...

There's a lot more to Silicon Valley than San Francisco. It's just as expensive with a lot of people absorbed in their work, but does away with the bad weather and crime. I've never understood why so many tech companies over the last decade went up to SF. Before that most were down the peninsula and in San Jose. I'd pick the lower peninsula over SF no question.

There is even less to do there.

If you like office parks upon office parks and parking lots then yea sure... go to Sunnyvale or Santa Clara etc...

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