LA Times Examines Silicon Valley 225
Richard Finney writes "The Los Angeles Times has a special section on Silicon Valley. Most of the stories focus on the 'survivors struggling through the toughest stretch in tech industry history.' There's also a story on
Five Reasons to Hope -
New technologies that may help Silicon Valley rise again: Biotech, microsensors, nanotechnology, flexible electronics and data mining. We'll see."
Should be read as (Score:2, Funny)
Re:Should be read as (Score:2)
Heh. Yeah, you really got the point of the article.
Re:Should be read as (Score:3, Insightful)
Exactly, in fact the first and primary reason has nothing to do with technology at all. It's about remembering that there are types of people who will infiltrate any industry, no matter how beneficial that industry is to mankind, and sell everyone short just to make a buck in a hurry.
Best case in point is Lucent Technologies. Lucent was a spin-off of Bell Labs, and represented some of the very best and brightest in the industry. The corporate culture was one of innovation, and progressive technologies.
The company is now a smoking crater. [yahoo.com] Largely due to wholely irresponsible internal fiscal management. This was a great company, with a history of producing highly innovative products and services. Most of that has been irrevocably destroyed.
It's a story of a few greedy, self-serving people at the top of the organization selling out the lives, careers and dreams of the thousands of technicians and engineers that comprised the company in its best years. One could argue that "stock options fever" is in part responsible for creating an environment like that...but I'm hoping that we've all suffered enough from that delusion to ensure that it doesn't happen again any time soon. Real products, for real people, in the real world....and hopefully real accountants to make sure things stay that way.
*crosses fingers*
Nanotech... (Score:1, Interesting)
Re:Nanotech... (Score:1, Funny)
As the saying goes... (Score:3, Funny)
There's way too many IT people nowadays & it's spoiling it for everybody.
wait a minute...
If we all became layers... We could wreck that industry too! GO FOR IT!
Re:As the saying goes... (Score:3, Interesting)
There's way too many IT people nowadays & it's spoiling it for everybody.
I take it by that you mean theres to many early twentish males who lernt html from magazines and think there gods gift to the net, then bullshite there cv to get a job, get fired soon after and relise there actualy not that good, then either decide to do advertising instead or try harder
I know this is how it works here in Manchester(UK).
Re:As the saying goes... (Score:2)
"Sue 3 companies using our services, and you get Suey the Sock Puppet!"
Biotech is a long way off (Score:2, Informative)
Not that I would not like another boom sooner, I have a few years experiance of designing electronics and writing embedded software but no degree. I got fired a few weeks ago, my long term plan is to become a plumber. I expect to be doing menial jobs for a few years and do some night classes and self training.
Re:Biotech is a long way off (Score:2)
wth? (Score:1, Funny)
peoples opions from the area (Score:5, Informative)
Re:peoples opions from the area (Score:5, Insightful)
Having your MCSE and Cisco certs doesn't mean anything other than you can study for a test where you know the questions going into the test. It has nothing to do with quality of coding. And being a good coder doesn't mean that you are able to create revolutionary technology that will transform an industry - it means that you understand the symantecs of a language and can solve problems within that language.
What drives the valley are those who are innovative and visionary, those who can create revolutionary technology. Look back to early Apple - Jobs and Woz. Jobs was the visionary and Woz was the brains, and together they created what was revolutionary. No one looks at these guys and says "gee, they were good coders who had good certifications". That kind of thinking is what caused people to believe the valley was dead and why the valley has far too many unemployed deadbeats. Too many coders with certs moved in and didn't realize that they didn't have the chops for what it really drove the valley to greatness.
Yes and No (Score:5, Insightful)
What the Valley and tech sector in general are missing is... wait for it... Vision! Microsoft has kicked real innovation in the nards. Microsoft is completely into innovating Microsofts stranglehold on the consumer and business computing environments. What innovations are coming in the near future? Maybe another niche product that runs on Windows you say? The problem here is that too many "tech" people now have windows-tunnel-vision. Their products are conformist with the Microsoft vision and increasingly drab. Very little that is new and exciting, which is what makes people want to spend their money and therefore create jobs for those tech people to work in.
This is just a brief summary of what is currently wrong in the American tech sector, so pick away. It is by no means complete.
Re:Yes and No (Score:4, Insightful)
Re:Yes and No (Score:2)
People and companies will spend ( and borrow) to buy a compelling product. If a business needs communication equipment to stimulate business, then they will spend. There aren't many new or innovative products on the market that are compelling people to expend resources to get right now. It is my opinion that Microsoft and their everwhelming monopoly certainly has stifled real innovation in the computer field.
Also, many countries are in recessions right now, not just the US.
Re:Yes and No (Score:3, Insightful)
I agree that successful companies, in addition to having vision also need highly skilled people to fulfill their vision. But my general impression is that most people who are considered good coders aren't really all that good. My personal experience over the past 14 years (damn, I'm getting old) is that 75% of people employed as programmers can't program worth crap. Of the remaining 25%, about 15% are good, 9% are really good and about 1% are exceptional.
Perhaps I am being prejudiced here, but I tend to dismiss people who brag about their certs. Being certified means that they have been taught to view all problems from a fixed paradigm. They have traded their brain to be a code monkey. Once they have done this, they no longer THINK about the problem and what alternatives their are for solutions and the affects and consequences for different approaches - they just spout that this is the way of doing things.
When I interview people, there are three things that I look for:
1). Are they smart?
2). Do they work hard?
3). Are they driven to succeed?
The fundamental premise is that if you are smart and work hard, you can do anything. I can teach you a programming language, but I can't teach you to be smart. You also can't teach someone to work hard - either they do or they don't.
Do you have a high GPA? Unless you have a respectable GPA, you aren't going to get in the door. A lot of programmers I know have low GPA's. Their excuse is that they thought that some of the classes were BS, so they didn't care to do well. Fine - and if you dont care to do what I want you to do when you think that it is BS, then I don't want to hire you and waste my money. The other point about GPA is that it is the college standard for success. If you didn't care enough to succeed by the standard where you were (college), they you don't care enough to succeed by the standard that your company will set.
>>Microsoft has kicked innovation in the nards.
I haven't really thought too much about this, so I can't give you an honest opinion. BUT, I don't think that innovation was ever their intent. I think that M$ business model was to embrace and extend. Let someone else do the work to create the market - they will just through some bells and whistles on it, and then integrate is so it APPEARS more natural when running on Windows.
I will say that M$ has done one innovative thing - the concept of a known gui framework. If you remember back to the days DOS, every application shipped with several floppies (long before CD's, and even before 3.5"). One floppy was the application, one floppy was if you had a hercules card, one for a EGA card, one for a VGA card. And some of these only worked for certain brands of cards. One downside to IBM's open architecture is that any card manufacturer had great leeway for how to impliment their hardware. Outside of a few common interrupts, all bets were off for how you had to interface with the card. Developers were forced to write very specific code for each piece of possible hardware. Enter M$ - instead of programming for specific hardware cards, you programmed to a known GUI framework. Once each developer didn't have to spend tremendous amounts of time writing hardware specific code, he was given a lot of time to actually work on innovative software.
>>
I think that you can currently say that about all software. From the work at bell labs (and others, including Berkely) back in the late 60's, there has not been a whole lot of innovation in OS's. Linux and it's myriad flavors is just a rehash of Unix with some bells and whistles. The OS's we all use every day has nothing new in it that hasn't been around for 35 years already. If software is to become innovative again, it begins with a fundamental paradigm shift of hardware architecture and OS thought - and the two must work together.
The last innovation, from my perspective, has been things like Plan 9 and Beowulf. Having an OS that can extend its tendrils out like an amoeba, create a grid/network of machines where CPU can be shared when needed is cool. I think that it needs to be extended such that these networks of computers can be self organizing, perhaps forming a grid/net architecture that can be used for massive parallel neural nets or other such thing, now, that would be cool. (Hmmm, this sounds like Skynet from the Terminator series, and we have already seen where that leads to).
But, we live in a consumer economy, so unless it can be sold such that it works with what the consumer already has, few will spend the money to develop it.
Re:peoples opions from the area (Score:3, Insightful)
unfamiliar with the CCIE [cisco.com] i assume?
Re:peoples opions from the area (Score:2)
It really is a scary world when employers are more interested in blind folded monkey who can only do what Uncle Bill told them, versus real programmer who actually know how to think/solve/code.
I have noticed one scary trend down here in the states - all kids coming out of college only know Java. Now, Java may be nice and all - I don't mean to start a flame war, but none of these kids knows jack about thinks like pointers, registers, heap, stack. How do you expect kids to know how to program if they don't understand what the machine is doing? How can they make smart decisions about their code if they never learn the technical details of what their code is actually doing?
One of these upstarts had the gall to tell me that he couldn't even figure out how to program anything useful in C because it didn't have classes - I laughed my ass off. The philosophy of a lot of kids I see these day is that progamming Java is all they need to know - things like pointers and hardware and memory management is for the "smart people" who write the JVM.
Scares the hell out of me.
Re:peoples opions from the area (Score:5, Insightful)
"Very good coders" are not in short supply, and in the Bay Area, an MCSE or Cisco certification is as illustrative of potential value to a company as, say, a driver's license. Same goes for quantity of resume buzzwords, which only carry a premium when hype is king, which now unfortunately it is not.
The start-ups doing best in this are lean (principals and architects only) and outsource a lot of work to places like Bulgaria and Bangalore.
The people doing best in this area have breadth, depth, experience building services, experience shipping products, experience managing teams, communication ability, and of course (of course), connections.
And those of us who meet the above criteria but don't have 6+ figures in the bank (from either prudent savings or a stint at a dot-com that actually went public), well, we are still pretty nervous.
Housing prices are finally starting to come down to earth though, and knock on wood I'll be able to buy a 1600sq.ft. 3/2 house in a relatively nice neighborhood in Sunnyvale for less than $550K come summer.
Re:peoples opions from the area (Score:2, Funny)
Re:peoples opions from the area (Score:4, Interesting)
I spent a year in the Valley looking for work... unsuccessfully. I'm now back in Australia and will try again in a few years. Jobs in the Valley are very much Cutting Edge Tech jobs, and i think it's very difficult to get into them unless you have recent experience working with them. (I'm talking software here - there are plenty of Verilog/VHDL/FPGA/etc jobs.) The software jobs almost all demand recent and extensive experience in J2EE/.NET/etc. The only jobs i ended up getting interviews for while i was staying there were in Fresno (central California/redneck zone) and in and around LA... and they were your average Linux/UNIX/C/VMS/etc jobs - exactly the stuff i am skilled and experienced in.
I think the Valley is trying too hard to be "cool" and ahead of the curve, at the expense of seeing that innovation can happen in other areas. Linux is a perfect example of something that is based on OLD technology and paradigms, but is still doing pretty cool stuff. Hell, even Windows app development is relatively old tech and "traditional" software paradigms, but there is a lot of flexibility available and a lot of Windows apps are far from "uncool". I don't know if we can blame this on the Dot Com boom... but it's frustrating that most developers who have honed their skills in other countries or even other states - or even OTHER CITIES IN THE SAME STATE can't find work because they weren't working with "hip" technology. It seems like Apple is about the only place in the Valley still doing interesting stuff with software. Hell, most of the game development houses are in LA, Microsoft is mostly in Seattle, Amazon is too... Linux development is distributed across the whole world, and IBM closed down its San Jose operations... All we can hope is that a few REAL visionaries end up in charge of companies there soon and start hiring people who have real-life skills rather than just a collection of certifications and J2EEE/.N3T/L33TPROGRAMMER!@23$ acronyms in their resumes.
Re:peoples opions from the area (Score:2)
Progress marches on... slowly (Score:5, Insightful)
The difference between the period of time between the PC boom and the Internet boom, was that the hardware of the PC boom was a springboard for the Internet boom.
I'd be hard pressed to come up with more then a handful of examples where new types of hardware was needed to drive the boom. Of course the increase in processor speeds, and other changes in the tech can't be dismissed out of hand, but these were incremental increases in technology, not true advances.
But with the five items mentioned in the article, with the exception of datamining, require great strides in research before they become truely feasible as the focus of a new boom. Nanotech is still five to ten years away before it's first truely practical uses, as even the most ardent proponent will admit when pressed.
These are hardware advances, and thus we face a slow march toward the next boom, waiting for advances in research and technology.
Re:Progress marches on... slowly (Score:2, Informative)
Was that segway [segway.com] a typo, intending segue, or were you being clever?
In any case, the "boom" had exceedingly little to do with any particular technology, but it had to do with a mad rush to the trough with a lot of investment bankers making a lot of money, and like all overblown bubbles eventually it burst. It may as well have been a boom over pet rocks (err, P2P Open Source Bluetooth Linux pet rocks) or hoola hoops for all the actual technology mattered.
Quick fact that a lot of people fail to appreciated: Year over year tech spending has been increasing year over year, albeit at a small amount. Today more is spent on technology and technology solutions in the computer arena than it was during the "super boom". Tell me again about what will bring about the next windfall?
Re:Progress marches on... slowly (Score:2)
About the cause of the boom, I'd have to say while it may have ended with such a rush, I think it began with people suddenly fired up with the idea computing and networking technology could be used by businesses in ways significantly different from traditional money making methods. I'd add that I make no comment on the truth of the idea. I'd also point out, that by my reckoning, most of those who made it through the boom never bought into the idea itself, but simply provided ways and means to those that did. Cisco routers could be seen as the miner's picks of the Internet Goldrush.
Cool quick fact. what do you define tech spending as? spent by who?
What will bring the next windfall will be a synergetic grouping of cost effective methods or products, with multiple applications, each resulting from a different source (corporation, university dept, etc.) It most likely won't be nanotech or biotech, considering the cost of development. I do know that it will seem obvious in hindsight.
Re:Progress marches on... slowly (Score:3, Interesting)
Again I just wanted to clarify: The "windfall" in technology was never a windfall at all (technology has been making the steady march forward for a couple of decades now), but rather was a classic investor's pyramid scheme -- It could have easily have been marbles or George Foreman Grills that got the markets fired up and we'd have the "Grill Heavy Nasdaq Composite". As far as hindsight, there were many people clanging the bells of doom for the ridiculous overvaluations back in 1998, but to many investors they were just trying to rain on their parade so they were ignored.
Tech spending is basically the gross sales of the major technology companies: It has actually been edging UPWARDS year over year. Never confuse the stock markets with reality, because they often are quite disassociated.
How to spell "segue" (Score:2)
Re:Progress marches on... slowly...like evolution (Score:3, Interesting)
Yeah, entering the field in 1996, ridden the boom, surviving the bust (amazingly, to me, with a stable and slightly rising salary), I wonder what "normal" should be thought of as.
But it is interesting to see how the evolution of technology is close to the current theories about evolutionary biology (something I know only a little about) in that there are incremental changes and modifications over long periods, interrupted by sudden large changes.
Ehh, because I'm such a Dennett fanboy (and love his book, Darwin's Dangerous Idea), I guess I agree with his view that the neodarwinian "puncuated equilibrium" is mostly a mismeasuring of the historical record.
In general, though, there really hasn't been many qualitative changes in my online life for a number of years now. I'm programming in J2EE that got started in 2000, use a PDA 80% identical to the one I got in 1997, connecting to the internet at the same cable modem speeds as I was in 1998, using a desktop OS whose UI at least was 90% established in 1995...and don't even get me started on how old the essential principle of Unix is...
Re:Progress marches on... slowly...like evolution (Score:2)
I am troubled by the idea that the punctuated variety should immediately be more successful in the home range of the species. That seems unlikely. Rather I would expect that either the variant would make survival more likely under a new environmental stress (though AIDS doesn't seem to have turned up any examples in a rather large population. Only gradulism has been reported.), or that it would allow the species to take advantage of a new environment. The first feathers probably allowed their possessors to survive in colder climates than their un-altered relatives, but we have no way to tell that this was punctuated rather than gradual.
There's the other problem: How does one distinguish between punctuated equilibrium and gradualism? S.J.Gould emphasised repeatedly that he was talking about changes that took place in "only a few thousand years". He wasn't talking about only one generation. So
Re:Progress marches on... slowly...like evolution (Score:2)
I think that's one of Dennett's centeral points, that it is a better of perspective and scale.
I know it's a bit of a cop out to make an assertation and then say "but I'm really not equipped to argue this" and go on my merry way but...I've read Dennett's points, couched in opposition to Gould, and it seemed pretty convincing, but I haven't really read a good debate where both sides go at it. And I think it is a somewhat academic debate (and of course, always runs the risks of some creationist pointing to honest intellectual disagreement within a certain framework (i.e. that evolution has been the source of biological diversity) as evidence that "even the scientists can't agree on what they're talking about!")
And like I said, I'm a big Dennett fan boy. Darwin's Dangerous Idea was incredibly exhilarating for such an academic book, and Conciousness Explained is about the best non-fiction book I've ever read.
Re:Progress marches on... slowly...like evolution (Score:2)
With this broad a sweep of coverage, it naturally comes in several different forms. The evolution of sub-atomic particles is nearly worked out, and relates to stability of each state and what preturbs it. (It's a part of the Standard Model, and will probably survive even it the Standard Model is replaced.) Biology is more complex, and less finely detailed. We are still uncovering surprises here. At the level of social interactions we only have a rough sketch. What makes a state stable? What perturbs it? Is it lawful, chaotic, or random (and under what conditions)? etc. But the broad similarities to the other forms of evolution strongly suggest that it is a real member of the grouping, just a bit to complicated to deal with. Moving up, galaxies also evolve. This has to do mainly with Newtonian gravity and orbital mechanics. In this area the only thing that Evolution theory adds is a quicker ability to recognize repeating patterns, since the entire thing is quite deterministic.
Probably general evolution is a consequence of entropy, but one would, of course, need a few more features before it could apply. Distinguishable members with different degrees of stability under differing circumstances is probably the minimum. (This is my idea
Cost of living is still too high (Score:5, Insightful)
Re:Cost of living is still too high (Score:1, Insightful)
Re:Cost of living is still too high (Score:3, Funny)
I'll bet you just couldn't make the payments on your $24M two-bedroom home.
Affordable to whom? (Score:3, Interesting)
View (Los Altos, Palo Alto, etc) house cash
exceeds the number of houses on the market.
The semi-retired gentry likes the lifestyle
of the area, and 30 years of tech success
has produced a lot of gentry. And in many
many cases, these folks can design prototypes
with their own hands, and think its fun to
do so. I don't think a comeback hinges on
re-locates -- it hinges on lifers.
Does Silicon Valley Matter Anymore? (Score:4, Insightful)
Re:Does Silicon Valley Matter Anymore? (Score:2, Insightful)
second in terms of human evolution.
Our brains are not adapted to feel comfortable
with ongoing interactions with disembodied entities
where the stakes are serious.
Whether it is a potential spouse, business partner
or whatever, you ain't gonna trust someone you
can't see.
Tech Valley is alive and well (Score:5, Insightful)
When I first became interested in Silicon Valley was back in 1980 - back when the valley was a syntonym for technical innovation, the idea was
1). go to the valley
2). make an innovative product
3). Sell product to VC for millions
4). Start all over again.
But the principle here is that it was driven by technical innovation - and turning this innovation to product. Heck, my idea, which was revolutionary 23 years ago was the idea of creating a color lcd TV (Hey, don't laugh, back then, we only had black on silver lcd's, and they bled if you touched them).
But once the internet took off and became what it is today (which was helped by some the valley innovation), people started to look at the valley differently. First - way too many people saw the valley as only internet and computer technology. Second - they viewed running a web site as technology. Having a bunch of dot com startups all based on running web sites and services is not technologically innovative. Third - people fell into the falacy that because there are millions of computer users/internet users, that if they could create something and sell it to 1% of that market, they would make millions.
At this point, it was not about technical innovation or creating interesting and useful products, but it because how fast can we whip something together. It is easy to see why so many dot coms failed. What is really surprising is that so many VC's fell for the trick.
The 'natives' of the valley are still doing the same thing that they have done for years - innovative research and product development. And the products that are eventually produced from this research will be revolutionary. The biotech and nanotech products that people are working on will be revolutionary.
But all of those pretenders that jumped on the internet bandwagon AFTER the techology was already out and in use were just the pretenders that never belonged their in the first place.
Now that they are gone (well, most of them at least), the valley will continue to do what it has done for decades.
Sure, just keep saying, "It'll all get better." (Score:2, Insightful)
I'm graduating with a BS in CS next year, you think I'm all that optimistic?
Data mining? IT recovery? (Score:4, Insightful)
Data mining concerns me to no end because it's designing an industry around invasion of privacy. If ever there were a volatile industry, that's it.
Now, even if the above were to cause more IT/IS people to regain employment, re-employing yourself back into a volatile position is barely an improvement, the part that improves is that you get a paycheck for a while.
I count myself lucky, as I had family cross-country, and I was able to find a job near them and just dropped everything and moved to get a job. I feel for those who have not been so lucky, and if anything will incur my wrathe it is those breeding hopes based on things that are not stable.
Re:Data mining? IT recovery? (Score:2, Insightful)
we just went through a bubble.... (Score:5, Insightful)
Folks, Silicon Valley will not return to what it was. In terms of real purchasing power, salaries will not return to what they were in your working lifetimes, and maybe never. Tech is already suffering from a true Depression, and the rest of the economy is most likely headed there too. We had the biggest bubble in the history of mankind, and if past experience is a guide, we will go through the biggest bust in history as well.
The Fed has cut rates faster and farther than they ever have in their 90-year history. Money is flooding the system via easy credit and a bubble in mortgage finance. We are at 40-year lows in interest rates..... and STILL the economy is failing. States are in the worst fiscal crisis "since the Great Depression" (their words, not mine.) Layoffs are rampant, stores are closing, bankruptcies are steadily rising -- and that's BEFORE the spigot of much-too-easy credit is closed.
The Great Depression left deep scars in this country, and a profound fear of credit and debt. Unemployment rates were around 30%. Healthy, strong men were living in cardboard shacks in great numbers. (which were called Hoovervilles, as people blamed Hoover for the Depression. This wasn't even remotely the case; the Depression was caused by the vast excess and waste of the 20s, not the little bit of nothing that Hoover did.)
The bubble we had this time was far larger, and encompassed much more of the economy... in fact, it sucked the whole world in. Likely results of the ensuing bust left as an exercise for the reader. Hint: it's not going to be fun.
A final suggestion: "buy and hold" is a good recipe for going broke in this environment. Wall Street has indocrinated everyone about 'buy and hold', but remember that they are trying to sell you something. These were the clowns giving you $500 price targets on Amazon. Do you REALLY trust them to manage your retirement savings?
From 1930-1932, the Dow lost over 90% of its value. The Nikkei, from 1990 until now, has lost about 70%. This is not a good way to save for retirement.
War (Score:3, Insightful)
What saved us from the Great Depression?
World War.
The grim reality is that the World Wars are what turned the American economy around, and might I be so bold as to say that just about every time the US economy has struggled, it has been war that has turned it around.
That being said, thing long and hard about Bush's motivations re: Iraq.
I actually have no qualms with Bush's arguments. I hate sending people into harm's way, but better we lose some life taking nukes away from Saddam than losing many thousands getting nuked.
But I would be hard pressed to say that the economy isn't a motivator either. Bush Sr. started the recovery from the last recession by starting the Gulf War.
Just a lone opinion.
Re:War (Score:5, Insightful)
Huh? Let me explain: economies gain strength in recessions and in depressions, though a deep enough depression can do true and long-lasting damage. The reason they gain strength is because waste is eliminated. As companies struggle to survive, they become very efficient.
The big problem is that it's hard to convince people to start spending money again after they've been saving so hard for so long. Our economy was extremely efficient by 1939, but we weren't spending money yet, so we didn't really realize it. Along came the war, and afterward, boom.... things took off like a rocket.
But note that the value of the dollar dropped by about half during the war, and that about 40% of the total economic output of the WHOLE COUNTRY was devoted to war production. People who had saved a lot of dollars prior to 1939 probably weren't too happy about their savings, after.
Right now the economy is terribly sick, from unrelenting dollar injection from Sir Prints-A-Lot (Greenspan), the bubble, and then desperate attempts by the Fed to prop up the bubble. This has caused huge distortions in the economy, moving wealth into 'sexy' projects like telecoms and dotcoms (where it was wasted and destroyed), and pulling it away from places where it was actually needed (like powerplants and oil exploration), to use two simple and obvious examples.
If we get into a war now, it might have some temporary effect, but it would be more propping-up. It will just make the problem WORSE, not better. We might feel better for a year or two, but ultimately the liquidity injections caused by the borrowing for a war are just another form of the liquidity injections by Greenspan at every crisis point over the last 12-13 years. It would be more of the same stuff that's making us sick -- prescribing more booze for the alchoholic. The alchoholic may feel great for awhile, but he/she will be sicker than ever shortly.
In any case, the effects of the Iraq war aren't likely to be profound, positive OR negative. Keep in mind that current expense projections are at about 0.1% of the GDP.... ie, pretty much a non-event. We might get a sense of euphoria if we beat them easily, and if we see ensuing cheap oil that WOULD be good for the economy -- but things are so badly damaged that cheap oil alone won't make that much of a difference, and euphoria can only last so long.
Re:War (Score:2, Interesting)
This war may be the galvinization that the people of Europe need to elect representatives that will agree with their constituents and not give the U.S. everything it wants. It could have a huge negative impact in the long run. Obviously this is speculation right now, but with the way that the world has reacted to Bush thus far, it may not be that far off. Perhaps the rest of the world put up with Regan and his policies which were very similar was becasue of the balance of power between the U.S.S.R. and the U.S. at the time.
Yep (Score:2)
Europe isn't going to give a shit when America wants Europe to open up its agricultural markets in the next WTO round. That'll cost US farmers plenty. For example.
Printing More Money (Score:2, Interesting)
What is wrong with printing more money? Let's look at 3 potential problems:
1. Inflation, which does not (yet) seem to be an issue here.
2. People put it under their matress instead of spending it. But with America's credit-card fast-draw ways, this does not look likely either. How many women do you know who can look at a pile of cash and not have an itching to spend it?
3. Falling value of dollar compared to other currencies. This makes exports cheaper (and Indian outsourcing more expensive.)
So far it looks like cranking out more greenbacks is a good move.
Re:War (Score:1)
I am not convinced that this was will help out the economy at all. In fact I'm so cynical that the only sector I think it will help will be the defense contractors. That won't be good enough to turn around consumer confidence and the like.
Re:War (Score:5, Interesting)
1) Bush continues buildup.
2) Bush does quick + fairly clean war. A few Americans die. Iraq is offically 'cleaned up'.
3) Bush rises in polls. The (US, short-term) economy recovers on the positive effects of the war. (Long term world economy predictions are nebulous.)
4) Bush is voted to another term.
5) Midway through next term, Bush proposes war against another country.
6) World condems attack. World pressures said country into capitulation.
7) Bush goes with world opinion and is praised for peaceful solution to problem.
8) Bush exists office, hailed as great leader in both times of war and peace.
9) Everybody else is pissed.
-Brett
Something about not learning from history... (Score:1)
oops on the history (Score:4, Interesting)
the depression was a result of a few things that date back to WWI. in th teens, with europe at war and no end in sight, wilson and especially the banks encouraged farmers borrow, borrow, borrow, and grow, grow, grow, since WWI was being fought on french farmlands. well, great idea. except, it takes about 2-3 years for the farmers to realize return and so by 1917, US enters the war, and within a year, it is over. (great move wooodrow. sorry, my $.02) so...farmers go bust. banks begin to feel the heat. large migration into the cities, where farmers are now competing with immigrants which drives down wages, etc. industry is doing well, but like today, it was built upon a bubble. so about late 20's, it begins to slip. germany can no longer pay its reparations to france and britain, who can no longer repay their loans to US banks. we decide to pass hawley-smoot tariff, and close off foreign trade. which causes huge banking losses. so...
the stock market was built on a bubble, like today. the collateral for a stock was the stock itself, and the holders had margins of like 10%. so, when the banks called their loans, and the stock was almost valueless, the banks began to fold. as banks began to fold, the stocks nosdived. and thus, october 29, the crash. (which btw, was not as big as the 1987 crash). since the economy was mostly cash based, the banks were way short cash, thus they close. now the good part...
the fed chairman, ben strong, was a student of marshallian economics. big time monetarist. so, there's a formula called the quantity theory of money, or MV=PQ.
#include <econ101.h>
basically, the quantity of money is supposed to be some proportion of the GDP. as GDP fell, ben strong "rightly" shrunk the money supply. then GDP fell, then strong shrunk money, etc., etc., etc. by 1932, the quantity of money was 2/3 of what it had been in 1929. thus, the severity of the depression. that is why some republicans, like jack kemp, have deep seated fears and distrust of the fed. also some democrats, since both see the power over the economy money has. long enough lecture.
Re:oops on the history (Score:2, Interesting)
During the 1940s and 1950s, economists were worried about the money supply, which had grown only 18% for the entire two decades, while GNP (it's GDP now, but it was GNP then) had grown something like 65% over the same period. They were worried that there 'wasn't enough money', but the economy seemed to be doing just fine anyway.
In 2001, the Fed grew the money aggregates by about 18%. (Which by any historical standard is INSANE -- this is crazy! they did in ONE YEAR what it took TWO DECADES to do back in the first half of the 20th century.) They grew money supply by, um, 8 or 10% last year (I forget right now, I'd have to look it up to be sure), and this year they're running at about a 12% rate.
But things are still going down, and in fact they've really set off the mortgage finance bubble by doing this. It's obvious that they learned the particular lessons that you describe, but it also appears very likely that these lessons are wrong.
If just printing money led to prosperity, the banana republics would own the world. Money and wealth are different. Money is a scorekeeper used to track real wealth. If the money supply contracts somewhat, that won't cause severe problems in a healthy economy; there are ways of adjusting. It might cause a little pain short-term, but long-term it's no big deal.
And the biggest reason the money supply shrank so much in the 1930s was because of debt defaults, not the Fed. If I owe you $50, and I have your $50, then we BOTH think we have the same $50, and we both carry it on our books. If I then default on my loan to you, $50 is destroyed. A small deflation can trigger a series of debt defaults, which makes the deflation worse (destroys more money), which triggers more defaults, and so on.
The Fed at the time was TRYING to grow the money supply but couldn't... because the Fed lends money into the market, it is dependent on finding a willing borrower to take it. In the absence of willing borrowers, the Fed can't do much. This is where the 'pushing on a string' observation from the 1930s came from.
The road to World War III? (Score:2)
If that is the case will Malthus' dire predictions come true, where World War III (this time with nuclear weapons) will likely reduce the human population by 30% or more?
Oh, you nattering nabob of negatism, you! (Score:3, Interesting)
I dont think so.
One thing that has always set this country apart from others, is that when we needed an idea; be it war, or a new gadget that spawned an industry; we got one. I believe that will happen again. No one in America should doubt that we will return from the brink once again.
Debt itself is NOT a bad thing, there is good debt and bad dept. Bad debt is what most Americans have because they cant stand not having the biggest SUV on the block, whether they can afford it or not. Sooner or later, someone (or some hundreds of folks) will go into debt to finance a good idea, which will bring us right back into solvency.
I am doing all I can to stay in debt, buying up all the cheap real-estate I can find, and renting it out at confiscatory prices. Good economy or bad, people will always need a place to live. Buy and Hold is not a bad idea; it just depends on what you are buying and holding.
Re:we just went through a bubble.... (Score:2)
The Dow has never lost value over any 20 year period. Ever. Short of bonds, it's just about the safest long-term investment you can get.
Bushvilles (Score:4, Funny)
New start-up idea. Sell boxes to all the umemployed techies in Silicon Valley: Bushvilles. They only need to have one perk: Net access.
depressing just as much as inspiring (Score:4, Insightful)
It's like no mention of the abuse potential here. I don't think that should be ignored, we have as humans ignored that in the past, to continue to do so will most likely result in planetary suicide. It's a variant of the short term profits mentality.
This could just as well been in the "how to make science reading more enjoyable" thread. It's a great example of something "close" but no seegar. I would have liked this article better if it was balanced better, show what is promising and the relative merits of it, as opposed to the obvious dangers of developing it without having a grasp of modern social paradigms and realities.
I think humanity needs a bitter reality pill-our hard science is advanced,and advancing much faster than anything else,but our social science is woefully inadequate to use our hard science advancements without abusing it. this isn't a theoretical world, nothing is pure science, you have to always consider the implications of what you are doing. It's like driving a car, really, a simple analogy. You can build a car that goes 200mph, but without some societal norms and without at least a minimum set of rules that are easy to see make some "common sense"and that are followed by most people, the potential for abuse would make universal adoption of the 200mph car a disaster on the roads we have and with the people we have now.
I guess I am a moderate, neither a luddite nor a "build all we can now, now, NOW!" kinda guy.
Hope this makes some sort of sense. When I first read 1984 it seemed farfetched to me, today, all I have to do is go to any large city and it's close, real close. I look at the headlines, the "robotization" of warfare, the reduction of humans to "collateral damage", the impersonality and reduction of the value of LIFE itself to just another commodity, well, it's scary. Then I read an article like this, and I think "heck, we are a year or two away from it being totally "1984" except with a turbocharger and on steroids.
Can we deal with as humans? No idea, I have serious doubts at this time though.
Re:depressing just as much as inspiring (Score:3, Insightful)
I agree with him to an extent, and it's the perogative of each and every researcher to decide what projects he or she wants to work on. For instance, I worked one summer at Raytheon [raytheon.com]. After the summer, I reflected on the work I was doing and decided that it didn't make me feel good knowing that my work would go towards the destruction of human life. I thought "If I agreed with each and every action that my governement undertakes while using this component, then I would have no problem creating it. But if I cannot make this claim, then I don't think I should use my abilities to create destruction." So that ended my work for defense contractors, and this was in 1999 mind you, before the current geopolitical situation.
Anyway, what I'm trying to say is that it's truly up to each and every one of us to decide how technology will be applied. We elect the officials (kinda, I suppose) and we can change things if we want to. We just have to have the WILL to act, and not stand by while other interests create a society that we disagree with.
Re:depressing just as much as inspiring (Score:2)
Well, there are non-dark uses for these technologies also. The UC Berkeley physical plant enginners are using smart dust technology to automate large parts of their electcial grid [berkeley.edu]. I'm friends with one of the head engineers there, and he's estactic by the amount of work saved by these things. Tasks that used to take hours can now take minutes.
Here's one example:
Durng a power outage, for example, engineers can pull up the campus's power grid on one of six computer monitors at the control center, zoom in on the problem area, then click on it to view the electrical drawings for that spot. Using this information, field crews can reroute electricity and restore power -- in some cases remotely -- within minutes. In the past, Trent said, restoring power often took several hours.
Re:depressing just as much as inspiring (Score:2)
Our society hasn't kept up socially, it's IMPOSSIBLE to do so. we still have the same exact ratiosof good people and bad people, the same amount of wars, etc, the same autocracy pushes that we had back in steam engine and pre steam engine days. We can't afford to ignore this and just say 'oh well, we have always dealt with it". We can't. The technology now , once it gets used for abusive purposes, literally can make one person equal to an army of the past. And nothing else has changed for the better, it's the same on the social human front. Every single advance in technology always has gotten used in BOTH general warfare, and in governmental warfare on it;'s own citizens. it's always happened in the past, and there isn't a single human can guarantee it WON'T happen in the future, and odds of it not happening are abysmally low.
So your smart dust will control the grid! Swell! Slick, sounds good! That also means some dictator or black faction could cause an 'accident" and maybe shut OFF power more effectively. Maybe even frame a class of people into showing who "did it". They can now morph videos where it's almost impossible to tell reality from fantasy, a la "the running man" faked videos. They can create digital records, change exisiting ones, etc, basically "prove" almost anything they want to. They are already doing it on the TV, and getting completely away with it, they are injecting fake backgrounds that are so realistic that the average viewer doesn't know he's looking at a talking tv newshead in a studio, they are seeing the news guy standing in front of a building or whatever they want him to see. That's some SCARY stuff if you think how mass propaganda efforts could use that technology. See the abuse potential? And it's happened in the past,it'shappening now, so it will keep happening, there's the rub. It just will get to be "better quality" abuse. More efficient wars. Faster/better psyops. Overclocked "command and control".
I know you can see where I am going with this. In steam engine days it was harder to "command and control" populations, they didn't have bugs, wiretaps, tracking technologies, death from the air directed from thousands of miles away via a console, things of that nature, BUT, we still got the same humans. They managed it then, but now, they can do it on unimaginable scales, and with sophistication into the "gee whizz" category levels..
Michi Kaku the futurist and physicist states this as well. He ranks theoretical global civilizations on a 0 to whatever scale, 0 is were we are now, 1 is controlling the planets weather and limited space travel locally, etc, all the way to a Q god like powers. His opinion, and I agree, that the odds of any civilization getting from a type 0 to even a type 1 are 99 to 1 against it, from misuse of technology. In his case he thinks it will be misuse of uranium, basically burning the planet up and poisoning it. I tend to think misuse of bioengineering from some really stupid "bug" that wasn't thought about and some bioengineered thing gets released and borks the global food systems, or actual bioengineered warfare biologicals released on purpose, but, that point is moot. They already borked a few, like the superweed canola and starlink corn, but that isn't stopping them from saying "whoops, well, we'll try it again". One of these days that whoops is REALLY gonna suck. and they ARE gonna keep whoopsing. guar-an-teed. that's what humans do. We build, we screw up, sometimes it works, sometimes it don't, sometimes it works just too well.
I just am resigned to believing it is going to happen, we'll have some amazingly good tech, humans will benefit from it, but the big dog global megalomaniacs and your combo of garden variety sins of greed and whatnot will order it's misuse, and seeing that humans will more just do their job and take and follow those orders and cash the check, I think it will happen. I mean, it already IS happening, so I see no reason to think it'll stop happening, so just run a normal extrapolation curve on it. Apply moore's law as a general indicator, how long before it gets bad, when some war gets out of control? Especially with the dwindling oil sources and fresh water sources and religious and social strife and the state of the world's economy right now?
Just something to think about, technology is always BOTH useful and harmful. Once the potential for harm crosses some threshold into being regional and global in size and has the ability to get their quickly, which it has arrived at now, then it's only a matter of when and not if it will occur. And I don't think it will be like a "commfortable" 50 years in the futre, nope, I am more thinking by around 2010 to 2015 things could be *quite ugly* on this old green and blue ball.
That's not a lot of time for everyone to evolve into universally "nice guys". Even the 50 years isn't enough.
I know this is termed a "calvinistic" outlook, but I really don't see another description that fits the mass human psyche as well. Humans are agressive, predatory, and perfectly willing to fight to even insane suicidal levels. So, look at the tech available now, project a few years hence, look around at what's generally going on in this old whirrled,then just think about it.
I never really addressed silicon valley. They are making a big mistake, same one they just came out of. The internet dot com bubble came about from greed and stupidity, but they are desparetly looking for the next bubble so they can go back to the good old days of cash as easy to get as it was, inssane amounts. That greed mindset combined with advanced tech we have now but lack of forethought with the tech advances coming real soon in the future might cause a tad more than just another economic bubble. I hope it don't, but really..... they ain't changed, have they? That "mindset"? So? Have governments changed? Are people less greedy, less stupid, less inclined to blame others, less inclined to be abusive? Nope, it's still the same humans.
I know what the missing part in the article is.. (Score:2, Funny)
Re:I know what the missing part in the article is. (Score:3, Funny)
Way too Bloated just like Boston Tech became. (Score:3, Insightful)
I think some lean, smart and hungry types will burst ahead - but it will not be in the Valley. Hopefully it will be in the USA but it could very well be in India or China next.
Who are they kidding? Themselves? (Score:2, Interesting)
The countries with the most lax labor laws (short of allowing child or prison labor, and I am not even too sure of that) will get all the new jobs, in the near future.
As for those just getting in, there are NO more entry level jobs in the tech sector. Heck, there are no more entry level jobs anywhere except in fast food restaurants.
The party's over.
This ain't flamebait, moderators (Score:1, Flamebait)
Nanotech and the CIA based security jobs that are cropping up in silicon valley now, are not the kind of industries where you can get into unless you have a lot of experience (and security clearance, in some cases). And nanotech research and/or development can easily be farmed out to countries where wages are low, and labor laws are lax.
I'd welcome anyone who disagrees, to put up their own points.
Re:Who are they kidding? Themselves? (Score:2)
It's tough here (Score:2, Interesting)
That said, I don't see the long term prospects here as being very good. It's too much of a pressure cooker.
Oh, who cares (Score:1, Redundant)
Re:Oh, who cares (Score:2)
Take your skills to another region where things may not be so tech-heavy but your skills will be even more valued when there is an opportunity.
Why should we give a shit? (Score:5, Insightful)
You want chip specs? You download them as .PDFs whether the company is in Sunnyvale or Moscow. You need to ask a development engineer something? You email or phone her whether she's in Santa Clara or Austin, TX. You want programmers? Start here or anywhere.
You want industrial capability near a major university campuses? Lots of that going around these days.
What's left in the Valley for us other than overcrowding and expensive real estate? A chance to hang with over-the-hill high-tech zillionaires? A chance to see industrial parks that look like ghost towns? (no URL, this is based on a friend's e-mail from 2 days ago) All I can really think of is tradition, and that's not something that will help anyone crank out code or improve ROI.
It has some cool high-tech museums. Perhaps the whole area should be declared a "historical monument" to make it official that progress will be coming from somewhere else from now on.
The place for a startup (unless you really are doing nanotech, in which case, why are you here?) is where there's cheap high-quality bandwidth available. The way that gets delivered these days is via CitiLEC... the window on this was closed by the state legislature in exchange for campaign cash from cable companies and telcos, the local power company had their chance to do it themselves and blew it. If I wanted to do a startup in California, I'd look at the City of Alameda (next to Berkeley and across from SF), whose muni power company has rolled out fiber to the home/business... or even the part of LA served by Los Angeles Water and Power.
I'm an ex-resident, I left after the high-tech boom led by the Commie 64 and Apple II... and I can't think of any reason why I'd ever start a company there.
Re:Why should we give a shit? (Score:2)
Re:Why should we give a shit? (Score:2)
If I wanted to do a startup in California, I'd look at the City of Alameda (next to Berkeley and across from SF), whose muni power company has rolled out fiber to the home/business
I definitely agree. I think Oakland and Alameda are ripe "revitalization" over the next decade (these things take time). Close to the Valley and the City (SF), close the Port, housing available in your choice of cheap or expensive neighbourhoods, lots of empty office space. My girlfriend works in Oakland. The five-story office building she works in was sold by the city to a contractor for $1, if they promised to renovate it!
Re:Why should we give a shit? (Score:2)
For an explanation of why, read the The Social Life of Information [amazon.com].
You want other reasons why the internet is not a substitue for proximity? Read the Speech Communication research into the effectiviness of e-mail and telephone compared to face to face communication.
Proximity has definitely not become less relevant.
After the Civil War... (Score:2)
There are industries that need a defined infrastructure. Biotech has a pretty specific set of needs. Locating among other biotech companies makes sense.
Most electronic / computer / software situations need good, cheap bandwidth and hardware you can buy off the shelf or can order conveniently from anywhere in the industrialized world.
Where are the Underpants Gnome references? (Score:2)
Re:Where are the Underpants Gnome references? (Score:2)
Before you get to Step 3... (Score:4, Insightful)
How about all of these tech companies consider kissing the "Silicon Valley" goodbye by moving out of California? I don't understand why on earth these corporations, much less the citizens, put up with the excessive taxes in CA. These companies have lost their shirt, and now have a chance to start over. Why not start over in a location where your company has the opportunity to cut their costs?
Re:Before you get to Step 3... (Score:3)
As a young guy trying to make it here, there is definitely a sense a schadenfreude in seeing the super-rich commercial property owners getting the tables turned after gouging every business in the valley. But I'm still burning $1500/mo here for a small 2br appartment. A 30% dip in housing prices would go a long way towards putting things back into balance, but I'm afraid it's not going to happen.
Tpropety owners here are just absurdly well-off. Generally, the guys who own all the commercial space can easily afford to just leave it vacant for another five years if they have to.
I moved to Owl's Head, Maine (Score:3, Insightful)
When I moved to Newfoundland in the spring of 2000 to get married to my Canadian wife, I was paying $1275 a month to live in a 2 bedroom house with a one car garage and a tiny front yard. It was half of a duplex.
I'd lived in Santa Cruz for fifteen years, but I didn't plan to return because the place had got so crowded. I could afford the rent at the time, but what really got me down was that it would take over an hour to drive across town between 3 and 6 in the afternoon. Coming home after work on highway 17 from the valley was maddening - and the main reason I became a consultant, so I could work out of my home.
After our wedding, we decided it would be best to be back in the US but Bonita wanted to live near her friends and family. We decided to buy a house in Maine.
Neither of us had ever been to Maine before we came house hunting. We picked the mid-coast Rockland area out of a tourist handbook.
We ended up with a four bedroom house with an oversized 2 car garage (it has 3 small rooms to the side) on nearly 2 acres of wooded land.
And how much does it cost me? Prepare to puke. The mortgage is $799 a month.
I think the loan officer was a little taken aback at this dot-commer from california coming and wanting a loan to buy what is a pretty upscale house for the area. But from my point of view, it was dirt cheap.
Things got a lot harder for us after the collapse. Many times we've wondered whether we did the right thing to buy a house, and to be away from Silicon Valley.
But only one of my clients have been from the valley since the collapse, and I have saved enough money from what I used to pay in rent on my old squalid hut to pay back the thousands of dollars that it cost to get a moving company to bring our stuff here. (We had it all in storage while we were living in newfoundland.)
I do OK because I work as a consultant for remote clients. There's not a lot of software here, mostly big-company IT stuff. There are a couple of chip plants in South Portland (Fairchild and National Semiconductor.)
I recently had a job interview where I would have had to move back to California. I'd been thinking of giving up consulting.
Before the interview I used a spreadsheet to calculate the salary I would ask for, adjusting the money I made last year upwards to account for the higher housing prices in the Bay Area.
When we discussed the salary, I explained that my request was based on the higher housing prices out there, and I told my interviewers what I paid for a mortgage out here. I planned to rent a considerably more modest place if I took the job.
They were pretty taken aback when I gave them the number. They said it was far more than they could pay, and that they had lots of candidates who would work for much less.
So I guess I'm going to continue being a consultant from Maine.
I feel really bad for everyone who's stuck in the Bay Area still paying those exhorbitant housing prices. Being out of work with a $2k/month rent bill just has to suck.
I probably wouldn't have made it through the last couple years if I hadn't moved to Maine.
One problem with Maine though (Score:2)
I have a choice of two bookstores with a decent technical selection, Barnes & Noble in Augusta, 40 minutes away, or Borders in Portland, 2 hours away.
There would be more to do if I lived near one of the cities (there's also Bangor, where Steven King lives) but in Portland at least the housing is much more expensive.
There are a couple nice cafes in Rockland where you can get espresso and stuff. The owner of The Second Read actually graduated from UC Santa Cruz back in the 60's. But The Second Read closes at 5:30 pm. When we asked why they don't stay open later they told us it's because they can't get anyone to work in the evenings.
But you know I'm this california hacker guy. Sometimes when the second read opens at 7 am I come in for a coffee, not because I'm up early but because I'm still up from hacking all night or hanging out /. and k5.
All the good Mainers are up at dawn. My neighbors go to bed at 9 pm.
I think many of the folks stuck in Silicon Valley would get along better economically if they moved elsewhere. But wherever you go, it's not as likely to be such an interesting place.
I long for the days when I used to browse in the Computer Literacy Bookstore and hang out with my friends in all the cafes on Santa Cruz' Pacific Garden Mall.
The other problem is that it's colder than a witch's tit during the winter. This winter has been particularly bad. Money's been tight and heating oil is expensive, so we haven't been able to keep the house as warm as we like.
The icing on the cake is that it's hotter than Hades during the summer. It's just not right after these cold winters. Bonita can hardly stand it. One reason I was looking at moving to California is that I wanted to go back to the mild climate.
Re:Before you get to Step 3... (Score:2)
Re:Before you get to Step 3... (Score:2)
I'm not sure California has really had all that much an impact in that regard... sure it has a lot of nice scenery, but so do a lot of places really. I live in Colorado and between Colorado and Utah, the only thing about California that even makes me visit California is the weather - and even then Colorado comes off pretty well by comparison.
Lots of places around the US do a decent job at protecting the environment and making sure a lot of open space stays open. I don't think what Californians get for the money they spend is really all that worthwhile, plus of course all of the beautiful scenery and nice houses is going to get rearranged at some point by a really nasty quake. I'm not sure why more people don't think about geological stability more in choosing a place to settle down...
Ok, we strike back (Score:3, Funny)
We will strike back. Next week "SF Chronicle" will examine Hollywood!
Re:Ok, we strike back (Score:2, Offtopic)
The only problem I have with the Times is sometimes they focus too much on Hollywood and never really examine it with an objective eye. Oh and they don't really give much voice to the people who are for fair use instead of siding with the media content producers, but that goes along with my other point. Other than that it's great!
Wrong new technologies (Score:5, Interesting)
First, printable electronics. The only real application is displays. Eventually, somebody will figure out how to make big, cheap displays. But they won't be manufactured in Silicon Valley. Existing displays aren't.
"Smart thermostat chips"? Those have been around for years. [maxim-ic.com] The going price is 99 cents. So has zoned HVAC. [smarthomeusa.com] The sensors are a small part of the cost; it's all those motorized dampers that get you. There are lots of neat sensor chips around, but it's a niche market.
Biotech isn't a big employer, although it can generate big profits.
Data mining. Been there, done that. More to the point, so has Wal-Mart, and they don't need that much hardware to do it. Most applications talked about are either Big Brotherish or spam-oriented. If you want statistical data, you sample; you don't need to crunch on huge volumes of data.
True nanotechnology a la Drexler is still a long way off.
But there's other stuff coming along. Vision processing that works. Automatic driving. Monitoring for the elderly. Ranging imagers.
There's also stuff that ought to work by now, but doesn't. Voice synthesis that sounds human. Systems that can talk on the phone without acting menu-oriented. Bright, cheap TV projectors. Computers that never crash. Safe third-rail systems for trains. Something with no moving parts to replace hard drives. Fuel cells. Cheap dimmable glass. All those need to be done.
I live in Silicon Valley, and I don't see a turnaround in the next few years. It's entirely possible that there won't be one. Remember , Pittsburgh, or Cleveland. None of them ever came all the way back. All three cities are smaller today than they were thirty years ago. The latter two are nicer, since the steel mills moved out, but fewer people live there. [detroityes.com]
The Valley is a Harsh Mistress (Score:3, Interesting)
I wrote it in late October 2000, as the meltdown had already begun to happen but before I had become fully aware of it. I came to a deep understanding of the depth of trouble we were all in when I was out of work the following month, and passed the time by emailing a few thousand resumes without getting any response.
Silicon Valley is thriving..it just moved overseas (Score:3, Insightful)
After all the CEO's do the real work and we should be on our knees and begging for forgiveness to live in poverty like our fellow Indians. Microsoft and Sun are laying off programmers left and right and replacing them with cheap Indians working for less then minimal wage. Even Chinese programmers are viewed as too expensive and its getting rediculous.
Remains to be seen if that is a fad. (Score:2)
Someday, when companies wake up and realize small, focused, skilled teams of three to four people could literally replace a hundred workers with no loss in output quality or quantity (I take that back, big jump in quality), then you might see some of those overseas jobs diminish. There would also be fewer jobs here but more people would really be computer scientists in the true sense than carnival plate-spinners the way it is now.
The biggest gain I think they get by going overseas is stripping away the layers of political BS that keep IT people from actually producing the software the business side of companies so desperately needs.
3rd world countries more loyal to citizens (Score:2, Informative)
Actually, that is true for immigration in general. I would like to take my saving in about 2-5 years from now, put it in the bank to draw interest, and go move to rural Latin America where the rents are super-cheap.
But it is pretty hard to do that.
Silicon Valley ghost town (Score:2, Interesting)
valley. On my commute to work ( 101 is a breeze
now), I see rows of empty buildings. The place is
becoming a ghost town. Housing is still $$$ but
it is a renters market. I have a friend who owns
a restaurant and his business is down 25%. I have
heard that the new business to be in is repo-ing
luxury cars. No new jobs, lotsa people looking
for work, gas is over $2.30 for premium. The
state of CA is billions in debt. I just had my
first heart attack last week.
Land of the free - home of the brave.
Retirement is only 10 years away. It will be a
tough 10 years.
San Jose Mercury News published 4-part series (Score:2)
http://www.bayarea.com/mld/mercurynews/business/5
This was published on 2/9/2003.
It is interesting, as each part showed a different point of view from a person of a different age.
Re:To be fair, employers... (Score:3, Interesting)
Interview them, give them a chance to tell you what they actually did. Many of them actually worked for successful (*gasp*) dot-coms. Many were lowly entry-level employees who did what they were told and produced quality work within those constraints.
And as for CTOs of failed dot-coms, well those resumes you can probably safely through into trash. They deserve to be judged by the quality of their work.
Re:To be fair, employers... (Score:4, Interesting)
I would agree with you...but you are only half right. I was in the middle of everything from before the boom, and still in it.
I know a hell of a lot of engineers that worked their asses off during the bubble. What I saw more of, however, was a lot of barely-got-my-mba types who wanted to drive their Ferrari's and schmooze and didn't know whack about managing a company, or what a business plan was.
It was this class of individual that ruined the economy, not the engineers. So, I would agree with you that the execs should be put in the circular file, but there are still some solid engineers out there looking desperately for work that do have proven track records marred by the dot.com bubble.
I would be careful of putting yourself on such a high pedistal...are you sure that you didn't profit from the bubble too?
Re:To be fair, employers... (Score:2)
Maybe so, but the DOTCOM experience that an engineer may have had is IRRELEVANT. You see, it didn't matter if the work that was being done ever amounted to anything. Who knows if the engineering was sound? Nothing mattered.
Yes, I did well during the "bubble". But I wasn't part of the problem.
Re:To be fair, employers... (Score:2)
I wouldn't rate school experience as highly as real-world experience, but I wouldn't disregard it either.
But then, when you get a thousand resumes, you have to do something to cut down the numbers...
Re:To be fair, employers... (Score:2)
You really took that resume out of context. In fact, all of the bad things you say to look out for, this resume does not do. For instance:
- Hyper-inflated titles: I don't see anything wrong with the titles listed... in fact, they are rather mundane titles that most non-dotcom tech companies use. In addition, you added the title CTO to your example when it wasn't listed on the actual one.
- No college education listed: the actual resume lists his college education, majors, distinctions, and GPA... what more do you want?
- Vague descriptions of work: that's because you removed all of the specific descriptions in your example resume. This resume goes into quite a bit of detail and cites many specific numbers on what this guy contributed.
- Enumeration of skills isn't backed up by experience: again, that's because you removed all of the specific descriptions (and some of the other positions this guy had) in your example resume.
I realize you are trying to make a point, but if you're going to claim this is from an actual resume, then take it from an actual resume. Otherwise, this is just weakening your argument. I actually took you seriously for a bit until I found the actual resume.I'm not at all surprised. (Score:3, Insightful)
I blame this on a fairly stupid and extremely greedy general population. Greed drives them to forgo their intelligence in place of an easy dollar. Greed drives them to believe the lies of shady execs, who themselves are just smart enough to capitalize on others' ignorance. Greed leads them down the path to bankrupcy, all the while banking on some manipulative joker's get-rich-quick version of the American dream. By the time they get to the end, they're holding onto ten grand in credit card debt, a house, and a car payment, wondering why everything went wrong.
If you're one of those people, here's something to chew on: Sillicon valley went wrong because you never thought about what the hell you and your company were doing. You didn't really care if what you were doing was useful or could stick it out in the long-term. You had your dumb eyes on the IPO and it made you blind to the fact that you were living a lie. Do I feel bad for you now because you can't get a job? Hell no. You had no skills and and you had no good itentions, you just got lucky.
Instead of trying to get lucky again, why don't you actually get off your ass and do some real work?
Re:Silicon Detroit (Score:2)
What happened to blue collar labor in the US in the '70s and '80s will now happen to those smart, hard working, well-educated white collar boys (and girls).
It already has happened and is still happening.
Re:Silicon Detroit (Score:2)
India? Go Mad? Nah, this is the standard policy that the crackpots think the crackpots in charge would follow.
We'd look for an excuse to go to war with India--and if that didn't work, we'd engage them in harsh trade tactics until they change their mind.
Anyhow, Pakistan looks like they might do it first.