| This article is so full of such silly generalizations I'm not even sure where to begin, or whether i should. "I did an informal survey of different Los Angeles based Information technology companies. One common theme: although espousing a culture of innovation, and although some are very profitable, most are simply not cutting edge, and some are very behind the times." An informal survey of LA start ups.. awesome. Any word on how exactly you went about conducting said survey? My guess is it was based on recalling random techcrunch articles read over the past couple years, but please correct if I'm wrong. LA has a ton of start ups that have all kinds of products, working environments and compensation levels, most of which I would guess the author never heard of. "In most Silicon Valley Startups, coders know SQL, a major scripting language as well as HTML and CSS. However MySpace had positions solely for just HTML/CSS, a trend that harkened back to the 90s when web pages were manually created." So basically, no one needs to know js and css/html anymore because they are all magically generated by some server side fairies. So facebook, twitter and google do not have people who specialize in js or css/html because that's just way too simple. Totally. For a product the size of what MySpace had, I think it would be shockingly incompetent to not have people who would specialize in that tech. "Another Los Angeles great, eHarmony.com, uses 40 to 50 engineers for its matchmaking algorithm and servers, whereas OKCupid.com uses only 10." In your survey, did you happen to ask them why they had such a discrepancy? Because i'm pretty sure it's not because eHarmony's employees are 5 times dumber than okCupid's. There could be a ton of reasons why these numbers are what they are besides lack of skill. Anyway, I think this is an attempt to rationalize some failure the author has experienced at his previous job. But frankly I think this was a pretty bad attempt at generalizing something as big as the LA and SF job markets. Start ups exist everywhere and come in all shapes forms and sizes, LA has lots of them. To say that an entire city's worth of start ups is one way or another because of myspace, eharmony and your last work place is just way too simple. Anecdotally, I have friends in several LA start ups that are doing just fine, have working environments as good as their peers in SF, if not better, and are using the same range of technology people in SF use. |