The struggles of most individuals have finally brought about the long-term prosperity of Silicon Valley.
Editor’s note: This article is from the WeChat public account “the world of magic iron “, the author of the magic iron.
(This article is the first Tencent Technology, please do not reprint without authorization)
Targeting:
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1 In Silicon Valley, people who make a fortune by entrepreneurship are called “Silicon Valley Mark Six”.
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2 Google’s contractors must go to the company two hours earlier than the official job. They can’t participate in Google’s weekly plenary meeting. They wear red badges when they work, which is different from the formal staff wearing white badges.
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3 The struggles of most individuals have finally brought about the long-term prosperity of Silicon Valley.
On the morning of January 24, 1848, carpenter James W. Marshall and sawmill owner Sartre accidentally discovered gold in California’s American River. California has since become a place where the gold rush has swept.
Times are as flowing as 2019. Despite the past, Silicon Valley has already taken over the California Valley, becoming a dream land for IT gold, and its wealth has spread across the ocean to China.
The head of the Xiaomi Group, Lei Jun, once said that “The Fire of Silicon Valley” and Jobs changed his life, so that when he was in his freshman year, he dreamed of building a world-class company.
In fact, the development of China’s Internet industry today is thanks to the legend of Silicon Valley Fortune.
However, recently, as a Chinese employee of facebook jumped from the office building, the glamorous side of Silicon Valley’s wealth legend was unveiled, revealing a bloodthirsty side that has been hidden for many years: the brutal competition of the weak meat, McKinley Hill (North America) The highest peak) pressure-like work pressure, and the dream of wealth that is increasingly difficult to shine into reality.
A night of rich legends
In 1957, Arthur Locke, a young analyst at Hayden Stone and Company, flew to San Francisco, and Gordon Moore, Robert Noyce, and others who planned to leave the Shockley lab. Eight people met. Locke just graduated from Harvard University with an MBA, and Moore and others expect him to help find a new job.
Rock had previously participated in the financing of a transistor company, and he was very profitable, so hePeople are not interested in finding a job, but brainwashing them: they are not as good as their own bosses, find venture capital, and set up their own company.
After that, Locke took out a few $1 bills, wrote the shares of each person, and signed eight people.
The Fairchild Company was established, and each of the eight individuals contributed $500 to get 100 shares.
After two years, the 100 shares were valued at $300,000 (equivalent to today’s $3 million) and rose 600 times, the 33-year salary of Moore and others.
8 wage earners get rich overnight.
Startups, venture capital, and overnight riches, these three closely-connected vocabularies have since become a core element of the Silicon Valley legend.
The media’s classic depiction of Silicon Valley legends is: one or two students who are dropping out of school/reading/university or unemployed, starting a business in the basement/garage, and venture capital companies throw them millions of dollars, two or three years. After the company’s meager profit/loss, the founder became a billionaire, the management became a multi-millionaire, and ordinary employees became millionaires.
Working hard for a lifetime can not be reached, the entrepreneurial Silicon Valley people will be OK in two or three years, which is what the most outsiders in Silicon Valley are talking about.
However, as long as you go deep into Silicon Valley, you will find that the dazzling wealth legend has nothing to do with most Silicon Valley people.
Silicon Valley Mark Six
Silicon Valley people want to get rich overnight, first of all, they have to take the stock option ship, and secondly, let the ship successfully travel to the other side – cash.
It’s easy to get on the boat. It’s hard to get to the other side smoothly, because there are usually two paths, IPOs are listed and bought by the giants.
To be a bag of acquisitions by giants, startups must at least dominate the track in a certain segment of the industry, or have the potential to grow into a giant enemy in the future. Netscape opened a browser, threatened Microsoft, and prompted the latter to open the bid code; Youtube pioneered the video sharing mode, which is another slogan of the Internet besides text and images. Android is the mobile operating system, and Google has been coveted. To catch the tickets for the Mobile Internet Express, they have to issue $1.7 billion and $50 million respectively.
Compared to giving the giant a “son”, it is obviously easier to land the capital market to realise the option. However, capital
The idiots in the market have never been enough.
It is often reported that a certain company will be listed and how many millionaires will be born.Weng, in fact, this is a paper wealth that is easy to shrink.
The US Securities Regulatory Commission stipulates that after the company’s IPO, the stock investment period of the venture capital institution and company employees including the founder is 180 days, which means that the stock can be cashed out after 6 months.
In the past six months, investors in the secondary market have had sufficient time to familiarize themselves with and research the company, and thus decide whether to sell, buy or hold stocks. The stocks of poorly-performing companies tend to fall all the way to the original. Under the stock price, the employees, founders and venture capital institutions that dream of getting rich overnight.
A company with good texture can escape this robbery? Not necessarily, because the capital market knows that after six months of listing, employees holding stocks will sell stocks, so they tend to sell first, and the stock price will fall. Facebook’s stock price reached $41.5/share on the day of listing, and the stock price fell to $17.55/share after four months. As the company’s value gradually became prominent, the stock took a year and a half to climb back to the price of the listing.
China’s famous semiconductor company Spreadtrum Communications (SPRD, which has been acquired by Ziguang) was listed on June 29, 2007. The highest price in the month of listing was US$17 per share. After 6 months, the shares held by employees were released. It fell to $0.63 per share and is on the verge of delisting. If it is sold at this time, the employee will lose to the current pants.
It took a year for the price of Spreadtrum to return to the price of the day of listing.
Since 1959, California has produced 1 million millionaires. This number also includes real estate and financial industries outside of Silicon Valley. The actual production by Silicon Valley is estimated at around 800,000.
Moreover, these millionaires are mainly concentrated in dozens of giants such as Intel, Microsoft, Apple, Oracle, Cisco, Google, and Facebook. These giants have spanned 60 years, spanning chips, PCs, the Internet, and mobile. Four eras of the Internet, each age is about 15 years.
A good company is like a few sesame seeds sprinkled on a time cake. It’s easy to hit it!
In Silicon Valley, people who make a fortune by entrepreneurship are called “Silicon Valley Mark Six”. Although it is a banter, it also shows the fact that its probability is surprisingly low.
Silicon Valley migrant workers
The vast majority of people in Silicon Valley actually get a salary.
In the first half of this year, the US Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC) received a report on the annual salary of Silicon Valley Technology employees. The median salary of Google employees in 2018 is about $247,000, ranking first, and the median of Facebook employees. The annual salary is about $230,000, ranking second.
But these dazzling rewards benefit only from formal employees, and a large number of contract workers are excluded. What is the number of contract workers? Only Google’s contract workers are as high as 120,000, far more than the 100,000 regular workers.
In Silicon Valley, contractors are quiteSecond-class citizens.
As far as Google is concerned, its contractors must go to the company two hours earlier than the official workers. They can’t participate in Google’s weekly plenary meeting. They wear red badges when they work, which is different from the formal employees wearing white badges.
The salary of contract workers is also a proper second-class citizen treatment. User experience researchers and senior software engineers belong to technical positions. The hourly wages are $71 and $120, respectively. It seems that it is, at the lower end of the industry salary level. It is even more incomparable with the formal work of the technology giants who are higher than the industry’s salary level.
The motivation for giants such as Google and Facebook to hire a large number of contractors is simple – reduce costs. The company does not have to pay medical insurance for contract workers (formal unions have family health insurance), 401K pension funds, disability insurance, etc., saving labor costs.
General Silicon Valley Technology Co., Ltd. is excusable for lowering the cost of employment contracts, but the giants like Google are not bad money, and still care about the green money spent by contract workers?
The answer is that the capital market cares. The large number of contract workers employed by technology companies is equivalent to reducing the number of formal workers. Since the number of contract workers is not reflected in the financial statements, the company has fewer employees, lower manpower expenditures, and more effective cost control.
As a result of lower pay, contract workers generally feel that there is a huge pressure on survival in Silicon Valley.
A house in San Jose, Calif., has a monthly rent of $2,400, while a Facebook contractor has a minimum hourly wage of $15. If it’s not a technical job contractor, the rent only costs 160 hours a month, which is equivalent to 20 days working for the landlord.
Even a senior software engineer contractor who pays a monthly rent for a house will need to spend 20 hours of salary, which is equivalent to 2.5 days a month for the landlord to work.
Contracted workers are not easy to rent, and formal workers are faced with the difficulty of buying a house.
In Silicon Valley, a new apartment with one bedroom and one living room is generally priced at between $400,000 and $500,000. The highest-priced city in the Bay Area is Palo Alto and Mountain View, where single-family homes are for sale. Prices are mostly above $2 million. Note that this is the price of 5 years ago, and it has risen by about 30%.
The annual salary of the official employees of Silicon Valley Technology Co., Ltd. is about 80,000 US dollars. After two or three years of work, the annual salary (including bonuses and dividends) usually reaches about 200,000 US dollars.
Remove all kinds of taxes and daily expenses, and save $200,000 in annual salary.For about $100,000, it takes at least 20 years to buy a single-family home in the Bay Area, and the pressure is not too light.
The rule of survival of blood drops
Someone once said: In Silicon Valley, there is no 996.
However, the truth may be more cruel.
Although California law is more inclined to protect employee rights than other states, Silicon Valley technology employees have the highest working hours in the United States. In small companies, it is very common for employees to work 80 to 100 hours a week. In a big company like Facebook, it is common to work overtime on weekends. This work intensity has actually exceeded the domestic 996 70 hours a week.
American law does not require formal employees to work overtime, and the company has never encouraged overtime in the system, but why do you have to take the initiative to work overtime?
There are two main reasons: the internal competitive pressure of the company and the shaping of corporate culture.
David Bitzer was a headhunter at Google, and he has recruited a large number of employees for Google in Europe for seven years. According to David, Google recruits dozens of employees every month, but it is not easy to become a regular employee. Google recruits about 7,000 people each year and receives 2.5 million resumes. The selection process is cruel. “You Must have (at least) 8 rounds of interviews, sometimes more… Someone has experienced 21 rounds of interviews and has not been accepted.”
Working with these thousands of people who choose, you must be good, because once you fall behind, it means being eliminated.
At the same time, Silicon Valley technology giants tend to turn employees into workaholics in corporate culture design. The spirit of Google has an open, innovative and comfortable side to foreigners, including high-end catering, free fitness and leisure.
But in the eyes of Google’s former employees, it all means “stress, fatigue and productivity”: reducing time spent on work-independent, putting energy into work as much as possible, becoming a workaholic, and being efficient for the company. Output value.
The benefits of the tech giants are known as the “golden handcuffs” that bind employees. The most famous and wonderful “golden handcuffs” are the “frozen eggs” benefits introduced by Apple and Facebook for female managers. This benefit allows capable female employees to concentrate on their work during the golden age of their careers without having to devote their energy to having children.
If you can’t burn yourself for the company, the result is dismissal – the human resources department will tell you directly “not to match the corporate cultureRong, not suitable for this.”
Because of the tremendous pressure of not being able to work, a large number of people leave the company every year from Silicon Valley Technology.
Joe Cannella worked at Google for 9 years. Since the first day of Google’s entry, his life began to be a little bit Google: eating Google’s food, wearing Google’s clothes, and having almost no boundaries for personal life and work. Incorporating into the office is like going home. “I might write an email at two or three in the morning. Many big company employees are like this (overtime), but in Google, this culture is more intense.”
It’s a lucky one to get an offer and a big job at a big company. A lot of people who flock to Silicon Valley can’t even get a chance to work for a big company.
The hidden rule of the workplace in Silicon Valley is that for those who have not found a job for more than half a year, no company is willing to hire. The reason is simple and cruel: those who have not found a job for such a long time have either technical skills or technology.
This means that if you are unemployed in Silicon Valley for half a year, it means you are out of the game and can only bow and leave.
As a result, Silicon Valley’s unemployment pressure is much higher than in other parts of the United States. After the dot-com bubble burst in 2000, the unemployment rate in Santa Clara County in the Silicon Valley Center was as high as 7%, 40% higher than the national average.
To this end, many people who can’t enter a big company are afraid of ruining technology. They would rather not have to pay and be willing to work. Just give stocks. Stocks may make a big profit in the future (the company’s entrepreneurial success), or it may be a piece of waste paper (company collapse).
Even if there is no wage work, the competition is fierce. Hundreds of people compete for several positions, and there are many high-tech engineers who exceed the recruitment requirements.
Under the general pressure of survival in McKinley, Silicon Valley engineers have evolved a unique strategy: usually work in a company for one year, after getting stock options, immediately quit to the next company, and get stock options one year later. Then jump to the slot, and so on. Through a large-scale spread, it is expected that in the future, a stock will be able to make itself “Silicon Valley Mark Six” and eventually recover the full cost.
Which Silicon Valley is “thorophilic”
There is no love and hate in the world for no reason. The “blood-blood” of Silicon Valley stems from the fierce competition in the technology industry.
In Silicon Valley, we can see rows of long-established star companies, Intel in the chip world, HP in the computer world, and representatives of software and the Internet, Microsoft, Google, and Facebook.
But the feet of these giants