Regional advantage
The book is a history and sociology of the differences between Silicon Valley and Route 128, the Boston tech corridor that was once considered a competitor to the Valley. It is very useful to understanding the structural causes of Silicon Valley’s success, showing that it was increased interpersonal and intercorporate sharing that made Silicon Valley continue to succeed after the shocks of the ’80s hammered both Silicon Valley and Boston’s Route 128.
Stats for nerds
8recommend
19mentions
10people
2007–2021years
79% recommend11% neutral11% critical
Mentions per year
What Hacker News says
- I'd recommend reading Regional Advantage, the dominance of Silicon Valley/Bay Area is a lot more nuanced than just noncompetes, good universities, etc.
- I heard a lecture by Richard Florida once. I felt like he viewed things through a quite different lens than I, such that I didn't believe his views on things. I see now that others are more concrete: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Richard_Florida#Criticism_and_...
How much of that is "Silicon Valley" and how much is "California"? To start with, why did California prohibit non-compete clauses .. back in 1872(!). https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/California_Civil_Code says the code was "revolutionary for its time".
If that helped cause openness, did that openness extend to other fields? Including the studio system during the Golden Age of Hollywood?
Given all of the companies working on secret government contracts, how open could they be?
The Pacific Standard article describes Florida's spin on a dissertation by AnnaLee Saxenian. Blank recommends Saxenian's book highly. For example, in https://steveblank.com/2009/04/20/the-secret-history-of-sili... . Blank wrote:
> I read all the popular books about the valley and they all told a variant of the same story; entrepreneurs as heroes building the Semiconductor and Personal Computer companies: Bill Hewlett and David Packard at HP, Bob Taylor and the team at Xerox PARC, Steve Jobs and Wozniak at Apple, Gordon Moore and Bob Noyce at Intel, etc. These were inspiring stories, but I realized that, no surprise, the popular press were writing books that had mass appeal.
> But no one was writing about where the entrepreneurial culture had come from. Where were the books explaining why were all these chip and computer companies started here? Why not elsewhere in the country or the world? With the exception of one great book, no one was writing about our regional advantage.
That "one great book" is Saxenian's "Regional Advantage: Culture and Competition in Silicon Valley and Route 128". Which, ummm..., answers my own question. :)
Re-reading that page by Blank reminds me of how much an eye-opener it was to hear Blank's talk the first time. His work really is the reason I am now wary when I read (yet again) the standard stories about SV.
- It's exactly this type of thinking that lead to the decline of Route 128 in the post-war years and the rise of Silicon Valley. If Google were to do this, they'd be cutting off their nose to spite their face. They could not enforce such a contract with existing employees and all new employees would look at such a provision and join an employer who doesn't do this.
The truth is that Google lost this market (or never really had it to begin with). At best they will end up like Microsoft, simply extracting rent via their patent licensing program.
For more information about Route 128 vs Silicon Valley, I cannot recommend the book Regional Advantage by AnnaLee Saxenian enough. It's a bit dated and academic, but it's fascinating if you want to understand why the tech industry in and around Boston lost to Silicon Valley despite having a huge head start.
- Ditto. I get incredibly irritated with this naïve revisionism.
I spent a lot of my child hood seeking out broken and junk electronics anywhere it could be found, including dumpster diving behind the high school and businesses. One of the opening scenes in Robert Cringely's Triumph of the Nerds is most instructive. In the first few minutes, you're introduced to a 10 year old kid named Edwin Chin. Take a good long look at that kid, imagine yourself being back at that time and ask yourself, "What adult, except an adult nerd, would ever encourage any kid, male or female, to be like Edwin?". I was like Edwin myself.
The number of people that I knew that were adults interested in computers and technology was exactly one, Murali Mani, and I lived in Chappaqua, NY, which was the very model of a privileged well educated community. This was a community where many people worked at IBM's headquarters at the time, but every person I knew that worked for IBM, were suits. The successful people at IBM were not the engineers, but the suits. No one encouraged you to be an engineer. Everyone encouraged you to be interested in being a doctor, a lawyer or a suit. Engineering really only started to become a desirable career around the first dot-com boom. And even in the first dot-com boom, mostly founding engineers did very well. After the founding engineers, suits still took home a lot of the winnings. It was only post-dot-com bubble that engineering truly became a desirable career that people encouraged and supported you in pursuing instead of pushing you to be a doctor, lawyer or suit.
Beyond Murali, exactly no one encouraged me to get involved with computers. I eventually moved to Raleigh, NC and went to a small private school, that like most private schools, preps you for university. Tech and engineering was never a focus even when I graduated in 2000 at the height of the first bubble. Guy or girl, you were not encouraged to go into tech at all. You would be more likely to be encouraged to play a musical instrument, do art or some sport than do anything tech related.
The revisionists really need to spend some time reading Meredith Patterson's "When Nerds Collide" essay, since most of their real beef is not with hacker culture, but with bro culture that became a part of tech at best a few years after the first dot com bubble.
https://medium.com/@maradydd/when-nerds-collide-31895b01e68c...
Another thing worth considering about computing history is that that there is a huge huge huge difference between computing pre mini-computer and post-mini computer. The culture in tech from the 80s and 90s didn't destroy the culture in tech pre-1980s described in this article because #patriarchy, but because the tech industry 1980s was entirely wiped out like dinosaurs with the move from 5" HDDs to 3.5" HDDs and the move from mainframes to hobby personal computers. Clayton Christensen's "The Innovator's Dilemma" and AnnaLee Saxenian's "Regional Advantage" will do far more to explain why the engineering/computing world pre-1980s disappeared than any revisionist explanation.
- I think the article posted is excellent and was an amazingly good read. The comment that I and rustynails replied to added absolutely nothing of value and was an admonishing post suggestive that the lack of surface diversity* in our industry is largely the result of discrimination and not other factors like base rates and natural nerd proclivities.
The people described in the article worked as computers and mathematicians at NASA because of:
- talent
- born, raised and lived in the right place at the right time (propinquity)
- self interest (they applied for jobs doing work they were interested in performing)
- health (reasonably good enough not to be a distraction)
- education
People who worked as engineers in Silicon Valley since the mini-computer revolution have done so because of:
- talent
- born, raised and lived in the right place at the right time (propinquity)
- self interest (they applied for jobs doing work they were interested in performing)
- health (reasonably good enough not to be a distraction)
- education
Notice that those two lists are largely the same? While I'm not saying discrimination isn't at play or non-existent, it's at best a minor factor relative to lots of other issues. Let's take what is likely to be one of the biggest issues that everyone loves to conveniently ignore, base rates:
In Hampton, Virginia, the birthplace of NASA, the African American population is 49.8% and in Virginia it's 19.7%, whereas in the Bay Area it's about 6.7%, most of which is largely concentrated in Alemeda, Contra Costa and Solano counties. Furthermore, these counties are not the locus of Silicon Valley, San Francisco (5.8%), San Mateo (3.0%) and Santa Clara (2.9%) are. Even the entire state of California is only about 6.5% black. This means, that to have a percentage of the Silicon Valley work force be black at approximately the same rate as the rest of the United States, black people need to move here either for work or for school.
As someone who's moved countries 4 times and states 2 times, this is non-trivial and unpleasant for those without a disposition to tolerate such a jarring change where you're an adult and responsible for supporting yourself and financing your own move. You lose support networks of family and friends. It's a non-trivial cost, especially if you need to move belongings. You need to rebuild and re-purchase the things you didn't bring.
The base rates above are the general population. If you assume that most people in tech have a bachelor degree or better (we no this isn't universally true since many software engineers are self taught), then the base rates gets worse. For people between 25 and 29 years of age, about 20% of black people have a bachelors degree versus 15% for Hispanics, 40% for white people and 58% for Asians.
Furthermore, 52% of college students attend a university within 100 miles of home and only 15.5% attend a university farther than 500 miles away. And a mere ~1.5% of Americans move across state lines each year.
Honestly, most people debating diversity as so incredibly awful at understanding statistics and performing a basic root cause analysis. It's like people start asking the 5 Whys, but the moment diversity is involved people's minds automatically short circuit and jump straight to because #racism or because #patriarchy. I'm not saying neither of those contribute to the problem, but they are far from the biggest factors. There are a LOT of filters that do a lot to modify/distort the available pool of people who would get even as far as applying for a job (which is for the most part a prerequisite for discrimination, active or unconscious)
Basically, if you want to make it so racial diversity in tech approximates the general population in the US, the best solution is not to try to change Silicon Valley, but to help more places like Silicon Valley exist in places with base rates that more closely match the racial distribution you believe is ideal. AnnaLee Saxenian's books are instructive if you're curious how such regions are formed: "Regional Advantage: Culture and Competition in Silicon Valley and Route 128" and "The New Argonauts: Regional Advantage in a Global Economy". A big part of what you need to move is money (i.e. you need a robust angel investor and venture capital industry).
* surface diversity - when you define diversity based on genetics and not content of character and live experiences.
yes, I'm aware that you could argue that recruiting mostly from people who live in the same city, county or state is a form of unconscious bias, but you're going to have a hard time arguing against that one ( http://www.bothsidesofthetable.com/2010/05/28/you-cant-look-... )
Hampton, Virginia http://quickfacts.census.gov/qfd/states/51/51650.html
Santa Clara County http://quickfacts.census.gov/qfd/states/06/06085.html
San Mateo County http://quickfacts.census.gov/qfd/states/06/06081.html
San Francisco County http://quickfacts.census.gov/qfd/states/06/06075.html
https://fivethirtyeight.com/features/race-gap-narrows-in-col...
http://www.thecollegesolution.com/where-most-students-end-up...
http://www.nytimes.com/2013/12/15/magazine/why-are-so-many-a...
- Two things happend:
(1) The mini-computer happened. You can't read the part in Clayton Cristensen's "Innovator's Dilemma" that talks about how the industry went from 5" drives to 3.5" drives and not see how many computing dinosaurs disappeared to be replaced by completely new companies founded by outsiders that inherited practically none of the culture of the big traditional tech companies from the days of The Organization Man (or Woman).
which lead to...
(2) The central locus of the tech industry migrated from Route 128 and MIT, which were the power houses post WWII to Silicon Valley and Stanford. The two had polar opposite cultures. Gone were the cultures of places like DEC and IBM to be replaced with the cultures of HP then Apple. AnnaLee Saxenian's book "Regional Advantage" does a great job of chronicling that shift from Route 128 to Silicon Valley and how East Coast and West Coast tech culture differed. If you look at pretty much every story that talked about tech culture back in the day versus today, they are often as much about Route 128 versus Silicon Valley, but few people are aware that such a big shift happened in tech from the 70s to the 80s. It wasn't just new companies built by the same people from the old companies. They were new companies built by complete outsiders to the old computing industry. At MIT, there was tech on campus and mainstream culture was exposed, thus the companies hired from the mainstream. When the center of tech moved to a couple of buildings across the country nestled among rural orchard communities, the people worked at those companies were not a sample of that community, rural orchard farmers. Instead they were the people who were so deeply involved in engineering AND sufficiently detached from their social structures on the East Coast, that they packed up their bags and moved Westward. Migrations are remarkable for their filtering effect. You can see this just by comparing each coast non-tech culture and west coast non-tech culture. The engineers that ended up in Silicon Valley were qualitatively different in attitude and baggage like all the people that settled in SF during the Summer of Love compared to those that remained in their comfortable rooted East Coast lives. Heck, Apple used to fly a pirate flag in their offices. You would have never seen such a display at companies like IBM, DEC, GE, Philips, etc.
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