Surrounded by geeks
I've had the opportunity to live in two of the worlds greatest geek-meccas: Redmond Washington, and Silicon Valley California. Both of them are dominated by their high-tech employers and geeky inhabitants, and they are far more similar to each other than to most cities. But they also have some significant differences.
I first lived in Silicon Valley as an intern during the height of the Internet Boom. It was an insane place to be. Despite the fact that cities like San Fransisco and Oakland are a mere 45 minutes down the road, life here was different. The most obvious difference was the ratio of males to females. Santa Clara county managed to beat Anchorage for the worst ratio in the US. The result was that single women were non-existent. If a woman was attracted to rich geeks she then was taken by a geek with a lot of money, way more than you'll ever have. If a woman wasn't attracted to rich geeks she didn't spend any social time in the Valley because she would get hit on by 10 geeks an hour, one of which was insanely rich. I can't blame either group of women. If you like geeks there were too many to count so you might as limit yourself to the large selection of rich ones. And if you don't like geeks, you'd have to avoid them.
The money that was flying around here brought other oddities. There was the BMW effect whereby my boss drove a 3 series, his boss drove a 5 series, and his boss drove a 7 series. Around 30% of the cars in the tech company parking lots were BMW. There was a 4 month waiting list to by a new BMW, but they'd loan you an old BMW while you waited. Also, they only had a couple of cars on display, and when your car came in it went on display for a few days until the next one came in.
But the really special thing about the valley is how people you casually meet are always working at leading edge companies. I can't go to the dog park or climbing gym without meeting a dozen googlers. In fact I've found it's usually best to assume someone works at a high tech company until you know otherwise. In addition, everyone you know meets techies all day too, so any group of people knows hundreds of techies. The six degrees of freedom game is easy in the Valley. If you don't know someone at a particular company, someone you know probably does.
This makes lunchtime conversations very different from the standard water cooler dribble. Someone will mention some article they read, and they'll mention what site directed them to it. Then someone will say that they know someone who works at that site, so conversation moves there. Then a third person will mention how similar that is to another company he's heard about that is doing it a little different. And then the table agrees on a great idea for a new company. (And then nothing ever happens because ideas are cheap in the valley :) )
Having discussions like this everyday keeps the mind sharp, and keeps people up to date on technology. Not just websites, but programming languages, game consoles, and anything else with a chip is up for discussion. Yes it's a little geeky, but it does keep you thinking.
So how then was Redmond different? Like SV, you can assume that everyone there works for a tech company, and that they encounter nothing but techies every day. The difference is that there's really only one company: Microsoft. As much as MS has a monopoly on the desktop, its monopoly over Redmond is worse. We would joke about the social experience as a black hole where you could only ever meet people within the MS hole, things outside it were beyond the event horizon and could never influence you.
The day to day life is about the same, with lots of geekiness and lots of money. The weather in Redmond is far worse, so travel was a more common pastime, but things like nice cars and electronics were still very popular.
The social hole however meant that the lunch time chats were pretty much restricted to MS products. Granted MS is a huge company that encompasses most of the tech spectrum, but there was always a huge bias. It's not that Microsofties think MS has great products, or that Windows is the ultimate OS. Rather, they aren't forced to look at any alternatives. For every new website that grows popular, there's a MS clone site that works almost as well. And everyone in Redmond probably knows someone on that team. It's incredibly easy to forget that not every product is integrated with MS, and it's even easier to dismiss the competition.
Recently Redmond has started to diversify a bit, with Google in particular building a large campus nearby. This will hopefully help open up the social hole, and that can only be good for the microsofties and MS.
Silicon Valley on the other hand has had a marked decline since the heyday of boom, and it is now conceivable that it exists in the same state as regular cities.
Both places though are incredibly unique in their geekiness concentration, and that is certainly one of the reasons for their success. As a geek, I love the feeling of being "home", surrounded by my kind. But it is important to remember there's a real world out there that just doesn't have an opinion in the Perl/Python/Rails debate and would rather just have a program that doesn't crash so much :)
I first lived in Silicon Valley as an intern during the height of the Internet Boom. It was an insane place to be. Despite the fact that cities like San Fransisco and Oakland are a mere 45 minutes down the road, life here was different. The most obvious difference was the ratio of males to females. Santa Clara county managed to beat Anchorage for the worst ratio in the US. The result was that single women were non-existent. If a woman was attracted to rich geeks she then was taken by a geek with a lot of money, way more than you'll ever have. If a woman wasn't attracted to rich geeks she didn't spend any social time in the Valley because she would get hit on by 10 geeks an hour, one of which was insanely rich. I can't blame either group of women. If you like geeks there were too many to count so you might as limit yourself to the large selection of rich ones. And if you don't like geeks, you'd have to avoid them.
The money that was flying around here brought other oddities. There was the BMW effect whereby my boss drove a 3 series, his boss drove a 5 series, and his boss drove a 7 series. Around 30% of the cars in the tech company parking lots were BMW. There was a 4 month waiting list to by a new BMW, but they'd loan you an old BMW while you waited. Also, they only had a couple of cars on display, and when your car came in it went on display for a few days until the next one came in.
But the really special thing about the valley is how people you casually meet are always working at leading edge companies. I can't go to the dog park or climbing gym without meeting a dozen googlers. In fact I've found it's usually best to assume someone works at a high tech company until you know otherwise. In addition, everyone you know meets techies all day too, so any group of people knows hundreds of techies. The six degrees of freedom game is easy in the Valley. If you don't know someone at a particular company, someone you know probably does.
This makes lunchtime conversations very different from the standard water cooler dribble. Someone will mention some article they read, and they'll mention what site directed them to it. Then someone will say that they know someone who works at that site, so conversation moves there. Then a third person will mention how similar that is to another company he's heard about that is doing it a little different. And then the table agrees on a great idea for a new company. (And then nothing ever happens because ideas are cheap in the valley :) )
Having discussions like this everyday keeps the mind sharp, and keeps people up to date on technology. Not just websites, but programming languages, game consoles, and anything else with a chip is up for discussion. Yes it's a little geeky, but it does keep you thinking.
So how then was Redmond different? Like SV, you can assume that everyone there works for a tech company, and that they encounter nothing but techies every day. The difference is that there's really only one company: Microsoft. As much as MS has a monopoly on the desktop, its monopoly over Redmond is worse. We would joke about the social experience as a black hole where you could only ever meet people within the MS hole, things outside it were beyond the event horizon and could never influence you.
The day to day life is about the same, with lots of geekiness and lots of money. The weather in Redmond is far worse, so travel was a more common pastime, but things like nice cars and electronics were still very popular.
The social hole however meant that the lunch time chats were pretty much restricted to MS products. Granted MS is a huge company that encompasses most of the tech spectrum, but there was always a huge bias. It's not that Microsofties think MS has great products, or that Windows is the ultimate OS. Rather, they aren't forced to look at any alternatives. For every new website that grows popular, there's a MS clone site that works almost as well. And everyone in Redmond probably knows someone on that team. It's incredibly easy to forget that not every product is integrated with MS, and it's even easier to dismiss the competition.
Recently Redmond has started to diversify a bit, with Google in particular building a large campus nearby. This will hopefully help open up the social hole, and that can only be good for the microsofties and MS.
Silicon Valley on the other hand has had a marked decline since the heyday of boom, and it is now conceivable that it exists in the same state as regular cities.
Both places though are incredibly unique in their geekiness concentration, and that is certainly one of the reasons for their success. As a geek, I love the feeling of being "home", surrounded by my kind. But it is important to remember there's a real world out there that just doesn't have an opinion in the Perl/Python/Rails debate and would rather just have a program that doesn't crash so much :)
posted by Ze Ace at
4:22 PM
2 Comments:
Wired is currently my favourite periodic source of fiction - it's techno-utopian oh so geek-sleek. I know it's not exactly a tech company, but they are pretty geeky. So, to put your interconnectedness of all things valley-of-the-geeks theory to the test, how many DOF are you to, say, someone who works for Wired?
By
Anonymous, at 11/15/2006 7:25 PM
As a wife of a geek, it's strange here to meet other geek's wives, and to learn that they work for places like Google. It used to leave me a little star stuck, I'm getting used to it now though.
By
TweedleDea, at 11/17/2006 6:53 PM
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