This struck a chord with me. I grew up in rural Scotland, learning to program my MSX and the BBC Micros they had in our school. I picked up a lot of 'tech culture' from Byte magazine, which would sporadically appear in our local newsagent. Although I have been to the US a few times now, I've only been to the valley once, but walking through Palo Alto listening to everyone around talking tech I had the strangest feeling that in some way I felt 'at home'.
This is interesting. I'm just out of college and from central Massachusetts, a place that I can best describe as "incredibly boring" (but with pretty good public schools).
However, Silicon Valley doesn't appeal to me at all. San Francisco? Sure, that's appealing, but it's not really "the Valley" (correct me if I'm wrong here). Even if it is, it's still not as appealing as Boston/Cambridge or New York.
I've been to the (non-SF) Valley. To me, it seems like home, but a little denser and with more money. There's still a lot of sprawl. You have to drive most places (I have very little interest in owning a car currently - I don't have $20000 on hand and I'm not interested in debt). BART seems kind of, well, sad, compared to the MTA or MBTA. I guess there's the advantage of being able to easily bike year round, but I would still need to bike a lot further.
It's a nice place, I certainly won't debate that. And I would appreciate a place where me saying "Cocoa" didn't bring chocolate to most peoples' minds. But I don't think it's for me.
This is kind of odd for me to read considering I actually grew up in the Valley - San Jose, to be precise - and have been working in high tech companies since I started high school. It's weird to me to think that the place where I grew up might also be the best place for me to start my career - I understand most peoples' lives aren't like that.
This article is a load of valley sensationalism if I've ever read it.
This culture is not exclusive to the valley at all; you're not "coming home" to some exclusive club for a group of people who were shunned by the rest of the world. This culture and the types of people involved exist elsewhere in the world (in very large quantities, much of the time).
You can claim LucasArts as valley, sure, that's fine. However, don't claim IRC, don't claim Linux, and don't claim the Anarchists Cookbook of all things. You got to where you were because you had persistance and some level of dedication that enabled you to build something remotely interesting - this is not the doing of a given area in the world.
I love technology and startups as much as the next guy, but I really do think a more critical view of the valley and the surrounding tech scene is necessary. This kind of blind evangelizing for the valley also does nothing for other location's tech scenes.
It's kind of strange, but when I read ESR's "Portrait of a Hacker", I recognized many traits in myself that I had independently developed, many prior to getting into the software world online.
Getting a turist visa shouldn't be that much of a problem.
But yeah, moving to the Valley is kinda like NASA going to Mars: quite a lot talk is going on and you keep getting your hopes up but in the end it just isn't feasible yet.
