If it's going to do anything but be window dressing then it needs to have the teeth of union - so just call it what it is.
I've argued for a while that tech workers need a union, but the chorus on HN and other places is "we're too special for a union." Which is bogus on it's face - otherwise SAG for example wouldn't exist.
If this moves the needle on a union then great, but I'm wary of the source being a pure power move (which all unions are - rightfully). I think whomever leads this needs to be above reproach in every sense as an advocate for the tiny introverted developer.
edit: I should note that the reason SAG worked is because some of the highest profile actors joined in the early days and arranged to collectively bargain for the rest of the group. It will probably work best if you get the top 50 most high profile developers (Eg. Carmack) to join and then advocate for the small guy. Sadly, in reality, a union is only as good as it's most high profile members.
This sounds like it's going to have exactly zero to do with what a labor union would normally be concerned with -- pay, working conditions, etc. Instead, I have a strong suspicion this is going to be some sort of enumeration of the progressive ideals that all tech workers "should" be concerned with, as dictated by a group of Bay Area tech workers. Namely, LGBT stuff, female and minority representation, immigrant's rights, etc.
offering parental leave is an excellent example of the kind of thing a union would negotiate, and is also pretty well related to how attractive a company is to women (who are more likely to have childcare responsibilities). Rules against firing someone for being gay or a different religion are a great example of something a union would negotiate, and are definitely going to help increase minority and LGBT representation. Why do you see 'working conditions' as unrelated to these topics?
This is not just a tech-unions-related complaint, this is a critique of unions as a whole. But yeah.
I think that tech workers are in a special place because we have a lot of disposable income. I've gotten over my college-era "can't pay for anything" attitude, and I'm willing to pay for content that could be gotten for free. Entertainment was the first one, but now I'm also supporting some people on patreon and donating to causes. We don't need a union to drive that-- we can just remind tech workers that if we all donate a little, we can make big changes.
Bargaining collectively is the whole point of creating a union in the first place. This special snowflake mentality that permeates the tech sector and the myopic individualism is a giant problem.
The union mainly defines a bottom level salary and also gives a defined path upwards. For most people this is a nice system for a long career.
The idea here is that the person at the top with outsized bargaining power is voluntarily relinquishing it to the person at the bottom in order to increase general welfare.
If you don't believe in that, then that's great, but that's kind of the direction everyone seems to be headed.
I have never heard of that. Why would that be?
then there is that asshole who becomes shop steward and well, you best hope you agree with them.
Yeah i am a bit jaded but no thanks. Let alone like it will matter because outsourcing will just become the standard means by which many companies will operate in a 24x7 world where talent to do IT can be anywhere. unlike your local plant our jobs can be done about from anywhere in the world. If you can work your job from home so can someone else
So don't have the union do that.
Have the union worry about coming down on places that fire members for refusing to work 60 hours a week, want you to train your replacement, force shitty unpaid oncall schedules, etc...
The G in SAG doesn't stand for union.
There are strong network effects and nearly unlimited economies of scale in most tech markets. In these cases, given enough time, the end result will be a monopsonist employer.[0] This results in lower employment, lower wages and, ultimately, the replacement of labour with additional accumulated capital (e.g. ML algos) and/or cheaper substitute labour (e.g. imported foreign workers). Even in cases where there are a few large firms in competition (e.g. Google and Apple), they will have incentive to collude and make illegal agreements on hiring practices, wage ceilings etc (and there have been documented instances of this).[1][2]
The logical way for software developers to avoid exploitation is to form a labour monopoly (i.e. a union or a guild).
I've noticed some interesting features of the software development labour market: quite a lot of the work is creative in nature, you produce non-rivalrous products (i.e. my consumption of 'software x' does not block someone else's consumption), and the workforce is supposedly peppered with unusually talented individuals who produce 50-100x the value that the average worker does.
There are two other industries that have similar features: traditional screen entertainment (TV & Movie), and professional sports leagues. In both of these industries, the content producing workers (baseball players, actors) are invariably a member of an industry guild or union, and they operate more like independent contractors than employees.
Food for thought.
[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Monopsony#Welfare_implications
[1] https://www.cnet.com/au/news/apple-google-others-settle-anti...
[2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/High-Tech_Employee_Antitrust_L...
Unions that have closed-shop contracts with employers are, by definition, monopsonies on labor. Employees are required to be union members in order to be employed, and the union is the sole purchaser of the employee's labor (before reselling it to the employer).
Some of the earliest and most successful unions formed in industries in which there already was a single, monopsony employer for an unionized market (think: "company towns" in the Rust Belt). But that's a very different situation from taking a competitive market and turning it into a monopsony.
In terms of dues, unions are democratic, so you can debate, decide, and vote on what you think is appropriate.
Without a a union there's a power imbalance between employer and employee. People say it's all based on mutually agreed contracts. In reality, you are probably much more dependent on your job than the company is on you. That's because they may lose something like 1/1000 of their employees when they fire you, but you lose 100% of your jobs[1].
Unions are a way correct this balance. Employees band together, so that failure to reach an agreement is as painful for the employer as it is for the employee, i. e. (in the worst case) work stops and nobody gets paid.
[1]: If you doubt me, try getting Google to come in for 6 interviews and make your future manager do a whiteboard exam.
I also think -- particularly if the HN audience is in any way representative -- that engineering in particular is far too deeply bought into the narrative of the rights of capital owners to unionize. Much like America, we think we're all temporarily embarrassed millionaires.
I'm well aware unions aren't perfect. But they are a countervailing center of power who work for employees. The relationship between the employeed and the employers is a fundamentally contentious relationship: sometimes your incentives align, but often they don't. See eg things like the option trap vs 10 year exercise periods, or even founders getting millions of cash off the table while employees get $0. Much like how VCs can whine all they want, founders get better deals because of economic forces such as decreased engineering costs from open source software and better tooling, more capital seeking investment, etc; employee unions are a way to better the outcome of the employees themselves.
The reason that old canard doesn't carry a lot of weight around SV and the other tech hubs is that a lot of rank-and file, non-manager techies actually _are_ millionaires.
You make a good point though and if the intention is that it will result in some kind of engineering code of conduct or Hippocratic oath - then my guess is that it will have too many hurdles. The military code of conduct is immensely difficult to arbitrate and the Hippocratic oath isn't anything without governing boards for certification and licensure.
So there needs to be a power structure somewhere that holds the power of the members if it's going to be worthwhile and that would have to be linked to the other tangibles like pay and time.
It comes down to how and what is measured. Time and Pay are easy to measure, if your MongoDB is being implemented "morally" or not is much muddier.
I'm trying to figure out why a tech worker union would want to sidle up to, say, YC. As someone who spent a few years as part of the Canadian Autoworkers Union, management were adversaries, not partners. Are the bourgeoisie trying to get out in front of this thing?
Yes. This sounds like techno-Fordism. Given that Fordism was invented to stabilize and rejuvenate a crisis-ridden form of capitalism, this is a very good sign.
The union would also want to work with VCs, since they're the real managers in the industry. Startup companies come and go, but VCs and giant firms (Google, Apple, Microsoft) last.
Well they shouldn't, actually - which was the whole point of my last sentence.
but the execs are waiting for most of us to be replaced by the algos we're writing before that happens so who knows
Is this YC trying to stay on top of the tech activism bubbling in various corners these days? He doesn't say, the entire post is expressed as self-evident, which makes me think his (et al) motivation is competitively strategic, and specifically political. Vagueness is construed against the writer, especially when it's intentional.
If he is indeed speaking to the DSA and ersatz-unionization ideas floating around, why not join forces with people who are already working on this? Fragmentation? Disruption? Narratology?
We’d also like to discuss how tech companies can heal the divide in our country
Evergreen take, but you still can't solve a people problem with technology.
"Sam Altman, Debra Cleaver, Matt Krisiloff". They sign the post.
>I know that Twitter and HN, i.e. the generic internet, are the only places Sam and I typically might cross paths, so who is the community he's speaking for?
The tech community.
(Bear in mind that even if you feel inclined to write off non-liberals, there is a such thing as a non-Silicon Valley liberal.)
I can't help but feel this organization is going to have a built in equivocation fallacy where whenever it is suitable they'll claim to be a "tech worker union" but whenever it comes time to decide what the union is actually going to do it'll be the "Silicon Valley Liberals" deciding what to do.
The SF/SV tech community defined by high-growth startups, maybe. I don't think he is qualified to say a damned thing about the actual practicing developers.
We've just emerged from an era where benevolent tech companies were supposed to stand up for us and reflect our values. Instead, they put on a polite face, said the right words to us, and then did whatever served their interests irrespective of our concerns. Repeating this scenario is foolish and only going to worsen the situation.
This is a greater dramatic shift and I'm not sure if we'll see it in our lifetimes, but it would be nice that, even that first high school job at a cinema would earn you shares in that company equal to the time you put in, for life. In some ways, that would make more sense than basic minimum income.
Intellectual resistance from co-opers isn't the main bottleneck though. Management infrastructure needs to be all digital and open source, and forking needs to be technically easy. That means the accounting, staffing, and operations procedures all written out in code, rather than in QuickBooks on some computer in the stock room. On github, with one-touch deployment to Heroku, or some equivalent. Ethereum maybe.
Once we're there I think it will be fairly easy to sell the employees on the "you should spend some time training people who are forking your business" concept, since they are (mostly) already amenable to anarchist (you don't really own anything) values. At that point it will be viral and anyone who is providing ops and logistical support for that ecosystem will get very rich.
If they don't exist in large numbers now, I'd have to think there's something about them that makes them struggle to be viable. Human nature most likely.
Many industries (and I don't mean natural food stores) have had cooperatives for decades. Agriculture is a big one, but industrial cooperativism is very real too. There are even already a few tech firms run as cooperatives.
The way to push the shift is to build a cooperative corporate structure which allows neatly for outside investment without compromising the interests of the worker-owners.
-companies violate privacy rights to gather more big data
-more data translates to more investment (I'm seeing this happen at my current company right now)
-VCs, who are the top of the food chain, are the ones pushing for higher returns (like any rational actor would do)
-then shouldn't the government step in and regulate this area?
Define standards that would limit the amount of funding/valuation based on 'user as product'?
Your game theory applies to people as well: if you find a wallet on the street, it doesn't make sense to give it back to the owner.
And yet, you'll find many people who do give it back. That's because we have evolved emotions such as altruism, or empathy. Those are still useful, even when most of morality has been formalised into criminal law, because societies tend to work better (and are more fun) if you can trust people, at least for the small stuff.
There's no reason we shouldn't expect corporations to follow a similar path,
There is a hierarchy and I think it is unlikely we will see common ground emerge. Survival of the fittest and the best will still win the day. Just like the labor unions of the industrial era, efforts like this are doomed to be spikes of ideology rife with the same contradictions of those it proposes to keep in check.
Some tech workers run multimillion dollar businesses and some push bits around for them in the wee hours of the morning for much less.
Some have PhDs in category theory and write Haskell on a multiple 6 figure salary in finance and some maintain dated ruby on rails systems they didn't write for much less.
Some roll around on scooters in data centers putting out real fires in environments that need high availability. Others spend their days upgrading old versions of windows in small town school districts.
The same divides that existed before the internet will follow us. Nothing new here. Work hard, strive to get to the top, and hang on. Unions are not the answer. Darwin always wins the day.
We'd also like to discuss how tech companies can heal the divide in our country.
Why _shouldn't_ there be divides in our country? Which divide is being referred to? Religious? Political? Net worth? Productivity? Persuasion?
Why assume differences need "healed?" Why this constant, desperate push for homogeneity?
Why can't people simply be different, and have conflicting opinions and worldviews? Why can't these disagreements, alongside of passionate debate, be lauded and encouraged instead of shamed?
Why can't people simply not like one another sometimes, without needing "healed"?
I don't think this is true, to state it mildly, but a lot of modern politics (and nearly every smart-aleck tweet ever written) makes a lot more sense when viewed through this lens.
If people could simply not like each other without killing each other or making each other's lives unbearable that would be one thing. Problem is people cant' seem to be able to manage that.
Yes, he should visit the rust belt (where I grew up) some time - there are gasp actual programmers making decent money there!
And a whole lot of people who are just never, ever going to be able to learn how to code.
Mob rule knows no fairness. When your ideas are vague, people fill them up with their version of fairness. Employees who are just starting out do not know anything about making sacrifices to build something bigger than themselves. If they collectively form a gang and override the will of the founders and investors who made more sacrifices, it drains the spirit of the individual to risk their time and savings to start something new.
People are free to organize their efforts but it takes founders and their sacrifices to make things happen. This collective power should embrace ideas of fairness and voluntarism instead of laws and force to get their way.
Quick reminder that unions are the reason that many of the benefits you have in the workplace today are standardised across the workforce -- a union that has teeth can actually make a difference to your employer's actions.
Tech companies are trying to do something better than what previous generations could do.
I believe that in many cases, the very first employees are equally responsible for the success of a company. I think this is especially true for tech companies founded by non-engineers.
But hey, Friday flamebait I guess.
Perhaps you can expound?
That said, I'm happy to hear YC preaching from the same Bible. I would encourage Sam to coordinate with the many groups already working to what is apparently a shared goal.
(I think this makes sense in a lot of ways, because there are already good people doing the former work, and usually when tech-focused groups try to help out we just get in the way.)
>“Tech workers of the world, unite. You have nothing to lose but your goddamned open-plan offices.”
This is the greatest thing I've read all week.
> We also believe tech companies have an opportunity and an obligation to reduce the polarization we've helped create.
I'm pretty sure this kind of thing is just going to make the polarization worse.
This necessarily means erasing the voices of people who hold minority positions in that group.
It has every potential to be another place where those with the most time to burn, the most anger, and the most refined ideological weaponry grab power over those with minority viewpoints or healthy self-doubt.
Unions are supposed to fight for the thing the workers definitely have in common - their direct economic interests. Lashing that union structure to entirely different political fights invites the above kinds of problems.
"We’d also like to discuss how tech companies can heal the divide in our country. [...] We also believe tech companies have an opportunity and an obligation to reduce the polarization we've helped create."
Easy as could be: switch to the other side
"We believe that tech companies can create a better economic future for all Americans"
Probably step #1 is to hire Americans.
"by spreading high-paying technology jobs around the country and other measures. [...] We are planning to hold a meeting on the evening of April 9th in the Bay Area."
Oops. To fix, move the meeting to one of the following: Wyoming, Oklahoma, northern Texas excluding Dallas, Alabama excluding Huntsville, Georgia excluding Atlanta, West Virginia, Tennessee, Montana...
I guarantee this is code for "we think Trump wouldn't have been elected if he couldn't use Twitter, Reddit, and Facebook. Let's figure out how to make that possible."
When you claim all of our thoughts on and off the clock, you encourage us to avoid creatively-fulfilling ventures, burn out, and leave for greener pastures.
you can't be serious. why would a company even exist if all the work it paid for would be owned by someone else?
i mean sure, you can live in that world, it's just nobody would pay for anything to happen.
If I'm a web programmer, don't give me a contract that claims my paintings, music, consumer electronics designs, video games, etc, and then claim that it is unalterable "boilerplate." I don't care that you're a big company which has its fingers in many areas of business. That shit won't fly.
For instance, in a sufficiently broad view, 99% of AWS is other people's IP - the PC platform, hardware virtualization, Xen, Linux and userspace tools, Perl, etc. etc. And they seem to be doing a fine job commercializing it. They could build their own computing architecture, write their own hypervisor, design their own OS, etc., but that would probably be a less profitable approach. There's an existence proof in Microsoft's Azure and IBM's z/whatever-they're-calling-it-these-days, which are significantly less popular.
Because software is, by default, a non-rivalrous good, and so a cooperative, share-and-share-alike mode of production makes more sense for it. Companies already deliberately support open-source contributions for exactly this reason.
Not releasing core tools can itself be a major impediment. Several years ago, a Google architect, Yonatan Zunger, noted half-in-irony that he'd settled on a hiring decision heuristic: "No".
That is: the answer to whether or not to hire anyone, was to not hire them. Again, somewhat in jest.
But also partially serious: Google has highly complex systems, operates very much on an NIH mindset, and has significant risks for any level of failure (though they've also engineered some impressive systems against many of those causes of failure).
I thought, and wrote, at the time that this was actually a major concern for me over the future viability of the company. If Google literally cannot find qualified talent, or figure out how to make the talent it does find qualified, then it cannot continue. Even accepting the hah-hah-only-serious nature of the comment, it's troubling.
Much of this problem can be avoided by opening up more of your core infrastructure, as it allows potential talent to both gain experience with your tools, and to demonstrate that experience, most particularly to you, which would then be of interest in an employment context.
Some additional context comes by way of a YouTube engineer I'd spoken with some years before that, who was commenting (this in the mid-2000s) how Google's technology was really old. That is, Google had settled on a software stack in the mid-to-late 1990s, and has (or had) to a large extent sealed itself off from the world since. As a consequence, Google's tools were diverging (in Google's interests) from those of the rest of the world.
(I don't know how that situation's played out since, though the comment sticks with me.)
Back to the question of IP: claiming rights to both what it is you teach your workforce, and what they come up with on their own (as I've seen written into employment contracts) ... betrays a staggering level of short-termism to my mind. It works out for the current King of the Hill, for so long as they're KotH, but tends to end rather poorly. Not only for those companies, but their customers, who are ultimately saddled with old, stale, one-off software for which the potential employment pools are small and generally less than stellar.
(Look up the recent HN discussion of the MUMPS programming language and the firm which continues to utilise it, largely in medical software, based out of Minneapolis. Cautionary tale. And yes, I'd heard of MUMPS decades before, and run then.)
However: Altman is a business owner and an executive. I don't think he can coordinate the solution. The kernel of the issue here is the disengagement rank-and-file employees have from the public policy implications of their work. Employees don't need permission from owners and managers to be accountable for those implications. The widespread, implicit belief among the rank-and-file that they do need permission is the first obstacle that we need to address.
Rather than staging meetings and attempting to help shape the outcome, Altman and other executives should encourage their employees to work amongst themselves. Getting directly involved, however, is problematic, and I think owners and executives should probably avoid doing that.
sama is a leader in the class of the exploiters, and crowdwashing like this won't change anything.
EDIT: The "general you", not "you, tptacek". :)
> Almost everyone I asked was willing to talk to me, but almost none of them wanted me to use their names—even people from very red states were worried about getting “targeted by those people in Silicon Valley if they knew I voted for him”. One person in Silicon Valley even asked me to sign a confidentiality agreement before she would talk to me, as she worried she’d lose her job if people at her company knew she was a strong Trump supporter.
..
> We also believe tech companies have an opportunity and an obligation to reduce the polarization we've helped create.
Are tech employees the correct population to attempt to bridge a political divide? I'm not convinced that's the case.
What you want is for no one to call you out for espousing terrible views. You want freedom from consequences of speech, not freedom of speech.
Maybe he should replace "employee" with "investor" and start working on that? In the end it's the investors that force companies to make money at any cost.
If you are not doing that, you should.
From what I can tell, this doesn't really line up with the location and remote-friendliness of YC companies. Most seem to be in the Bay Area and few that I can tell allow remote engineers, managers, or execs.
Sorry, but being an Instacart delivery person in Dallas isn't a high-paying technology job.
Prove me wrong with real numbers please.
- Unions are a force to protect the 99% from the corruption of the 1%. They are not a force to drive a liberal agenda, though by protecting the little guy they may indirectly align.
- Increasing competition by getting more people into coding (be them from outside the country or from outside of cities) is the exact opposite of what a union would do. It would drive down wages for the skilled workers that investors are getting rich off of.
- Technology making peoples lives worse is the fault of a combination of capitalism and the fact that CEOs and investors are more motivated by adding 0s to their bank account than anything as nebulous as "good." Why should tech workers risk their jobs to force the hand of the companies they work at?
- Is he talking about automation taking jobs? Because the profit from the concentration of wealth again is at the hands of the 1% and .1%. Unless he's saying tech workers need to pass the buffet rule, or tech workers need to refuse to work at companies that don't give enough equity then I don't see how the average tech worker is the solution to the wealth being drawn away from the average citizen (who can't afford $500 in an emergency) into an investor's portfolio....
If we want to protect our workers, our labor laws, and our standard of living, we have to stop globalization.
2. Can it be stopped? If US companies refuse to work with Indian or Chinese employees, what is preventing India or China from out-competing the US company in the international market? If the US places tariffs on technology products and services from other countries, what is preventing those other countries from outpacing our standard of living?
2. It can be stopped. The US was an economic powerhouse before globalization, and had an incredibly powerful middle class with a high quality of life. What China has done is use the money from outsourcing into creating its own internal industries, which is why their economy is rising all across the board, while in the US we've been outsourcing our industries to the point where only the capital owners who exploit globalization are seeing an increase in quality of life. If we stop that, the globalists will suffer but our middle class will rise. As far as competition goes, what does it matter if we have the "strongest market" or whatever if the majority of people don't benefit from it?
As members of the community, we're interested in ways in which tech companies can use their collective power to protect privacy, rule of law, freedom of expression, and other fundamental American rights
We also believe tech companies have an opportunity and an obligation to reduce the polarization we've helped create.
Let's start with the easy one, polarization: that gets reduced if the tech industry accepts Red America values. Well? It works. It is a solution to polarization. Problem solved.
Red America is fond of privacy. FYI, the recent ISP thing isn't going over well with non-politicians. When gun registrations were published in a newspaper, that didn't go over too well. Opposition to stuff like home/family/schooling inspections (kid-related government agencies) is intense in Red America.
Red America loves the rule of law. You can tell that Trump has disappointed them on this when they chant "LOCK HER UP" and he evades the issue. Red America prefers that the constitution be interpreted very literally, using the actual text, with the meanings of words as they were in the English language at the time they were written.
Red America accepts freedom of expression even when they don't like it very much. It wasn't Red America that violently shut down Milo's speech. That was all blue.
Red America is obviously fond of other fundamental American rights. When the ACLU counts to ten, they do this: 1, 3, 4, 5, 6, 7, 8, 9, 10 (skipping the amendment they don't like)
In the end, it was conservatives who shot Milo down by exposing his advocacy of Catholic priest molestation. His remaining supporters are fascist and reactionary pedophiles.
Not having to support politics I disagree with during or outside of work hours.
Not having my photo and about me on the company webpage. No one wants to know the truth that my hobbies are not rock climbing and playing the guitar.
Not being forced to go to conferences, hackathons, and other company sponsored events.
It would be nice if these values included lobbying for tech workers to not be exempt from overtime pay and reforms of the h1b visa program.
[1] Alan Kay - Inventing the Future Part 1: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=KVUGkuUj28o
[2] Alan Kay - Inventing the Future Part 2: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=M6ZHxUwqPVw
[3] Alan Kay's Reading List http://www.squeakland.org/resources/books/readingList.jsp
This is mostly bullshit. Instead of putting the honus on the executives and VC's who define the growth-first business models, it's somehow the responsibility of their employees to wield the power of a tech company responsibly? To shape the direction of a company?
Maybe in a round-about way, Sam is saying that unions are the only way to responsibly limit the power of tech companies' leadership. But make no mistake, the responsibility for the power of technology falls directly in the laps of a company's leaders.
Liquidate Twitter?
Isn't the elephant in the room extreme capitalism? Tech is just accelerating it.
Perhaps the alternative is workers managing their own workplaces:
https://www.amazon.com/Democracy-at-Work-Cure-Capitalism/dp/...
Do people forget that this industry is built upon the ideal of innovation? Why can't we build a new type of union that fixes the bugs that prior unions suffered? Why can't we experiment and find new solutions? Why can't we disrupt the relationship between capital and labor?
The notion that unions are somehow inherently unworkable flies in the face of everything that the tech industry stands for.
I believe this is key. Technology does not have to be binded to one or a few locations. If tech could once again try to be spread across other cities and states that will be good for everyone. It will be good for remote work, cost of living, people will support tech growth more nationwide, there will be new ideas that might not emerge in a tech hotspot and not everyone will have to move to one place which is really a single point of failure.
While an obvious positive, this completely ignores the fact that these higher salaries are precisely because we write software that increases efficiency over what a handful of humans can do. So while there is an increase in high paying jobs, there is inevitably a decrease in many more low paying jobs (short-term at least, likely long-term unless we learn how to re-train people better)
https://www.nemil.com/musings/software-engineers-and-ethics....
I was surprised we didn't discuss this more and I wanted to help someone early in their career think through it.
(I also got some good feedback from YC's Paul Buchheit who helped coin "Don't be evil" in the early days of Google)
I do like the idea of spreading the wealth to other parts of the country, especially those that are hit hardest by the changing characteristics of the economy --people we often forget, hollowed out industrial cities, forgotten rural areas, etc.
Would there be an opportunity for individuals not located in the Bay Area to attend, provide commentary on meeting notes, or somehow participate without being present locally?
Paul Graham's "How To a Silicon Valley" [0] has the best recommendations I've seen.
There's the role of the defense industry and Silicon Valley. See Steve Blank's "Secret History of Silicon Valley":
https://steveblank.com/category/secret-history-of-silicon-va...
That said, there's a bunch of strength to @pg's points and conclusions. Portland and Boulder as potential tech hubs sounds about right. It might be possible to build out elsewhere -- Rochester and Buffalo in New York were technology centers, once, and though it's small, Burlington, VT, has much of the right vibe (though possibly too harsh winters) for tech.
I don't see the sweat-and-mildew belt -- the midwest -- really doing much. There's too much about getting outside and actually clearing your head, which the vast expanses of overhumidified prarie (or frozen tundra) don't offer. Though the land is cheap, and a few college towns (University of Illinois, University of Iowa, Notre Dame) might manage to create some centres around.
I'm also not entirely sure Chicago ought be written off, though I suspect it would take a tremendous amount to turn it around. On the one hand, it's lower-cost land, nearer East Coast centres, with good natural transport (air, rail, ship, truck) for various industry. On the other hand, the weather's little different from Ithaca or Pittsburgh, and the politics are interminable.
The flexability of pretty much doing what you wanted in California in the 1960s, 1970s, and 1980s is hard to beat, and that's continued to pay off. Though I'd argue those benefits are now largely gone.
The role of a cheap housing stock and/or the ability to pick up and create a long-term plan with a large set of land, say, in Chicago or Detroit, seems interesting though.
E.g., a large and cash-rich firm could bid on more visas than it needs, starving other firms.
It also fails to address the leverage that the visa sponsor has over the visa holder -- lose your job, and you lose your right to remain in-country.
To have "rights", they must be encoded in the legal code.
"It is not, however, difficult to foresee which of the two parties must, upon all ordinary occasions, have the advantage in the dispute, and force the other into a compliance with their terms. The masters, being fewer in number, can combine much more easily; and the law, besides, authorizes, or at least does not prohibit their combinations, while it prohibits those of the workmen. We have no acts of parliament against combining to lower the price of work; but many against combining to raise it. In all such disputes the masters can hold out much longer. A landlord, a farmer, a master manufacturer, a merchant, though they did not employ a single workman, could generally live a year or two upon the stocks which they have already acquired. Many workmen could not subsist a week, few could subsist a month, and scarce any a year without employment. In the long run the workman may be as necessary to his master as his master is to him; but the necessity is not so immediate.
"We rarely hear, it has been said, of the combinations of masters, though frequently of those of workmen. But whoever imagines, upon this account, that masters rarely combine, is as ignorant of the world as of the subject. Masters are always and everywhere in a sort of tacit, but constant and uniform combination, not to raise the wages of labour above their actual rate. To violate this combination is everywhere a most unpopular action, and a sort of reproach to a master among his neighbours and equals. We seldom, indeed, hear of this combination, because it is the usual, and one may say, the natural state of things, which nobody ever hears of. Masters, too, sometimes enter into particular combinations to sink the wages of labour even below this rate. These are always conducted with the utmost silence and secrecy, till the moment of execution, and when the workmen yield, as they sometimes do, without resistance, though severely felt by them, they are never heard of by other people. Such combinations, however, are frequently resisted by a contrary defensive combination of the workmen; who sometimes too, without any provocation of this kind, combine of their own accord to raise the price of their labour. Their usual pretences are, sometimes the high price of provisions; sometimes the great profit which their masters make by their work. But whether their combinations be offensive or defensive, they are always abundantly heard of. In order to bring the point to a speedy decision, they have always recourse to the loudest clamour, and sometimes to the most shocking violence and outrage. They are desperate, and act with the folly and extravagance of desperate men, who must either starve, or frighten their masters into an immediate compliance with their demands. The masters upon these occasions are just as clamorous upon the other side, and never cease to call aloud for the assistance of the civil magistrate, and the rigorous execution of those laws which have been enacted with so much severity against the combinations of servants, labourers, and journeymen. The workmen, accordingly, very seldom derive any advantage from the violence of those tumultuous combinations, which, partly from the interposition of the civil magistrate, partly from the necessity superior steadiness of the masters, partly from the necessity which the greater part of the workmen are under of submitting for the sake of present subsistence, generally end in nothing, but the punishment or ruin of the ringleaders."
-- Adam Smith, An Inquiry into the Nature and Causes of the Wealth of Nations, 1776. Book I, Chapter VIII, "On the Wages of Labour".
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