Comment by api | Hacker News Reader

Comment by api | Hacker News Reader

Parent Full thread

I also think peak valley was the 'oughts. Seems like the valley has not been producing the same number of world shattering things since then.

Part of what is driving the valley's decline is its constrained size (both by geography and NIMBYism) coupled with its past success. The valley / bay area is now full of mega-corps that suck up most of the top talent and inflate wages and thus costs to levels startups and bootstrappers can't afford. There is no space to let off the pressure because its constrained by mountains, ocean, a fault line, and politics.

If the city were both able and willing/allowed to grow like New York, Chicago, or Tokyo did in their heyday of growth the engine might run a lot longer but as it stands the pressure is going to force the industry into diaspora.

Compare Shenzhen, new global HQ of the electronics industry. SV should have grown like that, but politics would have none of it. California liberals are anti-construction and California conservatives are anti-infrastructure.

Look, I know there's a recency bias to life, but the 00's were nothing compared to the 90's, and that was probably nothing compared to the 70's.

I doubt we know what the next technology cycle that's going to spur the next boom in SV is, but it's going to happen. Otherwise, it's impolite and barely relevant to bring politics into it.

Politics unfortunately tends to have a direct and majority effect on things like urban development, so it's hard to avoid mentioning in a complete/non-ommissive discussion.

How do you know the next boom is going to be in SV? Whose to say the conditions for the next boom aren't riper somewhere else?

The web wasn't, and yet Silicon Valley was the region that got rich off of it, and ended up with its name associated with it.

The web started at CERN in Switzerland. Mosaic came out of UIUC, as did Apache. Early web successes came from all over - Amazon from Seattle, Geocities from LA, ViaWeb and Akamai from Boston, WikiWikiWeb from Portland, Yahoo and EBay from Silicon Valley. Many of the most prominent Web 2.0 companies - FaceBook, Reddit, DropBox, and YCombinator - all started in Boston and later moved to San Francisco. Flickr was in Vancouver, LiveJournal in Seattle, and del.icio.us in NYC. A number of Silicon Valley companies didn't actually start in Silicon Valley - they started elsewhere and moved there early on.

Silicon Valley ended up co-opting them because of two factors: capital and engineering talent. Unlike in most places, it's possible to make a market in venture capital in Silicon Valley - you can setup meetings with a hundred firms all down the peninsula and have them bid against each other. That means that if you do have a good idea, you can get hundreds of millions of dollars to grow it, and then spend that money hiring people who actually know what they're doing and have done it before. If all that fails, you can either acquire companies that have an actual good idea, or be acquired by a company with capital and an ability to execute.

Silicon Valley has never really been a great place to start a company, unless you just happen to live here and have a job at one of the previous tech giants. It was, and remains, a great place to scale a company. None of the factors that led to its dominance in the last few technology waves have really changed, except possibly more restrictive U.S. immigration policy and a greater chance that the next big idea comes from outside the U.S.

They may be ripe. I do not see that as an issue.

Thing is, the money in SV, will pick up on whatever that is and jump in quick.

There is whatever comes next, could be gestating anywhere. And there is SV participating. Given the potential, unless whatever comes next is very seriously misaligned with SV potential, acting on it will basically be a boom for SV.

As a competetor, SV works within a huge economy with vast talent and resources available.

The next thing does not have to originate in SV for it's impact to be felt in SV.

it's probably still going to be someplace where there's a large concentration of money. it's also probably going to be in a mild climate, because those people with loads of money to invest don't want to live in the arctic. so, perhaps not SV directly, but i bet it will look similar.

It can take 7-10 years for a great company to emerge. In Apple’s case it took 30 years to bring out the iPhone. (Yes they had some success in the interim, but their true breakout was slower coming)

That makes it a lot worse, since the high costs mean companies that don't go vertical instantly die.

My point is that it’s premature to say “Nothing great has happened from recent companies.” It takes a longer time horizon.

The high cost does put pressure on companies though. Most startups quickly branch out of the Bay Area for their Sales and Services. The economics of founding (premium for access to capital and talent that isn’t risk-averse) is different than mature companies (premium on margins).

Another side to this, I myself have a feeling that software industry in developed counties is becoming more and more dependent on overseas "captive RnD centres" (yes, that's how they are called in pro manager lingo,) and more and more work in places like the Valley is about assembling code from knockdown kits made to spec by mule workforce abroad.

The few people from SV crowd I can speak frankly with, said "saying that will certainly not make you more popular here."

Do people realise that these "mules" are the real heroes here who do all the hard work on algorithmics. In a decade or so, USA based companies will certainly begin to scratch their heads.

Please give some examples. I don’t know what you’re referring to.

Very interesting. I think you may be right.

But, how can this argument be made more compelling? I mean, for example, is there an example of a knockdown kit from abroad you might point to?

To my own knowledge, the "to spec" outsourcing grew quite a lot. Deutsche bank, Credit Suisse, Swiss railways, TMobile are few I knew myself when I laboured in few outsourcing shops for few months after I got a boot from Canada.

To my biggest surprise, when I left a minor outlet (epam) for Luxoft for a 3 month gig, I was very surprised to see the same TMobile, with the very same project, but similar specs. Lib A should do that and this, method C and D, must pass test, E and F.

Back in 2009, the few Google Russia people I knew told that task they get from HQ were almost like competitive coding tasks, pull record A from using hash table index B, do that under N cycles under worst case scenario C,D, and E. And all with near nil human contact. Nobody could've said it for sure if the task is even physically doable. And for that particular task, they laboured for half a year of trial and failure, after exhausting every trick from computer science textbooks.

In the end they did make an index traversal algo that did it. What was unsettling them was the seemed disregard for the amount of resources spent, and no concern for "if it is really doable?," as they were getting from supervisors the same answer all the time: "if you think it's impossible, not you, but somebody else eventually will do it, I am 100% sure"

why a downvote for asking this question? is this a bad question or something? is this rude or offensive to someone? not quite sure...

I have never observed anything like what you're talking about.

Note: https://qz.com/india/1152683/indian-it-layoffs-in-2017-top-5...

That is happening elsewhere at a higher rate than sf usually in large corps.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com