Understand the author's (Clintonesque) pain, as I am going through a similar problem, but don't have it all figured neatly to disengage from the industry yet.
My own views are that the software industry has reduced its 'professional quotient' a lot, to probably near zero, and hence all this chaos. I used to work in 'well-run and large companies' prior to the internet days, and in some sense we are a victim of the post-internet (mid-90s' post-Netscape) runaway success.
There is no professionalism in the industry anymore, and paradoxically it could be due to the 'open source model'. Don't get me wrong, I like open-source with all that emphasis to openness, freedom etc.. but it has led to the ruin of the small developer. It is forcing a lot of us to jump into the 'entrepreneur/solopreneur' bandwagon.
The openness part described above also includes anyone to jump into the industry (unlike say the medical, or civil-engineering profession; after all do you want a 'hacker heart surgeon' or a 'hacker bridge builder?'). The professionalism is completely mocked at, and all this hero-worshiping of start-up culture etc.. has ruined it.
OTOH, I am not arguing in favor of high-barriers of entry etc... Honestly I don't the answer on how to fix it....
I think both authors miss the point that historically (esp. post WW2 which corrected the abberation during WW2) that capital flow was increasingly borderless.
It has been labor that is held back in some anachonistic time warp with visa restrictions and so on. In prior times, European colonialism in Asia precisely solved the labor issues by directly annexing, then enhanching, controlling, and regulating the historical Asian labor productivity flows.
After decolonization, with diversions to socialist/communist and autarkic models in Asia, most of these countries are now back in the game largely in control of developed (and mostly Western) nations.
You have to see the regulation of labor in these slightly larger timelines to appreciate what is happening even in SV, and in other parts of the world.
Majority of labor needs were of blue-collar variety, but thanks to technology, even white-collar labor is not immune to this economic rationale of matching capital to labor.
Borders will dissolve (they are mostly unnatural and artificial barriers), and before people bring up all the cultural and historical rights, even these items are ultimately driven by economics. High-tech jobs are no different in this equation and are driven by the same forces.
The only thing that can upset globalization trends is war which is precisely what happened with WW1 and WW2 in the 20th century (which also arrested the globalization trends which started to peak just prior to WW1). You want to stop labor migration flows? Start preparing for war.
The other possibility is for the labor vs capital imbalances to level out - for e.g. China and India become sufficiently advanced and developed to a point where there is no need for them to export their surplus populations, exactly how the British did in 18th and 19th century as they colonized North America (USA and Canada), Australia, and South Africa.
>> I'm also fascinated by Bob Woodward, a brilliant Yale grad who spend several years in the Office of Naval Intelligence, before deciding to become a reporter. Watergate was one of his first stories, an absolutely incredible coincidence - a guy with US intelligence connections breaks a story that takes down a president.
I still don't like Nixon but I can understand how guys like him end up in commanding positions.
The article is actually objective - tell it like it is rather than the uppity pretensions of 'presidency' and undue deference given to so-called politicians, leaders etc... (not just in the public sphere, but also in private).
This is another reason I like 'Daily Show' for news - the mockery strips away all the usual fig-leaf of BS 'respectability'.
This article intentionally or otherwise distorts how the real world really works even in the bubble of SV. The game in SV is more subtle - the meaness comes in different forms by silent exclusions, cliques forming to backstab other members and so on.... just like any other human enterprise.
Add to this, the 'false humility', and self-deceptions, SV is actually way more narrow-minded than it used to be - very intolerant to anything that deviates from a certain expectations of conformity.
1) The early 2000 dot-com crash + the Enron crash that changed the regulatory landscape to make it harder for companies to IPO. This has resulted in start-ups being formed for the pure purpose of the acquisition route - fund, and flip strategy.
2) I see the Netscape IPO as the transition point - I like to call the eras, BN and AN (before-Netscape, and after-Netscape) which coincided with the commericialization of the internet. Netscape IPO with its cult of the young founder started this trend.
All you have to do is list the companies that were formed in the BN vs the AN era, and get a feel of the 'engineering quotient' of these companies. Of course it also coincides with software overshadowing hardware companies where the former requires less upfront capital than the latter.
The capital requirements have gone down even further thanks to virtulization and consolidated infrastructure services like AWS.
3) Paradoxically larger involvement of the state. All the UC system and other universities occurred due to the threat of the cold war. Almost all the success of technology companies since the 1980s' can be traced back to the investments made in the earlier decades in universities (eps. in STEM fields), infrastructure (inter-state highways) and so forth.
How the same forumula can be replicated is going to be a challenge. Some signs like allowing private companies like Space-X to compete and augment govt. agencies might be the first steps - it will create new markets that will drive innovation.
The American triangular replationship between the State, Universities, and Private Enterprise are the 3 legs of the proverbial stool, and when one or the other legs weakens, the whole edifice starts to stumble.
4) Larger numbers of H1Bs who are legalized indentured labor that makes it harder for them to be confrontational with their employers. Note I myself went thru. the process, so I am not your garden-variety bigot here. My answer to this is to streamline the immigration process to:
a) Delink H1Bs' from a spnosoring employer. Allow H1Bs' to freely move to any companies to allow a more fluid labor market.
b) Allow H1Bs' to start companies - i.e. if they get VC funded (as founders, co-founders or early founding member teams), they get immediate upgrade to green cards. DHS can keep a list of certified VCs' where this program can apply, and it can also get a % of equity as a one-time fee (along with other concrete fees), so the immigration department can be self-sustaining, and overall encourge more entrepreneurship.
c) Reduce the 6 year process to 3 years for H1Bs to acquire green-cards, and remove country-based quotas (a holdover from 1920s regulations to limit immigrants were certain undesired countries which is really an anachronism in todays globalized economy).
Note from an IRS pespective, you are as good as a American citizen or a green-card holder after the 6 months residing in the US - i.e. you are submitting full taxes as anyone else, and IRS treats you as a resident.
If you are a co-founder, and you are being side-lined, and you have no recourse to get back into the driving seat, it is time to go. This can happen if the other founder secured the funds and has the support from the board.
Your only reason to be a founder/co-founder is to be on the driving seat - otherwise why bother with all the downsides of being in a startup?
The core of the issue (if any) is that historically, the patent system is inextricably tied into the free-market/laissez-faire economic system, which for all its flaws, did create the world as we know it for the last ~ 200 to 300 years which led to an exponential rise in technological development - a unique phase started in the Western world, where now some of the 'successful and well-developed' countries in the Eastern world (e.g. Japan, South Korea, Singapore) have incorporated into their respective systems.
"Patent law was intended to promote the publication of useful ideas, at the price of giving the one who publishes an idea a temporary monopoly over it—a price that may be worth paying in some fields and not in others."
The real question is does all software patents come in the last part of the aforesaid sentence: ".....—a price that may be worth paying in some fields and not in others."
A knee-jerk reaction to throw out the baby out with the bathwater by abolishing the whole patent system may not be the right solution here.
> A knee-jerk reaction to throw out the baby out with the bathwater by abolishing the whole patent system may not be the right solution here.
To further that analogy, if that bathwater is a toxic brew with, at least in the software industry, a serious chilling effect on innovation and enterprise is that really a bathwater the baby should be in?
If you can point out to me more success stories because of software patents than nightmare scenarios like the above and the X-Plane saga, then I might agree. But as it stands, the biggest success story, Uniloc, that's relevant to Australia, which is where I am, makes me just pissed off.
Sorry to get back too late for the response as I hadn't seen it earlier.
I do agree that the patent system as it is applied to software (and possibly other areas too like biotechnology) needs to be reformed. I am not defending the status quo but just pointing out that people who argue for abolishing the whole system needs to first understand its historical role before taking a drastic action.
At the risk of over-simplifying, there is a tussle between 'software as a collection of algorithms which in turn are defined as a special class of mathematics' which is not patentable, vs software as a 'product' that provides useful functions which is in-line with how patents have been applied in other areas. Things get a little more complicated with 'process patents' as applied to software.
It is hard to draw a fine line here and I don't claim to have any answers except looking at each case individually and deciding to apply it, sort of like the early definition of art vs porn: "I know it when I see it" (or something to that effect).
Even if you were to grant a expansive protection for functional cases or business methods (implemented by the software), you will still have ridiculous ones like the 'Amazon one-click patent'.
Regarding examples of 'success stories', I am not sure if these apply but the entire model of software business was driven on licenses during its critical growth period in the 1980s. One example is the core functionality of Excel which is probably one of the most successful software ever built:
"Frankly, it surprises me how small a role patents play in the software business. It's kind of ironic, considering all the dire things experts say about software patents stifling innovation, but when one looks closely at the software business, the most striking thing is how little patents seem to matter."
A slightly long winded way of addressing this dead-horse of an issue, so that even clueless managers and leaderless dimwits can understand why this idiotic concern keeps cropping p all the time:
When you look at the history of technology, it is always removing humans out of the system that leads to higher productivity - machines taking over in agriculture, assembly line + robotics, automation in textiles etc..
About the only thing not done yet is to replace humans in programming itself - maybe it can take a similar path as it was done in language translation; use statistical techniques on huge corpus of human-written code snippets (tagged via domain areas), and spit out solutions even if it is only approximate upto a certain confidence interval. The remaining details can be filled in by humans (and you may not need many of them). Of couse IDEs' do this somewhat with auto-code generation at a very minimalist sense right now.
Maybe it needs to be combined with self-correcting programs that evolves and adapts to new conditions. Yeah all vague but we may be moving in this direction - hardware itself is getting more 'soft', so the graying of the boundaries between h/w and s/w is possibly another direction we are heading towards, and may converge with the AI driven model.
Till that happens, it is the managements job to motivate humans as it is done for ages - with carrots and sticks. As you see with apes, sometimes we all have to groom each other, eat the lice, kiss here and there, rub the genitals and be co-operative.
You can also try to be 'inspiring' (most humans are suckers for hero-worship, and prone to worship false idols), and generally with a more intelligent bunch, it is more effective by 'leading by example'. You want your team to work hard, prove that you can be with them in the trenches, and do the same.
"Also I waste considerable amount of time trying to do things in the most readable, maintainable and simple way possible"
Motivation is tied to your attitude here as you are looking to do more 'interesting' work, whereas the task at hand looks boring. However the task at hand could be important for the company, so it is important to take trouble understand the big picture here. Most engineers (and I am one of them) are too self-centered to do this, and this can be debilitating.
It involves coming out of your shell, being proactive to talk to the business, product and other areas and see why these set of features that needs to get done has important implications.
At the end of the day, everything is about service. If you enhance your attitude to think more in a service-oriented way (it is not all about you), this changes your 'attitude profile', and in turn can boost your motivation factor by several orders. Suddenly what looked boring becomes very important. It may mean to be more pragmatic ( no ideological fixations on 'purity of code'), roll up your sleeves and get it done.
The valuable service to the customer, can lead into repeat business, which adds to the bottom line, and that later could mean more bonus for you, which you can use it up for that special time with your BF that you have been planning for a while.
My own views are that the software industry has reduced its 'professional quotient' a lot, to probably near zero, and hence all this chaos. I used to work in 'well-run and large companies' prior to the internet days, and in some sense we are a victim of the post-internet (mid-90s' post-Netscape) runaway success.
There is no professionalism in the industry anymore, and paradoxically it could be due to the 'open source model'. Don't get me wrong, I like open-source with all that emphasis to openness, freedom etc.. but it has led to the ruin of the small developer. It is forcing a lot of us to jump into the 'entrepreneur/solopreneur' bandwagon.
The openness part described above also includes anyone to jump into the industry (unlike say the medical, or civil-engineering profession; after all do you want a 'hacker heart surgeon' or a 'hacker bridge builder?'). The professionalism is completely mocked at, and all this hero-worshiping of start-up culture etc.. has ruined it.
OTOH, I am not arguing in favor of high-barriers of entry etc... Honestly I don't the answer on how to fix it....