Customer Reviews

Working in Silicon Valley: Economic and Legal Analysis of a High-Velocity Labor Market (Issues in Work and Human Resources)

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This is not another wide-eyed stroll through the Valley picking out the parts that make the most amazing stories. It's not even about the Valley in general; fairly early on, the book makes clear that it has a rather specific focus: The high-tech worker in Silicon Valley. What makes it different from other books about this subject (a la Nudist On The Late Shift, et al.) is that it's not just a montage of scenes that, to the author, best embody the spirit of the Valley. This book wants to be a serious research-based piece of genuine academia, as evidenced by almost pathological inline citations of information sources, and a correspondingly large list of sources in the back of the book. This list of references is over 20 pages long, so it's clear Hyde knows at least something about what he's talking about. The book is mostly quite non-technical in nature; rather, it approaches its subject almost entirely from the perspective of the social sciences of economics, business, politics, and law.

This aspiration is somewhat hindered by the basic fact that much of the book's content is pure opinion. The author tries hard, most of the time, to be neutral and back up his claims with third-party sources, but just when he's about to make a good point, he tosses citations out the window and simply says what he personally thinks. While there's nothing wrong with this, bear in mind that the driving purpose behind the book really is to push one man's perspective.

Hyde's perspective, though usually moderate, is almost unfailingly leftist. He picks out several key elements of what he repeatedly calls "high-velocity" labor markets. (Incidentally, such markets in general are what the book is really about; Silicon Valley is used as a convenient and contemporary metaphor, but the book claims to be applicable to *all* such labor markets, past, present, and future.) The primary elements that Hyde focuses on that affect technology workers in Silicon Valley are things like short job tenures, unusual compensation practices (such as paying with stock options instead of real money), hiring for specific short-term skills rather than long-term employment, and consistent lack of labor unions for high-tech workers. Hyde sounds very much like a socialist throughout the book, often gently suggesting that perhaps the high-tech industry would be a better place if normal job protections like unions, retirement packages, and long-term career paths were made commonplace in Silicon Valley. The book acknowledges the obvious resistance to these ideas by the industry, which sees its ability to rapidly hire and fire employees and change the nature of employment as key to its success. Hyde maintains, however, that high-tech is a field with very different employment dynamics than other more traditional fields (which is almost certainly true), and that special laws must be implemented for the sake of both the tech workers and their employers (which is more controversial).

Ultimately, Hyde offers several recommendations to deal with the problems of insufficient employee compensation, racial discrimination, and lack of employee career paths, but the book remains conspicuously silent on what is perhaps the most currently troubling--and, arguably, the most unsolvable--problem for high-tech workers: The job market hires only for skills that are currently needed. In a few years, those skills will fade out of demand. What's to be done with the tech worker when there are no in-demand skills left and the worker becomes obsolete? This question stands out today, as the world is now full of people well acquainted and educated in technology, who have no place in the working world because the time when they were employable has come to its end. Full of insights and pertinent information, "Working In Silicon Valley" may nonetheless ultimately leave you with more questions than answers.