
How “Silicon Valley” Nails Silicon Valley - sajid
http://www.newyorker.com/culture/culture-desk/how-silicon-valley-nails-silicon-valley
======
zippergz
Silicon Valley is so realistic that I stopped watching a few episodes into the
first season. I was going through a rough and very stressful time at work, and
the show was reminding me too much of that rather than being an escape (as I
usually want TV to be).

Thankfully I'm in a better place professionally now, and I recently came back
to the show. Now I enjoy it a lot, even though it can hit very close to home.

~~~
curiousgal
>I'm in a better place professionally now

Buy a gold chain!

~~~
chiph
Or if he's doing _really_ well, some Tres Comas Tequila.

~~~
curiousgal
hummm "Tres Comas", I wonder what that stands for..

------
gnahckire
“A friend of mine who works in tech called me and said, ‘Why aren’t there any
women? That’s bullshit!’ I said to her, ‘It is bullshit! Unfortunately, we
shot that audience footage at the actual TechCrunch Disrupt.’”

Unfortunately, unsurprising.

~~~
carryalls
If that's the case, why aren't there way more Asians in the show?

~~~
danyim
Why is this being downvoted? I think it's a valid point. Being an Asian-
American in tech, it pains me to see that SV doesn't have an accurate
representation (both in number and in stereotypes) of us on the show.

~~~
chillacy
Yea, and Dinesh has (so far) been falling into the "sexless asian man"
stereotype (also jin yiang, though he's just a minor comic relief character).

Asian exist in real life: [http://1u88jj3r4db2x4txp44yqfj1.wpengine.netdna-
cdn.com/wp-c...](http://1u88jj3r4db2x4txp44yqfj1.wpengine.netdna-cdn.com/wp-
content/uploads/2015/08/Photo-Aug-19-5-23-32-PM-930x698.jpg)

------
dang
I don't know the show very well, but this is a much better article than I
expected. The vignette about online forums is so perfect I can't resist
quoting it in full.

 _“Silicon Valley,” a show about computer nerds, has a fan base that is
particularly attuned to minutiae, and particularly apt to argue about them on
the Internet. If a Post-it, URL, or line of code is legible on the show, it
will be screengrabbed and scrutinized. Last year, a few hours after an episode
aired, a Reddit user with the handle HeIsMyPossum started a thread called “Why
did the writers just obliterate all the good karma they had built up with
their core audience?” He made an impassioned argument that a plot point—the
accidental deletion of data from Pied Piper’s servers—was implausible. “So the
files were being converted live while coming through an FTP? And that affects
disk deletion speed?… Come the fuck on guys.” Rob Fuller, a software engineer
and a consultant on the show, logged on to Reddit to defend his work, mostly
by displaying his own nerd plumage. “Stuff like this happens,” he wrote. “I
think even Amazon had an outage because one of the admins fat fingered a DNS
or ACL change at one point.” Another user responded to Fuller: “Thanks for
engaging us here, we really appreciate it.” The thread amassed nearly three
hundred comments. “Sorry for being a dick,” HeIsMyPossum wrote._

Edit: well, it's weirdly anticlimactic sitting here. But it was hilarious in
the New Yorker.

~~~
kordless
I think the premise of their technology is humorously on target. I mean,
there's no limit to how much you can compress things, right? :P

It's sort of a metaphysical overarching joke rolled into the show. Anything on
the show talking about their compression technology becomes necessarily
unbelievable as a result.

Causality caused the file to be deleted on both ends!

~~~
eli_gottlieb
> I think the premise of their technology is humorously on target. I mean,
> there's no limit to how much you can compress things, right? :P

There are of course limits to how much you can compress things, but only for a
finite number of possible files can you ever _prove_ that you've hit the
limit. For almost all possible files/strings, you can't ever prove you've got
an optimal compression algorithm, so if someone's new algorithm appears to
work better, well, you've got the burden of proof to show you've already hit
the Kolmogorov complexity of the file and they're cheating.

~~~
Joof
Well, I've compressed pi into a much smaller space.

------
timewarrior
I completely agree. Silicon Valley talked about the reality.

I founded a startup and headed engineering for another. I have seen more than
half the things there as follows: Getting money in tranches. Investors making
you spend invested money for personal gain. Having a business CEO who has no
product insights. Board control issues. Employees trying to overthrow founders
and getting fired because of that. Being forced to hire friends and family of
investors. Lawyers represent the company and not you. Founding company with
someone whom you do not trust. Investors getting involved in day to day
running.

Luckily each of the startups had an happy ending. But it took a lot of hard
work and a few miracles.

~~~
timewarrior
One more thing to add. Having a CEO who takes a salary of 180k/year after seed
round (which was almost half of the seed round) and apart from this also
charges part of his house rent to the company. Those were fun times.

------
minimaxir
If you want proof that the SV producers go the extra mile, a couple episodes
ago there was a split-second appearance of a GitHub repository belonging to
one of the characters. Turns out it's completely real
([https://github.com/Stitchpunk/atari-ai](https://github.com/Stitchpunk/atari-
ai) ) and the owner has accepted pull requests!

~~~
walrus01
they're done worse with the hardware - in the garage with the GPU rigs there
were a few brief shots of a cisco 6500 chassis with totally the wrong
linecards for what they would be doing. actually a 6500 would be the wrong
platform entirely.

~~~
cududa
Is this your own brand of satire or are you not aware you're entirely the
person being satirized?

~~~
walrus01
it's more meta than that, the 6500 satirizes itself with how people use it

------
untilHellbanned
Best part:

“Some Valley big shots have no idea how to react to the show,” Miller told me.
“They can’t decide whether to be offended or flattered. And they’re mystified
by the fact that actors have a kind of celebrity that they will never
have—there’s no rhyme or reason to it, but that’s the way it is, and it kills
them.” Miller met Musk at the after-party in Redwood City. “I think he was
thrown by the fact that I wasn’t being sycophantic—which I couldn’t be,
because I didn’t realize who he was at the time. He said, ‘I have some advice
for your show,’ and I went, ‘No thanks, we don’t need any advice,’ which threw
him even more. And then, while we’re talking, some woman comes up and says
‘Can I have a picture?’ and he starts to pose—it was kinda sad, honestly—and
instead she hands the camera to him and starts to pose with me. It was, like,
Sorry, dude, I know you’re a big deal—and, in his case, he actually is a big
deal—but I’m the guy from ‘Yogi Bear 3-D,’ and apparently that’s who she wants
a picture with.”

------
ben_jones
In last Sunday's show they were ramping up to launch a beta of their product
and had a closed alpha session where the team could give out access codes to
close friends. The three team members, all engineers, got universally positive
feedback for how great their user interface was. Well except from Monica, who
couldn't quite articulate why it was just off to the casual user [1].

[1]:[http://www.piedpiper.com/app/themes/pied-
piper/dist/images/i...](http://www.piedpiper.com/app/themes/pied-
piper/dist/images/interface_large.jpg)

Essentially everyone in the engineering team's social circle either were
engineers themselves who wouldn't recognize good design if it hit them in the
mouth, or intentionally did not give criticism of the product in order to suck
up to the promising new startup.

~~~
actsasbuffoon
Semi off-topic, but I think there was an Easter egg in that part of the
episode. A few seasons ago Monica had to give some bad news to Richard, and
she changed into white clothing before talking to him. I don't remember
exactly how it came up, but she said she changed because studies had shown
that bad news was less upsetting when the messenger was wearing white.

When Monica was in her office looking at the beta, she was wearing a regular
suit. When she shows up at Erlich's house (presumably soon after the last
scene), she's changed into a white/cream colored sweater. I thought that was a
nice callback to the earlier season.

~~~
mercer
Close, but it was about dressing as plainly as possible: "as a study showed
that the less sexual attraction a guy feels, the less it will hurt when he’s
given bad news."

------
smilbandit
For me the most realistic scene, one that only people in the field would
understand, is when they made the "box". The lead up from hating the
assignment to not being able to do shit work really hit home. I've probably
had had a few projects that i hated but spent more time then needed. To either
make it work faster or modulerized it even though it was probably never going
to be updated, just to keep my interest or to learn something.

------
joshu
I am a consultant on the show. I am super impressed with them. I find it less
"funny" and more "accurate" on a regular basis.

~~~
atom-morgan
How did that come about?

~~~
joshu
I spend too much time cultivating my network...

------
qnk
___SPOILERS ALERT_ __

The article contains several spoilers. You may want to hold off if you follow
the show.

~~~
minimaxir
If you follow the show, then _nothing_ should be a spoiler. :p

~~~
scrollaway
Or I guess if you're familiar with the SV startup scene, not much should be a
surprise :)

------
jewbacca
> In 2015, Weissman convened the Stanford Compression Forum, which resulted in
> a forty-page white paper outlining what middle-out compression might mean.
> One of his graduate students, Vinith Misra, worked out the math more
> explicitly in another paper.

The paper they link to from there
([https://www.scribd.com/doc/228831637/Optimal-Tip-to-Tip-
Effi...](https://www.scribd.com/doc/228831637/Optimal-Tip-to-Tip-Efficiency))
is actually "Optimal Tip-to-Tip Efficiency: a model for male audience
stimulation". Not that I'm complaining, that is absolutely incredible, but
does the compression paper actually exist?

~~~
vehementi
> whereas naive unsorted schemes have increasingly ﬂaccid perfor-mance.

Oh my god

~~~
j2kun
The chart at the end of the paper is very suggestive.

------
jpatokal
Great article, with some glorious lines:

“It’s capitalism shrouded in the fake hippie rhetoric of ‘We’re making the
world a better place,’ because it’s uncool to just say ‘Hey, we’re crushing it
and making money.’”

“Some of us actually, as naïve as it sounds, came here to make the world a
better place. And we did not succeed. We made some things better, we made some
things worse, and in the meantime the libertarians took over, and they do not
give a damn about right or wrong. They are here to make money.”

“In the real Silicon Valley, as on the show, there is a cohort of people who
have a real sense of purpose and actually think they’re going to change the
world, and then there’s a cohort of people who say farcical things about their
apps that they clearly don’t believe themselves.”

~~~
mindcrime
_and in the meantime the libertarians took over, and they do not give a damn
about right or wrong. They are here to make money._

What a load of bullshit. First of all, libertarians have hardly "taken over"
anything. If anything, the SV scene (as seen from the outside anyway) seems
markedly _less_ libertarian now than it did 15 years ago. Back when Slashdot
was full of techno-libertarian types, cyberpunks and crypto-anarchists were
spending gobs of time planning how to use technology to enable the stateless
society, and rich libertarian leaning folks like John Gilmore were suing the
government over the right to travel without showing ID... back then, the SV
technologist scene felt very libertarian indeed. Now, if anything, it seems
that the progressives have taken over. You still hear a little chatter about
Internet freedom and the need for strong crypto, and there is the crypto-
currency crowd who have actually gotten somewhere... but by and large, the
rhetoric you hear out of SV seems to have skewed in a distinctively statist
direction the past decade or two.

Heck, just go back through the archives here at HN and compare the talk back
at the beginning, to the talk now... you can't help but be struck by the
profound shift that's occurred. Now it's commonplace for people to criticize
capitalism, denigrate the value of hard work (after all, all success is just
"luck"), promote more active government involvement in markets, etc. Heck, I
guess you'd almost be hard pressed to find a libertarian on here anymore... or
maybe most of us just don't bother saying anything because we know we'll get
shouted down (and/or downvoted to oblivion) by the statists.

Beyond that, the essence of libertarianism is absolutely to care about "right
and wrong", as expressed by the Zero Aggression Principle. And libertarianism
itself doesn't say anything about making money... there are plenty of "hippie
libertarians" who don't give a shit about making money. IOW, just because
somebody is a Capitalist or is concerned with making money, doesn't
automatically mean they are a "libertarian."

~~~
vacri
> _And libertarianism itself doesn 't say anything about making money... there
> are plenty of "hippie libertarians" who don't give a shit about making
> money._

And yet... there aren't a lot of women or minorities in the libertarian
movement, and despite your 'hippie' comment, most of the voices are from
people with well-paying jobs.

Libertarianism doesn't mention money per se, but the effect of it is that
people who already have money and network effects don't have to share their
bounty.

Hell, I remember arguing with one libertarian who was crystal clear on
property rights, and that property could never be taken away if you didn't
sell it yourself; the government had no right to take land (yadda yadda, Zero
Aggression Principle) and any land transfers after that are moot because it
would have been taken by force.

Okay, says I, then give your property back to the Native American tribe it was
taken from. The rhetoric then changed to 'oh, I could only give it to a person
who could show that they owned the exact plot of land that I had'. What, the
specific plot of land that is only described by the entity that violently took
it? That communal ownership that was tribal lands meant that somehow you could
claim individual ownership over it anyway?

This is what libertarianism means to me, and to a lot of what you deride as
'statists'. It's a lot of superficially nice-sounding rhetoric, which boils
down to "I get to keep all my stuff, and don't have to share. So what if my
bounty is built on the backs of others, my stuff is my stuff".

~~~
mindcrime
_" I get to keep all my stuff, and don't have to share. So what if my bounty
is built on the backs of others, my stuff is my stuff"._

OTOH, I'd say it's closer to "I'm happy to share with others, as long as I do
it on my own terms, without somebody threatening me into it, and furthermore,
even if I don't 'share', I contribute to the overall good simply by
participating as a productive member of the economy". Consider what Adam Smith
had to say:

 _" But man has almost constant occasion for the help of his brethren, and it
is in vain for him to expect it from their benevolence only. He will be more
likely to prevail if he can interest their self-love in his favour, and show
them that it is for their own advantage to do for him what he requires of
them. Whoever offers to another a bargain of any kind, proposes to do this.
Give me that which I want, and you shall have this which you want, is the
meaning of every such offer; and it is in this manner that we obtain from one
another the far greater part of those good offices which we stand in need of.
It is not from the benevolence of the butcher, the brewer, or the baker that
we expect our dinner, but from their regard to their own interest. We address
ourselves, not to their humanity but to their self-love, and never talk to
them of our own necessities but of their advantages. Nobody but a beggar
chooses to depend chiefly upon the benevolence of his fellow-citizens. Even a
beggar does not depend upon it entirely. The charity of well-disposed people,
indeed, supplies him with the whole fund of his subsistence. But though this
principle ultimately provides him with all the necessaries of life which he
has occasion for, it neither does nor can provide him with them as he has
occasion for them. The greater part of his occasional wants are supplied in
the same manner as those of other people, by treaty, by barter, and by
purchase. With the money which one man gives him he purchases food. The old
clothes which another bestows upon him he exchanges for other old clothes
which suit him better, or for lodging, or for food, or for money, with which
he can buy either food, clothes, or lodging, as he has occasion."_

Now that's not to say that there aren't Libertarians out there with a "fuck
you, got mine" attitude. Then again, there are people with that attitude who
aren't Libertarians as well.

~~~
vacri
What happens when 'my own terms' are heavily asymmetric in the speaker's own
favour? How often would 'my own terms' be against the speaker's own favour?

We've also been through times when people "contributed to the overall good
simply by participating as productive members of the economy". It was awful,
and is why we have welfare programs these days. Private charity and/or
trickle-down economics just do not cut the mustard, especially for individuals
with chronic or ongoing problems.

> _But though this principle ultimately provides [the beggar] with all the
> necessaries of life which he has occasion for_

If you define 'necessities of life' as merely 'keeps a heartbeat going', then
that paragraph will probably make sense to you. Most people would also
consider shelter against the cold, clothes that fit and are in good order, and
regular food as being necessities, none of which are needed to keep a
heartbeat.

The other thing is that people's own self-interest is rarely thought about in
the long-term. It takes a lot of education to plan out far ahead, which is one
of the reasons why the wealthy stay wealthy. People aren't the perfectly
informed, perfectly rational actors that these kind of paragraphs (and
libertarian ideology) suggest.

------
fataliss
I think it's good that people in the actual tech industry and startup eco
system can laugh about themselves. It's healthy. The day they/we stop laughing
is the day we have a problem.

------
swampthinker
There was an article a while back on The Verge noting the irony in the show
being "comedy". It's supposed to be a caracature of startup culture, stories,
and the insane numbers that are casually thrown around. But as most people on
HN know, Pied Piper would have had a similar path if it was a startup in real
life.

What I'm getting at is that even in it's attempt to be more insane than what
startup life is like, it's strangely... more accurate.

And I can't really tell if that's a good or bad thing.

~~~
seizethecheese
This is also true for another current HBO comedy Veep. While it may not be as
close to reality as Silicon Valley, many political insiders note that it is
much closer than dramatic shows like House of Cards.

Maybe similarity to reality is a hallmark of excellent comedy. This is
certainly true of one of my favorite comedy shows Louie, which is almost
hyperrealistic.

~~~
tjakab
"Many police officers maintain that the most realistic police show in the
history of television was the sitcom 'Barney Miller,' far more so than that
father of reality TV, 'Cops.' The action was mostly off screen, the squad room
the only set, and the guys were a motley bunch of character actors who were in
no danger of being picked for the N.Y.P.D. pin-up calendar. But they worked
hard, made jokes, got hurt and answered to their straight-man commander."

[http://www.nytimes.com/2005/03/01/opinion/watching-the-
detec...](http://www.nytimes.com/2005/03/01/opinion/watching-the-
detectives.html)

~~~
imgabe
Likewise, all the doctors I know say Scrubs is the most realistic show about
being a doctor.

~~~
semi-extrinsic
How can it not be? Every other program about being a doctor has so much
personal drama and sex going on, they barely have time to look at patients.
(Except House MD, but he's obviously unrealistic, even in the show itself.)

~~~
golergka
Episode about how unrealistic House is was one of the high points of the later
Scrubs seasons.

------
dccoolgai
In a lot of ways, "epochs" of software development track to Mike Judge
productions... a lot of things changed after Office Space lampooned the
industry the first time... I wonder if Silicon Valley will have the same
effect.

------
ModernMech
The thing about SV that always gets me is the forced "code" vs "hardware"
rivalry between Gilfoyle and Dinesh.

"My code can beat your terrible hardware!" "My hardware is terrible because of
your terrible code!"

That just doesn't happen in my experience. Has anyone else seen this?

~~~
old-gregg
Well, if you replace "hardware" with "infrastructure", it starts making sense.
Somewhat realistic scenario goes like this:

The CTO makes a decision to move to AWS. A couple of "server huggers" on the
team start blaming AWS's "shitty infrastructure" for unexplainable latency
spikes and increased downtime. The CTO responds blaming their "terrible code"
for not being designed properly and points at Netflix.

~~~
rconti
Right. Or even bare metal vs VMs. How many VMs on what hardware? Many small
VMs, or fewer large ones?

------
mmmBacon
The attention to detail on the show is amazing. For example, during their move
to the new office I noticed that they had Corovan moving boxes. If you don't
know Apple uses Corovan exclusively and if you've ever moved offices chances
are high that they moved you. Not sure why but it was amazing to me that they
bothered with a detail like that.

~~~
NEDM64
Pretty sure it was product placement.

------
josu
I personally didn't like the humor of the show and stopped watching it after 3
or 4 episodes.

On a related note, a few days ago [1] Marc Andreessen recommended another show
based on startup culture: Halt and Catch Fire [2]

I haven't seen it, but I will probably give it a shot.

[1] [http://fourhourworkweek.com/2016/05/29/marc-
andreessen/](http://fourhourworkweek.com/2016/05/29/marc-andreessen/) [2]
[http://www.imdb.com/title/tt2543312/?ref_=wl_li_tt](http://www.imdb.com/title/tt2543312/?ref_=wl_li_tt)

~~~
greggman
I stopped after the first episode. It match ZERO percent of any of my silicon
valley experience. Have never seen a backyard party with famous band. Have
never seen a famous band with "nerds" not watching. Have never been to an SV
party where hot women stand around looking to pick up rich SV men.

Maybe it gets better but I didn't give it the chance.

~~~
bobsil1
> hot women stand around looking to pick up rich

Rosewood Hotel cougar night by Sand Hill.

~~~
greggman
This was a private industry party in someone's backyard, not a hotel
lobby/lounge

------
jrnichols
One of my favorite parts of the show is the opening credits. Being an old
Netscape employee, I still get a little sad when I see the Netscape logo fall
off that building, only to be replaced by Chrome. _tears_

------
rexreed
The Silicon Valley show makes me anxious. I laugh but I also feel the pain
from experience. And I'm not sure if that's good. I want and need to catch up
but I almost dread it. I wonder if it's the same for cop drama shows and cops
who watch them.

------
trhway
>“It’s capitalism shrouded in the fake hippie rhetoric of ‘We’re making the
world a better place,’ because it’s uncool to just say ‘Hey, we’re crushing it
and making money.’”

the world does seems to be a better place when you're making a lot of money.

------
blue11
I have really enjoyed watching this show but the last few episodes it seems
like the writing has went downhill. There were a number of cringe worthy
scenes like "tabs vs spaces".

~~~
excitom
Seriously? I laughed out loud at the "tabs vs spaces" scene since I have seen
it played out exactly like that at several jobs.

------
peter303
NPR Fresh Air broadcast a similar article today:
[http://www.npr.org/2016/06/09/481377115/in-hbos-silicon-
vall...](http://www.npr.org/2016/06/09/481377115/in-hbos-silicon-valley-the-
comedy-is-inspired-by-real-life-tech-culture)

------
jagermo
My favorite from the article:

Teller ended the meeting by standing up in a huff, but his attempt at a
dramatic exit was marred by the fact that he was wearing Rollerblades.

~~~
bewatson
On top of that, I loved the irony that it was basically too ridiculous to use
on the show.

------
f_allwein
for a similar satire of high tech culture 20 years ago, check out Douglas
Copeland's "Microserfs":
[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Microserfs](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Microserfs)

~~~
lurkinggrue
Wait, That book was satire??

~~~
Uhhrrr
I didn't take it as such when I read it. But I can see how someone might think
so.

------
zw123456
It seems to me that "Silicon Valley" is somewhat of a Roman a clef, as such I
think it would be great if the HN readers could provide the "key". Anyone out
there willing to give it a shot ?

~~~
bobsil1
Hooli = Google

Gavin Belson = Marc Benioff

Denpak Singh = Deepak Chopra

Peter Gregory = Peter Thiel

Erlich Bachman = Sean Parker

Russ Hanneman = Mark Cuban

Laurie Bream = Marissa Mayer

Philz Coffee onsite = Facebook

Hooli tunnel = Zynga tunnel

~~~
kmiroslav
And who's Monica?

OP plz

~~~
bobsil1
Monica is the associate you messed up the pitch with because she was
alarmingly cute.

~~~
zw123456
Something like that may have happened to me, or I had some responsibility for.

------
rconti
I have a really, really hard time understanding how anyone can watch the show
and be offended.

OTOH, maybe it's just because I'm neither rich nor important.

~~~
kmiroslav
Hint: nobody ever gets offended, they just get concerned that other people
might be offended.

------
drumdance
Just once I'd like to see Dinesh win against Gilfoyle.

~~~
jagermo
Yeah, I guess Dinesh would like that, too.

------
keypusher
As someone that works in enterprise storage, the last season has hit very
close to home.

~~~
rconti
As someone who works for a SaaS company that's trying to provide SaaS on-
prem... the mole people are real.

------
pyb
Does anyone else find that the show is running out of steam ? I think the
quality of the writing has gone down in this new series.

~~~
mercer
At times I had that feeling, but then something happens that has in me in
stitches in a way that few other shows pull off.

My main issue is Bachmann. He's been a bit too much for a while, but judging
by the last episode I think the writers did this on purpose.

------
p4wnc6
I love the Sweet Valley High series. Glad to see it's enjoying a renaissance
of sorts.

------
nasalgoat
One question I'd like answered is how Richard lost controlling interest of his
company. The ownership percentages are never really talked about other than
Erlich's 10% and the two coders getting 7% each. One minute Richard is
majority shareholder while Reviga has 20%, then Reviga has majority?

It's the only thing that gives me pause.

~~~
srdev
He sold shares to Russ Hanneman and Reviga bought those shares off of
Hanneman.

