
Silicon Valley Then and Now - steven
https://medium.com/backchannel/why-silicon-valley-will-continue-to-rule-c0cbb441e22f
======
sherlock_h
Interesting article. I agree with the conclusion that the ability to attract
talent is one of the secrets behind the Valley's success. Which is why I see
US immigration policy as a major impedance to its' continued success. I am
subject to US immigration policy's myself and have to fear for deportation in
about a year's time when my current visa runs out. I will be moving to the
West Coast after graduating from school in Boston precisely because of this
unique mix of talent, creativity, courage and craziness that are going on in
the Valley. With the huge surge in housing prices and the above mentioned
immigration policies, I am not sure however how long this trend is currently
still sustainable. Nonetheless looking forward to the experience.

~~~
jmspring
One thing that occurred in the 60s and 70s that doesn't happen now is that
companies actually invested in their employees and had significant amounts of
training available. Hell, even in the 80s, before divestiture, I recall AT&T
sending my parents (who both worked for the phone company) to classes on a
regular basis. My dad sometimes teaching a class or two in Illinois (he'd be
gone for a week).

Then and now, it takes curiosity, drive, as well as time and availability to
continue to learn. For some of us, it is easy, for others that may have
significant commitments, etc, taking time to learn something during what may
be private/family time is hard -- people similar to this group had the
opportunity to learn as part of their job back in the day.

My problem with US immigration policy isn't about those that come here to
study, get an advanced degree and then start at a good role at a company (or
start something). The problem I have is that many many companies are looking
for a capable body at the lowest possible dollar and don't want to invest in
their employees. IBM is a classic example of going from the former to the
latter.

Before I am comfortable opening the doors wider, I'd like to see a bit of
balance brought back. We already see the fraud of the private "for profit"
universities -- Heald (for instance) -- making promises, taking money, and not
amounting to much. We aren't going to go back to the day of companies
investing as much in their employees as they did in the 60s-80s, primarily
because we are at a different point in time and a number of people move around
regularly.

All that said, we are missing methods and structures to help those I mentioned
above (those hardest hit in the various bubbles) to facilitate growth and
learning.

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jmspring
I'm possibly a bit of a dinosaur in my thinking, but of the three "2000s"
areas outlined -- social, mobile, cloud. Cloud will have the longer legs (it
is basically open, scalable timesharing). Mobile is broad and has a lot of
avenues, but social really seems to basically fall back to "advertising". All
three of these areas are dominated by software.

70s (well more 80s) to 2000ish, the valley was a healthy mix of software and
hardware. HN seems to focus mostly on the software aspect of recent times,
there are still hardware companies out there. The peaks that get attention,
popular investment, and trigger the large growth help the valley, but a
balance of disciplines, technologies, and platforms (hardware/software),
really do help the valley.

An area trying to be "the next silicon valley" that ignores the unsexy things
happening in low industrial areas in Fremont or Alamaden Valley aren't ever
going to be the same. Yes, we are known for the wild successes, but there are
a lot of little no names that have helped companies big and small (that became
big) here along the way.

~~~
dredmorbius
Social might, and that's a _hugely_ stressed "might", have legs as _media_ and
the future of it, or at least a portion.

We've been watching the accelerating descent of traditional text and audio
media, and more recently video, for the past 20 years. I've had a few
epiphanies on this myself in the past year or so:

1\. "New media" actually is a pretty decent term. Much of tech -- pretty much
most of it that concerns person-to-person exchange (as opposed as machine-to-
machine systems controls and feedback) is effectively _media_. We should think
of Facebook, Google, and Apple as largely media companies. Amazon straddles
this line more with a focus on _commerce_ , it's also quite directly a media
player through books and music.

2\. Magazines were created in the 19th century as aggregators of short-form
narrative (fiction and non) as a crossover between individual pamphlets and
full-length books. Improved print and distribution mechanisms promoted their
spread, and by the first quarter of the 20th century several major periodicals
still surviving (somewhat) had emerged. In a sense a magazine was a large
bundle you could buy for a single set price. The individual items might or
might not _all_ appeal, but many or most would. It was stepping back the
purchase boundary from the individual piece to the collection.

3\. One thing that's happening now is that we're both _disaggregating_
individual periodicals, and _creating new aggregations_ at a larger scale.
Hacker News is one of many options for selecting individual items pulled from
diverse publishers. The concept's been around as long as there've been mailing
lists and newsgroups -- comp.risks has cited various articles and news pieces
since the mid-1980s. RSS syndication, Slashdot, Digg, and reddit, Facebook or
G+ or Ello feeds, etc., all do much the same thing. What they _don 't_
generally do is directly compensate authors.

We're starting to see some changes in that regard, with Facebook apparently
negotiating directly with publishers such as _The New York Times_ to publish
material directly to Facebook. I'm not sold (I don't _do_ FB), but it's an
interesting development.

I've been suggesting a broadband tax or similar automatic payment syndication
scheme as a major, if not necessarily the only compensation model (see also
Phil Hunt of Pirate Party UK and his broadband tax proposal). Google or major
ISPs might also enter into this (or be forced to).

The negative on the future of Social is that social media networks seem to be
awfully fragile and capritious. Facebook's fall could well be as fast as
Myspace's was.

------
OldSchool
No doubt the Valley will survive and thrive. However it will continue its path
toward the business culture lead of Hollywood: further concentration of power
and capital, more emphasis on acquaintance-level connections (something
innately technical people don't often do naturally), and an ever-increasing
cost barrier to entry. Hollywood of course has had the time to take this to
the extreme, but the "work for free and hope to get noticed" effect is
probably already upon us. I have to wonder how many startups are formed now
with the intent to turn a profit from operations, rather than simply on the
hopes of a large acquisition after obtaining some measurably significant
social relevance.

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WalterBright
> The drive to build another Silicon Valley may be doomed to fail

This reminds me that there have been many attempts to duplicate Lockheed's
"Skunkworks". They've all failed. I suspect they failed because they always
tried to create a skunkworks by fixing perceived "shortcomings" of the
original, not realizing that those shortcomings were what made it work.

It takes a lot of guts to create a skunkworks, because it defies all
conventional notions of how to do things. Lockheed is very commendable for
having those guts, but they remain the only one.

It also reminds me of Caltech, which remains the only university to have a
pervasive honor system. Nobody else has the guts to even try it.

~~~
nether
> This reminds me that there have been many attempts to duplicate Lockheed's
> "Skunkworks". They've all failed. I suspect they failed because they always
> tried to create a skunkworks by fixing perceived "shortcomings" of the
> original, not realizing that those shortcomings were what made it work.

> It takes a lot of guts to create a skunkworks, because it defies all
> conventional notions of how to do things. Lockheed is very commendable for
> having those guts, but they remain the only one.

Except for Boeing's Phantom Works, NASA EagleWorks, various "advanced
concepts" or "preliminary design" groups across other aerospace companies, and
various small aerospace firms operating with minimal overhead and extremely
talented engineers (Karem Aircraft's head actually specifically cited Kelly
Johnson's original rules for a SW-type organization, plus there's Joby
Aviation, Makani/Google, Zee.Aero). Sure, none of them have produced anything
like an SR-71 yet, but neither has the original Skunkworks since then. The SW
legacy of a tightly knit group of elite engineers operating with minimal
overhead and freedom to try radical concepts is alive and well in aerospace
though.

~~~
WalterBright
It's good to hear of others. I've never heard of any, and when I worked in
aerospace nobody knew of any examples.

The JSF, sadly, is certainly not an example. (SW produced a lot more than the
SR-71, they produced an unparalleled series of unique and spectacular
aircraft.)

You've piqued my curiosity. Got any references to these comparing them to the
original?

------
jolan
PBS has a great documentary covering the rise of Silicon Valley:

[http://www.pbs.org/wgbh/americanexperience/films/silicon/](http://www.pbs.org/wgbh/americanexperience/films/silicon/)

~~~
gdubs
Based on an excellent essay by Tom Wolfe:

[http://www.brightboys.org/PDF/Wolfe_Noyce.pdf](http://www.brightboys.org/PDF/Wolfe_Noyce.pdf)

------
xnull6guest
The other way to understand the present is to be read up on current events.

The current DoD involvement in Silicon Valley is not a callback to the ARPANET
so explicitly - the analogies are rough. But it's true that now, like then,
the DoD sees the US in extreme danger of collapsing as a superpower like its
old soviet rivals due to the huge changes and the challenges of the 21st
century.

Today it is China, the Eastern tip of Eurasia and the Asia-Pacific arena that
concerns the United States. Having been overtaken as the largest economy by
China, and having grown only 0.2% this quarter compared to China's 7+%, and
facing existential threats by China's ambitions to build the Chinese Dream of
a New Silk Road and to become a great nation, the US is doing everything it
can muster to arrange economic and security conditions in the world to
maintain its order and its position at the top.

The Defense Department investment in cyber and the partnership with Silicon
Valley is just one of many of these investments.

------
ivan_ah
More on the history of SV:
[https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ZTC_RxWN_xo](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ZTC_RxWN_xo)
TL;DR: lots of tech started in SV during WWII -- radio research, radars, anti-
radars, anti-anti-radars, etc...

------
michaelochurch
The interesting question, and I have no idea what the answer is, is whether
Silicon Valley will recover from what's been done to it.

There have always been douchebags everywhere, but it used to be something that
one was ashamed of. If you funded someone like Evan Spiegel, you didn't talk
about it. You just pretended that it didn't happen and called it a learning
experience. Now, we have a culture that values material success at the expense
of all else, isn't really about technology or progress, and views Sean Parker
levels of douchebaggery as a positive trait.

The Bay Area used to be for misfits who chose to go off and do their own
thing: live among the redwoods, play with circuits and computers, go mountain
biking. Now it's full of self-marketers who create the impression that they do
all of that stuff, while actually being unimaginative corporate drones even
worse than the last generation's kind.

All of that said, Silicon Valley has a long history and it's not going to be
ruined forever by a few bad years. If Silicon Valley gets back to a culture of
invention, and if we fix the culture by regulating VCs a bit (a start would be
to block the anti-competitive back-channelling and social proof checking; we
couldn't eradicate all of it _de facto_ but making it illegal would change
behaviors enough to give us a chance at fixing the place) it could return to
its old promise.

Another thing that Silicon Valley needs to do in order to save its character
is fix the cost-of-living issue by crushing some NIMBYs. I think that the
federal government needs to step in and crush every anti-development policy,
unless there is a legitimate environmental issue.

I sincerely hope that the Valley does survive, because if you take the long
view and look over the past 50 years instead of the past 5, you see that it
has done more good than bad for the world.

~~~
dang
This is a fine historical article. Your comment does not engage with it.
Please stop using HN threads as pasting walls for ideological boilerplate.

~~~
kansface
The current system of down-voting and flagging is (evidently) insufficient to
discourage comments like these. michaelochurch's comment is tantamount to
trolling - it is spawned a acrimonious chain of vile and meta-vile. Nobody
comes to HN for this. Nothing has been gained by engaging him. I'd go so far
as to say nothing would be lost if the entire thread starting with OP's
comment were removed. Perhaps HN could implement this feature?

~~~
IsaacL
I actually opened this thread just to ctrl-F "michaelochurch". I find him
consistently interesting, and I strongly agree with him that Silicon Valley
culture has weakened, though I strongly disagree with him on the root cause.

(He's basically way more left-wing than I am. I don't think the answer is
"government regulation". The root cause of the corporatism creeping over SV is
conformism, not capitalism. This isn't the thread for a detailed breakdown of
my theory so I'll just note that both Jobs and Wozniak cited Ayn Rand as one
of their biggest inspirations).

~~~
zeruch
I think I'm pretty much in agreement with you, particularly on the
'conformism' part. There is a certain sameness to the "failure" and
"disruption" these days.

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garrykopf
The article seriously reads like it was written by a 15 year old, and not a 15
year old who is excelling at writing. Ouch.

~~~
chmaynard
Note to dang: add a new feature to permanently block comments from a list of
HN accounts that I specify in my profile.

~~~
raldi
Negative filtering is bad for reddit-like communities. We need people like you
to see these comments and downvote them, for the benefit of all other readers.

