> During one visit to Google’s headquarters, in Mountain View, about six writers sat in a conference room with Astro Teller, the head of GoogleX, who wore a midi ring and kept his long hair in a ponytail. “Most of our research meetings are fun, but this one was uncomfortable,” Kemper told me....
> “He claimed he hadn’t seen the show, and then he referred many times to specific things that had happened on the show,” Kemper said. “His message was, ‘We don’t do stupid things here. We do things that actually are going to change the world, whether you choose to make fun of that or not.’ ” (Teller could not be reached for comment.)
> Teller ended the meeting by standing up in a huff, but his attempt at a dramatic exit was marred by the fact that he was wearing Rollerblades. He wobbled to the door in silence. “Then there was this awkward moment of him fumbling with his I.D. badge, trying to get the door to open,” Kemper said. “It felt like it lasted an hour. We were all trying not to laugh. Even while it was happening, I knew we were all thinking the same thing: Can we use this?” In the end, the joke was deemed “too hacky to use on the show.”
https://www.newyorker.com/culture/culture-desk/how-silicon-v...
Tyler expounded on his reaction in a rare Library of Congress interview made public back in 2012. "That movie bummed me out," he said, "because I thought, 'How dare they? That's all real, and they're mocking it.'"
To be fair, Silicon Valley (the show) never interested me... kinda found it to be boring. But it _is_ hilarious when you run into these art imitates life imitates art things.
silicon valley is really insufferable. i don't understand that place at all and don't ever wish to be there. and i am often reminded of adam curtis' documentary all watched over by machines of everlasting grace. i wish he would do another one along these lines.
Do the show producers feel something similar to some in their own industry or their surreality is just reality for them? Are they brave enough to mock powerful people they may wish to work with later?
Would be fun to watch one on Hollywood and they should have very intimate details to bare.
The only time I've been able to stand Hollywood critiques in recent memory is BoJack.
Try Californication or Entourage
Are you SURE
Silicon Valley is the show most startup founders will refuse to watch. My startup was featured on TechCrunch Disrupt, we were on stage talking about how we will change the world with our product. Then things didn't particularly go as planed.
I discovered the show and started watching it shortly after. It was painful to see that they portrayed our exact journey as it happened. Only the show poked fun of the mistakes we were making. I watched it not only as a comedy, but also as a documentary that would predict our fate. It was eye-opening!
My favorite part (and most humiliating) was when we pitched our startup to a non-silicon valley investor and she simply replied: "OK, cut the crap. Which website are you scraping?"
All my co-founders were offended by the show. I must admit, its painful to watch someone else make fun of the things you put your heart to. But from time to time, someone has to make fun of you or you start to take yourself too seriously.
If you are trying to make it in silicon valley, please watch the show. At best, it will help you make your startup more grounded.
My own startup has been mostly outside of America, but we get enough brushes with Silicon Valley culture -- or, worse, wannabe Silicon Valley culture -- to make the show really resonate.
Even closer to home, for me personally, is the Australian comedy "Utopia" (or "Dreamland", depending on the market). It's about a municipal urban development corporation, which is basically my startup's customer group. One episode features a sendup of what my own startup does (online collaborative infrastructure planning and stakeholder engagement) -- or, more to the point, what some of our would-be customers want it to do. You can tell that the writers know what they're talking about. Damn near killed me to watch it. Highly, highly recommended!
Hah! Anecdotally, I've had the opposite experience watching the show and running a startup in the valley. Most of my co-founder friends have seen it and see it as a sort of catharsis.
"We aren't the only ones, this happens to everyone, so much so, there's a show about it"
And then there's the inspirational, "Let's have the team coalesce around a deadline and jam out something that's never been done before", episodes. Also very real.
I'm a huge fan of the show, but one thing I would like to point out is that I don't think everything of the show is negative. sometimes it makes me wish I was developing (data science here). my favorite moments of the show is when they overcome some huge challenge (spoiler like with 2 days of the condor)
So, so true. I tried to start watching it when I was running my startup but it literally felt like I was watching the same place and people I was spending 9-14 hours/day at the startup accelerator I was in.
The first season resonated the most with my experiences, but I know others who recognize their own experiences in different parts of it.
Running home - "Hand Covers Bruise" - https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=xXdFJggkjzM Starting work - "In Motion" - https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=5y2mDjPR7oU
"During the review process once the footage [of Techcrunch Disrupt] was woven in, another editor criticized the crowd shots for not featuring any women and blamed Berg for the oversight.
'...Those were real shots of the real place, and we didn't frame women out.The world we're depicting is f---ed up.' said Berg"
https://www.google.com/amp/s/amp.businessinsider.com/hbos-si...
Sorry for the amp link, the main page was broken.
There's been debate about whether "Silicon Valley" the show should have more diversity than Silicon Valley the place, but Berg argues that a show made for entertainment not meant to be a "social-action wing" or be a force of change - the show is just satirizing the reality that the tech industry itself needs to take care of.
At least in my Silicon Valley career, the "cast" around me has been vastly less so.
Not at all surprising considering it’s Hollywood, but amusing nonetheless.
https://www.businessinsider.com/hbos-silicon-valley-had-dive...
Not only did I have that exact same conversation with my coworker the day previously about the exact brand of yogurt, on post-analysis we're pretty sure our company has stocked the exact same spoons they used in the show.
For a while I couldn't decide if it was life imitating art, or a tongue-in-cheek nod to the stereotype we were seen as. But it wasn't the latter, the founder/president wasn't that self-aware.
I can't imagine who thought that the community of some of the world's biggest nerds wanted to listen to Flo-Rida !?
This is what Iannucci says about making more of The Thick of It -- it's impossible to do because current politicians are self satarising in ways that are unbelievable if you put them on screen, even if those things actually happened in real life.
- Office Space, check!
- Idiocracy, check!
- Silicon Valley, check!
For Silicon Valley it helps he's actually worked for a startup, a hardware one at that.
Oh how I loathed that show, especially at height of its popularity. I got so tired of smiling and nodding (or rolling my eyes, depending on who it was) as non-technical people at work and even my mother-in-law made it clear they thought of me when they watched that show (simply because I was the "smart engineer", so obviously a huge nerd with no social ability). None of these people were my age though, they were all signficantly older and Silicon Valley would have likely been much too sophisticated for them.
> I got so tired of smiling and nodding (or rolling my eyes, depending on who it was)...
> ... Silicon Valley would have likely been much too sophisticated for them.
Not to get personal, and I'm sure you're more empathetic in real life, but your frustrations might seem like geeky egotism to your coworkers.
Silicon Valley is a very different show, but definitely on solid ground. And it's unique in that it seems quite popular amongst people its blatantly making fun of.
SV laughs WITH nerds, satirising the excesses of a culture that is presented as filthy rich and dominant beyond belief. It also deals with the actual wet dreams of the culture in a fairly realistic way.
Think about the material that a dim bully could get from BBT (tons), versus what he could get from SV (very little). That’s all the difference.
Have you watched SV?
Season 1 ends with TechCrunch Disrupt, where founders nervously stammer on stage about how their "mobile-first, local-first social media network" will "make the world a better place".
BBT is outsiders laughing at the image of a nerd archetype many have in their head. It can be entertaining; it can tell you a lot about their relationship with that archetype. But as with all caricature, the distorted image can be a little ouchy.
SV satirizes insider territory with surprising resolution. It can be entertaining; it can tell people a lot about the culture. Where it's ouchy, it's ouchy because the truth can be painful as well as funny.
(I live next door to Pasadena and am acquainted with many Caltechers.)
http://popculturedetective.agency/2017/complicit-geek-mascul... http://popculturedetective.agency/2017/the-adorkable-misogyn...
https://www.newyorker.com/culture/culture-desk/how-silicon-v...
My favorite part:
>>>
During one visit to Google’s headquarters, in Mountain View, about six writers sat in a conference room with Astro Teller, the head of GoogleX, who wore a midi ring and kept his long hair in a ponytail. “Most of our research meetings are fun, but this one was uncomfortable,” Kemper told me. GoogleX is the company’s “moonshot factory,” devoted to projects, such as self-driving cars, that are difficult to build but might have monumental impact. Hooli, a multibillion-dollar company on “Silicon Valley,” bears a singular resemblance to Google. (The Google founder Larry Page, in Fortune: “We’d like to have a bigger impact on the world by doing more things.” Hooli’s C.E.O., in season two: “I don’t want to live in a world where someone makes the world a better place better than we do.”) The previous season, Hooli had launched HooliXYZ, its own “moonshot factory,” whose experiments were slapstick absurdities: monkeys who use bionic arms to masturbate; powerful cannons for launching potatoes across a room. “He claimed he hadn’t seen the show, and then he referred many times to specific things that had happened on the show,” Kemper said. “His message was, ‘We don’t do stupid things here. We do things that actually are going to change the world, whether you choose to make fun of that or not.’ ” (Teller could not be reached for comment.)
Teller ended the meeting by standing up in a huff, but his attempt at a dramatic exit was marred by the fact that he was wearing Rollerblades. He wobbled to the door in silence. “Then there was this awkward moment of him fumbling with his I.D. badge, trying to get the door to open,” Kemper said. “It felt like it lasted an hour. We were all trying not to laugh. Even while it was happening, I knew we were all thinking the same thing: Can we use this?” In the end, the joke was deemed “too hacky to use on the show.”
Erlich passing Dinesh off as Latino to get a deal on a graffiti logo design:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=hSzmVFF58Mo
Dinesh recounting to a puzzled Gilfolye about how he was a "cool" kid back in Pakistan, and why:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=qKz0M6SmQ8c
The latter one, in particular, implies that the writers had a deeper than average understanding of the different youth cultures of the US and South Asian cultures at a particular time in history.
Dinesh is one of the few nerdy Indian stereotypes that I do not mind. All the others seem like caricatures and generalizations of South Asians. Dinesh on the other hand, could be sitting right across my table, coding....
If The Big Short is considered a great "documentary" for the 2008 crisis, then SV does even better for the Valley.
Indeed. In the context of the show, and American culture, it was Dinesh's perspective that stood out as seeming odd or unique.
But I wonder if the post-1950s American/Hollywood understanding of "cool" - the glorification of rebel/outcaste that Gilfoyle's personality represents - is itself really the anomaly on the global scale.
I'd imagine many/most parts of the world don't develop a romantic cultural trope around the underdog, or the person who doesn't fit in with the mainstream. But I'd be interested to learn otherwise.
Other than those two things so far, I really love the show.
I challenge any of us to come up with something better or an alternative!
That’s not the amount of transfered data that makes a P2P Internet practical or not, but rather its reliability, something a compression algorithm can’t do anything about.
My problem with that technology is that, if the main character actually wanted to do good, he'd donate that algorithm to Apache and the show would be over in ten minutes. Or, if he wanted to make loads of money, he could license it for millions. Instead he wound up launching an ICO. The show should have been over in half an episode, but they turned the hero into a moronic sociopath to drag it out for five seasons.
Still watch it, and love it though. And super impressed that a Hollywood production finally understood Northern California. That never happens (see: The Social Network, Hackers, every Steve Jobs movie, etc.)
really underrated show.
While in reality e.g. IQ score baselines keep getting adjusted to account for the fact that kids keep getting better and better scores as time goes on[0].
The world is not getting dumber and if it is there is no evidence for it and plenty against it.
Big Bang Theory: Purposelessly inaccurate in ways that upset you.
Silicon Valley: Purposefully accurate in ways that upset you.
*with the occasional rule breaking exception
Also, Sneakers and The Net.
The more you rewatch it, the more you realize it knew exactly how over the top it was being, and is doing so with a wink and grin.
And there are far too many truely geeky Easter eggs in there to say it's oblivious. Technicolor rainbow, indeed.
how about "the pirates of silicon valley"? I feel it's _by far_ the best movie made involving his figure, likely because it came out earlier.
"AAAAaaaaaah! here is this completely benign part of the software development cycle that we are dramatizing because the sky is falling and our company won't survive!!!!!"
Every episode
The guy later pulls Richard aside saying that he wasn't "openly Christian". The whole episode was hilarious.
Basically all the Hooli scenes are about that. Also just about the entire careers of Big Head, Jack Barker, and Denpok the "spiritual advisor".
I'm still thinking about this comment about Fieldbook shutting down [1], and the "What Happened at Fieldbook" [2] article:
> In contrast, our closest competitor, Airtable, seems to be getting more traction.
Was really sad to read that.
[1] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=18461395
[2] https://medium.com/the-fieldbook-blog/what-happened-at-field...
I'm not familiar with Fieldbook, but I do wonder if they weren't as savvy as Airtable when it came to sales & finance strategy.
Products alone rarely make a business. It's a perfectly viable strategy to keep forging ahead at a loss while you slowly gain market share. You obviously need to show revenue growth (sales savvy) to keep the funding coming through (finance savvy).
I'm definitely guilty of getting all caught up in product and neglecting the business side of things.
Outside of dumb luck, I don't see a plot arc that favors Richard's team at all.
Especially when one of the overarching themes is that over the seasons the "underdog" throws friends under the bus, hacks competitors, rents a botnet, lies, commit fraud, and all kinds of other abuses.
What's the difference between Richard dumping a gf because she uses spaces and Gavin screwing over Jack because Jack wanted to get dropped off first from the private plane? The only difference I see is that Richard's narcissism doesn't come with the weight of a $100 billion company behind it.
Richard's bad behavior comes off as less jarring because almost all of the time he has considerably less power than Gavin. Richard doesn't have a wall of lawyers who he can casually probe about assassinating a foe. Gavin does.
Edit: clarification
Growing up in Texas, I never appreciated how on-point the show was, until I left the state and realized that the subtle culture cues of Texas didn't exist elsewhere, which means that King of the Hill nailed it. I mean, every detail is perfect.
The voice for Hank was based on some redneck guy who kept calling MTV and complaining about Bevis and Butthead.
Pointing out that TBBT's parody is poor is like saying Will & Grace did not portray a representative picture of gay urbanites.
I'm not sure he has a great personality, and went offtrack during the Linux/IBM/SCO fiasco, but man is he funny.
His row with TechCrunch's MG Siegler provided some decent entertainment too.
Judge surrounded himself with a lot of different perspectives on all of this.
I like to think he photoshopped it in his spare time lol.
> I have friends in Silicon Valley who refuse to watch the show because they think it’s just making fun of them.
But yeah, it's good to take a look at satire of yourself once in a while. Often they can tell you stuff that you may have overlooked, and generally they're not too hurtful when doing so.
It feels, well, not fun anymore a lot of the time. Development by copy-and-paste and gluing other peoples code together to arrive at a half-baked solution instead of exploring the code to try to understand it as a system so the solution you arrive at is the most effective that time and skill permit.
Being more infatuated with nerd culture than building something great. (I see this a LOT!) Chasing dollars instead of knowledge. And, don’t get me wrong; it’s ok to want to make money. Even a lot of it. But that should be the icing on the cake of solving real problems.
I feel like we used to do this stuff because it was what we loved to do. But now it feels like too many people do it because they want to look cool and/or they want a lot of money. The romance is dying.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Rqfkuc5mawg&list=PLTM-Dbun10...
The past few years, the quality degraded significantly IMO. It mostly turned into "The Office but with developers and geeks!!" - which doesn't make it a bad show, but not as witty and thought provoking. I wonder if it's past the point where it needs to reach a wider audience, just like any other show.
sorry bill but one could argue in a round about way that andrej karpathy did do just that ;P
the hot dog identifying app is one of my favourite examples of how spot on the show is
here(o) is a question i asked to one of the show's technical consultants whether the choice of 'not hotdog' was a reference to one of karpathy's early demos(i||ii)
timanglade> Ha seems like a fun coincidence.
(o) https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=14639161 the yt link is now a dead link.. use either of the below
(i) https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=u6aEYuemt0M&t=465 ; Title: Deep Learning for Computer Vision (Andrej Karpathy, OpenAI) ; Desc: The talks at the Deep Learning School on September 24/25, 2016 were amazing. I clipped out individual talks from the full live streams and provided links to each below in case that's useful for people who want to watch specific talks several times (like I do).
(ii) https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=eyovmAtoUx0&t=5787 ; timestamped from the full stream; Title: Bay Area Deep Learning School Day 1 at CEMEX auditorium, Stanford ; Desc: Day 1 of Bay Area Deep Learning School featuring speakers Hugo Larochelle, Andrej Karpathy, Richard Socher, Sherry Moore, Ruslan Salakhutdinov and Andrew Ng. ;
_Yes, Minister_, which satirizes the British government, supposedly had close access to several people in government, though it was probably careful rather than casual.
The clips on Youtube are all distorted, don't bother with them, but find S01E04 "Big Brother".
One of the funniest things I’ve seen, while also being sad, because it’s so true.
The Internship
The Circle
It's possible to get a somewhat accurate view from watching these, but you have to know which parts to completely ignore. I kind of wish there were "this is accurate" edits of those shows and movies.
I have bought Netflix subscription - but I am dissapointed now - the library of historic films available for me (in Poland) is very small and the current productions are kind of mechanistic. And no SV in Netflix.
(Would presumably be just as true the other way around, but that's not the title of the piece.)
It was a constant the leader fucking up and the gang coming through at the end - over and over and over.
Pure genius.
https://nplusonemag.com/issue-25/on-the-fringe/uncanny-valle...
All the comments here make it sound like a depressing place to be
We decided to go grab a beer and play pool while we waited for this new thing to execute based on this new language sun was having us convert everything to, XML...
While at the pool place these girls in lingerie were walking about selling raffle tickets.
We asked what they were for.
"We are putting ourselves through school and we are selling raffle tickets for the lingerie we are wearing, for $5 a ticket."
"I see, where are you ladies going to school"
"Oh, we go to silicone valley college..."
----
I wish this was a scene in Silicon Valley... it was ridiculously funny.
I compare the show to Entourage: Amusing to those outside Hollywood, but completely ridiculous to anyone who actually works in the industry.
