Silicon Valley - The Geeks Are Back In Charge? 209
securitas writes "The New York Times' Steve Lohr reports on a fundamental shift taking place in Silicon Valley in the post-dotcom era: the geeks are back in charge. New start-ups and companies that survived the bubble 'are based on innovation and are run by people with deep technical skills.' These companies have real technology and a solid technical base that have historically been the bedrock of Silicon Valley - something that was temporarily forgotten during the dotcom bubble. Profiled companies include Tellme Networks (speech recognition), InterTrust (DRM - digital rights management), VMware (virtual machines) and Scalix (Linux e-mail servers)."
Let's not forget ... (Score:4, Interesting)
Amazing, first real dot-com I've dealt with that has a real solid shot of being the Big Dog in what they do
Myths (Score:5, Interesting)
False. In fact, middle-management is now finding their IT department unable to do much of anything without a huge budget increase or new equipment. Middle-management, as expected, is still sitting there, having meetings and trying to figure out what to do.
2) Anyone who can't get a job as a programmer now is a skill-less, freeloading slacker who got their technical skills from "Learn $TECHNOLOGY in 21 days" books.
False. There are Masters Degree holders in both engineering and scientific fields of IT study who cant rent interviews, much less jobs.
3) Technical skills are a commodity.
False. Perhaps 10% of the working population has the training, education and experience to build a complete computer program. Middle-management, unable to understand this fact, much less the technologies they are in charge of, continues to presume that ordering a database is no different than ordering new file cabinets.
When these and other myths are no longer givens in the discussion of improving the IT department, then, and only then, will things improve.
Well this is slashdot (Score:2, Interesting)
Now you know why they were included.
Interesting cycle (Score:5, Interesting)
It's interesting to see a shift this way.
It seems that the tech industry is highly cyclical, and, once the current batch of geeks have innovated sufficiently to create marketable products, slowly business people will come to replace them
Once these products have run their course, and a recession kicks in, the shift happens the other way.
It's a fairly symbiotic relationship, I think, playing to each group's strengths. It's certainly worked for the past 40 years. Long may it continue
one of them is a lawsuit company (Score:5, Interesting)
I don't know why the New York Times chose them as an example of a "geek company" really the only true example of that was VMWare, which never was a dot-com bubble company in the first place.
These are Geeks ? (Score:4, Interesting)
Now excuse me if I disagree here, but these appear to be a combination of technical people with decent business people working towards a real solution or product. Technologists don't have to be "geeks", most are not. I'd say that the
Steve Jobs & Bill Gates are not geeks, and its THOSE sort of people, and people like Metcalf @ 3COM, and the founders of the other successful IT businesses that Silicon Valley is founded on. Its people who combine strong technical skills, with an even stronger view on how to make markets.
Scalix real technology? (Score:2, Interesting)
Re:Myths (Score:3, Interesting)
Management went through and axed folks who cost money. Skilled workers cost money.
They kept the low men on the totem pole. People that they could keep dumping crap work onto. People who will never find better jobs anywhere.
People who will continue to work applying hack after hack, and bandaid after bandaid rather than fixing any one problem because they do not know how to debug problems. People who accept gladly an artificially low salary.
They don't keep the skilled technicians that could maintain everything because they cost more money. instead they "hire the handicapped" and keep the cheap flunkies who do what they are told and will not complain when the finger of blame is pointed at them for the technology failing that they do not know how to support in the first place!
Re:Quattrone is out/Torvalds is in (Score:3, Interesting)
I used to work at CSFB, where Quattrone was. A bigger bunch of gung-ho cowboys it would be hard to imagine. I was asked to do such things as fiddle reports to show losses become profits (reasoning was given, but the reasoning was bogus and the guy just wanted to get a bonus). I edited code on live production servers. Systems fell apart on a more than daily basis. Some loon had decided the best way to look productive was to do a release every two weeks, regardless of whether there was anything to release or whether what was being done was actually in a production ready state. I had to argue with a project manager over the importance of primary keys in a relational database (he didn't believe in them. No, really...).
Presiding over all this rubbish was convicted criminal Quattrone. I enjoy that phrase. He shouldn't have been the only one.
Funny. The article is a marketing plant. (Score:3, Interesting)
Re:DRM? (Score:3, Interesting)
DRM is certainly a real technology in the sense that it has goals and implementation details. I do think there are ways to see it as not a "real" technology; admittedly, doing so involves adopting some non-textbook interpretations of "real". Suppose that we colloquially choose to say that real technology is that which results in a clear benefit for humankind; arguably DRM doesn't. These issues aren't black and white, but that's the spirit in which I read the original post. Sort of like saying that the HMO industry isn't a real industry because it doesn't add value; yes it does enrich particular people, and yes it employs many and has lots of papers to shuffle around, but its value to humanity is highly questionable and I don't mind dissing it as "not a real industry".
Re:Myths (Score:4, Interesting)
Actually, you need to do a present-value cashflow comparison between the two options.
Really, "present-value cashflow comparison" is a Business 101 buzzphrase, but it's pretty much how you understand how financial decisions should be made. Everything else in finance (from internal rate of return decisions to Black-Scholes derivative evaluation) are variations on that theme, with different degrees of sophistication.
Here [macroanalytics.com]'s a quick tutorial I just found on Google. It's really easy to understand, and might avoid unwanted insertions in thy financial behinds.
The worm has turned. (Score:5, Interesting)
Last week, I turned down business for the first time this year for lack of available time. I dont think there is going to be a lot of hiring, but for Consultants like me, things seem to be getting good again really quickly.
If things continue like they have been, I may have to hire an extra couple of consultants myself.
bfg technologies (Score:2, Interesting)
1. offer 24 hr tech support.
2. a lifetime guarantee on all their cards.
3. that the owners of the company are huge gamers who make the cards so that can use them when the play games.
Re:Myths (Score:4, Interesting)
Let's say that a plumber spends some money in materials to build a network of pipes needed to bring fresh water to an house. He sells his product to one person, with one house. You can't resell that very same work to other persons, because each and every house needs its plumbing works and materials.
Now the programmer spends his/her lifetime in front of a computer and does some investments in himself by buying hardware and books.Some company may pay these costs.Once the program reaches a mature stage it can be sold to MILLIONS of clients with ridicolously low replication costs.
The programmers usually don't get royalties on quantity of software sold : once the program is developed, it's company property and (in theory) the programmer could be fired. Thanks for your help, goto hell.
Now is it unreasonable for a programmer to ask for -comparatively- otrageous wages ? NO ! We have just seen that he's not likely to see his revenue increase EVEN IF the company for which he developed the software sold some million copies.
He may choose to have stock options instead of cash , but as many programmers have understood that's too much of a risk expecially when there isn't a system preventing management from doing wrong business decision or simple fraud.
Someone may say that the programmer doesn't know jack about selling products, financing, accounting , laws etc so he deserves to be paid little because he's not sustaining all the costs involved in running a company. But how the f*ck is a programmer supposed to do ALL of that and still do his job of daily coding and bugfixing ?
It seems humanly impossible to me.
Yet, his product can be sold in enormous quantity and he's supposed to sustain all the risks of his job without a fair share on the QUANTITY of product sold. No wonder he's going to ask for comparatively huge wages.
Re:These are Geeks ? (Score:3, Interesting)
I would differ with that. The
The geeks did things like yahoo, google, Amazon, netscape, Redhat, and most of the successful companies. To be honest, it these were not pure geek plays but joint ventures of geeks with good (and mostly honest) business ppl.
Re:tellme does not belong on the list (Score:1, Interesting)
Re:skilled=unemployed (Score:1, Interesting)
When I ran into one of my co-workers a while later. I smiled and said "XYZ is done!".
Comment removed (Score:4, Interesting)