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Comment by michaelochurch | Hacker News Reader

I feel like the douche-pocalypse described by OP has already happened. It's not a future threat. It's how most people have to live. The Apple founders would be unable to get funding these days. They wouldn't even get a meeting.

VCs have set themselves up as executives (maybe more like record industry shot-callers than steel-company management) of the first postmodern corporation. If you don't take their terms, they can't exactly fire you, so they fund your competition. Tech press is a weird sort of HR organization, and so-called "startup CEOs" are merely product managers within this weird meta-corporation that is just as badly stacked against software talent as a 1970s steel company.

It's having pernicious effects on the software industry, which is now a hotbed of mediocrity utterly opposed to what it used to be.

I think what killed software entrepreneurialism for good was the rise in housing prices, coupled with the student debt epidemic and the cost of health insurance. Unless independently wealthy, no one can actually afford to "bootstrap" in these locations, so true entrepreneurial activity has been replaced by VC-istan careerism.

I don't know where the future is, but it's not in Silicon Valley now-- no place where middle-class houses cost $1.2 million is anywhere near the future-- and it's not in New York, and it may not be in the U.S. at all.

On a side note, I wish people would stop calling the VC ecosystem in the Bay Area, "Silicon Valley". That's why I use VC-istan. They're different things. Silicon Valley has a 70-year history and it hasn't always been VC-istan. VC-istan is just how it died.

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I've been doing startups since the mid 1990s†. There is no reasonable argument that says that it is harder for tech people to get funding now than it was in the 1990s. It is much, much easier to get funding in 2013 than it was in 1999 (which was the last time I got funding):

* There are more investors doing deals now than there were then

* The deal size needed to start any given company is lower and investors are playing along with that instead of holding out for deals they can shove 8MM into

* More technical people with no previous operational experience are getting funded than got funded in 1999 --- you can just look around to see this; bubble companies still needed grey hair and/or Ivy MBAs to get off the ground

* Companies have better pre-A-round options (particularly, syndicated convertible note funding) than they did in the 1999s, when "angel investor" meant "best friend's rich uncle gives you $200,000"

* There are more people with operational experience in software companies staffing VC firms

In 1999, if you were a software developer with a good idea, a working prototype, and just a little bit of traction, but no experienced operators and no inside track, you had no realistic chance of getting off the ground with external funding of any sort.

Your whole argument stems from a flawed observation and so, I think, falls apart when the observation is shown to be incorrect.

I do not like venture fund financing either, but the hyperbole you bring to these arguments does my own dissatisfaction with the model a disservice by presenting an easily dismissible caricature instead of an argument.

† From 1995: 1. Bootstrapped ISP with mid-double digits FTEs, 2. Angel-funded product company that exited successfully, 3. Venture funded product company that failed, 4. Venture funded product company that eventually exited successfully, 5. Matasano; I had key/sr/mteam roles at all of them and founded 2.

I would suggest the two of you are describing different parts of the elephant.

I was deeply struck by Venkatesh Rao's arguments [#] that entrpreneurlism now is simply a new form of hiring than genuine disruption. Michaels comment that VCs are the execs in some new corporate format has the ring of truth.

However, it certainly seems there is more capital, more widely available, and more fairly accessible both in the US and elsewhere. This means that a vastly increased number of entrpreneurs will be able to take flight and not all of them will be lacking the leverage of insight into tidal forces that Michael is alluding to.

Anyway I need sleep, but it seems to me that there is an elephant in the dark, it is the shape of Western workforce in the future - and we are all trying to describe its shape.

[#] http://www.forbes.com/sites/venkateshrao/2012/09/03/entrepre...

The notion that entrepreneurship is simply a different form of hiring is a popular notion that bears no relationship to reality. Operating a company is nothing at all like having a job. Operating a company that is cash flow positive after paying market salary is an extraordinarily privileged position relative to any reasonable (ie, not a first baseman for the Yankees) candidate/employer relationship in the market.

The thing that makes people believe that entrepreneurship is merely a hiring challenge is that most companies fail, and in this market, tech talent is so scarce that a failed startup team can still generate a premium. This is called "a safety net", and it is a good thing. You should be extremely wary of the kinds of people who argue that safety nets are a bad thing for tech startup people. Companies don't do their best work when they're dangling their development team's feet over the prospect of having no income and no health insurance if they fail.

The fact that most new businesses fail is not a new thing. Most new businesses in all sectors fail. That's why the rewards for financing a successful one are so high: that capital has been put at extreme risk.

I completely agree that a safety net allows you to concentrate on good long-term work and is invaluable.

But I also glimpse a new way of organising work. New ways of bringing together teams and rebuilding old networks, flexible remote working making this possible in ways not seen before. Add into the mix totally new market-types opening up (Indian micro-products where you need to think and capture value at fractions of a rupee at a time will demand insights that no-one walking the streets of SV will ever grasp)

I doubt that new entrepreneurialism is going to be a better sort of linkedIn for HR departments - but I do think that the (tech) world of work I will retire from will be radically different to now - and there are advantages in knowing which way the elephant is pointing.

>I've been doing startups since the mid 1990s†. There is no reasonable argument that says that it is harder for tech people to get funding now than it was in the 1990s. It is much, much easier to get funding in 2013 than it was in 1999 (which was the last time I got funding)

So, the "since the mid nineties" is a big misleading.

You might have been "doing startups" from then till now, but you were on the getting funds game from "mid nineties" to 1999 -- which is like only for 4-5 years at most, more than a decade ago.

And even that was during the most "give funding to any BS" bubble period in history, so it might not be that indicative.

I think you read the first sentence of my comment and then the note at the end and then no other part of it.

No, I also read the arguments -- I even agree with some.

I just wanted to point out that the "experience" part you mention (which people might see as validating) might not that relevant for the current climate.

If you had read the comment, you'd see that your attempted jab about my experience during the first bubble does the opposite of harming my argument; I am, obviously, arguing that it is easier for techs to raise external funding in 2013 than it was during the time of "give funding to any BS", as you put it.

>I am, obviously, arguing that it is easier for techs to raise external funding in 2013 than it was during the time of "give funding to any BS", as you put it.

And by what bizarro logic is that argument not harmed by your inexperience in the current funding scene?

That is, how does you arguing that "it is easier for techs to raise external funding in 2013" get any credibility by your 1999 experience?

That statement might or might not be true (it could very well be easier to get funding in 2013), but if you're gonna play the experience card, then you'll also need 2013 experience to compare the two eras.

The Apple founders would be unable to get funding these days. They wouldn't even get a meeting.

This was true in the 70s as well. The Apple founders had to rely on revolving credit from the parts suppliers to get the parts they needed to get off the ground.

Eh, that's more like angel level stuff. Wikipedia's history is lacking in details, but says "Jobs eventually met Mike Markkula who co-signed a bank loan for US$250,000, and the three formed Apple Computer on April 1, 1976." That's a million in 2013 dollars.

But I know they got VC funding later (and I seem to remember they weren't given the third degree in getting it) and Wikipedia acknowledges that saying "On December 12, 1980, Apple launched the Initial Public Offering of its stock to the investing public. When Apple went public, it generated more capital than any IPO since Ford Motor Company in 1956 and instantly created more millionaires (about 300) than any company in history. Several venture capitalists cashed out, reaping billions in long-term capital gains."

(http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/History_of_Apple_Inc.)

They had traction well before they met Mike Markkula - the Apple I sold out, even though it was nothing but a kit.

If can show traction today similar to what Apple had, you'll have a bidding war of investors on your hands. This is how YouTube and Instagram got bought for $1B+, it's how Google got two separate VCs to co-lead their series A, and it's how any number of other small startups attract investor attention.

The thing that's new is that you can sometimes get VC funding based only on an idea, without traction and without a prior business relationship. That never used to happen before YC. When I quit my job in 2007 to pursue a startup (2 years work experience), I told our VP of BizDev (a former investment banker) "Realistically, we have about zero chance of getting VC funding without traction, but this is our chance to try to build traction and see if it's fundable ourselves" and he was like "Well, at least you're being realistic about your odds."

Not that I necessarily disagree but YouTube, Instagram and Google are bad examples. The first two had founders who were master "politicians" and were already well connected in the valley. Sergey and Larry were Stanford CS PhD students who merely had to impress their professors with their prototype to get introductions to SV Royalty.

Facebook would be a good example though. Zuck did come from Harvard which added credibility and opened some doors but from the beginning FB's traction is what mattered far more than anything else.

I respect you a lot Michael, but don't you think perhaps you are romanticizing the past a bit too much here? I mean there was a time when tech advancements were more fundamental simply because you couldn't do as much in software. What makes you think VCs have changed so much?

I don't know whether VCs have changed, so much as they've either pushed themselves or been pushed into an inappropriate role.

A large part of it is that big companies have given up on trying to innovate (they just buy innovations, at a panic price) and the people from whom innovation typically came are now a pariah caste of almost-unemployable miserable geniuses. Even worse, those people can't raise funding anymore because they've been outcompeted (for attention, press, and funding) by people with superior social polish but shittier ideas.

VCs are private equity guys. For deciding whether two $300-million biotech companies should merge, they're probably the best people out there. It's not that they're "good" at making those calls, but that the companies are so complex and unusual that almost no one is, and they're the most adept at figuring out what's going on amid the chaos. They might be able to tease out a +0.02 correlation in decision-making while the rest of us would get zero. For figuring out who has the competence to start a tech company? They're in the dark. Not a clue among them. It's not what they learned in business school or McKinsey. They'd do 100 times better to have a person like me do the talent scouting/vetting, but for a variety of reasons that will never happen.

The real evil isn't VCs so much as it's the replacement of R&D by M&A, representing a wide-scale trend of engineer disempowerment. Being a software engineer used to be an R&D job because non-engineers understood that they didn't know how to do that job, so it got a lot of autonomy and trust. Now, it's being treated as commodity work, and the result is a catastrophic dilution of the industry. VCs aren't singularly to blame for this, but they certainly didn't stop it.

It was actually a lot better, for engineers, to be in R&D labs of large companies than it is to be an engineer at a VC-istan startup. You had more career growth and more opportunities to learn stuff. Don't be fooled by the bullshit equity handed out now. Sure, these R&D engineers didn't get rich at 27-- they had to strike out on their own to do that, and many were happy being upper-middle-class technology researchers as a lifelong career, so most never did-- but most VC-istanis don't either.

We need to bring back the R&D flavor of the software industry, or we'll have lost the industry for good.

There is a fundamental problem in everything that you say.

The VCs may be private equity guys, but they have learned to pay attention to what is said by angels and early seed investors. Who in turn frequently got that way by being in successful startups. Which really did compete on merit. And those people know plenty about programming.

As a case in point look no farther than ycombinator itself. I first heard of Paul Graham because he was a well-known Lisp hacker, and when I was starting in programming I was told to read a book of his to open my eyes to how much I did not understand. (I did read On Lisp and highly recommend it.) I first heard of Robert Morris because he famously accidentally took down the internet. They got the money with which they started ycombinator by running their own startup. And every year they identify dozens of unconnected but talented people as people who deserve a chance, and suddenly some kid whose main qualification is that they could impress some talented hackers is in one of the most prestigious inner circles in the Valley.

And yes, part of what they look for is the "social polish" that you deride. Because they've learned that you need some of that to make your business succeed. And yes, they will help you learn how to spin yourself successfully. Because that also helps in the real world.

But in the end they give a first step up to a lot of people who then go on to build everything from better online analytics to motorcycles that won't fall over.

>motorcycles that won't fall over

Which company is this?

The 4th link down:

https://www.hnsearch.com/search#request/all&q=motorcycle...

Lit Motors. Which reminds me, I meant to reserve one.

You've bought into the startup porn a little too much. YC is a startup mill -- they make a TINY investment, and it doesn't matter if most of them fail. The failed founders make a HUGE investment, and its on their head that the majority of the cost of failure sits.

YC floats on a bubble of spit and polish and politics. They want people like you to buy into it, because they need to take advantage of people like you.

You're the one who doesn't understand what is going on here.

The failed founders are adults who walk into the project with risks understood. Yes, a large percentage fail. However the ones who fail wind up with invaluable experience, an excellent item on the resume, and a network of connections to help them either try again or get a job. This is not a horrible downside if nobody is depending on you.

As for me, personally, I'm a married middle aged man who has been watching this from a distance. I have plenty of friends who have entered, gone through ups and downs, and mostly wound up reasonably well off. Unfortunately I have family commitments that have made the risk profile wrong for me. I also sat out the dot com crash and watched a lot of people lose a lot there.

I've also seen a lot of people think they were entering the startup world without a clue about what they were doing. They go through the motions, then painfully lose their shirts. Anyone competent develops a radar for those unfolding disasters. I feel sorry for them, but learned a long time ago the dangers of trying to rescue people from self-inflicted injuries.

> The failed founders are adults who walk into the project with risks understood.

Most of the YC founders are barely out of college.

> However the ones who fail wind up with invaluable experience, an excellent item on the resume, and a network of connections to help them either try again or get a job.

I'm curious, have you looked into "where are they now" for YC startups? eg, http://venturebeat.com/2012/03/27/y-combinator-demo-day-marc...

You're really just pushing the startup religion; that somehow inexperienced people who failed at getting traction now have a resume bullet point and a great network?

If that's true, then it just lends credence to the original article's point that we've replaced quantifiable quality with politics.

Let's compare.

At their age I went to graduate school in math. Which was a longer time commitment, at lower likely salaries, which left me with no real employable skills.

I do not see a failed startup at that age as a worse economic choice than graduate school was for me.

Losing 1-3 years of career development by working at a failed startup with other 20-somethings from whom you have nothing to learn is a very expensive career choice -- unless we do actually live in a bubble of vapid startups in which actually being good at your job (whether it's programming, business development, or otherwise) doesn't actually matter.

That's not even factoring in the broader opportunity costs, actual cash outlay, etc.

I don't think that's the right way to think of Y Combinator. It's Harvard++.

What incubators and VCs and tech press sell, much more than money or exposure, is legitimacy. Once you're legitimized, you don't need to worry as much about money because it will seek you out.

Being YC means you're already legitimate (it was the first of its kind, and is therefore highly prestigious) and require almost no further capitalization from YC itself.

I tend to view the tech R&D golden age as a product of post-war prosperity and the unique advantages the US had during the latter half of the 20th century. Trust between corporations and employees, and indeed the longevity of corporations themselves has now been so eroded that no one is willing to continue playing the long game of R&D. Take into account the insanity of how the patent system protects all the wrong people and has on balance the exact opposite of its intended effect, and I see the current situation as a bit of a Darwinian inevitability.

Being a software engineer is still a kick-ass job compared to almost anything else out there today.

Being a software engineer is still a kick-ass job compared to almost anything else out there today.

No, I really don't think so. If I were to do it over again, I would rather be an Alaskan fishing boat operator than a software engineer doing 99% of the stuff that paid programmers have to do.

My body is mediocre. It works, there's nothing wrong with it, and I'm probably in the top 33% for physique, but I'm not Olympic material, so using my body for mediocre physical work does not offend me. It seems about right.

I think I would be happier in medieval times when there was no expectation that a smart person would do high-quality work. You did harsh physical work for 45 years and then died. Seems more fulfilling than this corporate bullshit where a bunch of well-connected high priests don't merely do less work and make more money, but the fuckers think they earned it!

My mind, on the other hand, is Olympic material and any time someone tries to coerce me into using it for the grunt work they don't want to do, it just makes me homicidal.

This comment is the worst piece of crap I've read here. It reads like the worst kind of egotistical, entitled, and insular stereotype of people in this field. You ought to be ashamed.

You mind, "_is_ Olympic material". Bollocks. Did your Olympic class mind research the fatality rates and lifestyle for Alaskan fisherman? Happier in medieval times? Are you out of your damn mind? God help you that you have to deal with a boss that makes more money then you and doesn't recognize what a snowflake you are. I can't believe you have to deal with mundane tasks like the rest of us peons.

EDIT: I read the civility note, but how does the parent comment have positive points to engage with constructively? Honestly. It is pure tripe. I bet that 6.8 billion on the face of the planet would do anything to trade place with this guy, and he's wishing that he lived in a time when 1/3 of children died before age 5 and 1/5 of women died because of childbirth? Just because he is suffering from malaise? Can't he watch Office Space or Fight Club to get it out of his system? Didn't more than 1000 Bangladeshis die in a sweatshop less than 1 month ago? What a stunning lack of perspective and empathy.

Lack of empathy, sure. But this is orange sunshine perspective.

You hold strong opinions for how little you understand.

I am aware that there's a higher fatality rate for Alaskan fishermen than software engineers. However, I don't really worry about dying. I do worry about subordination, which I find to be worse. If I'm to die, I'll die. But the slow death that takes 50 years (subordination) is one I can't tolerate even thinking about.

Also, let's talk about the emotions that come along with robbery and crime.

Let's say that someone robs you at gunpoint and take the contents of your wallet. Lucky for you, you only have $3 in your wallet at the time. So the financial loss is trivial. You're still traumatized, and no one likes being robbed. No one. Even with only $3 lost, you'd probably rather this never happened, and avoid the place where the robbery occurred for a long time.

Yes, there are horrible things in the world that I can't control and those are far more awful than the state of the software industry. That's true. If I could change them, I would; and I'd feel awful if I didn't.

However, people are fundamentally local in how they engage with the world. They tend to focus on things they can change, the robberies in their neighborhood rather than half a world away. And, fundamentally, what we need as software engineers is a neighborhood watch for our industry.

The problem with Work (the social-climbing game, not the activity) is that when you get robbed, it's taken to be entirely your fault. If someone steals from you and fucks up your career, you're the loser, not him. He probably got a promotion for that shit.

What is the matter with you? Why do you write like this? Are you trying to build a personal online brand? Talk like an actual human being.

I don't need 5 paragraphs of explanation about why we deal with problems that are immediate to us. That is obvious. Prairie dogs understand that. Granted, that was not what I objected to in your original post, but I'll give you a pass on that.

Now, your last paragraph would be interesting if it weren't the fundamental point of (most recently and noteably) Karl Marx, who, interestingly enough, lived his entire life and wrote out a far better though-out version of your rant before there was a single computer. This is the what the rest of us have referred to as, "shit happens" for centuries.

I probably wouldn't have created a throwaway in the first place if it weren't for the unbearable arrogance in your posts when you're talking about something that philosophers have been discussing in far better depth for centuries, and the myopic belief that this is unique to software. Even if you switched too commmercial fishing you'd probably be the one complaining that he's stuck at deckhand because some other guy kissed the captain's butt to make first mate.

While the bitter negativity is a step to far, I also think that you romanticize serfdom. Read The Prince and tell me that corporate political ethos is not the same as 15th century court intrigue. All your work in either case is at the whim of those in power.

I don't "romanticize serfdom", but there is one advantage of pre-industrial serfdom over modern subordination. It lasts half as long; if you're lucky, < 1/50 as long.

You imply that malnourishment, lack of medical care, and hard labor, all contributing to an earlier death very soon after the end of productive capacity to be superior to a longer, less physically taxing, existence with more (Maslovian) needs met- that also has a high probability of retirement;

given 98% of your productivity in both systems profit other before yourself: your goals are clearly suicidal or trolling

If you would rather be a serf, then you can go - now - to some random country in Africa and try your hand at subsidence farming. The experience is pretty much the same as serfdom was, and your current economic situation is likely to let you start with a big step up over most of the locals.

> If I were to do it over again, I would rather be an Alaskan fishing boat operator than a software engineer doing 99% of the stuff that paid programmers have to do.

I usually find your comments thought provoking but as somebody who is familiar with this industry I assure you that this is not the case.

No need to even go into the conditions, which are probably more horrible than you imagine (in terms of the work itself, workers' physical safety, interpersonal interactions that usually range from unfriendly to physically abusive, and overbearing managers which we all know you despise). Those are obvious. But if you think that VC's exercise undue influence on the tech industry, and if you chafe against this kind of control (as it seems you do), you would not enjoy an industry where people doing the actual labor and putting their lives on the line (really) make very little compared to the extremely large companies that bankroll the operations and distribution.

A nitpick, I know, but... software development is still not a bad industry to be in compared to most.

I have to assume he is trolling here as he is quite a bright lad after all, and he had nothing to say when I called him out in my reply. As a troll it was one of the most effective I've seen in a while just by reply volume.

I have go call bullshit on this. You are probably younger than every Alaskan fishing boat operator today and you could go do that tomorrow if you really wanted. Also, why would it be better to pay 80% of your labor directly to a king who would let you starve after a bad harvest or two than it would be to deal with some douchey suits?

I mean you can't really be serious with this, it's just a diatribe against the existing corporate hegemony, am I wrong?

> Also, why would it be better to pay 80% of your labor directly to a king who would let you starve after a bad harvest or two than it would be to deal with some douchey suits?

Most of the time its literally the same thing: pay 80% of the value of your labor to someone who doesn't care if you starve in a drought.

In medieval times what you produced had intrinsic value. If you work in a corporation it's impossible to isolate the value you are creating from the company itself. Maybe they take 80% of your value, or maybe you are extracting a paycheck and providing negative value. In any case though, I find it disingenuous to seriously compare this to being essentially enslaved by a feudal lord.

Companies are built on employees creating more value than they are paid. That's obvious. The fact that its harder to measure who produces how much doesn't change the dynamic, it just means you have to do the analysis statistically instead of individually.

The other thing companies are built on is employees being able to create more value within the company than outside of it. Every single employee has the option of quitting and founding their own business. Several do. Many take a pay cut to exercise this right.

This is a crucially important point. The question becomes: to what extent does the accumulation of capital, expertise, equipment in a corporation render a software engineer able to produce more value than working on their own, or in a partnership, or other arrangement?

I would imagine this varies dramatically by industry. I know several of the biosciences, for example, do require a lot of specialized people, equipment and tons of cash... Many of the areas we're seeing disrupted by startups are areas where you'd hit diminishing returns (from, say, more equipment / capital) rather quickly.

Right, but that was true of feudal structures too.

I'm not sure if you're trying a reductio ad absurdum or what, but your point is lost on me because the comparison is foolish on its face.

It's funny, I actually met a guy once who worked on Alaskan fishing boats and decided to move into programming. I don't think he regretted the move.

FWIW, if you'd really prefer to be an Alaskan fishing boat operator than a software engineer, that option is open to you. I have a friend that spent 6 months on an Alaskan salmon-fishing boat before taking a job at an economics consultancy. He said the work is back-breaking, the job conditions are dangerous, the hours are insanely long...but it was overall a pretty good experience, because he learned that maybe office work wasn't so horrible. (He forgot it a couple years later when he quit and decided to party it up in Thailand off savings later, but that's another story...)

Also FWIW, I used to think my mind was Olympic-class material as well, and certainly had the test scores and comments from accomplished adults to back it up. Maybe it still is, but I care a whole lot less now, because I've learned that beyond 120 or so IQ, EQ matters a lot more. And if my mind is actually that awesome, I could use it to increase my EQ rather than complain about how nobody recognizes how brilliant my IQ is.

"I would rather be an Alaskan fishing boat operator"

Having spent a week on a trawler in the North Sea (and coming from a family where most of my males ancestors for ~300 years were fishermen) I can emphatically state that I like having a job on dry land.

It is incredibly hard work, uncomfortable, risky and unpleasant in just about every way possible.

I love being a software engineer, but I would quit in a second to become a crew member under Han Solo on the Millenium Falcon. Until that opportunity shows up software developer is one of the best jobs on the planet. Go work physical labour for awhile, then make a decision. If you like it better than switch, if you don't like that then switch again. There are no limits besides those we create for ourselves. Oh, you do have to let go of the thinking that money matters, you might have to get a cheaper house or have some hard discussions with your wife or friends. If they love you though they'd rather live in an apartment with a happy person than a huge house with an unhappy one though.

If I was not a software engineer/tech entrepreneur, I would be Alaskan Bush Pilot.

As someone who actually lives up in Alaska, I think you guys may be romanticizing it just a tad. Sure, it's adventurous and everything, but do you really want to live somewhere where you have multiple feet of snow nine months out of the year (or more - we had a snowstorm just about a week ago. Yes. In May.) Everything is more expensive, jobs are hard to come by unless you want a two-weeks-on two-weeks-off rotation to somewhere where it's even colder (-50 F plus wind chill is pretty normal for the Slope), etc.

If you do want to deal with that, good-for-you, but it's not like the grass is verdantly greener here.

And yes, I know you both were probably only half-serious. It just amuses me when people refer to Alaska like its some sort of mystical Last Frontier. It is pretty cool up here, I must admit.

I had the great opportunity of interning at HP Labs during my Junior year summer, and it was (in its own way) the kind of R&D haven that you describe. My team was comprised purely of PhD scientists, many of them former Xerox Parc exiles from down the road. Brilliant, wonderful people who could spend decades as engineers and researchers and be appreciated for their technical contributions.

It definitely had to deal with the corporate mandates, but (at least in my team) the team manager was a player/manager (MIT PhD who could do EE, ME, and CS) who was quite deft at managing the politics.

I imagine the place is being slowly eroded, especially given how poorly the company has been doing as of late, which is really a shame and I wish I were in a position to do something about it.

I think you nailed it right there. Corporate R&D can be the best of the best, but there's no default mechanism to turn that brillance into money.

If you read a few of Dijikstra's comments from the 70s and 80s, I think you'll find the software industry was a wreck then too.

>A large part of it is that big companies have given up on trying to innovate (they just buy innovations, at a panic price) and the people from whom innovation typically came are now a pariah caste of almost-unemployable miserable geniuses.

Why innovate when the miserable genius idea generates a 10% cap rate and you can borrow from your wall street pals for 3% and run the company like crap so it only generates a 5% cap and it still makes money?

The miserable genius eco-system has very expensive money. Meanwhile, up in the wall street/VC jet stream, money is easy to come by.

That term, "R&D," it sounds so retro and quaint!

I guess a lot of large corporations and their shareholders have stopped thinking that they can or want to do creative/innovative work, and have decided to focus on doing repetitive work more profitably.

That's why I use VC-istan. They're different things. Silicon Valley has a 70-year history and it hasn't always been VC-istan. VC-istan is just how it died.

To be completely honest, I never knew you intended to imply a geographic location when you use the term "VC-istan". I always thought you were applying that to refer to, basically, all VCs, anywhere.

Not sure if that changes to the extent to which I agree/disagree, but it is a detail that wasn't apparent (at least to me).

Sorry for the confusion. No, I don't intend VC-istan to be pinned on a specific location. There's definitely a New York VC-istan, and probably a VC-istan for every city that has a serious VC scene.

However, people use "Silicon Valley" to mean VC-istan, but Silicon Valley is something much bigger (at least in time, because it goes back about 70 years).

Ah, OK. Gotcha.

"The Apple founders would be unable to get funding these days."

If it's a political game today, I would take Steve Jobs over any entrepreneur today to win.

I've decided that if I had a dollar for every occasion that you refer to VC-istan, I could retire. The idea that people a) don't bootstrap here or b) can't afford to live here is some sort of VC agenda is just ridiculous. This is the pinnacle of the software developer's era of leverage, and yet you seem to insist that it isn't. Where's the proof?

This is the pinnacle of the software developer's era of leverage, and yet you seem to insist that it isn't.

Really? This must explain why every software company runs open allocation, instead of people being stuck on projects that often hurt their career. It must also explain why software engineers get to pick their tools and never get stuck maintaining legacy garbage that really doesn't add any value, but that risk-averse empty-suits are afraid to throw away. It must also explain how software engineers get paid enough money to raise a family and weather the instability of this industry, with its disposable companies and all that. It probably also describes the absence of age discrimination as a threat that begins in the mid-30s.

Oh wait, I just described an alternate reality that doesn't exist. And the real one is pretty horrible.

Maybe the world is dramatically different where you live and, if so, I'd love to hear about it. What I've seen is pretty dismal. Low respect for people who actually write the code, lots of legacy, low autonomy, ageism starting around 30-35. ("If you're so smart, why don't you have my job?") Even Google is closed-allocation. Now, if you know where to find something different from what seems to be the prevailing software industry experience, I'd love to hear about it.

Me and my friend recently talked about housing prices here in SV. His father moved to SV about ~25 years ago and was a tech worker in Cupertino. About a third of his income went to housing, and we calculated it would be around that price now too for current tech workers. It's above the US average, but it's still stayed somewhat consistent. You have adjust for the very recent complete cash sale, foreign investor, unoccupied house boom here driving up the price.

Remember, you have the option to drive 30m to Hayward from Palo Alto and buy a 3bed2bath for $330k. You don't have that option in lets say Vancouver, BC where a 3bed2bath costs $850k, and 30 minutes away in New Westminster, BC a similar house still costs $850k.

Student debt and health insurance is something epidemic to the entire USA, and you can still cost reduce it somewhat by being young and going to state universities.

"Remember, you have the option to drive 30m to Hayward from Palo Alto and buy a 3bed2bath for $330k. You don't have that option in lets say Vancouver, BC where a 3bed2bath costs $850k, and 30 minutes away in New Westminster, BC a similar house still costs $850k."

These prices and this dynamic are not even close to representative of most of the US.

hot cheap money does it. Wait for the FED to raise interest rates. I.e. why to invest in a startup when just keeping cash in a bank deposit gives you 7-10% return?

I read somewhere that the average return of VC companies hasn't been higher than traditional investments for the past decade. Wow! VC is high risk, should be high return. It is high risk with blue chip stock return.

This type of anomaly still functioning is possible only because of the low interest rates environment we have had for the past 15 years. Cheap credit enables this. People being forced to invest as they can't just keep money on 1% "savings" bank accounts helps that too. Once the hot air is out, it'll all go back to normal.

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