ICYMI: Deep job cuts in Silicon Valley could bring tech workers back to Canada

2023/01/03 Leave a comment

We will see but certainly presents an opportunity:

A northern Silicon Valley success story has placed Canada in the midst of the sudden plunge in fortune for the tech sector, and the hundreds of thousands of Canadians whose skill and ambition made them coveted engineers, programmers and leaders.

More than 150,000 tech workers have been laid off this year, according to an online tally. The cuts have been wide and deep, slicing across companies, global offices and nationalities – Canadians included.

But could their losses be Canada’s gain? It’s a potentially critical question for the entrepreneurs and visionaries who see a moment for this country to find serendipity in grim times.

The dramatic change in Silicon Valley’s fortunes has created “opportunity for Canada to reclaim some of its talent,” said Jennifer Holmstrom, a Canadian who leads talent and recruitment for GGV Capital, a global venture capital firm.

For every job lost in California – or Seattle or Austin, Tex. – there is a chance “for Canadians to come back and for global talent to move here,” said Dan Burgar, co-founder of Frontier Collective, a Vancouver tech industry promotion group. In Canada, “we’ll start to see startups being actually being able to scoop up some of this talent.”

That, at least, is the dream for tech companies north of the border.

But the rounds of layoffs also stand to reaffirm the long-standing struggles for Canada’s tech industry in luring the country’s best and brightest. While Canadian tech has become an increasingly attractive option for foreign workers – a trend that has accelerated this year as U.S. layoffs take hold – for many Canadians, Silicon Valley remains a land of possibility whose glitter has only slightly dimmed in recent months.

When Trevor Lai left Toronto for a job in Seattle with Meta Platforms Inc., his salary quadrupled. Moving to the U.S. has come with its share of troubles. His fiancée has not been able to secure a work permit there. His own status has become tenuous, too, after he was laid off in early November, when Meta shed 13 per cent of its work force. “If I don’t find a job I will get kicked out of the U.S.,” he says.

But his first priority is to remain in the U.S. “Just because of the money,” he said. Even had he been able to transfer his job at Facebook to Toronto, he calculated that his income would have fallen by 40 per cent. “I’ve worked in several companies in Toronto,” he said. “The people there are amazing. Everything is awesome – except for the pay.”

At the same time, the tech layoffs have come during a year that has already seen a surge in skilled immigrants coming to Canada, and there are signs that job losses in the U.S. may accelerate movements north.

The 4,882 applications for immigration to Canada under the Global Talent Stream program from January to October of this year are up nearly 70 per cent over the total for last year – and a more than 10-fold increase over 2017, according to statistics provided to The Globe and Mail by Immigration, Refugees and Citizenship Canada. The Global Talent Stream is open to people working in innovation-related companies, with a particular focus on tech workers, including computer and software engineers, information systems analysts, programmers and video-game designers.

Applications for Canadian work permits by Indian citizens in the first 10 months of this year are also up 40 per cent over last year, and more than triple the number from five years ago.

Indians hold nearly three-quarters of the H-1B visas granted by the U.S., a temporary work permit for specialized talent. They have been among the groups most seriously affected by tech layoffs, since H-1B visas are tied to employment. Those unable to find new jobs must leave the U.S. within 60 days.

Over the past decade of frenzied tech hiring and acute worker shortages, H-1B visa-holders could treat the threat of expulsion as theoretical. Tech layoffs have made that possibility unnervingly tangible.

Canada can be an appealing alternative. Major U.S. tech firms have already opened offices in Canadian cities, which have the added benefit of sharing time zones with their U.S. counterparts.

Last year, Canada counted more tech workers than California; the tech worker population in the Toronto-Waterloo corridor may soon eclipse that of the San Francisco Bay area. “If it hasn’t already happened, it will happen within the next 12 months,” said Chris Albinson, president of Communitech, the Kitchener, Ont.-based innovation hub.

“Canada is actually set up really well to be the largest innovation hub on the planet right now. What’s happening now in terms of the movement of tech workers out of the U.S. is going to do nothing but accelerate that benefit for Canada.”

In Silicon Valley, some have already prepared for this moment. The pandemic and Donald Trump’s presidency created enough fear that many Indian tech workers in Silicon Valley began filing immigration applications to Canada, said Sophie Alcorn, an immigration lawyer in the region. Today, “many have that as a backup option.” She estimates that between 5,000 and 15,000 H-1B visa holders have lost work in the last two months.

For many of those unable to find new jobs in the U.S., “if they can find a way to legally come to Canada, they would love that,” she said.

It’s not only those suddenly without work. MobSquad, which brings tech workers to Canada from the U.S. and elsewhere, has been hearing from software engineers who are “actually the ones that didn’t get laid off, that there’s interest in considering hopping to Canada,” said founder and chief executive Irfhan Rawji.

“We think it is going to create another pretty dramatic opportunity for the growth of our business, just like COVID did.”

It’s not clear how much that will address one of the biggest needs in Canada’s tech sector: a shortage of what Ray Newal, chief executive of The C100, a Canadian tech diaspora organization, calls “people who understand what ‘great’ looks like.” Those with experience working in and growing companies with $100-million and more in annual revenue are the people who can help build startups into global successes. Tech layoffs provide a new opening to recruit such people into smaller Canadian companies.

“Hopefully we’re going to see an opportunity to build more Shopify’s,” he said. To do that, however, will mean countering what he calls a “bifurcation of ambition,” where Canadians looking to do big things have traditionally looked outside the country.

“They don’t feel that their ambition can be met here,” he said. Reversing that is not “something we have figured out how to do well enough yet.”

Anyone leaving the U.S. has options that extend far beyond Canada, particularly with rise of digital nomadism. People are “going to want to work from Mexico, from Barbados, from Bermuda,” said Hongwei Liu, founder of Mappedin, a Waterloo-based company that maps indoor spaces. “If you can take your laptop and work from anywhere, why are you in Ontario?”

That question is a fundamental one not just for tech companies, but for Canada as a country. “We believe the biggest indicator of long-term success in the tech ecosystem is going to be talent,” said Jeff Larsen, the Atlantic Canada site lead for Creative Destruction Lab, which helps to develop seed-stage companies.

Mr. Larsen believes the question of how to attract talent is often approached wrongly. “It’s really creating the kind of community and city or region that people want to live in,” he said. Improving access to family doctors and transit may be more important than other measures.

Yet Canada has also seen enough tech success to make some ex-pat Canadians reconsider, especially as they weigh the political upheaval that has become part of life in places like the U.S. When Morley Ivers left Canada more than a decade ago, he found himself immediately at home as a tech entrepreneur in the U.S., where he became a citizen. “Being a founder was sort of recognized as someone who was living what people deemed was the American dream,” he said.

But, he said, “society inside of America has become so polarized that for me as a Canadian, quite frankly it became too much to bear.” He recently moved back to Toronto to create Cookin, a food delivery service for homemade meals. “I realized that the best place in the world for me to build in 2022 was Canada,” Mr. Ivers said. Toronto boasts not just cultural diversity, but “unbelievable tech talent – and it’s a fraction of the price.”

Others are leaving the U.S. in search of stability, including Indian citizens on H-1B visas who can wait decades to secure a green card. “I would call living on an H-1B in the U.S. like living on the edge,” said Syed Naqi, a software developer and project manager originally from New Delhi. He knows people who had to sell everything they owned – cars and houses included – after their status expired “and then rush back to India.”

When Mr. Naqi’s own H-1B visa was set to expire, MobSquad helped him move to Nova Scotia.

Within 18 months, he received permanent resident status in Canada. He now lives in Cole Harbour with his wife and two children. He describes his new community as warm and welcoming. He bought a house, and his family became fast friends with their next-door neighbours from Lebanon. His kids quickly adapted to a school system familiar after their time in the U.S.

“We like it here,” Mr. Naqi said. “Much better than in the U.S.”

Source: Deep job cuts in Silicon Valley could bring tech workers back to Canada

Filed under Immigration Tagged with , , , ,

Snubbed by Trump, Silicon Valley talent is looking to Canada

2017/04/27 Leave a comment

The “diversity dividend” to use The Pluralism Project phrase and a major opportunity for Canada.

But it will take a number of years to know whether this is anecdotal or more widespread in impact:

Like many Canadian tech executives, Roy Pereira, CEO and founder of Zoom.ai Inc., struggles to hire and hold on to highly skilled engineers, code writers and seasoned managers. Canadian software engineering grads often head directly to tech hubs like Silicon Valley and San Francisco, or use an entry-level position at the Canadian arms of giants like Google or Facebook as launching pads for U.S. gigs. And who could blame them? The pay is better; the career horizons, wider.

So when Pereira’s small but fast-growing software firm began recruiting for engineers earlier this month, using the usual online channels, he noticed something odd: the number of inquiries from the U.S. and overseas was significantly outpacing those from Canadians. “These were American citizens and sometimes foreign nationals, including a lot of South Asians. They were wanting to come to Toronto.”

He interviewed one woman working for Twitter in Silicon Valley. A member of a visible minority, “she wants to move to Toronto because she doesn’t want to deal with the situation down there,” says the 49-year-old serial entrepreneur, alluding to simmering racial and political tensions, as well as the Bay Area’s soaring living costs. “I’ve never seen that before and I’ve been doing this for a while.”

What’s driving these off-shore inquiries, according to Pereira and other executives in southern Ontario’s tech corridor, are the anti-immigrant signals emanating from Trump administration—not just the notorious travel ban on six Middle Eastern countries, but also uncertainty over potential travel headaches for American residents with family in those regions, stepped-up border scrutiny and, in particular, the fate of specialized H-1B work visas.

Washington issues 85,000 H-1B visas annually through a heavily subscribed lottery, including 20,000 to foreign nationals who obtained graduate degrees from U.S. institutions, many of them engineers and software developers. Trump recently signed an executive order directing federal agencies to review the H-1B program and, presumably, recommend toughening the rules—a change that has significant potential to close off positions for highly skilled professionals from around the world who want to work in the roiling American tech sector. “It’s a top-of-mind issue [for U.S. firms],” says Jeff Loeb, an American who recently jumped to Kitchener, Ont.-based Vidyard as chief marketing officer after 25 years in Boston’s tech industry.

So, amid all the tales about the fraught state of the U.S.-Canada border—north-bound asylum-seekers, cancelled southbound trips by Girl Guides—as well as these potential rule changes, Canadian firms have found themselves in the happy position of transforming all that stateside nationalist/protectionist fervour into a brain gain.

According to a recent Bloomberg report, U.S. universities have seen a decline in applications from Indian students who, sources said, are concerned about visa restrictions and racially motivated attacks, and who increasingly look to countries like Canada, Ireland and New Zealand for higher education and career opportunities. In the past few months, in fact, this unexpected opening has become a point of eager discussion at recruiting and tech-industry conferences, with panelists urging audience members to seize the day. “There’s never been a better time to attract global talent and capital to Canada,” Janet Bannister, a general partner at Real Ventures, a Toronto finance firm, said at one such gathering, alluding specifically to the political situation in the U.S.

At a biotech industry conference last month, Bradly Wouters, a top Toronto University Health Network researcher, observed that “it’s no secret that success in the U.S. has depended on ability to attract talent from around world.” That appeal, he added, is “threatened by the winds of change” and described the moment as “extremely opportunistic” for Canadian companies looking for highly skilled people.

Some tech-industry groups and firms have gone so far as to launch advertising campaigns or open letters aimed at attracting skilled foreign workers. CityLab reported recently that a Vancouver entrepreneur and some counterparts in the San Francisco area have set up a company, True North, that will help foreign nationals find positions in the sprawling tech sector in B.C.’s Lower Mainland. Even Prime Minister Justin Trudeau has gotten in on the act in a guest post on Quora earlier this month, pitching to international students and high-skill workers on Canada’s universities, tech firms and ethnocultural diversity. He offered carrots such as a significantly reduced permit process. “We want to help high-growth companies bring in the talent they need quickly by slashing the processing time for a Canada visa application from six months to just 10 business days,” wrote Trudeau, who didn’t mention Trump by name but slipped in a not-so-veiled dig at the president’s climate change denialism by noting that “our government is committed to evidence-based policy and respecting academic freedom.”

Yet some Canadian tech players say the spike in applications they’re seeing isn’t coming from international engineers so much as the aforementioned Canadian tech graduates who followed their careers to high-paying careers south of the border. “I’ve seen a lot of engineers [from the Universities of Waterloo or Toronto] who went to the U.S. during the 2009-2010 tech boom…who are saying, ‘Hey, we’re thinking of moving back,’” says Derrick Fung, CEO of Drop, a Toronto start-up whose app allows users to earn rewards on top of what their existing card reward programs provide. “We’re attracting people who’ve worked at Facebook and Snapchat.”

Not everyone agrees. Derek Ting, the 29-year-old founder TextNow, a cloud-based, low-cost mobile phone service based in Waterloo, Ont., and with an office in San Francisco, says highly skilled younger people will continue to follow their careers and seek out firms that have a strong culture and a sense of mission, regardless of the ambient political mood.

But Mike Silagadze, founder of the Toronto education software start-up Top Hat, predicts the combination of the high-tension politics, travel headaches and ramped-up protectionism in the U.S. will prompt more of Canada’s young engineers and researchers to pursue careers here. Noting that 80 per cent of Waterloo’s engineering grads go south, he mentions Canadian-born tech superstars such as Stewart Butterfield, who founded Flickr and now runs Slack, or Tesla founder Elon Musk, a South African immigrant who moved to Canada and studied at Queen’s University. “Imagine Elon Musk staying in Canada and starting Tesla here,” muses Silagadze. “That’s transformational.”

Source: Snubbed by Trump, Silicon Valley talent is looking to Canada – Macleans.ca

Filed under Immigration Tagged with , ,

Fasten your seatbelt, Peter Thiel, it’s going to be bumpy for Trump in Silicon Valley! – Recode

2017/01/31 Leave a comment

More strong commentary by Kara Swisher on Silicon Valley finding its spine and its contrarian, Peter Thiel:

So I thought my column this week would be a fun one, focused on the what-the-f&#k article last week in the New Yorker about some deeply narcissistic tech titans — are there any other kind? — who are “prepping” for the apocalypse by hoarding gold, stashing weapons and even buying spreads in remote places to hide.

Aside from commenting on their base inanity and deep selfishness, I even had the best joke to impart that one techie told me:

In the event of doomsday, I have some good news and some bad news. The good news is I have a bunker in New Zealand. The bad news? Peter Thiel is my neighbor.

Ahahaha. Imagining the end times spent with the quirky tech investor — who does, in fact, have one of those Kiwi escape pods — is certainly surreal. But it’s not much more bizarre than Thiel’s response this weekend as he tried mightily to spin an epic fib he told last year about President Donald J. Trump.

It took place in the question-and-answer part of a speech in D.C. that Thiel delivered in late October about his support of Trump, after a reporter asked him about the Muslim ban threat the candidate had clearly made.

As I reported then:

“The media is always taking Trump literally,” says Peter Thiel, while his supporters take him “seriously.” Well, thank goodness Peter Thiel is here to translate words that are said by someone who may be running the most powerful country in the world. He’s just kidding! Sort of! Not really again, but another nice pivot.

Dear Peter Thiel: Words. Matter. A. Lot. Look at me writing them down here on my keyboard.

I was being quite sarcastic then, because at the time I thought that Trump very much meant to do exactly as he said and that Thiel was either very stupid or very disingenuous for pretending otherwise.

Let me state for the record, I do not think Peter Thiel is very stupid.

But a fabulist? Well, let’s fast-forward to this weekend, when Thiel tried to launch another whopper in a pathetic attempt to defend Trump’s appalling executive order to bar the entry of refugees and also travelers from seven Muslim nations into the U.S.

A Thiel spokesman told the Wall Street Journal that “Peter doesn’t support a religious test, and the administration has not imposed one.”

Oh. Peter. Words. Still. Matter. A. Lot.

So please, for the love of Facebook, stop manipulating those words when everyone can see the real-life actions and consequences they have resulted in.

More to the point, every time you open your mouth, you look more and more like you got played by Steve Bannon and his army of hobgoblins to the detriment of tech leaders whom you somehow got to bow and scrape to the new administration.

It was bad enough that you pulled off that frightful kumbaya by trooping the most powerful people in Silicon Valley into Trump Tower for what amounted to a photo op for Trump and managed to get them to do so without uttering a word about key issues at the core of tech, like immigration. I called them “sheeple” at the time for doing that and staying silent, with you as their unlikely shepherd.

Now worse, you have dragged your pals, like tech icon Elon Musk and Uber’s Travis Kalanick, onto the president’s advisory council, with the promise that engagement with Trump will give them the chance to change his mind.

Not so, as it turns out, since they now look like quislings in the wake of the immigration disaster. After asking for suggestions on Twitter this weekend of how to approach Trump later this week on the ban, they are getting pilloried on social media for even being affiliated with the whole sorry mess.

…As for the vast majority of tech leadership and pretty much all of their employees, they are now making a break for the wall-free border with the government’s capricious and ill-conceived crackdown on immigrants and refugees.

The burn started slowly on Friday, with muted opposition largely focused on the impact on their workforces. Only a few strong voices, such as the very brave Reed Hastings of Netflix, made powerful moral statements about the Trump order.

Hastings’s this-shall-not-stand tone was infectious, as it turned out. By the end of the weekend, techies were ratcheting up the volume by the hour with increasingly more emotional, moral-high-ground statements, as well as offers of gobs of money (Google, Lyft, Uber and high-profile techies like Chris Sacca and Tony Faddell), food (DoorDash) and even homes (Airbnb).

Google founder Sergey Brin’s appearance at San Francisco International Airport was a heartening visual of that. While he said he was there as a refugee and not as a rep for the search giant, his presence spoke volumes about the way this was headed.

I knew that would be the case after I tweeted this note below late Friday night and it quickly started to garner a plethora of responses, including from some prominent techies, all of whom wanted in.

That included Laszlo Bock, former head of Google People Ops, who wrote: “former tech leader here, but still 100 percent against excluding people from our nation based on religion, origin, etc.”

It went on like that as opposition to the Trump immigration order has grown and I expect it to do so even more, as those very rich and very powerful and very influential tech companies start to act like they actually have money, power and influence. And, thank goodness, some of the loudest people on earth finally realize they have a very loud voice.

Behind the scenes, where all the real stuff happens, I am told the political arm-twisting has commenced and that there are a number of joint efforts that are under way. We’ll see how effective and long lasting they are, especially since there are many things tech wants from the Trump administration, as I have outlined before.

But given Trump has literally made good on several of his more heinous campaign promises that everyone thought he would not, I think cooperation between tech and Trump is going to be rarer than more opposition.

For example, what of Trump’s hard-line stance in the campaign on encryption or his appointment of very anti-net neutrality FCC chairman Ajit Pai? Neither will be easy to find common ground on.

And just today, Bloomberg is reporting another executive order being drafted focused on work visas that tech companies depend on, which will have a big impact on how critical talent is recruited. According to the report, “companies would have to try to hire American first and if they recruit foreign workers, priority would be given to the most highly paid.”

Well, that’s not going to go over well at Coupa Cafe in Palo Alto. No, no. no. (Fly-on-the-wall dream: I’d love to be in the boardroom at Facebook, where Peter Thiel is a director, to hear him explaining this one away.)

More: I was at a chock-full event in Palo Alto last week, as tech types planned their attack on the defunding of Planned Parenthood and the reinstatement of the global gag rule by Trump and the GOP that restricts foreign aid to those organizations that reference abortions in family planning. It was a move that Facebook COO Sheryl Sandberg spoke out against last week. “We don’t have to guess,” she wrote, noting that the move is a disaster for women globally. “We know what this will do.”

What else? Well, now there are rumors that Trump could sign another executive order aimed at restricting advances in rights made by gays and lesbians, such as allowing people to refuse to do business with them due to religious objections (expect federal legislation here too). And, earlier this week, press secretary Sean Spicer said, “I don’t know,” when asked if Trump would rescind a Barack Obama executive order banning anti-LGBT discrimination by federal contractors.

Given tech leaders have been very vocal in their support of gay issues, which are important to their employees, if Trump does any of this, it should go off like a Roman candle in Silicon Valley.

I’ll be curious what Thiel, who is now famously gay after his speech at the Republican National Convention this summer, will say about it if that comes to pass. I am guessing declaring that “Peter doesn’t support anti-gay orders, and the administration has not imposed one” will not work quite as well the second time around.

And neither will Silicon Valley not taking Trump both seriously and literally anymore. Because these are serious times and we need serious people who will literally be compelled to act and speak out on all this and more. (And if you think I am going to stop nagging you all, you should ask my kids how that goes.)

It’s probably a bummer for many of tech’s leaders that car execs or finance types or Hollywood moguls are not held to this high standard. In fact, the New York Times’ Mike Isaac tweeted about that yesterday.

Filed under Immigration, Multiculturalism Tagged with , ,

Hell is Silicon Valley people who won’t grow up – Recode

2016/12/22 Leave a comment

Kara Swisher on the Silicon Valley mentality and denial of some of the negative effects of technology:

Did Silicon Valley, which has reaped the rewards of this system by amassing startlingly enormous piles of wealth, imagine that all this would not eventually have to be paid for by someone?

Or as Trump’s main digital guru, investor Peter Thiel, has written: “In a world of scarce resources, globalization without new technology is unsustainable.”

As most regular readers know, Thiel is not someone I agree with often, given his disturbingly cavalier attitude toward a lot of values and standards I think are inviolate. (Don’t sue a publisher out of business secretly for personal reasons and then brag that you love journalism. Check!)

But in this, Thiel is correct: The results of tech have been and will continue to be devastating to too many in the general populace. So it would be nice if Silicon Valley could take that sentiment to heart as the days and years that stretch ahead look ever more serious and more fraught by all the technologies that have been created over the last two decades.

And, more to the point, things that technology is creating now are certain to result in even more unrest as they intensify. The questions that need to be asked are many and include:

What happens to all the many jobs that will be impacted by self-driving technologies, given so much of our population makes its living driving and transporting? While it may be for the best in terms of energy savings and the ending of needless human-caused accidents, is anyone developing in this arena thinking about its repercussions on existing jobs or scoping out what new jobs can be created?

It’s the same thing with a slate of on-demand or home-rental tech, the impact of which are too often shrugged off as “negative externalities,” which is a great euphemism for terrible things. Something can be both promising and also devastating at the same time, so try hard to take both things in.

What about acceleration of robotic technologies in factories and through the system from restaurants to retailers to banks to healthcare and more? While it is entirely clear these changes have a myriad of advantages, who in Silicon Valley is thinking about the job loss and what to do about this? (A salient point made to me in my Recode Decode podcast this week by New York Times columnist Tom Friedman, who noted, “people who worry about Mexicans [taking away their jobs], should worry about robots.”)

And, of course, who is assessing what will happen with leaps in artificial intelligence and the potential for replacement of many service jobs. from legal work to accounting to, yes, journalism? Will, as Elon Musk told me in an interview, humanity become mere “house cats” of the technologies? (Even if the food is good and the litter is fresh, do we want to become house cats?)

I am not heartened that anyone in the high echelons of tech is thinking about any of this in a consistent and systematic way, largely from the reaction so far.

Calls for California to secede from the U.S. — fyi, we’ll need a lot more firepower than what comes from servers to do that — come only because figuring out what’s next is really hard.

Murmurs that Silicon Valley companies might place a token manufacturing facility in the U.S. to shut Trump up seems not really profound enough to make a true difference.

Memos and quotes saying techies will not create appalling things like Muslim registries are great, but do not address what they will do in cooperation with an administration bent on destroying many, many more core values of this industry.

And tramping up to Trump Tower en masse to talk about a variety of the expected topics while saying nothing in order to get things for the present seems very short-sighted indeed. (Kudos for Facebook’s Sheryl Sandberg for bringing up women and minorities, but only Alphabet’s Larry Page had a truly unusual idea about changing the electrical grid — more on that soon.)

It all reminds me of the vision that tech continues to reflect about itself as a place of fresh ideas and newness at all times. To my mind, which I often say — hat tip to investor Pejman Nozad — Silicon Valley is still a place of big minds chasing small ideas.

It’s often referred to as a Peter Pan mentality, in which its denizens are trying to remain forever young in a land of perpetual boyhood, making things like photo apps and social media and new ways to play old video games.

Personally, I think there is a far more sinister comparison to another fairy tale, that of Pinocchio’s transformation into a jackass on Pleasure Island. It’s a place where boys are indulged with endless fun until it becomes clear that there is actually a price for all that indulgence.

It also reminds me of another thing Sartre wrote: “Man is condemned to be free; because once thrown into the world, he is responsible for everything he does.”

Well, Silicon Valley, it’s finally time to pay up and admit that you are not forever young. More importantly, you need to stop acting like you aren’t powerful or that you don’t have huge businesses and, most of all, that you just can’t fix big problems because it’s super-duper hard. You’ve been part of creating this mess and you should absolutely be part of fixing it.

Source: Hell is Silicon Valley people who won’t grow up – Recode

Filed under Other Tagged with , ,

President Obama explains the difference between Silicon Valley and the real world – Recode

2016/10/19 Leave a comment

To be noted:

The final thing I’ll say is that government will never run the way Silicon Valley runs because, by definition, democracy is messy. This is a big, diverse country with a lot of interests and a lot of disparate points of view. And part of government’s job, by the way, is dealing with problems that nobody else wants to deal with.

So sometimes I talk to CEOs, they come in and they start telling me about leadership, and here’s how we do things. And I say, well, if all I was doing was making a widget or producing an app, and I didn’t have to worry about whether poor people could afford the widget, or I didn’t have to worry about whether the app had some unintended consequences — setting aside my Syria and Yemen portfolio — then I think those suggestions are terrific. (Laughter and applause.) That’s not, by the way, to say that there aren’t huge efficiencies and improvements that have to be made.

But the reason I say this is sometimes we get, I think, in the scientific community, the tech community, the entrepreneurial community, the sense of we just have to blow up the system, or create this parallel society and culture because government is inherently wrecked. No, it’s not inherently wrecked; it’s just government has to care for, for example, veterans who come home. That’s not on your balance sheet, that’s on our collective balance sheet, because we have a sacred duty to take care of those veterans. And that’s hard and it’s messy, and we’re building up legacy systems that we can’t just blow up.

Source: President Obama explains the difference between Silicon Valley and the real world – Recode

Filed under Government Tagged with ,