
For Silicon Valley, the Hangover Begins - vanderfluge
http://www.wsj.com/articles/for-silicon-valley-the-hangover-begins-1455930769
======
skewart
Is it just me or does it seem like a lot of media outlets really, really want
to see a big tech downturn? I want to say to the collective writers ofthe WSJ,
the NYT, and everyone else, "stop trying to make a bubble happen, it's not
going to happen."

I get that a bursting bubble would be dramatic, and would make for lots of
compelling stories. But there are plenty of other exciting and interesting
things going on in tech these days! There's no shortage of dramatic tales that
aren't quite as simple as "those crazy Californians are finally getting their
due!"

I mean, I get it. Journalists gonna journal. But still.

Anyways, sorry for the rant. Please continue reading the comments as you were.

~~~
seibelj
Seriously? When the entire country has been forced to endure decades of
stagnant wages, crippling debt, and the two major presidential candidates are
a socialist and a fascist, you are surprised that people want the most babied,
prima donna group of workers to ever walk the earth to get their comeuppance?
An entire group of engineers who complain about 6 figure salaries and how hard
it is to live on them?

I'm one of the group, I'm exactly the person I just described, I'm just not
shocked in the slightest.

~~~
ditonal
By what metrics are engineers the most babied in the world?

Certainly by metrics of the Silicon Valley PR machine that pays them, would
greatly prefer to pay them less, to blame them for the housing crisis, and to
use as a debate piece for advocating for infinite H1Bs (but certainly not
green cards - those employees have rights).

But not by any real metric. Go walk around an open-office plan filled to the
brim with programmers, then walk into a VC office with their mahogany desks
and high ceilings and private offices. Check out a law office where you'll see
similar things. Look at actual salary data. Lawyers make significantly more
than engineers, despite the "shortage" of engineers and "surplus" of lawyers
(since this always gets brought up - yes, elite Stanford programmers who work
at Google make more than some podunk law grad, but that Stanford law grad
still does better, and the average programmer is paid less than the average
lawyer). Doctors are 9 out of the 10 highest paid positions in the country.
Police, firefighters, and teachers get paid actual overtime with pensions that
pay out almost their whole salary after they retire, and have infinitely more
job security. On the other hand, tech workers seem to think uncompensated 24/7
on-call is a badge of honor, just like spending all your free time doing even
more programming to keep up with the endless tech skill treadmill. So why
exactly are tech workers on the top of the list to see fail, other than us
taking the blame and devilization for the failure of SF residents to properly
plan housing and economic growth for years and trying to preserve the
"character of the city" over making practical decisions?

Tech is a great career and compared to many people in this country who have
been totally fucked over, we have it great. But this trope that tech workers
are so spoiled because they give us a ping-pong table and catered lunch while
paying us less than many other white-collar professionals is overdone, so drop
it.

And what come-uppance do we deserve? Because we have jobs building products
people use and value, that we show up to every day, that makes us deserve some
retribution? Because we reasonably point out that six figures in the Bay Area
is nowhere near an extravagant lifestyle, which anyone who knows anything
about the cost of living would agree with?

The biggest problem I see is too many engineers jump on this self-flaggelation
train without thinking critically about it or how it hurts them.

The real reason people keep calling "bubble" is because they're unimaginative.
It happened before, so it's easy to just say the same thing will happen
without really thinking about it. And yes, they say "this time it's different"
in every bubble, except in this "bubble" there is no real indication that
there is a bubble, and all these market corrections and beatings tech
companies take that are pointed to as the existence of a bubble actually prove
the direct opposite, because in real bubbles it goes up really fast based on
speculation and comes down really fast in a spectacular crash. Tech has been
slowly but consistently growing for years and occasionally takes some
corrections and downturns, which is like any other market and nothing like a
real bubble.

~~~
mdorazio
By what metrics? Job availability, for one. Can you provide an example of
another profession where someone with 2-3 years of experience can quit their
high-paying job and have recruiters calling the same day to entice them to a
new one?

Education requirement, for another. Your examples all require advanced degrees
from prestigious schools, multiple years of low wage grunt work, and/or a
proven track record before hitting the high salary mark you seem to think is
the default. Meanwhile, 22 year olds graduating from college with a CS degree
and zero years of experience are getting six figure offers.

Work environment, for a third. Think you can be a doctor and work from home
when you feel like it, or have Nerf wars with your coworkers after grabbing a
beer from the office-provided kegerator?

SF and SV engineers _are_ spoiled. Spoiled by market conditions that have
combined to make right now an unprecedented good time for people who like
writing code. Meanwhile, the other 98ish percent of Americans continue to get
a poor deal. That's no one's fault, it's just the way economics has gone over
the last few years. But it's no surprise that a large number of people want
engineers to have to work with the same conditions as everyone else. I mean,
can you really say with a straight face that someone writing yet another
version of Tinder or whatever is providing more "value", as you put it, than a
teacher?

~~~
ditonal
Tech workers have it better than many, worse than some. But hardly the most
spoiled ever.

If you're the type of person who values kegerators and nerf wars more than
salary, benefits, and professional status, then I can see how you would have
your perspective. I can only guess you're much younger than some of us.
Personally, I'd rather finish my work and leave the office to go home and buy
my own beer with a bigger paycheck than act like I'm in a frat-house.

As for comparing someone writing a dating app to a teacher, I in no way
implied that programmers create more value than teachers, or that somehow
salary directly reflects the value people contribute to the world. But I think
both contribute some value, and neither deserves to get demonized for just
doing their job or even advocating for their own interests.

------
robryan
The office environment in the picture looks terrible. Not only is it open plan
but there seems to be barely enough room to setup a couple of screens and a
laptop.

~~~
AlexB138
Agreed, it looks absolutely miserable. I would really like to see an end to
the era of open work spaces, or at least shared desks. Is anyone aware of a
study comparing the productivity of developers in these types environments to
ones that provide a little privacy?

~~~
LanguageGamer
Not specific to developers, but this article, The Physical Environment of The
Office, reviews several studies of impact of office-type on office workers:

[https://lubswww.leeds.ac.uk/fileadmin/webfiles/cstsd/Documen...](https://lubswww.leeds.ac.uk/fileadmin/webfiles/cstsd/Documents/The_Physical_Environment_of_the_Office_Davis_Leach_Clegg_2011.pdf)

------
Animats
Think of the customers.

The lead company in the article, Practice Fusion, is an electronic medical
records service for medical practices. With their system, everything is on
Practice Fusion's servers; the local equipment is just a web browser. If the
company ceases operation, they can export patient charts in CCDA format (which
other medical records services are supposed to accept). But the office records
for billing aren't standardized. If they go under, the transition will
seriously upset the operations of thousands of medical practitioners.

~~~
ForHackernews
Yeah, that's why we've been saying "Don't put everything in the cloud" for the
past decade.

~~~
laughfactory
This. As a consumer and professional I've become progressively more resistant
to putting anything in the cloud for fear that any service I use and value
will be 1) acquired and closed, or 2) go out of business. Any platform we use
in the cloud is an investment...learning how to use it effectively,
transitioning all our related content to it, etc...so when they go down it's
often non-trivial to find an alternative and adopt it. The transition costs
can add up. I think the reality is that people (consumers and businesses) will
spend a lot more time and effort vetting new apps and platforms before
investing in them as users. This means that new startups will need some
serious legs and a way of explicitly addressing these underlying concerns.
They may have to put aside a large chunk of capital just to be able to say
explicitly that they have an operational five year or ten year plan. Otherwise
users like me won't use the next cool thing because the odds are very good it
won't last even a year. Part of the value of the really big successes like
Salesforce is that they are clearly not going anywhere. Where I work we've
invested in using a machine learning model deployment service which makes it
relatively easy to expose our models as API endpoints, but since it's a
product offered by a startup I know I'm hyper aware it could shut down any day
out of the blue. If that were to happen we'd have to find another service to
transition to, trial their product, and adapt all our stuff to it (potentially
lots of new code to write and lots of learning how to use their platform
effectively). It'd literally set us back months. Yes, potentially good for my
job security, but who wants to fiddle with that kind of stuff. I want to move
forward, not back or sideways. So yeah, the startup world needs to come to
grips with this. I suppose what we might see in the future is a lot less VC
funded startups, and a lot more bootstrapped startups which organically grow
much more slowly. But even these startups will need to buckle up for a much
longer growth trajectory because they'll have to overcome the idea that they
might just shutdown.

------
dawhizkid
How is it that the hangover just "began"? Public markets have been trashing
prominent tech IPOs for several years now. Groupon? Zynga? Ring a bell?

------
supercoder
Love how in the medias eyes if it's not a massive boom then it must be a huge
recession.

~~~
reviseddamage
tbh, vc's apply the same rationale before investing. no?

~~~
supercoder
no

~~~
reviseddamage
oh ok. good.

------
curiousDog
Feel like they're blowing this way out of proportion. Uber and Airbnb are
doing perfectly well and from the looks of it Uber will IPO at $100-$150
billion easily.

------
jwcrux
If only there were a way to bypass that paywall.

~~~
dpflan
Try the 'web' link right under the HN title to perform a Google search for the
article. The 'web' link resolves to:
[https://www.google.com/search?q=For%20Silicon%20Valley%2C%20...](https://www.google.com/search?q=For%20Silicon%20Valley%2C%20the%20Hangover%20Begins)

~~~
xur17
This used to work for me, but no longer does:

[http://digiday.com/publishers/wall-street-journal-paywall-
go...](http://digiday.com/publishers/wall-street-journal-paywall-google/)

~~~
hanapbuhay
Manually adding the link into Instapaper worked for me.

------
denominator1986
The funny part is that Phenomenal Fridays weren't that good. Ryan would get up
and spew words at everyone and make fun of his son and his dog would piss on
the rug.

Far better examples of companies who got indulgences right. PF sorta sucked as
a corporate culture. To be COMPLETELY frank, it is probably better off now.

------
denominator1986
Lauren Burris was a glorified secretary. The CEO was a clown. The company
actually has a shot at being a lethal competitor now.

------
jonathanpeterwu
You've got to write about something when you cover tech. It's like pulling a
magic rabbit out of a hat.

------
jonesb6
There is no bubble. Investor speculation taking a down turn? Sure. But that's
been happening for CENTURIES.

------
foxly
Please stop posting paywalled articles on Hacker News.

~~~
metric10
Google the article's title and click on it. WSJ articles referred from Google
news search are free.

edit: As reported below, try turning off your ad blocker and/or using
incognito.

~~~
venantius
That is no longer true.

~~~
venantius
Looks like they track the number of visits you've made to the WSJ in the past.
If you use an incognito window you can still use the Google search results.

~~~
ac29
>If you use an incognito window you can still use the Google search results.

Nope. This stopped working for me about a month ago.

~~~
ktRolster
It depends on the article. Some of the articles it works for, others it
doesn't.

