What nerds like is the kind of town where people walk around smiling. This excludes LA, where no one walks at all, and also New York, where people walk, but not smiling. When I was in grad school in Boston, a friend came to visit from New York. On the subway back from the airport she asked "Why is everyone smiling?" I looked and they weren't smiling. They just looked like they were compared to the facial expressions she was used to.
May 30, 2006
Nerds and rich people.
It's what you need to make the next Silicon Valley. How do you get nerds and rich people in the same place? When do rich people want to live in a place that nerds like? And what do nerds like?
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16 comments:
The second link is broken, and I don't see the connection between the subject and the first link. Shouldn't you be linking to this?
Dave: You didn't read the essay, did you?
The essay argues that those people will come once business starts booming. But to start your new silicon valley, you need critical masses of both programmers and money.
Sorry to screw up both links! Fixed now.
Dave: that's a pretty weak excuse for uninformed ranting.
I've always thought I was a nerd. My wife calls me a nerd. Yet I dislike Boulder and Berkeley. So apparently I'm not a nerd.
I need to redefine myself, I guess.
And matt r-c: Right on!
"As written, it's just Paul Graham's list of funky cities he'd like to live in."
Yeah, his failure to mention Madison bugs me. He does mention Ithaca -- where he went to school -- but dismisses it because it has winter.
I suspect I'm as close as anyone reading this to the kind of techno-nerd the article writer is discribing.
I think the writer is simply extrapolating his personal preferences to geekdom as a whole. There are plenty of suburban loving geeks running around, and plenty who prefer Pittsburgh to San Francisco. How can you say that geeks live in Silicon Valley because of the personality and libralism of San Francisco? The center of Silicon Valley is San Jose, as vanilla a city findable in California (although there is a ample Vietnamese food.)
On a personal note, I'd rather live in Duluth, MN than San Francisco. Every year, I go to Apple's Developer Conference in SF, and every year I wish they'd move it back to San Jose.
Maybe one reason for one city being a tech hub is a nexus of Chinese and Indian immigrants, some place where they can buy familar foods and smell familar smells. After all, Pittsburgh has the lowest concentration of Asians of any major city in the U.S..
Or maybe, it's just the law of expanding returns, the network effect, and the first mover advantage all rolled into one. The bigger the geek population the larger the geek magnetism. Perhaps, tele-presence technologies will eliminate this and factors like home pricing and taxation will cause my fellow geeks to join me in New Hampshire.
Why isn't Madison a tech hub based on this guy's premise? It has an excellent research University. It's certainly a walking/biking city with more bookstores per capita than anywhere else. I'd be happy to move there, but there are very few coding jobs there.
He does mention Ithaca -- where he went to school -- but dismisses it because it has winter.
Winter would certainly disqualify Madison then as well. Paul Graham certainly sounds kinda whiny when it comes to weather.
I would think Milwaukee would make it before Madison.
I never realized there was such a rivalry between the two cities.
Peace, Maxine
I find New York much more friendly than Boston...no, really, I do!
Glenn Howes: I'll give you a run for your money on the techno-nerd scale. :)
If you've read any of his other essays, you'll find that projecting his own preferences onto the market at large is basically what Paul Graham does. That's not necessarily a bad thing, because PG has a lot of good experience and his preferences usually do align quite well with mainstream geek culture.
One reason why Madison hasn't taken off as a tech town is that we don't have a lot of investors here. The local market for programmers is actually quite hot right now, but most of the work is contracting for the state gov't. That sort of work generally doesn't attract the sort of programmer that is really interested in entrepreneurship. But the relative dearth of investors is a much bigger problem.
For those who aren't in the business, Zach's remark about LISP is on target: LISP is a programming language from the 1950s which is considered very elegant (as in math, not as in Vogue), but not very practical. It's marginal in academia (excepting Graham's alma mater, MIT) and virtually unused in industry. It's been a widely-exposed failure in the "market" for fifty years. It has had its chances.
Graham is a dabbler and a blowhard. His ideas are superficially plausible, but they're usually about a millimeter deep — sometimes even in programming (see above), which is one of the very few fields he knows anything about.
Sometimes he lapses into absolute gibberish, like when he offers Google as an example of a company smart enough not to use Java: He explains that when they hire Java programmers, they like to see some Python (a programming language he prefers) experience as well. No joke: He uses their ads for Java programmers to prove that they don't use Java. WTF? That essay is about how smart people don't like Java, and those job ads from Google are the only real data he offers. But he doesn't even link them; knowing Graham, it may have been only a single ad, from which he extrapolated. Aside from that, Graham offers nothing more than some vague impressions about what he thinks his friends like. That's his usual method.
Glenn Howes has it right. Graham suffers from Eric Raymond Syndrome: He thinks he can learn everything worth knowing about a whole cluster of professions merely by looking in a mirror. He's a fool.
In programming, you can reliably generalize in ways which are perfectly nonsensical in the real world. It also happens that programmers are often unfamiliar with reality, particularly the human race. It's not rare for programmers to make asses of themselves this way.
He does have a reasonable grasp of the obvious, at least: The thought of a "civil servant" funding startups is as hilarious as he says it is.
Incidentally, Graham really did help start, and run, an extremely successful startup. He's not actually a moron. But that was right out of grad school; it's the only programming job he's ever had. His experience in the industry is very narrow.
I think that there are different types of nerds. The ones whom I am most familiar with are more interested in the outdoors ementies than the indoors types. That was true in both Austin and Boulder. Now, coming from Colorado, I could never understand outdoor activies in Austin, but many of the engineers I worked with there were avid bicyclists, both mountain and road biking. (But I still don't see why you would prefer mountain biking in Austin than in Boulder).
BTW, as to the comments about Boulder - whatever growth there is around the town is definately not in Boulder, but rather much of it is around it, where it doesn't have to conform to the ZPG Boulder mentality (and resulting sky high housing costs) - for example, the US 36 corrider.
But I think that the authors have some good points. The problems with Boulder (and CO in general) are that the university system is not world class - because, in the example of CU, the relatively conservative population is tired of paying for Ward Churchills, and there isn't the level of VC money there.
I have experienced the difference a couple of times with Silicon Valley. Not only is it easier to find financing, but you also have an easier time getting an experienced money man involved - someone who has been through acquisitions and IPOs enough to be good at it, and to find the financing. You can often tell if a company is serious about this sort of thing precisely this way - they may be young, but if they have an experienced money guy on-board, they are serious (and a serious contender, because these guys don't go with losers). And these money guys also tend to live in places like Silicon Valley, and like to be able to drop by and keep their eyes on things.
The problem though that Silicon Valley is facing is that it isn't that attractive a place anymore. I have pictures of my great-aunt and great-great grandparents camping out in Palo Alto in the 1920s, before she moved to Hawaii. It was rustic then - there is not a house to be seen from their camping spot. Try camping anywhere near there today.
As a result, we have seen a big move by some of these big CA firms to move as many of their engineers out of Silicon Valley, and, in particular for us, here to CO (but also Oregon, Idaho, etc.) A lot of those geeks would just rather live someplace like CO, OR, ID, etc. than in Silicon Valley, both from a quality of life point of view, and a cost of living point of view. And, ultimately, some startups come out of that (we have our share of 3rd and 4th generation startups already). Not as many as Silicon Valley, but noticable.
Bruce Hayden said, "Try camping anywhere near [Silicon Valley] today."
and reveals he hasn't got a clue what he's talking about and thus calls into question everything he has to say about everything else he talks about so constantly.
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