Silicon Valley Needs To Take Itself More Seriously*

"While there are many downsides to the mainstream exposure of Silicon Valley — the myriad fakers and sycophants that come along in any sort of high visibility situation — I’m willing to trade in occasionally having to deal with an annoying person if our values (entrepreneurship, self-reliance, fearlessness, disregard for a hierarchy, technical excellence) get a wider audience and more importantly, excite a fresh crop of high school seniors applying to college to go into CS because it 'sounds cool.'"

To the extent that I worry about this show, I have the opposite concern. Jersey Shore did not exactly make me want to move to Jersey and take up the lifestyle.

At the moment, to the extent that the country thinks about us at all, I think they think of us as brave folk trying to build the future. If this show convinces them we're a bunch of partying douches, that'll be sad. I'm not too worried about it, but that's the potential bad outcome.

In 2002, I thought of I-bankers as smart, hard working people who were well compensated because what they did was difficult. Now I think of finance as mostly parasitic. Impressions can change.

This article seems like mostly bullshit once you reach the the point in the article that concludes that the talent crunch is due to SV "taking itself too seriously." I'm not currently an SV engineer and I'm not entirely sure I want to be, but the claim is patently ridiculous.

And as a side gripe about the article, it annoys me at least a little for everyone to be diminished to "coders" by someone who admittedly hasn't put in the time to learn basic programming. As far as I'm concerned, "coder" is a half step above "code monkey" and the engineers building the next Google or Facebook or any moderately successful tech company are not code monkeys.

I don't agree with the premise of this article. It makes it sound like people who don't like this upcoming show don't like to have fun.

Personally, I would love to see a show about Silicon Valley, especially one that has a lot of comedy in it. But this show portrays a glamorous lifestyle which seems really condescending and skips what puts the "silicon" in Silicon Valley.

With that said, I think Techcrunch is disagreeing just for the sake of disagreeing; it puts them in a position to put down other people (ex. pandodaily) and generate more buzz.

I often wonder what the culture of a third tech innovation hub would be like outside NY/SV (And I hate to say it, but Boston and NY are interchangeable for the purposes of cultural discussion).

The only cultural thread I've been able to pick up that is common to all the U.S. tech hubs is great baseball teams.