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On an unrelated note (completely unrelated to the original article, but highly related to the place that Michael's post is coming from), when things in your life don't go the way you want them to, and you find yourself in a position where you're upset that everyone isn't recognizing your genius, there's two things you can do.

(1) You can take a long hard look at yourself and the people around you and your assumptions about everything, and realize that maybe you screwed up and/or maybe they screwed up and/or maybe the system can be a little messed up sometimes. And, forgive yourself and forgive other people and accept that life is full of bumps and misunderstandings and confusing situations and downright unknowable things, and soldier on a little bit older and wiser and less certain of your own infallibility.

- or -

(2) You can construct an elaborately detailed worldview in which you are still a flawless genius and everyone else is wrong, and devote the rest of your life to trying to convince everyone else of this worldview. If people push back or don't believe you, that still works because your whole worldview is that you're a flawless genius and they're all idiotic corporate drones, so of course they don't want to buy what you're selling. It's a narcissistic tautology, and it's a black hole that sadly many otherwise intelligent people get sucked into.

I was trying to figure out why it was that I disagreed with so much of what Michael O Church raised here.

Not only is Michael O Church clearly smart and well spoken, but it is simply statistically unlikely to be so often anti-affirmative by accident; not merely disagreeing, but holding a position that is the opposite of (what I believe to be) correct.

I came to the conclusion that I probably am seeing a very very different Bay Area than Michael O Church, and filtering the part that I see in a very very different way.

I think the reality is that perhaps mass culture is negative in the direction, but not magnitude, described here.

But what I see here, in the bay area, is a small tribe, embedded in city of San Francisco, energetically, beneficently, earnestly, relentlessly working and helping each other out, putting their considerable time, capital, and intellect towards building the future and solving our biggest problems. Nowhere else in the world are people really trying to solve these problems. And maybe it's not nearly enough of the bay area, but damn it, people really are trying. Not everyone believes and lives what they say.

But I think that, just enough of them, do. Enough to change the world for the better. And it feels, genuinely, like it is happening here, more than elsewhere. It would be a shame if that signal is lost to the noise.

Solve our biggest problems? I'm neutral here, but are you sure that's what is happening in the Bay Area and no where else in the world?

I'd be happy to be proven wrong, but I think natural resource constraints and tribalism / nationalism are the greatest chronic threats we face.

Energy tech and communications tech try to solve these, respectively; most funding, research and commercialization appears to happen here (although most deployment happens globally).

I've been studying where things are happening from my admittedly skewed vantage point for quite a long time. It does still seem that the vast majority (>60%) of activity is happening in the bay area.

Thats a very SV response of course.

I don't think SV is at the forefront of energy tech, don't have any figures to hand, but I would put Germany way ahead of SV.

Communications tech, yeah maybe, but it is very well dispersed now. Social change created by this? Less so, the US is trying to reinforce the existing consumer society through better advertising. Much of the rest of the world is experimenting with using new technology to help change society, from the Arab Spring to M5S and the Pirate Party and so on.

This is one of those occasions where it's worth checking the poster's profile. Danielle Fong is "cofounder, chief scientist, lightsailenergy.com" and probably does know a lot of people in SV working on energy tech.

Silicon Valley certainly outperforms Germany in new energy tech. It's not even comparable. Germany just spends more on deployment.

There is little need for better energy tech at this point, it's all a question of deployment.

Edit: That is to say wind and solar can both be cheaper than coal right now depending on location and how you calculate the cost of money etc. Which means we are over the tipping point and it's just a question of how much and how quickly to invest not the need for some great breakthrough.

It's not possible to economically power the world with non-fossil fuel based sources based on current prices. We are between a factor of 2 off, optimistically, and more likely a factor of 5 off (floored by extraction and processing costs.)

I don't know where you got your data or how you're doing your analysis, but you're incorrect on this one.

If by power you mean electricity then your simply wrong. According to a Power Purchase Agreement (PPA) between El Paso Electric Company and First Solar, electricity will be sold from First Solar’s thin-film solar panels to El Paso Electric Company for 5.8 cents per kWh http://cleantechnica.com/2013/02/03/thin-film-solar-power-to... Let's compare that with http://www.heco.com/portal/site/heco/menuitem.508576f78baa14...; and say there is no way to run an economy on renewable energy.

That said, scaling things up quickly is a hard problem but slow things down and many problems go away. Realistically, rather than transporting electricity to industry a lot of industry is going to move to where there is cheap power. Also, transportation is a separate issue boats and airplanes are not going to be 'green' any time soon.

Let me try again. Maybe it will enlighten some other readers.

You're cherry picking some of the outermost outliers of both of their ranges, ignoring the cost of storage and transmission and distribution infrastructure, and ignoring the fact that the price of fossil fuel could just decline to the cost of extraction processing and transport as we produce replacements. The cost of coal + extraction nears 2 cents per kwh.

That's a vary different argument from It's not possible to economically power the world with non-fossil fuel based sources based on current prices. However, my point has little to do with today, where not going to replace most power plants in the next 10 years so you need to consider the longer term.

First off transportation and processing are huge factors in the price of fossil fuels, finding and pumping oil are a small slice of the price of gas. At it's simplest cost of fossil fuels = (natural resource value) + (cost to locate) + (cost to extract) + (cost to refine) + (cost to transport) + (environmental cost). [even this ignores subsides etc]

What's important to consider is a proven reserve may or may not be worth extracting based on the market value when your done due to extraction, transportation, and refining costs. Many coal mines in west Virginia have been closed and reopened based on such factors. Now where do renewable energy come in? Shutting down existing coal power plants is a question of maintenance and fuel costs, but new power plants need to consider construction as well. Add to that all existing power plants have a finite lifetime so long term it's only the replacement costs you need to consider. So while building solar in new England is not worth it now, there are plenty of places where it is worth it and that's not going to change.

We have crossed the Rubicon to the point where economics are pushing adoption. Which means there is going to be a lot of grid connected wind and solar power in the future in places like Arizona which means grid operators have no choice but to adapt. The grid can and will slow adoption, but again existing infrastructure has a lifetime and the replacement is going to be designed around matching production with utilization.

The future of the energy market is a huge multidimensional optimization problem. But, investments follow expected profits and there are hundreds of billions of dollars worth of profitable alternative energy investments to be made over the next 30 years. Governments may help or hinder the process but unlike 10 years ago they don't actually need to be involved and it's still going to happen.

What makes America unique and strong is that few other places attract the amount of international talent that SF, and the US in general have. To my knowledge there is no other city in the world that attracts the amount of international talent that SF or NYC can. That with some of the best universities in the world, with many of them in California, put California, and SF, in a good position for many years to come.

Having said that, the world is changing. And we will see other inovation hotspots emerge, but I truly believe without diversity in people, it is harder to have diversity in thought , which can inspire innovation.

Given the level of attraction of SV, the number of talented people from outside the US would be much greater if it wasn't for the way the US government treats foreigners. If the government doesn't become more receptive to foreigners it is quite clear that SV will never grow to its full potential.

London has been a global city for its entire history, and would be in that group. As would Tel Aviv and Singapore.

I think there's quite a strong divide between the creators and the consumers of (low level) technology, even in San Francisco (even though I've never been there). From what I can tell, there is a shift going on in the sense that the number of consumers will grow relative to the number of creators.

This all is the (natural) consequence of the successes of SV. These days, enough kids aspire to be the next Zuckerberg, rather than the next great sports player. These kids will move to SV and consume existing technologies, in the sense that they will follow a couple of a rails tutorials and build the "next great webservice" by combining a couple of the patterns they've learned and create a twitter-bootstrap website that goes along with it. They may create some trivial extensions and post it to Github, but that's about as far as their direct contribution to technology goes.

This isn't necessarily bad, some of the world's problems will be solved by this new generation of entrepreneurs. The presence of more high level developers may also make SV even more attractive to the developers that can actually create cutting edge technologies, which would make SV an even 'richer' place in the sense of talent. However, the number of times I hear people say "I've wasted 4 years at university, and wish I dropped out after the first month" makes me think that they have not understood what university is all about, and makes me wonder if they will be among the ones pushing forward the frontier of technology.

I think the fault in your last paragraph falls to universities. I have a liberal arts degree and have never once questioned the value of my education or its applicability to my work. I learned how to learn, how to understand the ideas of others and developed a broad base from which to understand modern society, whereas the CS graduates I know learned many concrete facts that are useless in their day-to-day lives.

I think that there's a significant number of people who didn't do the learning you apparently did, and instead tried a let's call it "vocational" approach. Funnily enough, such approach is at the core of the jokes about a so-called "humanist" studies leading to a job at McDonald's - the difference being that you can usually get by enough to start in STEM fields.

The other group of people complaining about university, to whom I sometimes belong, is grumpy due to how easy it is to be self taught, even if you might miss some of the more theoretical stuff that you won't use unless you work on a harder problem than most software in the world. Sometimes it's not even about education as much as it is about finances - I quite often found myself looking at job ads and thinking "I could do the job right now if I dropped uni, and I would have no more problems with money".

You are misrepresenting CS degrees. There are very few classes based on memorizing facts. It looks like your degree has taught you how to create strawman arguments pretty well though...

Let me show you how it looks from the other side. I got two technical degrees (one of which is CS). I learned how to learn, how to understand the ideas of others, how to model complex problems via abstractions, and how to apply logic and mathematics to those abstractions to solve the underlying problems. I have very few concrete facts memorized because I know where/how to find them. However, the liberal arts students just sit around and have pseudo-intellectual conversations about art/music/whatever, but never gain the discipline required to discover an 'actually correct' solution to a complex problem. This is why they can't get jobs.

I wanted to stay out of the whole Michael Church discussion: it is unfair, because I read the original article as a cry for help or expression of sadness by the original author, not part of anything more systematized.

However, I'll say this: for a theory to be useful it has to be internally logically consistent, but internal consistency is insufficient. The theory is usually applied to a mix of tautologies (independent of experience /perception) and observations (dependent on experience/perception)

In Michael's case his theory is logically consistent within itself, but 1) his axioms (about what ones' goals should be, what to seek in life, what constitutes fulfillment in work, etc...) seem wildly different from mine 2) what he has experience seems to trend towards the negative side and while not unheard of is, is definitely atypical in terms of the chain of events (hence our gut response which is to say "is he really talking about the same Bay Area/same Google/same software industry?") 3) even so, his perceptions of events seem to be very different from how I might perceive the same events.

I think that's why many people see Michael as while hyper-graphic (a common trend amongst many other Internet posters), clearly intelligent, insightful on technical topics (I'm a bit biased in this case, being a caml fan as well), but find his conclusions in discussions of the industry, management, and of entrepreneurship to be a bit bizarre.

(Donning a flame retardant suit, I am a bit reminded of Stephen Wolfram's A New Kind of Science -- or other theories of a "computational universe": it is interesting and there are no internal contradictions, but I'm at at loss at how it could be broadly applicable or how it supersedes existing scientific and mathematical theories).

This is the standard red pill/blue pill paradox, which one do you want to take? Reality can be very subjective. I sometime see what Michael sees, but I can understand why others don't.

Are you claiming that it's the true reality? If you want, you can trek down to specific parts of Kabul, or the Tenderloin, or South Bronx, or San Quentin, and see horror upon horror that bespeaks the devils within our phenotype.

But you can see far more greatness, goodness, and humanity if you so choose. Which shall it be?

The key distinction here is that travelling to those places as a successful entrepreneur is worlds apart from being born there, without any genetic or environmental advantages to help one escape such a fate.

Michael is speaking from a broad base of experience, one that is not just a hero's epic of one success after another with a token failure before the ultimate victory. From the heroic perspective (PG, Zuck, Gates, etc.), every setback is but a small dip before eventual triumph. These people sincerely believe that anyone can do what they have, and as a result their worldviews are extremely limited and naive. In a way, they cannot know the other side of the story, because they have never experienced any other outcome.

The cold truth is that the situation Michael describes is reality for the vast majority of the working world. The darling VC-fund kids are a tiny minority, selling hopes and dreams to the masses in exchange for their servitude as employees who will never join their ranks.

It is very hard to see the system as a whole when one is so deeply immersed in one side of it. VC startups will not save the common man. If anything, they will put him out of work and ask him to "retrain", putting him in massive debt for an entry level position making far less than his previous job.

All this being said, I am extremely optimistic for the future, but I understand that the US requires significant structural reform if everyone is to benefit from technology. Not everyone can be a successful startup founder or programmer, and as soon as we accept that, we can move onto an earnest conversation about what needs to be done to make a better future for all, elite and commoner alike.

I'm very confused by this. Who is "selling hopes and dreams to the masses in exchange for their servitude as employees who will never join their ranks."

The dream we sell to our employees is one version of an idyllic California life. Awesome weather, awesome people, awesome food, and the best work that they've ever done. That what we strive towards. We don't say whether they'll join our ranks; it is simply not an issue. Nobody asks. And if they do have an interest in founding their own thing, we'll help them. They are usually capable.

Again, I just do not see the reality that you're talking about.

> the best work that they've ever done

Whatever you say, Marie Antoinette. You're the exception to the rule and can perhaps create a new kind of corporate culture (though I sincerely doubt it.. if you do, you'll owe it to society to write a management textbook. Or - you will act like most people do - and hoard the information for personal benefit, until one of your underlings reverse engineers it and publicizes because you're just not paying her what she's worth. Case in point: Michael O Church). Most great work is stymied by politics, because the great creative thinkers and engineers haven't been groomed and trained in politics/management. So due to their social flaws, their projects fail, and they're stymied.

Michael O Church is crowdsourcing political support, and he believes the crowd will throw out the hegemony. Well, Michael O Church just might be on to something.

A downvote without a reply is a form of impotence. It says: I don't like what you said, but I don't have the verbal dexterity to articulate my position in a cogent & cohesive way.

For whatever it's worth, that's not me down voting you.

I will say two constructive things, and leave it as that:

- Startups cannot possibly afford to pay people what they are worth in cash salaries, because the value that they create is realized in the future. In order for startups to be fair, employees actually have to recognize some of the potential value of stock.

If employees were in a position to realize it, they could earn far more in equity. But people reasonably need some cash to live, so that is the tradeoff.

- The best experiences are worth more than equity or money combined. This is, to my mind, not sophistry. It's the only way to live. Money ultimately just gives more options for experience. You have to actually live life, and enjoy it.

Living life and enjoying it; a.k.a. "presence"; is not available to everyone. Most people, including workers in Silicon Valley such as engineers, literally get used and farmed. You happen to be of rockstar talent level and your ride will be more pleasant than most. Don't feel guilty - but don't get upset either when we mock you.

Startups cannot possibly afford to pay people what they are worth in cash salaries, because the value that they create is realized in the future. In order for startups to be fair, employees actually have to recognize some of the potential value of stock.

Of course, that is true and so I agree with what you're saying. The problem with startup equity/options is that it's often so pathetic. 0.03% of a 50-person company for Engineer #20? That's ridiculous, especially when useless nontechnical VPs are still getting 1%.

Software engineers, in most companies, get next to nothing in equity. What they get is a token, a lottery ticket. Only founders and those horrible executive implants pushed by investors get a real slice.

Here's a fairer way of doing that (profit sharing): http://michaelochurch.wordpress.com/2013/03/26/gervais-macle...

The best experiences are worth more than equity or money combined. This is, to my mind, not sophistry. It's the only way to live.

Few people have the luxury of not paying attention to compensation. There are STEM PhDs out there who end up working retail because they have no safety net and when they fall into the working class, they can't get back out (often, they can't even afford interview expenses to get out of whereever they are).

This is a great post.

Michael is speaking from a broad base of experience, one that is not just a hero's epic of one success after another with a token failure before the ultimate victory. From the heroic perspective (PG, Zuck, Gates, etc.), every setback is but a small dip before eventual triumph. These people sincerely believe that anyone can do what they have, and as a result their worldviews are extremely limited and naive. In a way, they cannot know the other side of the story, because they have never experienced any other outcome.

My story's not over yet. I plan on being successful. I'm too old (30 this month) to be a VC darling, but I know I'll do something cool, and probably in the next 10 years. But the world needs to see that the misery is real and that, no, not everyone gets out of it. Most people don't start talking about their lives until the bad stuff is all years ago and they end up putting forth an "all's well that ends well" rosy view. I want the whole story to get out. If I have a break-out success in five years, then after 5 more on that, I will already have lost some touch with how the world really is.

VC startups will not save the common man. If anything, they will put him out of work and ask him to "retrain", putting him in massive debt for an entry level position making far less than his previous job.

Right. I don't think that's the intention. I think many VCs are good people trying to help the world. However, most of the established players in Corporate America would rather cut costs than improve yield. The first increases centralization of power (fear) while the second is destabilizing to those in power, even if economically beneficial to all (including them).

VC-funded startups can't change the world because they are an even more short-sighted (by necessity) strain of the Corporate America they're theoretically supposed to be attacking.

All this being said, I am extremely optimistic for the future, but I understand that the US requires significant structural reform if everyone is to benefit from technology.

Very well said.

You can see horror upon horror just treking in the states. Whether you choose to, or more importantly, whether that is USEFUL to you is key.

Societies and cultures are complex systems. There are a lot of historical biases (e.g. castes even in the states) that are fairly easy to identify if you are looking. But for most people, I think, it is not worth stressing over aspects of the world that they have little ability to change. Why be unhappy?

> But you can see far more greatness, goodness, and humanity if you so choose. Which shall it be?

Unhappy critical people like some of us will see more because it is there to see. Many choose not to see it, because that is how cognitive dissonance makes people happier. Whatever world view works for you is the best one to have, I guess.

This whole comment comes off as a sociopathic and mildly paranoid screed. The idea that software is an extremely anti-intellectual industry is remarkably out of touch. The numbers you throw around (95+ percent of all people, "cognitive 1-percenters") are pure hokum and your prescriptive advice is comical ("take mid-afternoon naps in a place your co-workers won't find you" -- what'd you have in mind, the broom closet?)

I'm surprised to see this comment at the top, it's hardly related to the article and reads like a tangential rant from a self-aggrandizing loner.

I think his assessment about the software industry being anti-intellectual is not out of touch, unless you have had the privilege of working with people who like to learn things beyond new programming patterns in their favorite language.

Often, to even suggest an alternate way to look at things—perhaps functionally—or to advocate a new method be learned is often met with disdain.

  * "We don't have time for that."

  * "What we have works. If it ain't broke don't fix it."

  * "Get those monads out of here. I don't understand them."

I think the stagnation in the development and popularity of many mainstream languages underscores this point.

As a small anecdote, there has been an interview from which I was rejected simply because in a programming puzzle, I employed high-order functions to solve the problem, without:

  * loops,

  * off-by-1 errors,

  * null pointer dereferences, or

  * type unsafety.

The sad thing is that this kind of behavior wasn't local to this particular company. It runs rampant.

An industry which is focused on results generally occludes importance in the path to achieve the results. And it is often the path that can be optimized by some metric by use of intelligence.

>>> Get those monads out of here. I don't understand them

This is actually may be a valid reason, unless the specific code can be supported by one person and this person doesn't mind being chained to a desk. If the company has code that only one person can understand, the company has a big problem. Of course, this can be solved by hiring more people that understand this, but it may not be always easy/practical/affordable/feasible.

>>> I think the stagnation in the development and popularity of many mainstream languages underscores this point.

Slow development of mainstream language is a good thing. Mainstream should be stable. Exciting things should happen in the cutting edge and then be slowly brought into the mainstream.

Yes, Exciting things are foreign and alien. We must protect ourselves from that frightening strangeness.

A lot of engineering (as opposed to computer science) is about eliminating strangeness and minimizing risk.

Probably because those areas of engineering are about making things that work.

Bosses understandably want to commoditize programmers.

Speaking of "strange tools", Rich Hickey mentioned the phenomenon of helping commoditize yourself by shying away from the unfamiliar (in Simple Made Easy).

Everybody wants to commoditize programmers. Commoditizing is how you build mass production, mass production is how you get cheap accessible goods, cheap accessible good is how you keep 7 bln people fed and reasonable comfortable. I get it that for a professional programmer the threat to his priesthood status is unpleasant, but it's where it is going, and it is inevitable.

The problem is not fear, the problem is unfamiliarity and cost. If US company decided that all company communications from now on would be in Mandarin, it would be a mistake - not because Mandarin is particularly bad or frightening, but because most people in US would not know how to speak Mandarin and thus would not be able to participate in communication without very substantial effort.

Code is a form of communication too, and it must be done in a way that is understandable to fellow developers, otherwise costs of development raise immensely and the whole project comes under threat.

I wish HN would let you block users, so I wouldn't have to read the same micheleochurch tripe in every article.

Taking a lead from another current thread [0]: on what basis is this tripe? I find micheleochurch's comments always thought-provoking; not always grounded in the world I see, but that's not what I look for in a good comment. I want to be provoked to think.

[0] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=5807770

To be honest, I actually find value in clearly written content that I consistently disagree with. It allows me to pause and consider different angles of perception especially when it comes to SV, in this case.

I think the alternative, being surrounded by a bubble of things that I agree with, is far more dangerous (though understandably more pleasurable of an experience).

I wouldn't dismiss the advice so quickly! I've known several promising young computer scientists (one now at an illustrious and wealthy tech company, one hopefully entering a graduate program at a famous university, etc) who would hide in their companies' offices and take naps.

> The idea that software is an extremely anti-intellectual industry is remarkably out of touch.

Have you ever worked at a web development shop? Your bio says you're a biology guy caught up in programming, so I would guess you've found a more intellectual strain of the industry - if so congratulations. Enjoy it, because you're one of the lucky few. I slowly die of boredom in the web development field...

The future's going to come out of a location that's free from the high-rent nonsense that creates a work culture of subordination.

I've been toying with the idea of a rural technologist. Sure, if the startup I'm part of goes big, my equity might get me (most of) a house near the city. Or, I can take my skills and my money to the country. How might society change if rural areas had an influx of people who care about applying modern tech outside of city life? I feel like I (and maybe OP) would flourish with lower living costs, time to think and experiment, large tracts of land and grassroots farming & manufacturing industry.

It may not be as crazy as it sounds at first. Per documentaries, that was why the Silicon Valley came to be. Land was cheap, so Shockley (specifically avoiding the old centers of industry) set up shop there, and the rest is history.

That's skipping the substantial part where Terman establishes Stanford's engineering department, brings in massive government funding, and encourages students to commercialize the research.

Yes, certainly not to say Shockley was all alone in establishing in the Bay Area- but without him, would it be called the Silicon Valley? :)

perhaps shockley would have actually preferred if it were called 'germanium valley' :)

Yes I have been interested in this as an idea. The industrial revolution in the UK started in the countryside (in the beautiful Peak District) due to availability of water power, and Cambridge University started in a rural setting too (to escape from Oxford).

There have been some versions, like this http://www.colletta.it/

I think you need some sort of coworking facility, the monastery model rather than the hermit model to get the most out of it. Otherwise you are giving up too much of the community aspect that makes cities so stimulating now.

X-posted on FS: http://firespotting.com/item?id=1087

This sound like an amazing premise for a reboot of Green Acres.

This would seem to assume modern tech isn't cared for outside of cities, which is pretty funny. Now don't quote the Amish to disprove me, I'm talking about regular rank and file rural people.

Some fun things to google for are "high tech redneck" and the scene in Huntsville AL in the 90s (and probably now).

This sounds like the future. A lot of people are still in the "i'm city person" mindset, without ever knowing how it is to live in a less populated area where living costs are lower and your peace of mind is almost guaranteed.

michaelochurch's comments are as valuable as the article. In particular, "3. I don't think the future is in the Bay Area or Manhattan..." rings very true. Earlier today there was the regular 1st of the month "Who's Hiring?" post. Scanning through (and trying to not overgeneralize) it struck me how rather uninteresting most of the Bay Area startups' pitches seemed (to me). Retail, ads, IT cloud services, etc. All relevant and worthy of respect -- but not _inventing_ anything really new.

Absolutely agree. The Bay Area is a horrible cancerous wart on the tech industry. It is a huge mistake that my employer is supposedly going to build a new HQ on old HP superfund land in Cupertino. There's a reason the people who need engineers claim they can't get enough in the Bay Area domestically, but they rarely will mention (because they are near dishonest) that Americans largely refuse to move there, for financial reasons at least, and huge cultural depravity (worship of money). Michaelochurch hit many serious issues dead on accurately. I've never read a more honest remark on reddit or ycombinator since either began. (And I knew what a y combinator was decades ago, so was saddened to see it moved to the west coast.)

> Retail, ads, IT cloud services, etc. All relevant and worthy of respect -- but not _inventing_ anything really new.

Those are the types business that make money fairly easily and therefore have capital to spend on hiring. They're also not great places to work, and so they don't have talented people banging down their doors to work there. If you want to work somewhere that is doing something really cool, it's unlikely you'll see them posting it on a job board

Actually the cloud's not much in SV. Rackspace is in Texas and Amazon's AWS leaders are in Seattle and their biggest datacenter is in Virginia.

The whole point of the cloud is that it doesn't matter where the servers are physically located. The programming jobs aren't located where the servers are anymore. The servers are in places with cheap real estate and power.

> Corporate America is a nation of social climbers

Well, yes, but you can only climb up to a certain point on the social ladder. In fact, adapting to corporate culture guarantees that you will never be a member of the highest class. You may reach the upper middle class, but you will never become a member of the upper class because the upper class not only does not work (they don't need to), but they look disdainfully upon people who have to work, especially people who sell things, because they consider selling things for a living to be vulgar. People who come from the corporate world will almost always, even if they aren't conscious of it, have middle class tastes, and middle class speech mannerisms. For example, Corporate America loves modern design (because it is boring, and thus cannot be offensive) and uses lots of euphemisms. Members of the upper class hate euphemisms, and consider saying "Fudge!" to be much worse than saying "Fuck!". This goes against everything a Corporate America drone has been taught. Social norms in the upper class are much different than social norms in the upper middle, and other classes. The obfuscatory circumlocutions known as "HR speak" or "BS" are reviled, and so are foolish compliments. If you are at an upper's house and praise their furniture, you could be ejected from the premises. Why? Because it is a given that an upper will have good furniture, and compliments about it suggest that this may not be the case, which is offensive.

Because the things we do, say, and the values we have are often subconscious, it takes a concerted effort to change them and it is almost impossible to do so. The things that determine your class cannot all be written down into a book. Even if you do pretend to be an upper, at some point you will commit a faux paus that gives you away.

Strong post. I agree.

Here's a blog post I wrote to explain the terminology I'm going use next: http://michaelochurch.wordpress.com/2012/09/09/the-3-ladder-... .

The E3's are the ones who end up running corporations, except in ceremonial sinecures and extremely high positions with no accountability, where E2's and E1's will sometimes go. E3 is as high as you can go via work.

E2 is the declining national elite ("WASP establishment") that, as you said, is the true upper class and does not value (but disdains) hard work.

E1 is an emerging and outright nasty global elite. E1 is more willing to play the corporate game than E2, but an E1 will never attach himself to one corporation. CEOing is a highly-paid E3 job that can ruin your reputation if it goes badly. E1s buy and sell corporate positions, social access, assets and resources; they're too savvy to attach themselves to one company, however.

You're not a mismatch for E1 on values if you're a corporate striver, but you'll still never cross that divide. You can't enter E2 or E1 as anyone's subordinate. E2 is inaccessible by wealth (and probably closing up and inaccessible in general at this point) and E1 requires so much wealth to enter it that it will never happen, even on a CEO's salary.

I strongly recommend that you read Class: A Guide Through the American Status System by Paul Fussell. Although it was written in 1983, it is still the best description of the American class system that I have ever read. It's less than 200 pages, so you can read it within a day. It primarily deals with the social factors of class,which makes me think that it makes it a good choice for you because it will complement your existing knowledge of corporate culture.

http://www.amazon.com/Class-Through-American-Status-System/d...

I've read it. It's insightful and accurate. It misses E1 because the global elite that we have now wasn't a problem yet. Upper Class and Top-out-of-sight are E2. Upper-Middle Class is a mix of E3 and G1-2.

Nijk, you've been hellbanned, but you're question is valid so I'll respond to it (I can't respond directly to a hellbanned user).

Brin and Zuckerberg are members of the (upper) middle class. Class is a broad term; the people who think that there is "a growing division between the classes" are usually using income as the sole indicator for determining class. The definition of class that I'm using takes into account social factors as well.

The members of the upper class like archaic customs, dress, and design. They have little use for technology, because they have servants to perform the tasks that members of the middle class use technology to do.

Privacy is also very important to uppers, because they hate when middle class people attempt to pry into their business. That's why they have half mile long driveways and tall shrubbery around their houses to keep prying eyes away. Zuckerberg and Brin give themselves away as members of the upper middle class because they sell (selling is vulgar to the upper class) services that do not respect the user's privacy.

> If you are at an upper's house and praise their furniture, you could be ejected from the premises.

Have you performed any experiments to verify this claim?

Relatedly, if you watch the social climbers, they don't do a lot of real work. If you get even passably good at their game, you can get by with a couple hours of focused effort and that leaves 5-6 for self-directed learning. (Don't write code that you'll use later on work time-- you don't own that-- but feel free to explore and just rewrite the code from scratch at home.) Don't feel wrong about doing this; it's a crooked game and that makes criminals of everyone. Work is (for 95+ percent of people) just about advancing your career; the other shit is stuff people say to distract the naive and clueless.

This reads a lot like @vgr's description of the career trajectory of the so-called "Sociopath". More specifically, the transition from Loser to Sociopath.

http://www.ribbonfarm.com/the-gervais-principle/

And a far richer and more thorough expose on the subject is @michaelochurch's Gervais-Macleod series. To whom you responded.

Nice - I must check it out then!

edit: in case others are interested, that link is - https://michaelochurch.wordpress.com/2013/02/19/gervais-prin...

Much of what you write here is perceptive, until:

"Things are terrible right now for cognitive 1-percenters who want meaningful, interesting work (i.e. an upper middle class salary isn't enough, and it's never "stable" for top-0.x-percent intellects because of the job security risks that level of talent implies)"

You write as if you need the monetary and security advantage of the climbers while at the same time needing the artistic/intellectual liberty of the "cognitive 1-percenter". We don't need that. Basically all the brilliant intellectuals that I've been blessed to be surrounded by is happy and productive without the money and social recognition -- as long as there is room for learning and creativity. Of course, heaps of money and recognition are welcome. But not needed. And certainly their absence is not the ground for recrimination (again, as long as there is learning, freedom and creativity -- with some basic food on the table).

About point 1, if it were true, what would stop "rogue" managers from braking ranks?

There would surely be a lot of marketplace advantage in being the only one hiring trans-industrially if the industry-specific experience had little or no real value.

Most screeds I see against the Bay Area seems to ignore one of the most important things about it: It's in California, which has had laws against overly-restrictive employer non-compete agreements since the 1800s.

You don't just need a critical mass of technologists in an area, you also need them to be able to do new and interesting work on their own schedule, either by switching jobs or by starting companies. The Bay Area meets both criteria.

6. If you can, start getting up at 5:00 in the morning. Get some productive hours banged out before you go to work. If you can't go to bed early, then compensate by taking mid-afternoon naps in a place where your co-workers won't find you (almost no one gets anything done during those hours anyway). Relatedly, it's worth a lot of money to kill your commute. If you can't afford to live near work, then consider a different city.

I like Intermittent Fasting of the Martin Berkhan flavor - you don't eat breakfast or lunch. You free up your lunch hour and you don't get sluggish in the afternoon (AND it's easier to lose weight, of course).

Silicon valley didn't become what it was because of cheap housing. The entire west coast was built up for high tech electronics and aircraft because of proximity to japan in WWII and later to russia/china in the cold war.

Ah, yes, the Gervais Principle. More people here should be familiar with that.

Also, why isn't there a startup in SV trying to truly disrupt the housing market there? Can it even be done?

Foster City was probably the closest thing to "disrupting the housing market" SFBA has seen in a while; a relatively high density community built on formerly unused land.

There are some other areas which could get redeveloped the same way (I think the Belle Haven part of Menlo Park and just north of there would be the easiest).

Just build 2-4 story apartment/condo buildings. Some parts of Mountain View seem to be doing this now, too.

> Things are terrible right now for cognitive 1-percenters who want meaningful, interesting work (i.e. an upper middle class salary isn't enough, and it's never "stable" for top-0.x-percent intellects because of the job security risks that level of talent implies

You seem to be implying that less intelligent or educated people have LESS job security risks to worry about than the "cognitive one percenters"?

You can't be serious. Are you confusing "risk" with "choice"? Going down that scale, it's "choice in finding a job" that gets reduced, not "risk of having to find a new job".

Or maybe you're confusing the "job security risk" of losing that really nice intellectually challenging job and having to pick a possibly less interesting one from a number of companies that are jumping up and down because intellectual talent like that is never on the job market for long, with the ACTUAL job security risk of losing your job, period. And the subsequent worries about where next month's rent will have to come from.

And the "right now" part has me scratching my head as well. From what I'm seeing, if there's one sector that seem to be coasting along just fine in this turmoil of economic crises, it's the tech sector and in particular the highly intelligent top of it.

My friend for instance, is a brilliant programmer with a sharp analytical mind, only just about to finish his Physics PhD, already found a job, had to look for, oh, about a week or so. He had at least 3 options (he indeed picked the most intellectually challenging one), the reason it was "only" three was because he doesn't really want to move (this university town is a bit of an "island", most people have to move to other regions "where all the jobs are"), he limited his options by choice.

Now compare with his girlfriend. Equally smart, but no background in programming and her PhD is in Bio/Med. She's already had to move to be able to take a temp research position and has been looking for more stable employment for months, without much luck.

... and one other, unrelated thing, the following can be pretty dangerous advice:

> Don't write code that you'll use later on work time-- you don't own that-- but feel free to explore and just rewrite the code from scratch at home.

I can't speak for how it works where OP lives, but this won't fly in the Netherlands. Regardless of whether you rewrite it from scratch, code that you could conceivably have written as part of your normal work description (yes this is pretty broad), you don't own that. Doesn't matter one bit when or where you write it, at home or at the office, whether you made money from this hobby project or volunteered to write a simple database app for your local sports club (that last example is literally a casus we learned about in class).

It's a snag, usually won't give you trouble because a boss doesn't need to enforce it, esp if he wants to keep his programmers. But what you're suggesting is deliberately placing yourself in an adversarial position, it depends on how you do it, but the tone you described it, can easily push someone to become very difficult, very quickly.

what a load of bullshit. nerds were supposed to rule the world, but jocks, err...managers, took that away from you.

OP and you seem to share this feeling of greatness, this deep conviction that you're special and all the fucking mouthbreathing plebs around you should understand that. turns out the world doesn't work that way, tough shit.

the sissyfication of modern life is getting amazing. don't like workng for someone else? then don't, found something and go go go you brilliant mind, stop complaining in your wall of texts that you don't. have. time. guess what, if you are on HN or have blog, are writing a book (see OP) - then you have time.

haha, a harsh dose of reality. repped.