michaelochurch

My point is that programmers and technologists, as a group, aren't inclined to be worse than the general population. (Most programmers are pretty damn supportive of women getting into the industry and being treated as well as men.) However, the dominant culture is Silicon Valley isn't set by programmers ("nerds") but by the people sent West by the mainstream business culture to boss nerds around. That particular set of people (the colonial overseers) is across-the-board awful, and they've taken the waning casual sexism of the MBA-culture world (meeting a client, or celebrating a good day at the trading desk, at a strip club) and leveled it up into something a lot worse, and that's what we see in the Valley. It's authentic misogyny but it comes from the top. Your typical young engineer is just an average nerd; not a misogynist.

The generations that were most aggressive about pushing women out of the workforce were past peak by 1980 and have all but vanished today. That doesn't mean that there isn't sexism and that there aren't rotten individuals, as in every generation; but my point is that even the people we consider old for full-time work (65-70) are Baby Boomers who came later and who were either very early in their careers or still in school during the bad old days when "woman" meant "secretary".

Seriously, fuck this "unicorn" shit and fuck that whole culture of juvenilty that comes out of the polar vortex of immaturity called Silly Con Valley.

Speaking of unicorns, if you want something to hate for the next few minutes, watch this video: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=bMJIBxtDUHc .

There isn't an above-baseline sexism among long-term professional programmers. Sure, there are bad apples, but the culture that you'll find at a gray-haired research lab or even a more traditional, supposedly conservative, enterprise shop is not nearly as exclusionary as the supposedly progressive and new Silicon Valley culture.

By stereotype, you'd expect 60-year-old men writing elevator controllers in Indiana to be far more sexist and exclusionary than 25-year-olds in California. It ain't true. First of all, someone who's 60 now was born in 1955 and has no meaningful memories of the bad old days; by the time he or she was starting a career, women were already in the workforce and it was accepted by many as a good thing. Second, if you control for education, the age vs. exclusionary behavior correlation goes away. Third, most people actually get more mature with age, and while there are some who mature at a lesser rate than society advances and become the "racist grandparent" trope, I don't think that it's the norm. (Also, American society's rate of advancement has slowed in the past 30 years compared to the 30 before that, but that's another topic.) Fourth, anyone who thinks the dominant Silicon Valley culture is still liberal has been asleep for 20 years.

That's not to say that private sector tech doesn't have a sexist, exclusionary culture. It does. It doesn't come from the programmers (although there are individual programmers who are assholes and keep it going). Rather, it comes from the mainstream business culture (MBA culture) that colonized us. In fact, the sexism of the Damasos (see: https://michaelochurch.wordpress.com/2014/01/05/vc-istan-8-t... ) who are sent West to boss nerds around is a lot more severe than that of the mainstream MBA culture. Banks might make it harder for women to advance; venture capitalists, on the other hand, will outright hit on them and threaten to "pick up a phone" and make them unfundable if they don't acquiesce.

You know how when a criminal gang kicks out some of its underperforming members and they form a new gang, the upstart young gang is typically more violent than the one it splintered off from? The sexism of the VC bros and the Spiegel types they fund is analogous. The demigods of the Valley are people who got kicked out of mainstream business culture because they weren't smart enough to do statistical arbitrage at hedge funds, so they were sent West to man this colonial outpost (from the MBA-culture perspective) called Silicon Valley. As MBA-culture failures, it's not surprising that they amplify some of that culture's worst traits, and that they've created a dominant culture in Silicon Valley that is (a) very negative and (b) far worse than the more superficially conservative (no sandals at work) but generally professional culture you see in more traditional companies, including the ones doing (say) hardware work and low-level programming, the latter of which seems to be the OP's interest.

She had a positive experience because she was hanging around Real Technologists, who aren't nearly as sexist as the Silicon Valley wunderkinder. The Shanleys of the world aren't complaining about 55-year-old men who still say "Oriental" (meaning no harm, and not holding racist views) but are generally professional and not very sexist (many are married and have daughters). They're complaining about 22-year-olds who get funded to the gills because they were in the same rape frat as a leading VC, and who go on to create horrible work cultures.

I disagree. I've worked for a couple "limousine liberals" in New York. So has my wife and so have many of my friends. Many of the limousine liberals are assholes (not that he's very liberal, nor is he wealthy, and he's also fictional... but think of Frank Underwood). Sure, they vote Democratic, but they're nasty, elitist people who will hurt your career for any reason or no reason at all, and who put a lot more stock into meaningless social prestige (connections, pedigree) than typical conservatives. Their liberalism is mostly an air they put on in order to make themselves socially acceptable since they can't hide their wealth. (That's not to say that all wealthy liberals are like that. The type certainly exists, though.) Frankly, it's at the point that I don't really care about a person's macropolitics. Some of my favorite people are conservative (I think they're wrong, but that's another issue) and some of the worst people are nominally progressive (and probably sincere in their support for left-of-center politics). As with religious belief, some expect a correlation between position and ethical character, but the actual correlation seems to be near zero.

Frankly, I think that this was intentional. It has nothing to do with being "a conservative" or "a liberal". This NIMBYism is about maintaining high house prices; it is about being a selfish piece of shit. It just gets a leftist veneer because these people are good at coming up with an argument that other people will listen to. End of story.

I think the progressive anti-growth sentiment is earnest; it’s people honestly trying to protect their city from unwanted change.

That's the opposite of "progressive". They're leftist, but that's not the same thing as being progressive. Kim Jong-Un is a leftist. So was Stalin. So are many of the Euro-rednecks

The U.S. is different from Europe in that our mouth-breathers, kooks, racists, regressives, and assholes are more numerous on the right of the economic spectrum... to the point where tropes are made of it. In Europe (and in NYC and San Francisco) the authoritarian nutjobs and the xenophobes and the anti-progress crowd is more evenly split between the left and right.

Some component of the Bay Area housing evil is ill-thought-out liberal politics (see: legacy rent control systems that don't allow rents to rise even with inflation) but much more of this stuff is exclusionary than people will admit to.

We should seriously consider an electron-free lifestyle. I don't mean that we swear off electricity. I'm saying that we get rid of all of fucking chemistry (which is dominated by interactions of outermost electrons of atoms). It's a fucking distraction. We don't need it. Sure, our brains will need to use a different fundamental particle for neurons to signal each other with, and we'll have to evolve an exotic chemistry to replace our current composition, but you hear about pentaquarks every day. It can't be that hard, with all the modern science... oh, wait.

Sure, there are the Swiss bank accounts, but every corrupt official in China has a house in Silicon Valley in case he gets caught.

It helps them that their opponent isn't sympathetic at all. Non-zero medallion values, by definition, mean that there are too few cabs on the road (and in New York, there are). The Medallion Mafia pisses me off; just a bunch of rent-seekers stealing money from drivers.

I'm actually glad to see the Medallion assholes get "disrupted". I just wish that it were a different company taking the lead in doing it.

Yet Facebook, Apple and Google — companies that brag about their forward thinking — are trying to reinvent this template of the past. They have commissioned high-profile architects to design versions of the ultimate office park in Silicon Valley, an hour-plus shuttle ride from San Francisco. [...] They will be movable, lightweight structures instead of blocky concrete buildings. Anything to attract brilliant minds and assure employees that they’re living in the future, not a glorified version of the past.

The OP does a great job of explaining why Silicon Valley won't be involved in much of a meaningful way. I think that the biggest problem is that the balance of power between connections guys and talent has fallen into a state of irreversible moral calamity. In their time, Steve Jobs and Steve Wozniak were approximate equals. The business partner wasn't innately taken to be superior to the engineering partner. That changed somewhere between 1995 and 2005. Now, the connections guys are the only people who really matter and engineers (even up to the CTO level) are largely viewed as interchangeable. And they probably are interchangeable given that these businesses are all built to be dumped on a buyer inside of 3 years, and the consequences of mediocre engineering generally don't have business-macroscopic effects (beyond "throw more money at it" problems) until 5 or 6 years have passed.

I don't know where, when, or how the positive-sum mentality of the old Silicon Valley will reconstitute itself. I do think that it will be at least 500 miles away from the current one, because the current tech hub has "Future Detroit, But With Less Architectural Character" written all over it.

Sand Hill Road will lose money. The leading VCs will still be rich, just less so. Very high-end California real estate will crash. Unfortunately, it probably won't do much for SF apartments; what we see in real estate is that people hoard (even at significant financial loss) rather than selling when real estate demand drops, because of emotional attachment.

What made Silicon Valley great in the 1970s-90s will reconstitute itself somewhere else in the 2020s: possibly the Pacific Northwest, possibly the North (Midwest and New England) again, and possibly another country.

2017 is a very approximate date. That could easily be off by five years, or even more.

We're still in a housing bubble (although not as much as one, and one with a sharper geographic profile) but what's propping it up now is industrial decline and extremely lopsided job availability. Much of the country is starved of economic activity while a few metropolitan areas (e.g. New York and the Bay Area) have healthy job markets but extreme real estate costs.

All of that said, I have no way of predicting how that bubble will resolve or when it will crash. We could see it happen in 2 years or in 25, and it will probably vary with geography (just as Vegas and Florida got hit hard in the last one, but the Bay Area and Manhattan remained unscathed). Housing bubbles are weird because there's so much corruption (foreign money, NIMBY regulations) involved that makes them political and therefore unpredictable.

The 2001 tech crash didn't do a lot of damage to the rest of the world (9/11 did far more). The 2008 crash is still being felt in Southern Europe. I can't predict how much of an effect the ~2017 VC-land crash will have. To be honest, the numbers don't look that bad; when Silicon Valley drops a turd like ZNGA on Wall Street, the Street usually reacts with proper skepticism. So I think that this one's going to be relatively limited in terms of its impact on the rest of the world. I don't like what it represents about our society, and what it may continue to represent, because that is corrosive. The truth about VC-funded startups in the Bay Area is that 98% of that stuff has nothing to do with creating new value, but with devising ways to profit from widespread organizational decline.

Why is every discussion of fact treated as incendiary?

People react as if they were baited when they see my name. That's on them, not me.

I assume that that's not what you're looking for, though.

There's a fine line between "maintenance" and "improvement", and without the latter, you have stagnation. There certainly are systems that require very low levels of maintenance. I have a friend who built a program in Erlang that is still running, 10 years later. (I don't mean that the code is still in production. I mean that the program itself is still running.) Of course, Erlang allows the definition of "a program" to span multiple machines, and we're debating terminology here...

Pay-as-you-go maintenance is best. Don't allow technical debt if you can help it, push back against The Business on deadlines, certainly don't allow that micromanagement under the name of "Scrum" to get in or else you're just fucked when it comes to quality because you'll get a fuck-quality-I-need-to-complete-story-points culture, and create a culture of doing things right the first time.

Not that you'll necessarily use them, but learn a few things about strong statically typed languages like Haskell or Ocaml (Java doesn't count; that's shitty static typing). One of the great things about Haskell is that it allows safe refactoring. You're not holding your breath every time you change the code, because the compiler will usually tell you where your change broke things, and you can just go in a fix them. It is possible to write highly reliable software in dynamically typed languages (such as Erlang, mentioned above) and I don't mean to denigrate those tools at all, but it's a bit harder, especially when you're fairly new to programming, to do so.

Finally, once your system reaches a certain size, you will need tests no matter how good your type system is. They start to become an obvious win around a thousand lines of code. Consider generative testing (e.g. QuickCheck) rather than hand-written tests if you can.

Implying that someone isn't an adult isn't an insult either. If someone's 5 years old, it's not an insult to call that person a child. Likewise, I call my cats, "cats", and my friends' dogs, "dogs", and no one seems to be offended.

If someone who I don't know acts like a child, I will presume that that person is a child. If someone posts "sdj;;;s;dksk;ld;sdkl;sd" I will presume that a cat walked across the keyboard. Is this offensive?

Silicon Valley's a joke at this point. So where will the technologist's positive-sum impulse reconstitute itself? I have no fucking idea. It could be in Seattle, it could be in the Upper Midwest, and it could be in another part of the world. And who will fund the new way of doing things, one which will be more profitable (in the long term) and much more socially responsible, but less controllable by the people holding the pursestrings? Again, I honestly don't know.

Interesting theory. (Let me add Minneapolis to your list.) The Midwest gets a lot of bad press on the Coasts ("flyover country") but what's missed is that if you control for urban-versus-rural or for density, it's probably the most educated and liberal part of the country (perhaps tied with the Pacific Northwest). The East Coast, for example, isn't notably cultured (to any degree that's hard to find in other parts of the country) outside of certain neighborhoods in Boston or New York (which are getting expensive and inaccessible anyway).

The real cultural tension in the U.S. isn't South vs. North or "Red States" versus "Blue States". You might call it "urban versus rural", but there are so few farmers (and most farmers I know are actually quite educated; you have to be smart to compete with agricorps) that it's more of an urban versus suburb dichotomy (with the distinction depending more on lifestyle and outlook than whether the location is technically part of the incorporated city).

So yes, I agree. I don't know that we need more talent coming into the Midwest (although it won't hurt); we just need to stop losing the talent that we have to the Bay Area (where young engineers are still paid better after adjusting for cost-of-living; once you get older, the Midwest starts to win because it's more like 140k vs. 170k than 70k vs. 120k). Obviously, most of those talented people don't stay in the Bay Area (they get older, need space for families) but there isn't a clear "next" destination for them. Do they go to Seattle? Chicago? Portland? Austin? Somewhere else? Perhaps this is a good thing, though, because it's probably better for the country to have talent spread around than to try to replicate an aberration (SV's concentration of economic activity, which congests it and deprives the rest of the country).

You nailed it.

Companies don't want their reasons for firing people in the public. If they said they fired her for performance, she could subpoena not only her own performance history (Google has secret "calibration scores" that are not shared with the employee) but the ratings of others in the company and any HR actions taken toward them-- in order to find out if people were evaluated consistently.

No company wants its HR data in discovery, because almost every company has dirt. They'll usually settle.

Google also has, interesting enough, High Compensation Plans (HCPs) for people it's trying to bring in from finance. On an HCP, you get faster promotions and usually you are on the management ladder, which is much easier to climb, especially past level 7+. So, if you come from Wall Street, you can be a Software Manager III or Director but write code full time.

Seattle, Portland, Chicago, Austin, Minneapolis, and Boston are more affordable than the Bay Area, and generally considered to be good places to live. (I won't say anything either way about St. Louis, because I don't know anything about it. I was there about 12 years ago and will probably be there this year for Strange Loop, but that's it.) There isn't a lack of affordable, good places to live in the U.S. There isn't even a lack of affordable, good places to live in cities: Chicago is still the Second City, culturally. L.A. is just a company town for the entertainment industry and way too spread out.

New York is expensive but actually worth it in terms of urban amenity (unlike SF). There really isn't anywhere in the U.S. that has that urban density, so if that's what you want, NYC provides it. San Francisco, on the other hand, wouldn't be on the map except for the VC industry. It has more of a one-dimensional economy than Los Angeles.

I do think that there's value in it. If you genuinely enjoy what you do, you work in a low-stress environment, and you're not a subordinate, you can work 60-70 hours per week continuously without ill effects. If you have a regular office job in an open-plan environment, and you're a subordinate, then a 60-hour week will murder you over time. If you call the shots over your own work (there's always a boss, so the distinction of "not a subordinate" is more about degree and the people around you than formal reporting structure) then you can work harder and much more efficiently than typical disengaged office workers and it won't hurt you.

An important concept, that I've cribbed from Havel, is Living in Truth. At some point, I realized (to my annoyance) how much of an advantage the rich kids had in the career game. (Growing up in Central PA, I thought I was a "rich kid". Then I worked in finance in NYC.) They worked as hard as anyone else-- I'll never say that they didn't-- but it was received better and led to rapid promotion. If you're from a middle-class background and bust your ass, your bosses assume that it's because you want money and to be like them, and that doesn't really endear you to them. If you're already from a rich family, then people assume that you have a genuine work ethic when you put in the 40-55 hours that is taken for granted from everyone else.

So, I started thinking about it, and I realized that, most of the time, it's not obvious what peoples' actual backgrounds were. No one consciously favors the rich kids; it's the confidence and status that they carry with them that gives them the advantages. They expect to be treated with respect, even by powerful people, and most of the time, that's what happens. Paradoxically, the people who didn't fear their bosses or take the corporate nonsense too seriously were the ones who got ahead. That's when I realized that it's possible to act as if you were economically free-- to work only on the stuff that matters, either because it advances your career or because it helps someone or some cause that you care about-- and, most of the time, to get away with it. If you're ethical and hard-working but, at the same time, don't allow anyone to lower your status, ever, you definitely invite short-term rockiness (see: my Google experience) but people respect you more in the long term. Obviously, you have to be tactful and sometimes a bit political. When something not worth doing gets dropped on your plate, you need to find a way to get higher-priority and valuable stuff on it...

I bring this up because it's impossible to be efficient if you don't live in truth. You'll have recurring commitments and drudge work delegated onto you, and eventually the only escape will be to change jobs and, since you're going to be tired and bitter by that point, you'll get a mediocre raise (the 3-5% per year that you didn't get where you were) but no real promotion. I don't know the OP, but I'm guessing that he mastered the art of Living in Truth. For example, in an hour-long status meeting, he probably had a rehearsed and compact 2-minute update that didn't invite follow-on questions (status meetings are like Scrabble; good players aren't trying to drop 100-point words so much as they're trying not to open up the board) and 58 minutes to work on stuff that actually mattered. And while there's a lot that's in productivity literature that isn't replicable for most people, I think that the general concept of Living in Truth has a great deal of value.