Hacker News Reader

Comment by ucee054 | Hacker News Reader

I haven't personally been in the Valley recently, but...

"Startup" in the old Silicon Valley used to mean companies with serious technology like Amiga or Apple or Illustra. The staff used to be PhDs and sometimes professors from Stanford & Berkeley EECS. "Startup" did not used to mean "3 marketing dweebs and a website".

Valley interviews used to be "Super Saturday" 6-hour exams with theory questions for junior positions. Startups had more rigorous requirements than big companies; BigCos would at least look at entry-level resumes, Startups not so much.

I have trouble believing London's Shoreditch is any kind of "Silicon Valley".

View on HN

When technologies move from specialist areas to broad consumer usage, a more diverse (and less specialist) thinking also comes along, so people like zuckerberg, instead of data mining specialists with phd are ruling the techno start-up scenes, or stated otherwise, people who learn php and mysql, and not necessarily people with phd in cs rule this world. Moreover, to traverse all the possible space of innovation possible, more human effort, more dreamers are rushing into the field. finally, most are failing; this is normal in any problem solving when people simply traverse the possibility space with overlapping innovations.

A bubble is better identified in retrospect and a bubble predicator may be, the abundance of prophets such as this blog. Finally a bubble is good, and it simply justifies the fertile ground a certain technology provides. In this case web and mobile technologies have left no area of life untouched, and the bubbles are the golden medals they all carry going forward; showing their success and of course limitations.

I think real Silicon Valley start-ups are generally serious organizations with very rigorous hiring requirements. There have been more and more second-tier city "Silicon Valley" startups, but many are not really comparable to typical Silicon Valley startups.

I think there is probably more a bubble in New York and London than Palo Alto. Inexperienced investors can give anyone some money, but that doesn't mean they will succeed.

I can't agree more.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com