How to Get Rich Quick in Silicon Valley | Hacker News Reader

How to Get Rich Quick in Silicon Valley

theguardian.com

100 pointsderrida58 comments

'So if someone asked “What’s your space?” and you had a deeply unfashionable job like, say, writer, it behooved you to say “I deliver eyeballs like a fucking ninja”.'

LOL. I personally would rather hear someone come out and say they're a writer, but I can see how the alternative can sound more interesting.

Only to people in the bubble. When someone introduce themselves to me as a "ninja", they immediately get awarded -1000 points in my mind. Either they're full of shit, or they're an actual ninja, but then they suck at their job because ninjas don't go around proclaiming their ninjadom. So it's deserved either way.

I'm no expert on Japanese culture or ninjas, but my idea of of a ninja is someone who is dressed in black, infiltrates your building, kills you with a thrown weapon, and then escapes without being seen. So, if you "deliver eyeballs like a fucking ninja," then you're not a very good ninja.

Or, the alternative, they dress in black, infiltrate your building, and then gouge your eyes out and deliver them to their client. If you think of them that way, then yes, they can be a good ninja.

Okay, I can accept that perspective. But that's not exactly in the way they mean it in Silicon Valley. In Silicon Valley, when they say "deliver eyeballs like a fucking ninja," they mean, "I'm can get a quarter-million people to look at your website." Obviously, that means quite something different than carving peoples' eyes out, after which they won't be able to see any websites.

"We startup wannabes were not entrepreneurs. We were suckers for the shovel merchants"

Now for a little experiment: everyone reading this, go immediately to the mirror, look at yourself, and explain the business model of the company you work for. Can you do it? Doesn't it make you want to throw up?

This is one of the most dystopian things I’ve ever read.

Yes, this can be a very good topic for an episode on Black Mirror TV series [1]

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Black_Mirror

I'd say more appropriate for a TV series, where each episode the hero finds something else more depressing about this future. Maybe like the TV show "Silicon Valley" but with much darker humour.

"A Valley of silicon, tragedy, and despair..." - sounds like some dark Lovecraft stuff.

True. I mean I work since 5+ years in Startups, even (with not so much success) co-founded. At the bottom line it stinks, of course I see that I can find a new well-payed job with ease. But people do treat me like a drone and I need to go through all this stupid office politics. Working from Berlin in Germany though but I get the taste of the pure essence, which seems to be in SV for instance...

Is it even possible to get rich in SV? Obscene cost, no housing, high taxes, life time alimony... It seems like the worst place to start the business.

Yes. There are many rich people in SV. That is why the costs are obscene.

Even if a house costs $2M in SF, you can earn that in a few years on an engineer's salary.

If you pick the right companies, and are relatively successful, it should be possible to accrue millions of dollars in SV, even with the costs of living. That's rich in my books.

But really rich? There are of founders of tech companies who earn $100M or more from a successful startup. SF is probably one of the most likely place to make that happen.

This is somewhat analogous to film industry, isn't it? It attracts lot of potential actors. Lot of stories about their struggles and how unforgiving the industry can be. All they see are super-famous and super-rich actors and they all want to like that.

Entry-level programmers are paid $100k per year, entry-level actors are paid exposure.

> Even if a house costs $2M in SF, you can earn that in a few years on an engineer's salary.

Yes, because everyone knows that average engineer in SF earns ~400k per year.

I have to bang a drum here, because it's a really important drum for HNers to hear and internalize:

It is factually the case that AppAmaGooBookSoft pay mid-career professionals in the engineering track approximately that at whatever the local equivalent of Senior Engineer is, and Senior Engineer is a level that everyone in the engineering track who is not fired is expected to get to.

There's a bit of wiggle-room between "is it even possible to get rich" and "average salary".

Don't forget tax and living expenses (rent isn't cheap). Saving two million on a single engineering salary is going to take closer to a decade than a few years.

Whoa, so it's going to take ten whole years to own a house? ...and that's considered bad?

I was addressing the original assertion that an engineer could save enough for a house in a few years.

My approach was to save and then fun as far from the Bay Area as I could. Much quicker.

If you can save USD 2M in ten years, and buy a house outright then you are in a position to get a mortgage on said house in a much shorter timeframe.

It's possible. I came to Silicon Valley with a Honda CRX and the stuff that would fit in it, a degree from the University of California and a net worth of about negative $2500. I left sixteen years later a multimillionaire.

I'm glad I left. It is a good place to get rich if you're a programmer. But I'm never going back.

I enjoyed the first couple of years in Silicon Valley. I started to hate it more every year after that.

If I was 21 years old now with a CS/CE/EE degree, I'd go to another second-tier tech hub, like NYC, Austin or maybe Boulder.

I made it six years; that was enough for me. I wonder what percentage of coders secretly resent the place.

I was there for about that amount of time when I manged to build enough reputation and connections to get into one of the hot startups at the time. I was 29 at the time. I really wanted to leave Silicon Valley, but I already realized that I had made my big break if I played it right.

If I hadn't gotten into to this startup (now a big company on the NASDAQ), I would have left and moved to Austin.

I continued to hate Silicon Valley more every year, but it made me rich.

I'm hating it after four. Nothing quite like the realization that you can either afford a house or to retire elsewhere.

It's the best place to start a business if you're rich or build a business if you already have good revenue.

Salaries are paid based on what a very competitive market demands in a place with high cost of living and taxes, but they're a large amount in absolute dollars. Anyone moving to the Bay Area when young and maximizing their savings rate can easily and quickly save a fairly large amount, which can then be invested with an eye to long term growth.

Nobody is twisting your arm to use that money to buy a Bay Area house and settle permanently. After a decade, move away and you're suddenly rich.

He junks the Silicon Valley culture by portraying how this it's a fake culture fueled only for some people to make money. I don't disagree with it, what I disagree with its portrayal as a scamming culture. Won't you expect everyone to be trying to make a buck when the time is right legally? Legality can be said to be objectively important, but morality is choice? And while it does represent the majority, isn't this the very same culture that enabled the unicorns from there? The descriptions of Zuckerberg or Musk or Jobs's lives before they got big would've sounded very similar to this.

As an intern nearly done with work in the Bay Area I find the whole idea of permanently immigrating to Silicon Valley repugnant. Housing prices are in the millions, terrible healthcare, earthquakes every other week, dire state public transportation, apathetic attitude towards its homeless and, lots of groupthink. I suggest any YUPPIE (in a developed nation) with offers from a big four here reconsider their local offices imho. It is depressing to think this is the best place for STEM careers in the world.

Oh yes, I've heard about the earthquakes. If they're half as bad as I've seen in movies, that must be pretty bad!

I'll bet it disrupts your whole day when the Earth randomly splits open and your car falls in, eh? Every other week, too?

> earthquakes every other week

Ridiculous hyberbole is right.

> It is depressing to think this is the best place for STEM careers in the world.

I don't think that's the case.

"It is depressing to think this is the best place for STEM careers in the world."

There are many amazing places well beyond Silicon Valley for STEM careers. And in startups if that is the route you want to go. I'm in the Minneapolis/St. Paul area. We have a vibrant startup community and the unemployment rate is near 0. No matter if you want to go startup, small company, or large, you can find it here with great pay and benefits.

The people here are fantastic. You can live in the city or suburbs for an affordable amount of money and escape the city in 30 minutes if you want to get away. Great place.

Not to mention Austin, Chicago, and so many more. Don't limit your looking to just the valley. There is much more out there.

> It is depressing to think this is the best place for STEM careers in the world.

It might be the best place to make money in software. It's not the best place for “STEM careers” (which is a thing that doesn't exist: STEM is to diverse to have a meaningful best place; the best place for agricultural biotechnology careers isn't the best place for civil engineering which isn't the best place for high energy physics which isn't the best place for computational finance.)

I live in silicon valley and * My health care is just fine * I don't feel an earthquake every other week - perhaps you are just afraid of them? * Take Caltrain to work - it's clearly not "dire" * groupthink - yes, and you appear to be among them, bashing the bay area as if was on the verge of collapse.

The bay area has lots of problems, but also lots of good. Great weather, health care, job and recreational opportunities, can ride a motorcycle all year, can work at places that make things I care about.

If you were in NYC, you would have another massive set of problems, Chicago as well.

TLDR: writer with "a bunch of half-baked ideas" whose plan is to "pitch a tech startup and get obscenely rich while writing a book about how to pitch a tech startup and get obscenely rich – the Silicon Valley way" moves to "Hacker Condo" in San Francisco, conflates it (SoMA) with Silicon Valley, does other cliche tech bro things, namedrops an incoherent sequence of tech brands (Soylent, TaskRabbit, and then LifeHacker??), claims startup communities such as Hacker News are shovel merchants, reminds us that "profit-hunger, philistinism and misanthropy are and always have been at the core of the enterprise" and concludes "new breed of Silicon Valley billionaires knew exactly what they were doing. The plan was to take all the money and run – to Mars, if necessary"

This is what the author had to say about job security for programmers:

many programmers who had “made it” in Silicon Valley were scrambling to promote themselves from coder to “founder” ... the programmers knew that their own ladder to prosperity was on fire and disintegrating fast. They knew that well-paid programming jobs would also soon turn to smoke and ash, as the proliferation of learn-to-code courses around the world lowered the market value of their skills, and as advances in artificial intelligence allowed for computers to take over more of the mundane work of producing software.

This seems to be a plug for their book "Live Work Work Work Die: A Journey into the Savage Heart of Silicon." Here's one of the Amazon reviews and I quote, "If you don't have any ideas and can't succeed, write a book about it"

"If you don't have any ideas and can't succeed, write a book about it" would be an awesome blurb for a book...

As for your TL:DR; i thought it was a bit unfair to the author... they write really well and I think there is a huge shadow side in terms of tech capitals impact on the culture that, by definition, if you're in it, you're going to see as them as "out group" ... "obviously they aren't a good X... they failed"... ah, the fallacy of ad failuralum non VC-ium. :) ;) :)

What sort of cultural valuea are there where the notion of being "uninvestible" can get your ideas crushed without question? Is not a culture that values high technology, reason or the plethora of values that make something worthwhile and good

All while insulting the actual businesses and San Franciscans they want to imitate at every turn.

"Now the tower’s largest tenant was a website that allows anonymous semi-literates to post critiques of local establishments."

"there were not enough applicants to fill all the openings for “Java Legends, Python Badasses, Hadoop Heroes”, and other gratingly childish classifications describing various programming specialities."

Very classy.

Although I must say, I have noticed that there is a great deal of Silicon Valley hate in many places in Europe.

> Although I must say, I have noticed that there is a great deal of Silicon Valley hate in many places in Europe.

Really? Haven't noticed that. There is a lot of mistrust of some companies because of privacy (Google, Facebook, Twitter) and market disruption (Amazon). But SF appears popular as a tourist destination and I haven't heard of anyone here in Europe hating SV as such. I think Wall Street still has a far worse reputation than SV.

How are those quotes insulting? Maybe if you came up with the term "Hadoop Heroes" and thought it was amazingly clever?

> I have noticed that there is a great deal of Silicon Valley hate in many places in Europe.

Where it exists, its mostly schadenfreude/jealousy. SV culture is probably closer to european than a lot of the US.

That's a little harsh, no?

It's an outsiders' take on what seems to have grown into a disconnected, insular culture. While under most circumstances one could dismiss such commentary as "he doesn't understand us and made little effort to get to know us," when that culture exists primarily to make stuff (products, software) for the masses it would do well to pay heed to its criticism, don't you think?

Well, sort of, I think. The thing is that these 'outsiders' don't have a fresh or independent take. They come packed full of previously established ideas and ways of thinking. I don't just mean preconceptions; I mean something like how ethnographies were found to employ very common tropes, or how so-called science documentaries misrepresent research by making a story look like a primetime detective show.

Why do think so many of these outside stories seem the same? The short answer is tropes. These don't only concern the forms any story can take, but also actually shape how one conceives of things.

Besides, the Bay Area employs more than 1M people just in sw/hw connected roles (engineers, product managers, project managers, operations, and testing). The outsiders look at a subgroup that represents less than 5% and equate that the tech industry out here.

Yes. Thank you. It’s not just the message or sentiment. It’s that it’s unoriginal and not introducing anything new worth debating

Except it's (mis)representing itself as an insiders view. Kind of reminds me of The Circle, iirc the author made a point out of not researching how Google/Facebook works when writing it, instead preferring to indulge his fantasies.

At least The Circle didn't pretend not to be fiction, this seems like it wants to be journalism. And that's, frankly, a problem.

> That's a little harsh, no?

I don't think it's harsh. If anything it's falling for the author's narrative.

The author was clearly there solely to write a hatchet job on the SV startup culture. The stuff about getting rich is just there to make him sound a bit less parasitical.

I'm sure some of what he says is valid but the dystopia is just as fake as the idea that SV is paved with gold.

I'd go further and, given these kinds of articles usually follow a template, it's quite interesting what he didn't say. Usually the author will find people who are disillusioned/downtrodden to interview i.e. show the rotten underbelly.

It's noticeable that the only negative commentary came from a barman and a musician, and they were of the basic change is bad variety. As a consequence, he's stuck with painting everyone as a witless man-child.

So either he's an incompetent journalist or he didn't find a rotten underbelly. As I've never been to SV, I can't comment on which it is but I can be pretty confident that this article won't help me find out.

Yes I thought it deeply ironic that the musician presumably one of the previous waves of incomers that pushed out the previous I habitants did them selves not see the irony

It's not particularly insightful criticism though.

Bay area housing is atrocious, SF has a homeless problem, and the tech industry has been hopelessly corrupted by money. (Not that there weren't con men before.)

Hopefully that's not news to anybody here.

Tech, like any other profession, has its own sociolect or variation from daily conversational English. Not everybody can appreciate that, especially those that grew up monolingual.

Short of giving unsolicited advice to the writer about leaving the confines of whatever monocultural bubble they grew up in, I'm not sure what there is of us to heed in that part of the critique. Shall we all stop using words they know in ways they don't like?

Realistically, the author's target market is not HN, and we're just experiencing marketing for their book. Judging by the article, it's a story book for adults that want to feel secure that they made the right choice by not moving to experience California (both its positives and negatives), even for few months. If the author would like to question all of the lingo; the "metrics", our "spaces", this is not that book. (I would be interested in reading that book!) If they want to take their shot at taking down the sharing economy, this is not that book.

You're right, we should heed criticism, but the article is light on that and instead pushes a familiar offensive narrative.

> "[..]and as advances in artificial intelligence allowed for computers to take over more of the mundane work of producing software"

Sounds like a brill idea. We could cut those pesky developers out of the loop. I imagine that the AI would need some kind of detailed specification to guide it. To avoid ambiguity, the spec should have a very clear syntax. We'd need people to translate from human language to spec language, of course. And to remove unforeseen consequences, and to change the spec as business requirements evolve. And when unsupervised, these people would argue over indentation or write comments on HN ...

Hey, wait ...

:^)

I love how arguing over indentation is an essential part of being a programmer according to this descrpition.

The author may be wrong in some areas, but I think he is also right elsewhere. I don't think your TLDR is accurate.

Isnt the last quote true, actually? I have seen a lot of people complaining about job market in SV and articles about people who struggle to get jobs for various reasons. (And also different people having good time, but that does not cancel out others.)

> They knew that well-paid programming jobs would also soon turn to smoke and ash, as the proliferation of learn-to-code courses around the world lowered the market value of their skills,

The complains about outsourcing are complains about exactly this. And complains about jobs going to cheaper young people. And the complains about young people not being as awesome or passionate or obsessed natural geniuses or whatever as we all supposedly were. And complains about people who went to school and have degree, but don't have experience yet. There seems to be a lot of insecurity going around.

And logically, learn-to-code courses that makes it easier to learn to people who would not even know where to start or that it is possible to learn programming easily are bound to lower the marker value of our skill.

Hacker News is part of YC's lead generation funnel (deal flow), so the part about shovel merchant is correct.

The HackerNews shovels costs me nothing but leisure time

It's the Guardian. They have a serious axe to grind with SV/tech in general. Their bias in this area is laughable but gotta play to the home crowd I guess.

Writing blog posts is the get-rich-slowly plan :)

Googling his name, he seems to have always been an author, my interpretation is that his "half baked idea(s)" is just a fictional premise he's made up, so he can experience what it would be like to try to get into the tech scene. If he were writing about Hollywood he'd say he's trying to be an actor. And well duh it's a plug for his book, it's adapted from it.

But his criticism is valid, IMO. It's not like Silicon Valley is a concentration of brains trying to solve the world's problems, it's a concentration of brains doing silly shit, like the billionth app that will let you order pizza or some algorithm so your video stream loads faster, or as he quoted: "what is my mother no longer doing for me?". What's their (SVers') goal? Success, within monetary terms? If that's your religion, and you're in IT, of course SV is your mecca.

I wrote "solving the world's problems" above, I'm inspired by this TEDx criticizing the shallowness of TED Talks (video is embedded: https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2013/dec/30/we-nee...), why are we just making the next pizza delivery app instead of thinking how to fix problems like climate change or food shortage?

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