

Ask HN: Based on your experience is the series Silicon Valley close to reality? - kiraken

Now i know that this is only a comedy series and merely meant for entertainment. But as someone who really doesn&#x27;t know how the business side of development work, i&#x27;d like to know if it&#x27;is close to the real thing. And if so, i have to say, it&#x27;s pretty terrifying
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staunch
It's about as accurate as Office Space. The inaccuracy is in the exaggeration,
which is what makes it funny. The technical details and terminology are nearly
flawless. It does notshow the thousands of quiet hours of work required in the
real world.

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aaronbrethorst
[http://www.nytimes.com/2015/05/05/opinion/joe-nocera-
secrets...](http://www.nytimes.com/2015/05/05/opinion/joe-nocera-secrets-
doomed-script.html)

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codeonfire
The business side in my opinion is much more harsh. If only it were a fun
comedy. Many companies are much bigger and don't have comedic actors working
there. Somewhere between SV and Breaking Bad is real life. Sometimes though I
have felt like Jesse Pinkman chained to a desk when someone robots me.
Robotting someone is a term I just made up to describe people that treat you
like total shit, twisting every screw, but at the end of the day still
robotically desire you to develop a product for them. You walk out of the deal
or job and their mind breaks because it doesn't compute that their bad
behavior is not liked.

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DigitalSea
Obviously being a comedy TV show, there are certain elements of fiction to
make it entertaining. However, the show in many ways actually does highlight
the state of Silicon Valley or any startup tech mecha area like San Francisco.
It is a perfect parody of the current state of startup culture and tech
investment. After a recent stint with a large startup in Seattle, I can
honestly say there are a heap of elements from the show that mimic real life
(from incubators to work until you pass out culture).

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michaelochurch
Spoiler Warnings ahead.

The TV show is (paradoxically?) more vulgar but also more good-natured (being
a comedy) than the real thing.

For example, no one would call a VC a "choad-gargling fuck toilet" in a
pitch-- VCs share notes more than is appropriate or legal, and have black-
balled people for less-- and I doubt that a group of typical startup engineers
could pull off a flawless 3-minute dick joke like the one in Season 1's
finale. So, the TV version of the Valley is more overtly vulgar. The real
thing tends to be crass and exclusionary, but you're not going to hear words
like "shit-riddled anal wasteland" or nicknames like "Cunty" very often. The
show focuses on superficial abuses that are funny rather than the long-lived,
subtle, and often subversive ones that characterize the actual Valley.

Another discrepancy: when Richard achieves a record-breaking "Weissman score",
the entirety of TechCrunch disrupt is in awe. In the real Valley, 95% of them
wouldn't know what a Weissman Score is. The technical literacy of the people
in the show is actually much higher than in the real Silicon Valley. At one
point, there's a reference to a "DFT" (Discrete Fourier Transform, I presume)
and I'd bet that only 1% of investors and 5% of SV founders know what a
Fourier Transform even is.

The show gets far more right than I would have expected, and more right than
it gets wrong. One of the things that is true to life is the purely political
promotion of Bighead (an incompetent engineer who gets a great job because the
CEO of Hooli wants to fuck over Pied Piper). That happens a lot and I'd love
to see his career grow and for him to become a VP, a founder, or even get
promoted into the investor ranks. The part that isn't true to life (or, at
least, very common) is his humility and self-awareness. He knows that he's
mediocre; whereas most people who benefit from political or aggressively
aspirational promotions tend to believe they actually deserved it, and get
quite arrogant.

Another thing that's true to life is Russ Hanneman's unethical use of
information, when he poaches an engineer that Pied Piper wants for another
company. That may be the core ethical flaw of Silicon Valley: a complete lack
of respect for the idea that there are things that one should not do with
others' information. That sort of ethical looseness is common and spot-on.
Likewise, the herd mentality of the VCs around Pied Piper hits reality
exactly.

Finally, you have Erlich Bachmann and Russ Hanneman (inspired by Sean Parker
and, some have said, Mark Cuban). Bachmann is a jerk, superficially, but still
a bit too good-natured to be a real player, as we've seen in the recent
episodes. Russ Hanneman hits the archetype of the Silicon Valley billionaire
("three comma") on the nose. That said, even he's more self aware than most
real SV billionaires.

~~~
S4M
> Another discrepancy: when Richard achieves a record-breaking "Weissman
> score", the entirety of TechCrunch disrupt is in awe. In the real Valley,
> 95% of them wouldn't know what a Weissman Score is. The technical literacy
> of the people in the show is actually much higher than in the real Silicon
> Valley.

I was also surprised by that when watching the show, but I believe it was
Gavin Belson who hyped this metric while presenting Nucleus at Tech Crunch.
Most non technical people would have understood the Weissman score as
"something that measures how good a compression is, the higher the better, and
since G.B says 2.98 [or something] is record breaking, it must be the case.",
so when Richard achieved a Weissman score of 5+, the same non technical people
concluded that an algorithm with a score of 5+ must be totally revolutionary.

