Secret Guild of the Silicon Valley
A couple of weeks ago, I was drinking beer with friends in San Francisco and someone pointed out:
The joke is funny, but it made me think. Who are these “zhyrobasy who know C ++” or, as someone else said, “bearded guys in stretched sweaters that support Google servers”? And why if you met one of them, this is how to pull a string of a ball and they all seem to know each other?
The reason is that…
... all the best engineers in the Valley, whether they realize it or not, enter the secret Guild. They constitute a fraternity of craftsmen with the following features:
')
They are not interested in tweeting, writing blogs or making reports at conferences. They are interested in making code and launching it into battle. The easiest way to find them is on IRC, for filling in bug reports for Apache projects, or for developing Github repositories in your free time.
They are part of a nomadic gang of soft-craftsmen who have trained each other in the Valley for the past 40 years, and they have quietly but reliably built the infrastructure behind the most successful companies in the world. When they leave - like they left places like Netscape, Sun, Yahoo - abandoned firms wither, wither and die.
If you want to build a technology company, you will need to hire them, but you cannot hire a Guild member through a recruiter. Recruiters make cold calls to them every day, write cold emails and other messages on LinkedIn, but the Guild’s response is always similarly cold.
A real member of the Guild from the new work in Facebook, Google or that long archipelago of startups that their brothers are building, is always separated by exactly one message by Skype, ICQ or other IM. Externally, successful companies that fail to attract engineers from the Guild will definitely struggle with the problems of the performance and stability of their technology - as LinkedIn struggled before and like Twitter struggled until recently.
An entrepreneur or top manager rarely earns membership in the Guild, for this requires a journey of discipleship, which few people have enough talent or energy. However, it is possible to earn the respect of the Guild and convince its members that your company is the Guild House, that is, a place where they can meet daily to learn their craft and develop it.
It begins with engineering culture, when technological decisions are made for technical reasons, not personal motives. It also means that the masters are given to solve problems by creating new tools, and not just stubborn, but heavy use of old tools. It is these values of Google and Facebook (the two real Houses of the Guild from the Valley) that laud any engineer for asking about them.
Finally, the implicit pact concluded by the Guild with the company states that the efforts of the Guild members will not be in vain. The most powerful force that attracts the Guild, the essence of the promise to build a product that falls into the hands of hundreds, thousands or millions of satisfied users. This is the desired currency, and it can even be offered by companies like foursquare, which are still struggling to build their engineering reputation.
The Guild of the Valley is almost completely invisible, but it is the links with it that determine the rise and fall of the technological giants. Startups today that the unsung talents of its members value today will become success stories tomorrow.
Supplement from the author: As George E.P. Boxing , “All models are wrong. Some models are useful. ” My ironic model of the anti-hipster Guild of Engineers angered those who took it literally, but the purpose of my rhetoric is different: to declare that heavy engineering work is unreliable and for the media environment or the ruling start-up pop culture in San Francisco. But if you want to build a successful technology company, then it would be nice to target experienced guys who have been honing their skills in the trenches of the Valley for the past few decades, and those they have trained.
Translator's notes: "Valley of Silicon" specifically, in order to increase the bombast. Other non-letters are also intentional. Fat is, no beard, sweaters, too, I continue to work on myself. ;) Original here: medriscoll.com/post/9117396231/the-guild-of-silicon-valley; I didn’t give innovations about hubs and design (I was looking for a drop-down list with a type, but I didn’t find it), I will correct it in future translations.
“You have too many hipsters, so you will not scale. Hire several girobasses who know C ++. ”
The joke is funny, but it made me think. Who are these “zhyrobasy who know C ++” or, as someone else said, “bearded guys in stretched sweaters that support Google servers”? And why if you met one of them, this is how to pull a string of a ball and they all seem to know each other?
The reason is that…
... all the best engineers in the Valley, whether they realize it or not, enter the secret Guild. They constitute a fraternity of craftsmen with the following features:
')
- Their profession is to create software.
- Their tools are C, C ++ and Java, not Javascript or PHP.
- They wear ironic T-shirts, and this is the upper limit of their fashion sense.
- They are not hipsters who live in the Mission area or even in the city ; they live near the CalTrain train stop , somewhere on a peninsula in the southern part of the bay.
- They gather on Thursdays on the Games Night to play the Colonialists .
- They are passive, logical and generally similar to Spock .
They are not interested in tweeting, writing blogs or making reports at conferences. They are interested in making code and launching it into battle. The easiest way to find them is on IRC, for filling in bug reports for Apache projects, or for developing Github repositories in your free time.
They are part of a nomadic gang of soft-craftsmen who have trained each other in the Valley for the past 40 years, and they have quietly but reliably built the infrastructure behind the most successful companies in the world. When they leave - like they left places like Netscape, Sun, Yahoo - abandoned firms wither, wither and die.
If you want to build a technology company, you will need to hire them, but you cannot hire a Guild member through a recruiter. Recruiters make cold calls to them every day, write cold emails and other messages on LinkedIn, but the Guild’s response is always similarly cold.
A real member of the Guild from the new work in Facebook, Google or that long archipelago of startups that their brothers are building, is always separated by exactly one message by Skype, ICQ or other IM. Externally, successful companies that fail to attract engineers from the Guild will definitely struggle with the problems of the performance and stability of their technology - as LinkedIn struggled before and like Twitter struggled until recently.
An entrepreneur or top manager rarely earns membership in the Guild, for this requires a journey of discipleship, which few people have enough talent or energy. However, it is possible to earn the respect of the Guild and convince its members that your company is the Guild House, that is, a place where they can meet daily to learn their craft and develop it.
It begins with engineering culture, when technological decisions are made for technical reasons, not personal motives. It also means that the masters are given to solve problems by creating new tools, and not just stubborn, but heavy use of old tools. It is these values of Google and Facebook (the two real Houses of the Guild from the Valley) that laud any engineer for asking about them.
Finally, the implicit pact concluded by the Guild with the company states that the efforts of the Guild members will not be in vain. The most powerful force that attracts the Guild, the essence of the promise to build a product that falls into the hands of hundreds, thousands or millions of satisfied users. This is the desired currency, and it can even be offered by companies like foursquare, which are still struggling to build their engineering reputation.
The Guild of the Valley is almost completely invisible, but it is the links with it that determine the rise and fall of the technological giants. Startups today that the unsung talents of its members value today will become success stories tomorrow.
Supplement from the author: As George E.P. Boxing , “All models are wrong. Some models are useful. ” My ironic model of the anti-hipster Guild of Engineers angered those who took it literally, but the purpose of my rhetoric is different: to declare that heavy engineering work is unreliable and for the media environment or the ruling start-up pop culture in San Francisco. But if you want to build a successful technology company, then it would be nice to target experienced guys who have been honing their skills in the trenches of the Valley for the past few decades, and those they have trained.
Translator's notes: "Valley of Silicon" specifically, in order to increase the bombast. Other non-letters are also intentional. Fat is, no beard, sweaters, too, I continue to work on myself. ;) Original here: medriscoll.com/post/9117396231/the-guild-of-silicon-valley; I didn’t give innovations about hubs and design (I was looking for a drop-down list with a type, but I didn’t find it), I will correct it in future translations.
Source: https://habr.com/ru/post/143285/
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