
How to Get Rich Quick in Silicon Valley - derrida
https://www.theguardian.com/news/2018/apr/17/get-rich-quick-silicon-valley-startup-billionaire-techie
======
xivzgrev
'So if someone asked “What’s your space?” and you had a deeply unfashionable
job like, say, writer, it behooved you to say “I deliver eyeballs like a
fucking ninja”.'

LOL. I personally would rather hear someone come out and say they're a writer,
but I can see how the alternative can sound more interesting.

~~~
siberianbear
I'm no expert on Japanese culture or ninjas, but my idea of of a ninja is
someone who is dressed in black, infiltrates your building, kills you with a
thrown weapon, and then escapes without being seen. So, if you "deliver
eyeballs like a fucking ninja," then you're not a very good ninja.

~~~
mempko
Or, the alternative, they dress in black, infiltrate your building, and then
gouge your eyes out and deliver them to their client. If you think of them
that way, then yes, they can be a good ninja.

~~~
siberianbear
Okay, I can accept that perspective. But that's not exactly in the way they
mean it in Silicon Valley. In Silicon Valley, when they say "deliver eyeballs
like a fucking ninja," they mean, "I'm can get a quarter-million people to
look at your website." Obviously, that means quite something different than
carving peoples' eyes out, after which they won't be able to see any websites.

------
czep
"We startup wannabes were not entrepreneurs. We were suckers for the shovel
merchants"

Now for a little experiment: everyone reading this, go immediately to the
mirror, look at yourself, and explain the business model of the company you
work for. Can you do it? Doesn't it make you want to throw up?

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JohnJamesRambo
This is one of the most dystopian things I’ve ever read.

~~~
sudeepj
Yes, this can be a very good topic for an episode on Black Mirror TV series
[1]

[1]
[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Black_Mirror](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Black_Mirror)

~~~
netsharc
I'd say more appropriate for a TV series, where each episode the hero finds
something else more depressing about this future. Maybe like the TV show
"Silicon Valley" but with much darker humour.

~~~
jxub
"A Valley of silicon, tragedy, and despair..." \- sounds like some dark
Lovecraft stuff.

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jankotek
Is it even possible to get rich in SV? Obscene cost, no housing, high taxes,
life time alimony... It seems like the worst place to start the business.

~~~
mcpherrinm
Yes. There are many rich people in SV. That is why the costs are obscene.

Even if a house costs $2M in SF, you can earn that in a few years on an
engineer's salary.

If you pick the right companies, and are relatively successful, it should be
possible to accrue millions of dollars in SV, even with the costs of living.
That's rich in my books.

But really rich? There are of founders of tech companies who earn $100M or
more from a successful startup. SF is probably one of the most likely place to
make that happen.

~~~
romanovcode
> Even if a house costs $2M in SF, you can earn that in a few years on an
> engineer's salary.

Yes, because everyone knows that average engineer in SF earns ~400k per year.

~~~
underwater
Don't forget tax and living expenses (rent isn't cheap). Saving two million on
a single engineering salary is going to take closer to a decade than a few
years.

~~~
davidivadavid
Whoa, so it's going to take ten whole years to own a house? ...and that's
considered bad?

~~~
underwater
I was addressing the original assertion that an engineer could save enough for
a house in a few years.

My approach was to save and then fun as far from the Bay Area as I could. Much
quicker.

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amitlzkpa
He junks the Silicon Valley culture by portraying how this it's a fake culture
fueled only for some people to make money. I don't disagree with it, what I
disagree with its portrayal as a scamming culture. Won't you expect everyone
to be trying to make a buck when the time is right legally? Legality can be
said to be objectively important, but morality is choice? And while it does
represent the majority, isn't this the very same culture that enabled the
unicorns from there? The descriptions of Zuckerberg or Musk or Jobs's lives
before they got big would've sounded very similar to this.

------
sooham
As an intern nearly done with work in the Bay Area I find the whole idea of
permanently immigrating to Silicon Valley repugnant. Housing prices are in the
millions, terrible healthcare, earthquakes every other week, dire state public
transportation, apathetic attitude towards its homeless and, lots of
groupthink. I suggest any YUPPIE (in a developed nation) with offers from a
big four here reconsider their local offices imho. It is depressing to think
this is the best place for STEM careers in the world.

~~~
fragmede
Oh yes, I've heard about the earthquakes. If they're half as bad as I've seen
in movies, that must be pretty bad!

I'll bet it disrupts your whole day when the Earth randomly splits open and
your car falls in, eh? Every other week, too?

~~~
ArchTypical
> earthquakes every other week

Ridiculous hyberbole is right.

------
alephnan
TLDR: writer with "a bunch of half-baked ideas" whose plan is to "pitch a tech
startup and get obscenely rich while writing a book about how to pitch a tech
startup and get obscenely rich – the Silicon Valley way" moves to "Hacker
Condo" in San Francisco, conflates it (SoMA) with Silicon Valley, does other
cliche tech bro things, namedrops an incoherent sequence of tech brands
(Soylent, TaskRabbit, and then LifeHacker??), claims startup communities such
as Hacker News are shovel merchants, reminds us that "profit-hunger,
philistinism and misanthropy are and always have been at the core of the
enterprise" and concludes "new breed of Silicon Valley billionaires knew
exactly what they were doing. The plan was to take all the money and run – to
Mars, if necessary"

This is what the author had to say about job security for programmers:

 _many programmers who had “made it” in Silicon Valley were scrambling to
promote themselves from coder to “founder” ... the programmers knew that their
own ladder to prosperity was on fire and disintegrating fast. They knew that
well-paid programming jobs would also soon turn to smoke and ash, as the
proliferation of learn-to-code courses around the world lowered the market
value of their skills, and as advances in artificial intelligence allowed for
computers to take over more of the mundane work of producing software._

This seems to be a plug for their book "Live Work Work Work Die: A Journey
into the Savage Heart of Silicon." Here's one of the Amazon reviews and I
quote, "If you don't have any ideas and can't succeed, write a book about it"

~~~
tomc1985
That's a little harsh, no?

It's an outsiders' take on what seems to have grown into a disconnected,
insular culture. While under most circumstances one could dismiss such
commentary as "he doesn't understand us and made little effort to get to know
us," when that culture exists primarily to make stuff (products, software) for
the masses it would do well to pay heed to its criticism, don't you think?

~~~
lucozade
> That's a little harsh, no?

I don't think it's harsh. If anything it's falling for the author's narrative.

The author was clearly there solely to write a hatchet job on the SV startup
culture. The stuff about getting rich is just there to make him sound a bit
less parasitical.

I'm sure some of what he says is valid but the dystopia is just as fake as the
idea that SV is paved with gold.

I'd go further and, given these kinds of articles usually follow a template,
it's quite interesting what he didn't say. Usually the author will find people
who are disillusioned/downtrodden to interview i.e. show the rotten
underbelly.

It's noticeable that the only negative commentary came from a barman and a
musician, and they were of the basic _change is bad_ variety. As a
consequence, he's stuck with painting everyone as a witless man-child.

So either he's an incompetent journalist or he didn't find a rotten
underbelly. As I've never been to SV, I can't comment on which it is but I can
be pretty confident that this article won't help me find out.

~~~
walshemj
Yes I thought it deeply ironic that the musician presumably one of the
previous waves of incomers that pushed out the previous I habitants did them
selves not see the irony

