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Comment by ng12 | Hacker News Reader

> engineering-and-data-obsessed monoculture

Gee, a company who's business is data is obsessed with engineering and data? Color me shocked.

Snark aside, technology is hard. If you've worked in consulting for any amount of time you've probably realized that outside of a few pockets (SF, NYC, Austin, etc) most of the world is really, really bad at technology. Many of the biggest, most important institutions in the world really have no idea what they're doing. The biggest problem in my mind is that technical know-how is not distributed evenly. I don't know why that is, but I don't think diversity has very much to do with it.

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> If you've worked in consulting for any amount of time you've probably realized that outside of a few pockets (SF, NYC, Austin, etc) most of the world is really, really bad at technology.

You mean outside of Tokyo, Calgary, Tampere (points if you can locate it on a map without names), Geneva, the Ruhr area, Milan, Shenzen and a thousand other places?

The 'world' is a lot larger than the USA and there are many places where people are really good at technology.

They may not be able to address a large unified market and they may not have access to enormous amounts of dumb money to chase the latest social media fads but that doesn't mean you need to ignore their existence, unless it was your idea to underscore the point of the article.

I mean, even in other countries, there tends to be one or two cities that are major tech hubs and the rest of the country is not. I don't know that this is necessarily a bad thing or just a normal thing. There are many industries or specialties that are concentrated in certain areas (or have been historically), like autos in Detroit (although that's changing), finance in NY, movies & fashion in LA, etc.

I'm curious why you don't count Detroit as a "tech hub"? Or NY? Or LA? Does you definition of technology not extend beyond software development?

There are myriad industries, like car manufacturing, energy, finance, filmmaking, aerospace, health, etc. that involve huge amounts of technology, and whose leading players are based nowhere near Silicon Valley. But instead of going out and working in these industries to build something revolutionary, tens of thousands of world class programmers cluster in Silicon Valley, all talking to each other about how amazing and disruptive they are, while wasting their prime years blowing through VC money in startups chasing the latest ecommerce/chatbot/messaging/AI/blockchain fad, or as a cog in some tech giant's machine to turn customer data into advertising dollars.

LA is not a fashion capital: https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fashion_capital.

Is it not #14 on the 2017 list given there? (Was #4 on the 2016 list)

> The cities considered the global "Big Four" fashion capitals of the 21st century are Milan, London, New York and Paris.

It does have fashion, but it's not the biggest by any stretch.

Geneva and Tampere (200k pop each! how many devs do they even have?) and Milan and Calgary are known for tech? Quite frankly that's news to me in each case. What are the biggest tech companies from each of those? After a quick google search for "largest tech company city_name", Milan was the only one to pop up with a familiar name (Accenture).

> Geneva and Tampere (200k pop each! how many devs do they even have?)

Geneva is home to CERN, if you shoot a random passer by your chances are pretty good that you hit someone that is good in physics, software or both.

Tampere is where Nokia had a huge installation.

Milan has lots of CAD related companies as well as ABB.

Calgary is one of the cities in Canada that have lots of networking tech related companies, and also Rockwell, Unysis and Garmin (and many others besides).

Silicon Valley is dominant in web tech, not in tech.

And of course, the thing it's actually named for.

Huge fabless semiconductor companies in sunnyvale/santa clara. And some with fabs elsewhere.

TSMC has plenty of that, and all of the stepper tech comes from ASML in Eindhoven, The Netherlands.

This whole myth that SV is somehow the only tech place on earth worth mentioning is ridiculous.

Previous post suggested to me that SV was the center of only web technology. I was pointing out it is the birthplace of Intel, AMD, Altera, Xilinx, NVIDIA, etc. And has offices of Samsung, Hynix, Mediatek. Really too many to name.

> Silicon Valley is dominant in web tech, not in tech.

SV is dominant in web/mobile/cloud/social/productivity/AI/autonomous driving/electric cars/sharing economy and in foundational tech like programming languages, databases, kernels, and networking. This is in large part due to American graduate-level education in tech being vastly superior to anywhere else in the world, both in quality and in having its finger on the industrial and market pulse. (I've experienced high-quality graduate programs in other countries, incl. Germany, France, and Canada, who are just completely out to lunch in terms of what's relevant.)

I know I'm making some big claims here but in my experience as a elsewhere-born American graduate student, software engineer, and world traveler, this is pretty much true.

> web

Invented in Europe, ca. 1989.

> Mobile

Mostly the Nordics

> cloud

Yes, Amazon is really good at that. Located in... Seattle

> social

Preceded by many countries we are now left with a handful of dominant players, and fwiw we could miss them and I wouldn't lose a single nights' sleep. But yes, Social is something that SV is dominant in.

> productivity

Which packages are we referring to here? Productivity is a bit broad to assign to SV in its entirety, or even dominance wise. There are so many players in that space all over the world that I'm not sure that is a credible claim.

> AI

Yes, probably you are right there. But the University of Waterloo, Canada is where the vast bulk of the current AI wave originated.

> autonomous driving

Is an offshoot of that AI effort mentioned above.

> electric cars

True again, and it couldn't happen anywhere else than in California.

> sharing economy

I would be happy to get rid of all of it.

> programming languages, databases, kernels, and networking

That's pure rubbish. These have been contributed too all over the world and SV is not currently dominant in any of that.

Half truths. Who cares if http was invented at cern so many years ago?

NOW it's pretty dominant. Mobile? How are those Nordic countries doing? Seems to me it's Google and Apple.

pretty much every piece of tech you mentioned had decades of government investment. Maybe what makes those places possible is government policy. Not many governments are as rich as USA.

> Silicon Valley is dominant in web tech, not in tech.

I would generalize that to software engineering, or at least large-scale industrial software engineering. You cant compare what's happening in SV to Geneva.

Soooo much more than web tech.

I disagree heavily. Many people worldwide are incredibly good at working with the technology in their environments. In fact, I would say most Silicon Valley engineers do not actually understand the environments they develop products for.

Probably one of the best historical examples was when Facebook had to force employees to use low end Android phones so their developers could figure out how badly the experience sucked.

Silicon Valley tells us to connect everything to the cloud while 10 meg Internet and wireless devices that costs us far more to stream than to store locally are common.

Security is another good example: Silicon Valley engineers are often worried about side channel attacks, arcane sandbox escapes, discussion about how to jump an airgapped PC using a speaker or something. Meanwhile, it's 2018, and Google just realized Chrome extensions are full of malware and is finally taking baby steps towards fixing that. We've had an ironclad solution over here in Chicago for years: We disable all Chrome extensions.

The technologies developed and the solutions created in Silicon Valley are rarely good solutions for the rest of the world. Silicon Valley is very good at fixing very first world problems, like the constant attempts to make travel data easier to find in your email box or your assistant, while failing to recognize that most people can't afford to travel often enough for a feature like that to matter.

I'd have to agree. From what I've seen, the SV reality distortion bubble makes it difficult for its occupants to understand the practical reality of people outside of it. There's that old expression, that when all you have is a hammer every problem looks like a nail? SV seems to be almost entirely populated by hammers.

You're right. The rest of the world has plenty of smart people, including developers and engineers. SV and some other metros have advantages in funding sources that let them brain-drain other areas through better salaries and stock, but it's not that people in other place just don't what they're doing.

RHEL does just fine with talent operating out of Chicago and Raleigh NC. If companies are willing to pay solid salaries, and give growth opportunities to people outside of SV (this was actually the biggest downside I noticed while working at a very large sattelite office of a SV-based tech company in NC), then they will find sufficient talent in most any large enough / educated enough US metro.

If you pay them, they will come.

"In fact, I would say most Silicon Valley engineers do not actually understand the environments they develop products for."

Isn't that the point of her book ?

> technology is hard

And moreover: it's _deceptively_ hard - it looks easier than it actually is. Every time, every case.

"“...If you have a hierarchy where engineers are at the very top and the people who are interfacing with the outside world are a couple rungs below that, you really miss something when those people don’t have an equal voice at the table.”"

Technology is hard. Customer support is hard. Making money without collecting a massive amount of data about everyone is apparently very hard. Many things are hard.

That has nothing to do with placement and everything to do with intent and motivation. A generation ago the landscape was technology lifers and scientists -- now it's everybody and their mother trying to make a buck. The bar for competence is too high for the majority of people entering the field these days.

Tech is hard, but also unwanted. I don't think what distinguishes people in tech is proficiency in certain tools. It is a drive to optimize their lives that people outside of tech do not have. I think most of them are happier. Not "ignorance is bliss," just contentment with the present.

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