
How Hurricane Sandy Reminded Me Why I Love the Tech Industry - patrickambron
http://www.patrickambron.me/how-hurricane-sandy-reminded-me-why-i-love-the-tech-industry/
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lallouz
First off, great post. Although it is pretty awesome to see how the community
comes together when people are in need, during the storm and aftermath I
couldn't help but think about our industry vs others in rebounding efforts.
While most startup founders / employees I know were eager, almost rabid to get
back to work, a lot of my friends in other industries were very happy to have
the few days off, no questions asked.

So my question (which I've been asking myself), do you think that it's an
attitude thing? A certain NEED to get back to the grind that our industry has
that others don't? Or do you think we are operationally that much better at
coming together?

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MortisMortavius
Perhaps it could also be that the tech industry knows how important time is.
Everything changes so ridiculously fast that being out of the game at all
makes people start to feel nervous... other more well established industries
don't have their technology change nearly as fast.

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themckman
Slightly more cynical view on this whole matter is that taking some time off
due to your city being in shambles doesn't make for the greatest blog post.

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patrickambron
I'm not sure I'm following

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MattGrommes
There's also the great story about Squarespace, FogCreek and Peer1 employees
doing a bucket brigade of fuel up to their generators to keep things up.
That's awesome commitment to their customers and business.

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patrickambron
I actually wasn't aware of this. Sounds cool Can you elaborate?

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jchook
Here is an article detailing the valor of the Squarespace team. Honestly I'm a
little startled by how many sloshing buckets of fuel their infrastructure must
consume per day. [http://techcrunch.com/2012/11/01/squarespace-fog-creek-
peer1...](http://techcrunch.com/2012/11/01/squarespace-fog-creek-peer1-kept-
ny-data-center-alive-by-carrying-fuel-buckets-to-the-17th-floor-in-the-dark/)

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patrickambron
This is so awesome. One it's cool to see a company care so much about it's
customers and its reputation. Two, it's amazing how much fuel they need to fun

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entropy_
Whenever I read about power outages in the states and the kind of mayhem they
cause I think about how different the situation here is -- Lebanon that is.

We haven't had enough power to run the entire country ever since the end of
the civil war in '90 so there's a rationing scheme whereby you get power
during certain times of the day depending on where you live. People have just
gotten used to having generators that kick in automatically about a minute
after the power goes out and using UPSs to bridge the gap.

I just bought an apartment in a Beirut suburb and one of the main advantages
the owner was touting was that the building has its own generator(so you don't
have to deal with a distributor as those tend to have insane prices because
they know that people need the electricity anyway).

Our startup just moved in to a proper office a couple of days ago. One of the
problems we are now dealing with is that the A/C in that office is too power-
hungry to run on a generator and we're having split units installed so we
don't have to work in a sauna-like environment for the ~6hrs/day when there's
no power.

I'm actually not complaining, you get used to this stuff and it's not that
much of an inconvenience once you know how to deal with it. I know this was
off topic, but this is what I'm reminded off every time a story like this
comes up.

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patrickambron
That's a really interesting point. I think a big part of anything like this is
how prepared you are. For example, Florida routinely gets hit with much
stronger storms, but they are much better prepared. New York doesn't deal with
many Hurricanes, so our infrastructure--that millions have learned to depend
on--failed. To your point, it's amazing how places and people can adapt to
different conditions. I'd love to hear more about running a startup in Lebanon

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entropy_
Well, it's not easy to say the least. There are essentially two big problems
we have.

One, anything telecom related tends to be much more expensive here than almost
anywhere else in the world. For example the best home connection I can get
right now is 1Mb/s down 128Kb/s up with a 12GB/mo data cap for ~35$/mo. And
that's DSL, for 3G(whose coverage is spotty at best) it's a 100MB/mo cap for
10$/mo(above and beyond the 20$/mo just to have a cell phone line). My cell
phone bill regularly ends up in the 80-100$ range and I don't talk that much
on the phone, people who do end up closer to 150$.

Two, and this flows from one and the fact that salaries here are about 1/3rd
of US ones with comparable cost of living; any talented people that have
options will just say "fuck this"(possibly turn over a table as they get up)
and just leave. I regularly half-joke with foreigners I meet that our main
export is engineers. Through college I met about 5 people who I'd consider co-
founding something with. Of those 5, one is now in new york, another is at
Intel, a 3rd is in france doing graduate studies and the other two left but
I've lost touch with them. This even extends no non-computer fields and
basically anything that requires high skill-level(so any engineering field,
business consulting, finance, etc...).

The startup I'm working at now is actually based in the states. The founder is
Lebanese-American and a mutual friend introduced us. We're trying to start
something here(we're currently only 2 guys). My hope is that people eventually
realize that programming can be done from anywhere and they don't have to go
to SV and we might have a viable startup culture at some point. We're still
very far from that point though.

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swohns
Great post, and couldn't agree more. I think Bloomberg and Rachel Sterne also
deserve credit for their amazing rallying and general scrappiness, which
enabled alot of these companies to step up with supportive offers (AirBNB &
Uber stand out).

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patrickambron
Absolutely. It was pretty amazing to see how the whole city came together,
especially leaders – from Obama to Bloomberg to Governor Christie to Sterne to
many others.

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PeterisP
An important factor may be that in other industries generally all companies
provide competing services, but in the tech(startup) industry most companies
don't compete, and even provide complementary goods/services.

If other local tech startups succeed, it generally helps your tech startup
succeed; but if other local ad agencies or pizza shops succeed, then it hurts
your ad agency/pizza shop.

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kl4555
So true! Lallouz's comment is also so point on. In most other industries
people were acting like children on a snow day. Go Tech!

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patrickambron
Yea that was really surprising to me. It's another reason I feel lucky to be
in this industry. It became obvious people love what they do more than any
other industry.

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dave_chenell
Crazy stuff. That was a good recap. The tech scene is awesome.

