My reaction exactly. I read through the entire article (inexplicably) and I can't tell what it's trying to "say." What am I supposed to feel after reading this exposition?
I think it's supposed to be a satirical think-piece? The author is linked to The Bold Italic, the king of local pretension.
Something something something unexamined privilege, I rather suspect. It'd be funnier if the author wasn't trying to make some kind of political point muddled by half-baked humor.
Silicon Valley is famous for its navel-gazing. There's even a hit television show devoted to it. The privilege is well and rightfully examined. That's why, I think, this satire falls flat -- it doesn't say anything that isn't painfully obvious to anyone who has even a casual familiarity with the local culture, and even worse, it doesn't say the painfully obvious in any new way.
It doesn't 'bite' like the onion does, where it comes too close to reality for comfort. It's not zany and off-beat like a Mad Magazine bit. It's just... not that good.
Cut all the prices in half and replace startup stupidity with enterprises-trying-to-act-like-startups stupidity and you have most people's lives outside of Silicon Valley. Not to make it generational but this feels like how most people my age live anywhere.
Nannys? Going to fancy restaurants hoping to see venture capitalists?
Most people your age do not by any means conduct themselves like this, nor could they if they wanted to. Their "nanny" is their sister or mother or mother in law or a neighbor.
They don't go to a fancy restaurant because they don't have the money for both the fancy restaurant and a baby-sitter.
They're a two income-family forever, not until stock options vest and can be sold on secondary markets to speculators with easy capital.
This whole scenario is ridiculous and not at all representative of anything but a very small demographic. But I guess that's the Valley, at least to this outsider reading articles like this.
Let me put it this way: I have lived in Silicon Valley my entire life (and I'm not that young), and the only person I've ever met who was raised by a nanny was a rich kid who went to my high school. I've never met anyone who hired a nanny, except that kid's parents. But maybe that's because I don't live in Atherton.
And let me put it this way: Every working couple except for one that I know with a kid has hired a nanny for at least some portion of the time, including myself.
In the UK to be a nanny, childminder or work in a nursery you have specific regulation and qualification required. A babysitter requires nothing, it can and generally is some teenage kid.
The difference with all 3 is where the child go. Nursery has special dedicated facilities to take care of several children, number limited by the number of employee and size. A childminder will take care of 1 to 3 children in her own home. A nanny will come to your home and take care of 1 to 3 of your children.
All 3 are available in full-time ( i.e. working hour full time ) or part-time.
The movie type, stay at home Nannies are "Au Pair". Depending on the qualification ( from foreign student doing a bit of cleaning and getting the kid to and from school to fully qualified nanny ) the price varies enormously. Au Pair is not unusual, Au Pair Nannies is rich people stuff.
Again UK-specific: They only _need_ qualifications to register with OFSTED, and as a parent, it's up to you whether you require your childcare to be registered. If you leave your kids with a friend, for example, your friend doesn't need any kind of qualifications. However, you can only get Government subsidies (like child tax credits and childcare vouchers) for a registered childcare provider.
Technically, the requirements are a little stricter: "You must register with Ofsted or a childminder agency if you want to be paid to look after children under 8 for more than 2 hours a day in England"[1]
In the example of leaving your children with a friend, the exemption is for a maximum of 3 hours (per day), if the friend is being paid. Any longer and the friend is obliged to register with Ofsted (with a penalty of an unlimited fine and/or jail for not being registered).
I doubt many people would think to check the legal requirements though.
Here in Spain I know a family that hired a young girl "au pair" (in their case a Polish girl who wanted to learn Spanish). The father told me they paid her about 400 euros/month + food and accommodation, so it's not something prohibitively expensive.
To use your numbers, a person would have to make less than $11,000 a year for that salary to be half their income. I doubt there are many people reading this discussion in that income bracket.
There are many things in life that aren't feasible if you are at the poverty line: Apple laptops, electric vehicles, extended vacations, etc. I would argue that the only difference here is that many people are deeply uncomfortable with the idea of paying someone to take care of their children in the home.
I am living abroad, and I will let countrymen/women correct me, but in Portugal you can hardly aspire to earn more than 1500 euros before taxes, in the best companies.
Most of them pay less than that.
So a university degree will land you around 1000 euros, a bit more if you are doing lots of overtime.
Renting a flat will always be above 300 euros, or 500 in the biggest cities.
So unless one if living with a significant other, and reserve one salary for such expenses, they aren't possible at all.
In Spain the salary level on average is around 25% more than on Portugal, but given the actual situation the real numbers on the bank account aren't that much different.
And I am writing about people with degrees, let alone those that only learned their profession hands on the job.
"Au Pair" means "on par" meaning living as part of the family. As such, au pairs get house and board and a small amount of pocket money, but no salary as such. They also don't have clear-cut work duties, they help around a house, as a member of the family would be expected to do, cooking, cleaning, washing etc. As a parent, you're generally not supposed to leave the au pair in sole charge of the children for more than brief periods of time (as you would a babysitter). That's the general theory, of course, individual arrangements range widely.
A nanny is a professional employee of the family, generally has training and certification, has clear duties and makes an actual salary. An "au pair nanny" is an oxymoron, that would be a "live in nanny" and, yes, definitely rich people stuff. Au pairs are definitely possibilities for the middle class.
A nanny doesn't necessarily live with the family, but the 'primary care setting' (i.e. where they take care of the children most of the time) is the child's home. They can also be part-time.
The key difference is that a nanny is usually a formal salaried employee with regular contracted hours, whereas a babysitter is typically paid an hourly rate and is self-employed.
In the US in the 21st century vernacular (at least in NYC and Bay Area), nanny means child care provider with fairly regular hours, taking care of a smallish number of children (1-5ish).
The phrase "nanny share" is very commonly used. Sometimes the nanny is in their own home, sometimes in [one of] the parents' home.
Babysitter generally means someone who comes occasionally to watch a single family's children.
There are obviously fuzzy lines separating the two terms.
I'm raising a kid in SF. Many people have nannies. Go to any major playground in the city during the work day and you will see nannies. Sometimes on weekends too.
For the last decade since I moved here, my life in silicon valley was more like: wake up without an alarm, brew a cup of dragon well tea, walk my dog, hit my gym for slow and steady progress, check email for crises, deal with anything other people care about, maybe go to the office. Have some lunch, write code until I'm tired, then maybe make an effort to socialize. As far as coal mining goes, these are sweet digs.
Likely not, but this portrayal in the article isn't close either. It only applies to 'hot startup' folks, which are a subset of startups, which are a tiny subset of employees here.
well it's representative of my experience, so that is why I shared it ;) The hidden node here is that I took my first programming job in 1996 when I was 16 and I've been continuously programming since (also, I first learned on an atari 800 basic cartridge). I'm also 35, fit, disciplined and high energy. So for these factors, it's probably representative.
Yep, I agree with this. I am a highly paid senior engineer at my current tech startup. I basically wake up at noon every day, on some days I pop into the office for a couple hours, but most days I just chill at home, go to the gym, hang out with my dog, take vacations. I basically check emails when I'm having my coffee in the morning but that's pretty much it as far as work.
I've been enjoying this lifestyle for 12 years with no end in sight. Living in Silicon Valley is the greatest thing I have ever done and is absolutely nothing like this article claims.
My life is similar:
6am wake up with my 2yo son. He wakes up early. Make coffee and breakfast for him and I. I do some emails and do some lightweight coding while we watch Masha and the Bear again.
At 9am I wake up my wife. She's in SF State getting her MBA. If its not a school day for her, I then go to the office and do a meeting or some more intensive coding, otherwise I'll go teach a spin class or lift weights and come home to hang out with my son and we go to the park or for a bike ride while my wife goes to class.
At night and on weekends I'll find myself sneaking in coding work, mostly to put the brain wheels at ease over whatever thing I'm working on.
We have a baby sitter one night a week when our schedules need it. We aren't a dual income family and I don't make a killing but my work is super flexible. We are barely comfortable and I have to teach spin classes on the side but my son and I have an amazing connection. I don't have much work life balance or separation but I think I prefer it that way.
Reading this was an interesting anthropological experience to me as the lifestyle is so different from my own though it seems the underlying long-term goals are similar to mine (wealth, meaning, having smart and interesting friends and acquaintances). I too live in SV, but in a modest home I own in the East Bay. I too commute a little less than an hour to work, but I do my own grocery shopping and I don't care for nice restaurants, fancy cars or the latest gadgets. I still drive my 08 Prius.
I have a fair amount of stock options I've collected from 3 different mid-size companies over the last half decade; all are still in business but none are showing extremely promising outlooks, so I no longer count stock options in my long-term financial planning though it would be a welcomed bonus to my plans. Instead, I count the value of $5000/month left over from my decently high salary minus my non-materialist lifestyle invested in index funds to achieve financial independence the old fashioned way. Somewhat anti-Silicon Valley philosophy? Perhaps, but the Bay Area is all testing diverse ideas and out of the box approaches to life satisfaction. I don't claim my life is superior to the theoretical in this article, but it is much simpler and probably lower stress, and I'm pretty happy on a day to day basis so I'm not yet tempted to dive in to the alternate approach.
Of course, discretionary income and salary are not the same thing. If you are a developer in the valley paying to live in Palo Alto, driving a BMW, etc. you too could choose to have a lot more discretionary income.
$60k is more than 88% of Americans make in total income. Having that for discretionary spending would place you well within the top 1-2% of Americans, regardless of how much or how little your living expenses are.
Sure, you're right about the average American. I'm pretty sure most people in this discussion are taking about the perspective of someone who works in the tech industry in the bay area since that's what the article is about.
Right. Talking about that kind of money as merely "decently high" is only a slightly different kind of bubble as the one this medium post is satirizing.
Although they obviously spend a lot [2], at some point discretionary income gets pretty blurry. I'd hope any reasonable society would consider they have a lot more than $60k at their discretion, though. I make about a third of that, putting me just barely in the top 10%, and have more than $60k at my discretion.
Wealth inequality is pretty insane in this country.
The calculator you linked is measuring household income, not individual income. Rerunning your numbers with a calculator that uses individual income [1], I find that the top 1% of individual earners make at least $270k/year and an income of $150k/year would put you just barely in the top 5% of individual earners.
Living expenses make up the majority of most people's living expenses, and this person owns the house they live in, which means it's possible their expenses aren't that high to begin with. They imply as much in their post. So it's possible their salary is like $70-75k.
The median salary in the US is $52k.
In light of that, I, too, would call his salary "decently high".
Yes, rents are part of the price of the ticket to work in SV, and as such does not constitute discretionary income. The extra cash you spend to drive a BMW instead of a five year old Nissan definitely most certainly does.
Yes, but even how much you pay for rent can be controlled, if you choose to.
You can easily find a room in an apartment for less than 1000 $/mo anywhere in the bay. It won't be a nice room if you choose to live in, say SoMa, but it's housing. So you could argue anything over that is "discretionary".
Obviously, many people would consider such a living situation unacceptable. But in the most general sense, it is still a choice.
That's true -- according to Trulia, the median rent right now in Palo Alto is $6100 vs. $3495 in San Jose. But I think it's kind of easy, living here, to lose sight of just how out of whack those costs are with the rest of the country. In Tampa, Florida (which is actually pretty close to the US average), it's $1495; even in Sacramento, about two hours from here, it's $1600. If you could stand the time sink, it's quite likely it would be cheaper to live in Sacramento and commute to the Bay Area.
None of this means that there aren't valid reasons for staying here; even giving up a fairly significant portion of my income as rent leaves me with more money than I'd likely have after rent if I had a comparable job in Tampa, assuming I could even find one. But I don't think this is a sustainable situation for the region. The nanny in the "This is your life in SV" satire, and other people in her salary range (or under it), are on the cusp of being pushed out of the area entirely.
I'm saying "decently high" compared to my software engineering peers in Silicon Valley. Of course, nearly every worker in the US has at least a decently high income compared to most of the world. The minimum wage in India is $3 per day.
I spend most of my waking hours in Palo Alto. Unless of course you don't consider time at work "living", in which case I hope your plan is to retire ASAP so you can finally have a life.
I admire the fact that the author was able to add a humorous twist to almost every paragraph. However, to get the humor they indulge in a bit of exaggeration. That's fine, I have no problem with parody. I would find this style revolting if the article was longer, or if this was a book, but as a short blog post it reads fine.
I am curious if the emphasis on status symbols was meant to be so exaggerated? The first joke was funny, but there were several on the same theme. By the time he got home and was thinking about watching stuff on Netflix, only because other people were talking about it... by that point, either the joke is over-used, or if it's meant to represent "real life" then it is just sad.
You guys take yourselves too seriously. I think this article is funny as hell.
"You briefly use mobile Safari to browse for Vipassana retreats — you hear a 10 day retreat in Soquel may be the ticket to shake things up. You realize it’s not going to be possible. You download a meditation app. You turn it off. You don’t have time."
I don't really know about brunch, although I guess there's something about waiting the better part of an hour to eat that makes it attractive to hipsters because I sure have seen them do it a lot.
But my guess is that Burning Man is rather passé, and has been roughly since people who hadn't been there started hearing about it in large numbers.
"You skim the HN comments about life in the valley. You haven't bothered to read the article so you do not realize it's a satire. You decide to comment anyway."
"Six minutes of continuously refreshing the page later, you get a reply from a throwaway account calling you out for not even skimming the article. You contemplate deleting your comment but decide that would look even worse. You then wonder why you don't set up a throwaway account of your own for your less thought out comments."
"You are now faced with a risky decision. If you can't beat the feeling of having been meta-duped, turn to page 4. To try your luck, and put your reputation on the table, turn to the next page..."
Would have been great if it ended with something like:
Your friend emails you a satire on Bay Area life. It isn't perfectly written, and it surely doesn't fit your life, but it fits so many of your friends' lives. You continue to read it anyway. Something about it bothers you, but you post it to Facebook, because you're sure that it will get many likes. Your friends love reading satires about their lives.
I used to work for a non-US company's US Bay Area office during the dot com boom. I recognize a lot of this, especially the parts about our own company. And about myself and my coworkers at the time - worrying a lot about status and superficial issues, a lot more than about our product and what we were actually doing there (nobody really had a clue). That startup didn't even tank but was sold for a few hundred million - because the "market" carried us and at least some people, especially the developers, did some work, and because the Dilbert world is everywhere.
The good thing: I learned that there is no magic in either SV and/or venture capital, they muddle through like everybody else. I learned that I suck at anything "business" (I'm a good techie and communicator, that must suffice).
I also learned that while an American business may be really horrible in many of the details - but on the executive level I experienced (as a techie "guest listener") that when it comes down to business the 0.1% they get right blows most everybody else out of the water. It was so embarrassing for my own executives. At those high-level meetings I gained a huge respect for some of the guys at the top of American firms. It seems they figured out what's important and what is only "nice to have" and concentrate on the former. They also managed to ask exactly the right questions - we didn't have an answer for a single one of them. But we still felt very, very important...
It's not just Silicon Valley though. I remember that my 2nd job after university was with that (foreign) startup (at first in their country). The very first conversation getting a coffee in the kitchen when I came in Monday morning for my first day was a guy heavily complaining about perceived injustices and "office politics": Will I get the (big) office I deserve? I should get the group leader position, that other guy is a leader then so should I be, etc. It was all about status. My 1st job had been with a major multinational company, and while politics certainly existed it wasn't that... childish. Most of the time we thought about and cared about what we were doing, not about status. That's a side effect of joining a huge organization where there isn't nearly as much dynamics, so much less fear of missing out on opportunities of quick advancement. In that startup you have people go from barely-graduated to department head in a very short time (and this was a several hundred people "startup" by that time becoming a "leader" wasn't just an empty title on business cards). Personal connections to the founders mattered a lot!
I think there's a lesson in this. High growth and opportunity for advancing quickly can be quite dangerous for what people are focused on.
Yes, part of this definitely reminded me of my cousin in NYC. Her husband is some big shot at Goldman Sachs, and their toddlers are raised by a nanny and being pushed into elite schools (yes, as toddlers). Their attitude towards restaurants is basically the same, and her husband has a similar lack of time (he works all his waking hours on the weekdays... and then crashes on the weekend).
Oh, and the kicker: they shop for clothes for their kids exclusively on Amazon. How do they know the clothes will fit? They don't; they order the clothes in every single size Amazon has available. I don't know what they do with the stuff that's the wrong size.
I went to school in NYC and I always thought it takes a special kind of person to do finance. My friend's brother works from 9am until 7-8pm, sometimes more, everyday. Yet my friend is determined to follow in his footsteps. I can't imagine doing that.
Perhaps its same back in silicon valley of india too.Life here comes with reduced perks from unlivable traffic to substandard infrastructures.But the story is same everywhere across the industry I believe given greatest advantage is being close to your loved ones.
Being nudged, even momentarily, from our delusion that none of us are all that special, will always hit a nerve. I think these things are healthy to reflect upon occasionally. Delusions are fine, to a point.
Funny that this is still super relevant for the life in London, particularly in East London, where everyone you meet is working in or has started their own startup. I feel like "silicon valley" mentality has spread far beyond just the bay area these days.
Well written. I like the tone. I think it's a particular case of a global concern : what the purpose of life and how to live it well ? Even if i'm very different and put my efforts in other domains than "looking smart for other people". I'm asking myself similar questions: doubt about past choices, job, city, and so on.
At the point you get to 'self-actualization', you realize that it's best done by helping others get to that point. Maslow's hierarchy of needs is a pyramid scheme.
A lot of this can be applied to modern day middle class life in Stockholm, Sweden, too for example. I guess SV is a bit more extreme, but the same things are there: the lust for gadgets, using podcasts to find conversational topics with your friends, sharing half-read articles, the "perfectly Instagrammed life", and, perhaps most of all: "The reporters all share photos and videos of the homeless person, but no one talks to him."
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[ 2.6 ms ] story [ 295 ms ] threadSomething something something unexamined privilege, I rather suspect. It'd be funnier if the author wasn't trying to make some kind of political point muddled by half-baked humor.
Silicon Valley is famous for its navel-gazing. There's even a hit television show devoted to it. The privilege is well and rightfully examined. That's why, I think, this satire falls flat -- it doesn't say anything that isn't painfully obvious to anyone who has even a casual familiarity with the local culture, and even worse, it doesn't say the painfully obvious in any new way.
It doesn't 'bite' like the onion does, where it comes too close to reality for comfort. It's not zany and off-beat like a Mad Magazine bit. It's just... not that good.
Most people your age do not by any means conduct themselves like this, nor could they if they wanted to. Their "nanny" is their sister or mother or mother in law or a neighbor.
They don't go to a fancy restaurant because they don't have the money for both the fancy restaurant and a baby-sitter.
They're a two income-family forever, not until stock options vest and can be sold on secondary markets to speculators with easy capital.
This whole scenario is ridiculous and not at all representative of anything but a very small demographic. But I guess that's the Valley, at least to this outsider reading articles like this.
In the UK to be a nanny, childminder or work in a nursery you have specific regulation and qualification required. A babysitter requires nothing, it can and generally is some teenage kid.
The difference with all 3 is where the child go. Nursery has special dedicated facilities to take care of several children, number limited by the number of employee and size. A childminder will take care of 1 to 3 children in her own home. A nanny will come to your home and take care of 1 to 3 of your children.
All 3 are available in full-time ( i.e. working hour full time ) or part-time.
The movie type, stay at home Nannies are "Au Pair". Depending on the qualification ( from foreign student doing a bit of cleaning and getting the kid to and from school to fully qualified nanny ) the price varies enormously. Au Pair is not unusual, Au Pair Nannies is rich people stuff.
In the example of leaving your children with a friend, the exemption is for a maximum of 3 hours (per day), if the friend is being paid. Any longer and the friend is obliged to register with Ofsted (with a penalty of an unlimited fine and/or jail for not being registered).
I doubt many people would think to check the legal requirements though.
[1] https://www.gov.uk/register-childminder-childcare-provider/o...
I mean, that only medium level and upper classes can afford it.
There are many things in life that aren't feasible if you are at the poverty line: Apple laptops, electric vehicles, extended vacations, etc. I would argue that the only difference here is that many people are deeply uncomfortable with the idea of paying someone to take care of their children in the home.
400 euro a month plus food and accommodations is a lot more than $5,500/yr.
I think you ignored the "plus food and accommodations" part.
Most of them pay less than that.
So a university degree will land you around 1000 euros, a bit more if you are doing lots of overtime.
Renting a flat will always be above 300 euros, or 500 in the biggest cities.
So unless one if living with a significant other, and reserve one salary for such expenses, they aren't possible at all.
In Spain the salary level on average is around 25% more than on Portugal, but given the actual situation the real numbers on the bank account aren't that much different.
And I am writing about people with degrees, let alone those that only learned their profession hands on the job.
A nanny is a professional employee of the family, generally has training and certification, has clear duties and makes an actual salary. An "au pair nanny" is an oxymoron, that would be a "live in nanny" and, yes, definitely rich people stuff. Au pairs are definitely possibilities for the middle class.
The key difference is that a nanny is usually a formal salaried employee with regular contracted hours, whereas a babysitter is typically paid an hourly rate and is self-employed.
https://www.care.com/a/what-is-the-difference-between-a-baby...
The phrase "nanny share" is very commonly used. Sometimes the nanny is in their own home, sometimes in [one of] the parents' home.
Babysitter generally means someone who comes occasionally to watch a single family's children.
There are obviously fuzzy lines separating the two terms.
I doubt you know that.
I've been enjoying this lifestyle for 12 years with no end in sight. Living in Silicon Valley is the greatest thing I have ever done and is absolutely nothing like this article claims.
At 9am I wake up my wife. She's in SF State getting her MBA. If its not a school day for her, I then go to the office and do a meeting or some more intensive coding, otherwise I'll go teach a spin class or lift weights and come home to hang out with my son and we go to the park or for a bike ride while my wife goes to class.
At night and on weekends I'll find myself sneaking in coding work, mostly to put the brain wheels at ease over whatever thing I'm working on.
We have a baby sitter one night a week when our schedules need it. We aren't a dual income family and I don't make a killing but my work is super flexible. We are barely comfortable and I have to teach spin classes on the side but my son and I have an amazing connection. I don't have much work life balance or separation but I think I prefer it that way.
I have a fair amount of stock options I've collected from 3 different mid-size companies over the last half decade; all are still in business but none are showing extremely promising outlooks, so I no longer count stock options in my long-term financial planning though it would be a welcomed bonus to my plans. Instead, I count the value of $5000/month left over from my decently high salary minus my non-materialist lifestyle invested in index funds to achieve financial independence the old fashioned way. Somewhat anti-Silicon Valley philosophy? Perhaps, but the Bay Area is all testing diverse ideas and out of the box approaches to life satisfaction. I don't claim my life is superior to the theoretical in this article, but it is much simpler and probably lower stress, and I'm pretty happy on a day to day basis so I'm not yet tempted to dive in to the alternate approach.
Although they obviously spend a lot [2], at some point discretionary income gets pretty blurry. I'd hope any reasonable society would consider they have a lot more than $60k at their discretion, though. I make about a third of that, putting me just barely in the top 10%, and have more than $60k at my discretion.
Wealth inequality is pretty insane in this country.
[1] http://money.cnn.com/calculator/pf/income-rank/
[2] https://douggollan.com/2015/05/02/how-do-the-super-rich-spen...
[1] https://dqydj.com/income-percentile-calculator/
The median salary in the US is $52k.
In light of that, I, too, would call his salary "decently high".
True, true.
It is customary to say you "own" a home you're paying a mortgage on, whether or not you have meaningful equity in it yet.
You can easily find a room in an apartment for less than 1000 $/mo anywhere in the bay. It won't be a nice room if you choose to live in, say SoMa, but it's housing. So you could argue anything over that is "discretionary".
Obviously, many people would consider such a living situation unacceptable. But in the most general sense, it is still a choice.
None of this means that there aren't valid reasons for staying here; even giving up a fairly significant portion of my income as rent leaves me with more money than I'd likely have after rent if I had a comparable job in Tampa, assuming I could even find one. But I don't think this is a sustainable situation for the region. The nanny in the "This is your life in SV" satire, and other people in her salary range (or under it), are on the cusp of being pushed out of the area entirely.
I am curious if the emphasis on status symbols was meant to be so exaggerated? The first joke was funny, but there were several on the same theme. By the time he got home and was thinking about watching stuff on Netflix, only because other people were talking about it... by that point, either the joke is over-used, or if it's meant to represent "real life" then it is just sad.
"You briefly use mobile Safari to browse for Vipassana retreats — you hear a 10 day retreat in Soquel may be the ticket to shake things up. You realize it’s not going to be possible. You download a meditation app. You turn it off. You don’t have time."
TOO REAL
But my guess is that Burning Man is rather passé, and has been roughly since people who hadn't been there started hearing about it in large numbers.
What does "cool" mean to you?
"Six minutes of continuously refreshing the page later, you get a reply from a throwaway account calling you out for not even skimming the article. You contemplate deleting your comment but decide that would look even worse. You then wonder why you don't set up a throwaway account of your own for your less thought out comments."
Meta.
Your friend emails you a satire on Bay Area life. It isn't perfectly written, and it surely doesn't fit your life, but it fits so many of your friends' lives. You continue to read it anyway. Something about it bothers you, but you post it to Facebook, because you're sure that it will get many likes. Your friends love reading satires about their lives.
The good thing: I learned that there is no magic in either SV and/or venture capital, they muddle through like everybody else. I learned that I suck at anything "business" (I'm a good techie and communicator, that must suffice).
I also learned that while an American business may be really horrible in many of the details - but on the executive level I experienced (as a techie "guest listener") that when it comes down to business the 0.1% they get right blows most everybody else out of the water. It was so embarrassing for my own executives. At those high-level meetings I gained a huge respect for some of the guys at the top of American firms. It seems they figured out what's important and what is only "nice to have" and concentrate on the former. They also managed to ask exactly the right questions - we didn't have an answer for a single one of them. But we still felt very, very important...
It's not just Silicon Valley though. I remember that my 2nd job after university was with that (foreign) startup (at first in their country). The very first conversation getting a coffee in the kitchen when I came in Monday morning for my first day was a guy heavily complaining about perceived injustices and "office politics": Will I get the (big) office I deserve? I should get the group leader position, that other guy is a leader then so should I be, etc. It was all about status. My 1st job had been with a major multinational company, and while politics certainly existed it wasn't that... childish. Most of the time we thought about and cared about what we were doing, not about status. That's a side effect of joining a huge organization where there isn't nearly as much dynamics, so much less fear of missing out on opportunities of quick advancement. In that startup you have people go from barely-graduated to department head in a very short time (and this was a several hundred people "startup" by that time becoming a "leader" wasn't just an empty title on business cards). Personal connections to the founders mattered a lot!
I think there's a lesson in this. High growth and opportunity for advancing quickly can be quite dangerous for what people are focused on.
Oh, and the kicker: they shop for clothes for their kids exclusively on Amazon. How do they know the clothes will fit? They don't; they order the clothes in every single size Amazon has available. I don't know what they do with the stuff that's the wrong size.
Clearly a plant from the LA startup scene.
Puzzler: at what latitude does 101 become "Teh 101"?
Source: I lived in LA for nearly a decade.
Article: https://nplusonemag.com/issue-25/on-the-fringe/uncanny-valle...
Discussion: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=11565691
I really enjoyed this piece.
Which I could not recommend enough, I'm having wumo flashbacks all the time just as with obligatory XKCD.
https://hn.algolia.com/?query=chaos%20monkeys&sort=byPopular...
I don't think I've ever done a '+1' style comment on HN before but couldn't resist. I really love that idea.