
The secret guild of Silicon Valley - Luyt
http://medriscoll.com/post/9117396231/the-guild-of-silicon-valley
======
birken
(I realize this was written 8 months ago and the addendum tries to take away
the bite, but I'll comment nonetheless)

I hate articles that make it seem like there is some magical cult of amazing
engineers that have an untouchable and unattainable aura. I remember how
intimidated I was after I graduated college and was coming into the workforce
due to it.

Well, I used to work with the men and women who "who keep Google’s servers
running" and at one point in time I was one of them. I can tell you that none
of the stereotypes listed apply to any sizeable percentage of them, and their
variety and skills were incredibly diverse. Some had years of experience and
were grizzled veterans, some of them were right out of college. Some of them
lived in the south bay, some lived in the city. Some dressed more fashionably
than others. Some were men, some were women.

They, like many, liked working on interesting problems. They, like many, cared
about engineering and improving their skills everyday. But, there was no
magical guild which encompassed them. It is just a bunch of engineers with
different skills, different interests, different personalities, who all just
enjoyed engineering. Just like you and me. Your company doesn't need people
from this magical guild to succeed, because this magical guild doesn't exist.

I certainly agree that any engineer would like working at a place where their
work will have a huge impact and will be appreciated, but who wouldn't? If
your company is marginalizing some percentage of your employees, whatever
their job title is, then you certainly aren't going to be able to attract
quality candidates for that position. That really has nothing to do with
engineers or some magical guild though.

~~~
appleaintbad
> I hate articles that make it seem like there is some magical cult of amazing
> engineers that have an untouchable and unattainable aura. I remember how
> intimidated I was after I graduated college and was coming into the
> workforce due to it.

I think that the point is that typically in startups, people revere the
company founders, the MBAs, the VCs, etc. and not the quiet experienced
engineers that just make things happen. You're right that it isn't a secret
guild, however there is a range of experience and talent, and some are on the
higher end of that. Not everyone can easily attain the level of experience and
talent that some of these people have; it is a mix of education, natural
ability, hard work, and luck. But, you are right that getting a lot closer to
the level these people are at is not impossible.

~~~
untog
_I think that the point is that typically in startups, people revere the
company founders, the MBAs, the VCs, etc. and not the quiet experienced
engineers that just make things happen_

I disagree. I think that engineers get a huge amount of attention, far more
than they would in any other industry. But at a base level you need to be
outgoing and sociable- it seems that proportionally fewer engineers are, when
compared to MBAs, VCs and the like.

------
ChuckMcM
I found it amusing, and do think that it can feel like there is a secret guild
sometimes. However, there is a more interesting truth hidden in there.

People talk. Not really too surprising but Silicon Valley, like Hollywood, or
Washington D.C., or any community being warped by a common theme, is at its
heart people. And I don't know it if it part of our genetic heritage or what,
but many people love to talk about other people, and so there is the
undercurrent of a social fabric (made more visible by LinkedIn or Facebook but
its the same fabric).

What Hollywood, Silicon Valley, and Washington DC share is a very low
viscosity when it comes to job change. People move around, some move around a
lot, and so the stories of people, and opinions about people, move with them.

Finally there is an external valuation that gets applied to folks, that is
part who they are, what they are doing, what they have done, and who they have
helped or hindered.

This isn't rocket science, but its good to be aware of it if you're working
here, or thinking of working here because it can and does affect how you
experience things.

So a new college graduate goes to work for a company. They come to know the
people around them, and may develop opinions about their relative value to the
company. After a few years they move on. The next company is looking for help
and they ask you to 'reach out to your network' meaning "Let's see if we can
poach the 'good' people from your previous job." This cycle repeats ad-
infinitum.

Within that repeating cycle you will discover a truth which I learned from Bob
Lyon at Sun which is this "There are no bad employees, only bad fits" which
you may or may not believe, but it is true, that people who perform poorly in
one environment can be superstars in another. And the flip side is "There are
no good employees, only good fits." which is a scarier thing. At some point
you will experience hiring some person who was a superstar at X and they join
your company/group and don't get anything done.

Over time, and we're talking decades, you find people who are good to very
good in most environments, and those who are poor to very poor in most
environments. The latter tend to move on (either out of the valley or into
different roles), the former become 'targets' for being recruited.

The interesting aspect though is that someone has done well in a wide variety
of roles, that usually means there are lots of people who know them from
interacting with them. Further they often know others who are good in a wide
variety of roles. Sometimes it seems like there is a secret society somewhere,
but there isn't.

When you encounter this phenomena for the first time, you might feel like they
are a secret guild, folks who know the other 'good' people who can get things
done. And yes, they can demand, and get, a higher than nominal salary (see
today's front page story on 'pay'). But that comes from the probability they
will do well, regardless of their role.

Three things to take away from this:

1) If you think your co-worker is a 'loser' consider they may just be in a bad
role, if your managing them put them into a different role to see if they are
better.

2) Track records can only be created over time, so don't worry that you're not
'a superstar' in 3, 5, even 10 years. Get to know people, try different
things, test your own boundaries.

3) Recommendations and criticisms of someone by a former co-worker who has
only seen the subject in one role, can be misleading. It only tells you about
them in that one role. If several people have worked with a candidate in
different roles and you are getting feedback that is both 'great' and 'skip
this one' consider the roles at the time and weight based on your proposed
role.

------
hkarthik
I've been speaking to a few of the more established startups in the Bay Area
that built apps on Rails and have started migrating the performance hotspots
to the JVM. There's definitely a pattern I've seen.

1) First version of the app is built in Ruby, Python, or PHP and the
lightweight stack helps the business stay nimble as it finds its market
position/niche. During this time, there are a LOT of inexperienced, younger
engineers working on the code.

2) Once the right market position is found, the app takes off and scaling
problems abound as the lightweight stack starts to fall down at massive scale.

3) Funding is secured and more experienced, older talent (the Guild) is
brought in (at much higher salaries) to help fix the hot spots. This is
usually done using a combination of using the JVM or unmanaged C/C++. The
engineering demographic often switches here as you see a lot of 30-something
veterans from Yahoo, Google, etc come in and bring their tools with them.

4) Scaling isn't an issue anymore, but the culture has changed a bit as the
business has become more established. Many of the early folks have moved on or
gone into leadership roles. A few have been absorbed into the Guild and will
move on.

It's very interesting. I've worked mostly in the midwest and the South during
my career, and this lifecycle of talent is not something I've really observed
outside of the Valley.

~~~
stcredzero
_I've worked mostly in the midwest and the South during my career, and this
lifecycle of talent is not something I've really observed outside of the
Valley._

I suspect that this "lifecycle of talent" is a part of SV's secret sauce. As
manufacturing becomes even more amenable to rapid prototyping, this sort of
culture could be applied to that domain. (Is it already?)

~~~
hkarthik
_I suspect that this "lifecycle of talent" is a part of SV's secret sauce. As
manufacturing becomes even more amenable to rapid prototyping, this sort of
culture could be applied to that domain. (Is it already?)_

I've wondered the same thing about whether this is a differentiator that makes
SV companies successful. Observing it is part of the reason I'm even
interesting in speaking to these companies, despite the unrealistic outlook I
have on actually living there.

I do wonder if the Makerbot/3D Printing thing will lead to the same thing. I
certainly think it could, but it'll be hard to make shippable products using
3D Printing at home. The production cost for volume will be too high to leave
it to the consumer based machines.

------
throwaway64
This is a pattern you see repeated many times, at many levels. Stuff like
blogs, HN comments, or just any form of public discourse has a heavy bias (one
might say it optimizes) towards people that use it the most. By definition
heavy use of such media is time consuming, leaving less time for learning,
coding, or doing more productive things in general. So the discourse becomes
dominated by not the best and brightest that practice their trade the most,
but rather those that talk the most about it.

~~~
reneherse
Not only that, but all these short-form media tend to be playgrounds for the
extraverted, who are more comfortable putting themselves "out there".

------
relaunched
Unfortunately, the person who wrote this missed the point, as far as I'm
concerned. These people do exist. But, it's not about an engineering culture,
it's about a culture of respect and emphasis on learning. It's also about
building friendships and relationships and allow people to express themselves
and their interests.

Most startups don't attract these people because when you approach a great
engineer when you want something, they can smell it on you. They don't need
your job and they don't want to work for someone who sees them as a means to
an end.

~~~
stcredzero
_Most startups don't attract these people because when you approach a great
engineer when you want something, they can smell it on you. They don't need
your job and they don't want to work for someone who sees them as a means to
an end._

Words of wisdom for a founder who wants to establish a culture of "Good
People."

------
stephencanon
> Their tools of choice are C, C++, and Java

Definitely, maybe, and absolutely not, respectively.

> They wear ironic t-shirts, and that is the outer limit of their fashion
> sense

True.

> They’re not hipsters who live in the Mission or even in the city; they live
> near a CalTrain stop, somewhere on the Peninsula

True.

> They meet for Game Night on Thursdays to play Settlers of Catan

False. SoC is for hipsters. The neck beards are playing something much more
obscure, which probably hasn't been translated from German yet.

> They are passive, logical, and Spock-like

Logical, absolutely, but they are anything but passive. It's just that the set
of things they really care about has almost zero overlap with the set of
things that you really care about, which looks like passivity to you.

~~~
jbooth
Absolutely not? I'm sorry if Java's too unfashionable for you to be caught
using, but what language are Hadoop, Cassandra, Zookeeper, etc written in?
Google wrote their equivalents in C++, and java's garbage collection has it's
problems, but nobody's writing those platforms in Ruby.

If you have such a bias against any language that delivers the goods in the
real world like Java does, you're probably not a systems guy. Let me guess,
you have a problem with some clumsy aspect of the language or other? As if C
is graceful?

~~~
stephencanon
It's not a question of what's "unfashionable" for _me_ to be caught using
[However: I write C and Assembly, thank you very much]. The question is "what
languages do the neckbeards use?" In my experience, writing Java is a shaving
offense. They might even make you wear a suit.

~~~
cgh
Java isn't "cool", and I agree that the language itself is frustratingly
verbose and kind of lame, but the frameworks built around it are solid. And
believe me, many of the Apache Foundation contributors are unquestionably
full-on neckbeards.

~~~
stephencanon
I'm being overly glib, sorry for that.

I've seen a lot of cool things done in Java. I don't mean to imply otherwise.
I've also seen a lot of really cool things done in Fortran and COBOL, many of
them by unquestionably full-on neckbeards.

That said, within the population of people I know well, the experts who really
understand low-level details of computing do not chose to write Java.

~~~
cgh
For systems-level apps and so forth, I 100% agree (I have done a lot of
systems stuff in C and C++ in my life).

For web apps that scale out to a certain level, Java + Spring + Hibernate +
Tomcat works boringly well. That is Java's niche. As you inferred, I wouldn't
use it for much else.

Above a certain scale, you're back to C++, of course.

~~~
guard-of-terra
Hibernate works entertainingly bad. If you don't have a very fancy data model
(lots of different entities but relative small tables), you better stick to
bare spring jdbc-templates.

------
stcredzero
_they have quietly, steadily built the infrastructure behind the world’s most
successful companies. When they leave — as they have places like Netscape,
Sun, and Yahoo — the firms they leave behind wither and die._

Reminds me of one Korean woman I knew in South Carolina. She would start
cooking at a restaurant and it would flourish. Then the owner would alienate
her, and she'd leave and the restaurant wouldn't be so popular anymore.
Eventually, she started cooking Korean food at her husband's _cuban sub shop_
and the sub shop became one of the most popular places to get Korean food.
Seriously, the place was often packed with Korean students from the
university.

However, the sort of insider culture described in the article makes me think
of the insider culture portrayed in the beginning of "Moneyball." I suspect
that, given more open statistics, the industry would benefit from a more
quantitative evaluation of technical people, as opposed to the stone age
reputation mechanisms of _Homo sapiens_ at play during shop talk. (Which work
pretty well, but we can do better.)

This is one place where large companies currently have an advantage over the
market at-large, as they can gather this sort of quantitative information
about their own population of employees, with a uniform set of standards to
enable measurement.

An organization like Y Combinator could do something similar. Even better,
startups and incubators in worldwide could start doing this.

I've advocated "guilds" here in the past, and HN members have downvoted me.
Really, that's just poor marketing, as what I was advocating wasn't anything
like a medieval guild. What the industry needs more of are 1) mentoring at
levels above the "pop-culture" of programming 2) better and more open
quantitative measures.

Really, 2) is the same thing as pro athlete's stats or MPG figures on a car's
sticker. Better flow of information would result in a better market.

~~~
jbooth
The thing about moneyball is you're evaluating a player based on a few
thousand iterations of the same thing: Up to bat, get a hit, walk, strike out,
or fly/ground out.

Every software project tends to be different. Lots harder to quantize.

------
praptak
This is similar in spirit to Orson Scott Card "How Sofware Companies Die"
piece: [http://www.zoion.com/~erlkonig/writings/programmer-
beekeepin...](http://www.zoion.com/~erlkonig/writings/programmer-
beekeeping.html)

------
EternalFury
This article is slightly inaccurate. Members of the Guild are totally
technology-agnostic.

We do not prefer C, C++, and Java over Python, Ruby, JavaScript or any other
cool language of the week.

We LOVE to build things and solve problems. We LOVE to start with nothing and
end up with something USEFUL to much more than ourselves.

In order to achieve our goals, we will pick up any technology or tool
available, based on their suitability to the task. Coldly.

But, yes, we smile a lot when we see the way the business world and
entrepreneurs repeat the same mistakes over and over.

~~~
neworbit
I dunno, I think a lot of us love LISP :)

------
guard-of-terra
I don't see those people pushing to github. The amount of hard code on github
is low. Those people are probably pushing to svn of their mature open source
project. Sourceforge or self-hosted.

------
alexchamberlain
There is different way to read the article. It says that the current fashion
for rapid development using Ruby/Javascript/PHP/<insert interpreted language
here> is great, but eventually, to enable you to scale effectively rather than
just buying more EC2 instances, you will have to identify your bottlenecks and
reimplement them in more efficient languages. This involves hiring experienced
software developers who can develop secure C/C++ (I might as well mention
Java, I don't like it) without the code being available to everyone.

------
rbanffy
> Their tools of choice are C, C++, and Java

I have serious issues with labeling people according to their tools of choice
(disclaimer - I'm a known pythonista with a rather strong opinion on both C++
and Java). A good software engineer will use the right tool for a job much
like a mechanical engineer will pick the right material for the job. The
analogy above shows an engineer with a preference towards titanium, A53 steel
and lead.

------
marcusf
The point he's trying to make isn't really served by the slightly derogatory
tone. I've known two-three really great engineers in my day, people that could
carry a company, and I doubt any of them would take the link as a compliment
though some parameters certainly fit (none blog, tweet, comment on HN or apply
for jobs for example...)

------
endymi0n
This is a repost from 8 months ago... back then I had the following to say ;-)

<http://www.growinup.org/2011/11/the-right-tool-for-the-job/>

------
iamleppert
Can we finally close the book and depart from old and untrue stereotypes that
have done such a disservice for the industry? Intelligence comes in all shapes
and sizes, races, genders, types of people, etc.

------
it
This article would have been more convincing if it had some examples of Guild
members, even if it's not meant literally. So it's a story. OK, then go with
that and make some people up.

------
petegrif
Very true.

------
lani
while this is definitely cool,bbut i probably am not in one , so this is
definitely not cool. sorry for the grammar.

------
kayoone
stereotypes FTW!

