

Silicon Valley Needs To Take Itself More Seriously* - irunbackwards
http://techcrunch.com/2012/04/08/not/

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kenferry
"While there are many downsides to the mainstream exposure of Silicon Valley —
the myriad fakers and sycophants that come along in any sort of high
visibility situation — I’m willing to trade in occasionally having to deal
with an annoying person if our values (entrepreneurship, self-reliance,
fearlessness, disregard for a hierarchy, technical excellence) get a wider
audience and more importantly, excite a fresh crop of high school seniors
applying to college to go into CS because it 'sounds cool.'"

To the extent that I worry about this show, I have the opposite concern.
Jersey Shore did not exactly make me want to move to Jersey and take up the
lifestyle.

At the moment, to the extent that the country thinks about us at all, I think
they think of us as brave folk trying to build the future. If this show
convinces them we're a bunch of partying douches, that'll be sad. I'm not
_too_ worried about it, but that's the potential bad outcome.

In 2002, I thought of I-bankers as smart, hard working people who were well
compensated because what they did was difficult. Now I think of finance as
mostly parasitic. Impressions can change.

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prophetjohn
This article seems like mostly bullshit once you reach the the point in the
article that concludes that the talent crunch is due to SV "taking itself too
seriously." I'm not currently an SV engineer and I'm not entirely sure I want
to be, but the claim is patently ridiculous.

And as a side gripe about the article, it annoys me at least a little for
everyone to be diminished to "coders" by someone who admittedly hasn't put in
the time to learn basic programming. As far as I'm concerned, "coder" is a
half step above "code monkey" and the engineers building the next Google or
Facebook or any moderately successful tech company are not code monkeys.

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atarian
I don't agree with the premise of this article. It makes it sound like people
who don't like this upcoming show don't like to have fun.

Personally, I would love to see a show about Silicon Valley, especially one
that has a lot of comedy in it. But this show portrays a glamorous lifestyle
which seems really condescending and skips what puts the "silicon" in Silicon
Valley.

With that said, I think Techcrunch is disagreeing just for the sake of
disagreeing; it puts them in a position to put down other people (ex.
pandodaily) and generate more buzz.

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thinkingdeeply
I would love to see a real show too, but reality TV and founding a company are
anathema to each other. Cheever put it best in his joke e-mail. How are you
supposed to be heads down, focusing on solving the right problems when TV
cameras are all around? It's not surprising that no one credible or serious
actually signed up for this for fear of career suicide.

I don't think TC's trying to put down anyone either. The irony is that Lacy
wanted to do her own reality TV show startup competition that ended in Las
Vegas, but Randi beat her to the punch her own mainstream TV deal. So Sarah's
just trying to position herself as the "serious" authority in Silicon Valley
for later deals down the road even though she is very much part of the same
overall trend toward superficiality and showmanship.

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officialchicken
I often wonder what the culture of a third tech innovation hub would be like
outside NY/SV (And I hate to say it, but Boston and NY are interchangeable for
the purposes of cultural discussion).

The only cultural thread I've been able to pick up that is common to all the
U.S. tech hubs is great baseball teams.

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prophetjohn
I'm not sure what to make of the Giants being considered a great team, but
it's probably not a discussion for here.

I kind of want to plug Austin, though, as the third tech hub. There have
already been some successful companies come out of Austin and Capital Factory
is trying to build a YC of Austin of sorts. With Austin being a top-5 fastest
growing US city over the last 10 years[1], plus the awesome climate,
relatively reasonable cost of living and UT's engineering program, I think the
pieces are in place for some exciting stuff to happen here.

[1][http://money.cnn.com/galleries/2012/real_estate/1204/gallery...](http://money.cnn.com/galleries/2012/real_estate/1204/gallery.US-
Cities/5.html)

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jedberg
The problem with Austin though is that once a company gets successful, it
moves to Silicon Valley, destroying any sense of community Austin might be
building.

Austin is a great city -- they need to figure out how to get successful people
to stay there.

