Certainly Silicon Valley has their fair share of douchebags, but the media hype surrounding this is simply nonsense. The world hates Silicon Valley? You're telling me that somehow all these SV douchebags outweigh Hollywood or Wall Street douchebags? Come on, now.
The ethics of the power players in Silicon Valley are far worse than those on Wall Street. (I don't know dick about Hollywood other than its reputation.)
Wall Streeters are greedy, but they don't go out of their way to ruin peoples' careers (except in the movies). They'll do a lot of things to get that $10 million bonus, but they don't hold long-term grudges and wreck careers of people who've since flown away from them. A trader will get you fired if it suits his career goals, because he is ruthless, but once you're out of his way, he'll take an active interest in making sure you get a better job afterward. Valley people, when they separate, tend to make it really ugly: lots of gossip, negative references, long-term grudges and other nonsense that wouldn't exist among people who cared more about themselves winning than about other people losing.
Silicon Valley attracts people who want power, and those tend to be worse than those who want money. It also attracts, more than nerds, people who come on specifically to take advantage of nerds. The latter set tend to be horrible, and to rise fast.
Finally, there's the false poverty effect. If you make $10 million in a year, you're rich. If you're a trust-fund kid, but you're only paying yourself a $25,000 salary because that's all your investors will let you take out, you feel more entitled to fuck people over because you're "the little guy" and because, being "scrappy" (or "lean"), you "can't afford" the costs of being ethical.
Whenever I read HN and see an extremely anti-startup comment I always know it's from you. For a while I'd get angry reading your comments, but I'm actually curious- What on earth happened between you and startups to make you think they're a huge scam to take advantage of the unsuspecting?
I'm a nobody who came to Silicon Valley and has done relatively well for himself as a founder. I've seen many, many other founders with similar stories. We raised a significant amount of money and can spend it however we want. The worst I can say about my experience with investors is sometimes they can be arrogant. The ones that did invest in us have been nothing but incredibly humble and helpful. But going out of their way to screw someone over? I just haven't ever seen anything close to that happen to anyone in the 3 years I've been here.
I used to work in finance where they're much more ruthless. I have a classmate from undergrad who recently was arrested for "stealing trade secrets" from a hedge fund: http://www.forbes.com/sites/nathanvardi/2014/02/19/analyst-c.... Who knows what actually happened but that sort of stuff would never fly in Silicon Valley.
That's not to say I have the correct perspective but I always see these generalizations coming from you that seem so far off from my reality that I wonder what's going on. What happened to you?
He's not the only anti-startup commenter here. I'm curious, have you ever worked at a startup as a programmer, not as a founder? Sometimes, it's easier to see the downside of a system when you're not the one profiting from it.
The part I don't understand is why people generalize their one bad experience to "the whole system is corrupt!"
I've worked for two startups as a programmer. They were both broken, and each was broken in its own way. I don't think that the founders of them were bad people or out to screw me. They were, however, way in over their heads. Startups are hard.
I also founded a startup. It was also broken in its own way, despite trying to avoid all the mistakes that I'd seen my previous bosses make. Startups are hard. Luckily, I didn't take anyone else down with me - it was just me and my cofounder, he soft-landed at business school and I soft-landed at Google.
I now work at Google. It is significantly less broken than any previous startups I've worked at. However, there are still a bunch of things about it that are annoyances.
No place is ever going to be perfect, but if you tar each new employer with the same broad brush that made you leave the last one, then chances are the same broad problems will come up.
I've written about it at length already and don't choose to relive it in detail, but I worked for an extremely unethical startup.
In 3 months, I saw... bait-and-switch hiring all over the place, multiple people hired into the same management role, and (after I left) a CEO who spent months trying to destroy my reputation.
At 3 months, I was brought into a room with HR and the CTO. Upper management wanted to get rid of early hires with "too much" equity and wanted to pull my technical credibility to justify their firing, but the documents I was asked to sign constituted perjury (blaming people for nonexistent technical shortfalls, claiming that I directly managed people I didn't even know, etc.) Some of the claims would have required revising my past and saying I'd consulted (a consulting VP/Eng, I can't make this shit up) with the company before the start date (in order to make the rest of the story check out). They fired me for refusing to do it. When I pointed out that I had grounds for a lawsuit, the CEO threatened to pull family connections and bribe judges.
I'm sorry, but I don't do "We're giving you 10 reports, and your job is to fuck over all of them over the next two months." I may or may not be a leader (that's not for me to decide) but I am surely not a henchman.
This is one of the VC darlings and although it was almost a down round (barely above flat) and dilution was heavy, they raised again in late 2013 (almost 2 years after that happened). Granted, this last VC round is essentially a severance, giving the company a couple years to run on fumes while its executives find better things to do with their lives. But I didn't get a severance, so why should they?
Now, I think companies that are that shitty are pretty rare, even in the VC-funded world. That might be bottom 1% overall and bottom-10% in the VC-funded world. Even most startups and ex-startups (e.g. Google) aren't nearly as bad, but there is a certain crappiness to the tech world in terms of how regular people are treated. Companies care a lot about image (being sexy, "cool", VC darlings, whatever) but not about long-standing reputation-- at least, on the latter, not enough to seriously value doing the right thing.
The old Silicon Valley was a pay-it-forward economy. Even when you separated, you were good to other people. If you had to cut people in your startup, you introduced them to investors. People helped each other out. You didn't fuck over a talented engineer, because you might want to work with him 5 or 10 years later. That's gone now.
I do have to offer this disclaimer, though. I never worked on the West Coast. Maybe it's different out there, but the things I've heard convince me that it's not that different, and I've definitely met dodgy characters in California.
Day to day, what angers me is the general lack of respect for engineers in the "new" Silicon Valley. I'm talking about the startups offering pathetic equity slices, and about the companies that are actually very business-driven posing as "tech companies". Engineering and research talents aren't really valued, despise the mouth-honor paid to them.
"I do have to offer this disclaimer, though. I never worked on the West Coast."
LOL okay I guess that explains it. I've been in the Bay Area since the dot-com times, and the type of behavior you describe is something I've never seen, not even once. I've worked for some real assholes, and I don't deny that this probably happens here, but not often for it to be a discernible trend.
Yes, you had a bad experience, but no it's not all like that, at all. I work for a YC startup, something I never thought I would do, and the cofounders are genuine, smart and people I'm ready to put my career and financial future behind even though I'm roughly 15 years older.
I don't think anyone sat down and said, "I'm going to create a housing bubble, tank the economy, have people forced out of houses they couldn't afford because of said bubble, and cost millions of people (including myself, with high likelihood) their jobs".
Wall Street has had some very negative effects on the economy, but I don't think those were intended. There wasn't malice. It's just that we, as humans, are terrible at handling complexity beyond certain levels. Take one of those now-infamous mortgage-backed securities. To analyze the thing, you need an economist, a mathematician to model it, a programmer or two to write (and test!) the modelling code, business people who know the involved counterparties and how they will behave under distress-- that is, will our counterparty make good, or default?-- and lawyers (because the damn things are, at the end of the day, contracts). The things are dangerous because no single person on earth holds even half the knowledge to know what the thing is actually worth. But (as in government) that complexity is the product of creep, not (in most cases) intentional malice.
Wall Street people are ruthless and greedy. If the trade they want to do means getting up at 3:00 am (or, even, getting the team up) for the European open, they'll do it. They want to win, and they play hardball. However, Wall Street's rules are well-defined (unlike in VC) and most of the obviously unethical things have been made illegal. Wall Street people, for the most part, don't like being in jail and would rather avoid that. Most people on Wall Street are (although ruthless) actually ethical. There are exceptions but they tend to take a lot of collaboration (see: housing bubble) and it's actually hard to get people like that to "conspire" on anything. It just has to happen, emergently, and it only happens once every 10 years or so.
See, predictable, greedy, and mostly ethical people (with a few unethical ones in the mix, as anywhere) aren't that dangerous a set. If someone costs you your job, you get another one. No big deal. It's true that you have about a 20% per year chance of getting laid off on the street, but it's not stigmatized and your co-workers (and often your managers) will go to bat to help you get a better next job. (Silicon Valley probably has the same 20%/year job-loss rate, but startups refuse to have an honest lay off and mask those firings as "performance"-related or "cultured fit", meaning there's no severance and the startup's reputation is preserved at the expense of the ex-employee.)
In the Valley, people may not be as open about liking money, but they are more hung up on power and, at high levels, it's like high school. That's why social proof is so important in raising the first round of funding: because it's essentially adolescence all over again. The stakes are lower (Silicon Valley can't tank the economy in the way that Wall Street can) but the petty personal grudges are more common and people are much more willing to go out of their way just to hurt someone they dislike.
It used to be, in the Valley, that people went out of their way to help each other. If a startup CEO had to lay people off, he introduced the laid-off people to investors so they could start their own companies (presuming they didn't compete directly with him). Now, that same reputation economy exists but, instead of it being powered by people helping each other out, it's powered by people pushing each other down to solidify their own positions.
I like the term "false poverty effect." It'd be nice to have something to describe all the annoying people I've met who think they are "poor" but can hit their parents up for an interest free $100,000 "loan" they never have to repay or a brand new 2014 car. Then they make fun of you for struggling to afford (or being unable to afford) college tuition or rent when they clearly had no problems affording it on part time minimum wage.
