Sketching Silicon Valley: Five Perspectives on Working in Tech

Silicon Valley usually means the cluster of technology companies and communities around the southern San Francisco Bay. The industry stretches across the wider Bay Area as well.

Apple and Google are among the companies that made it synonymous with technology. The surrounding ecosystem has helped companies get started in fields as different as electric cars, online accommodation, and social media.

How Silicon Valley became shorthand for innovation

Founders have good reason to look closely at a region that has produced so many influential companies. How people organize their work is one part of that story.

For job seekers, the attraction includes the prospect of responsibility and compensation that can grow along with a company, although the experience depends on the employer.

What makes working there different?

Sketching Silicon Valley began as a Brunch series by five Yonsei University graduates working in the region. The essays became a book in 2018. That date matters when reading about office life and hiring, even if some of the organizational questions still feel familiar.

The five contributors came to Silicon Valley from different backgrounds.

1. Kim Hye-jin studied education and English literature at Yonsei University.
2. Park Jeong-ri studied English literature at Yonsei and became an accountant.
3. Song Chang-geol studied mechanical engineering at Yonsei and business at Fordham University.
4. Yoo Ho-hyeon studied English literature and library and information science at Yonsei.
5. Lee Jong-ho studied English literature at Yonsei and earned a master’s degree in interaction design at Carnegie Mellon University.

Organizing work around rank or roles

The authors see a greater emphasis on roles at some of the Silicon Valley companies they know and a greater emphasis on rank at many large Korean companies.

Either structure can work. Giving specialists room to make decisions can make it easier for a team to act on new information.

In a hierarchy, authority follows rank. Titles such as department head tell people where decisions are made, and teams carry out plans approved above them.

This can make it clear who gets the final say. A small group of decision-makers can also become a bottleneck, and much depends on their judgment.

In a role-based organization, decisions can sit with the people closest to the work. An engineer, a product manager, and an engineering manager have different responsibilities.

That structure can help a team respond quickly. It can also lead to confusion when people are working toward different goals.

The model depends on people understanding the scope of their work and using their expertise to make decisions without waiting for instructions at every turn.

Apple and Google as examples

The book points to Apple under Steve Jobs as an example of how strongly a company can be shaped by decisions at the top. Some of that emphasis on centralized direction was visible under Tim Cook as well.

The authors associate Google with more room to join projects and test ideas. That approach has produced widely used services as well as experiments that never found the same audience.

The products give a feel for those different approaches. Apple is known for tightly integrating its devices and software, while Google has often made its services available across platforms.

Apple also built stores where it could present and sell products directly. Its example suggests how much room there can be for judgment and creative problem-solving even inside a company with a strong hierarchy.

How employees are paid

The authors describe technology salaries that can look high from South Korea, though the Bay Area’s cost of living changes what the figures mean. Pay varies considerably by employer, role, and experience.

A compensation package may include a salary, stock options, restricted stock units, or an employee stock purchase plan.

Equity can let employees share in the growth of the company, although its value can also fall.

1. Stock options
2. RSU : Restricted Stock Unit
3. ESPP : Employee Stock Purchase Plan

An option gives the employee the right to buy shares at an agreed price before the option expires. The authors describe an example in which a quarter of the grant vests after the first year and the rest vests gradually. The exercise period and what happens after leaving depend on the plan.

Restricted stock units, or RSUs, can deliver shares once vesting conditions are met. The employee does not have to exercise a purchase option.

An employee stock purchase plan, or ESPP, can let staff set aside part of their pay to buy company shares, sometimes at a discount.

Performance reviews from several directions

A review may draw on managers, peers, people further down the reporting line, and employees’ own assessments. The book provides examples of prompts for a self-review.

They can also help when deciding how to describe your own work in a résumé or a job application.

Questions for a self-review

1. What did you do?
   1. Which two or three results are you proudest of?
   2. How would you rate your work over the past six months for someone at your level, on a five-point scale?
   3. How much did your work contribute to your team’s success, on a five-point scale?
2. How did you do it?
   1. Which company value did you put into practice most effectively?
   2. Which company value could you put into practice more consistently?
3. How do you plan to grow?
   1. What are your strengths?
   2. If you could choose one thing to achieve or improve over the next six months, what would it be?

The postmortem after an incident

After a service fails, a postmortem helps a team reconstruct what happened and decide what to change.

The authors describe six practices.

1. Invite the people involved.
2. Reconstruct the timeline.
3. Look at what went well and what went wrong.
4. Keep the focus on learning instead of assigning blame.
5. Agree on improvements.
6. Share the findings.

Google’s fictional example involves a newly discovered Shakespeare sonnet, the DeLorean time machine from Back to the Future, and an outage in Google Search.

The example is available in Google’s own material on site reliability engineering.

• Google’s sample postmortem https://landing.google.com/sre/book/chapters/postmortem.html

Waterfall and agile development

The book contrasts waterfall development, in which work moves through planned phases, with iterative ways of building a product.

Agile teams typically work in shorter cycles and use what they learn from customers and users to guide the next round.

The Agile Manifesto

The manifesto grew out of work on better ways to build software. The authors identify four priorities.

• People working together take precedence over a strict focus on processes and tools.
• Software that works takes precedence over extensive documentation.
• Working with the customer takes precedence over negotiating every detail by contract.
• Responding to what changes takes precedence over adhering to a fixed plan.

The items given lower priority still have value.

Breaking down agile work

Different teams use different conventions. The authors give an example of breaking a broad goal into smaller pieces.

• Theme: restaurant ordering through tablets and cloud services.
• Epic: give customers a tablet at the table for tasks related to their meal.
• Story: let a customer browse the menu before ordering.
• Task: build a menu screen that displays pictures of the dishes.

A section on working in the United States

Reading about Silicon Valley can make a reader want to try working there.

For someone who is not already authorized to work in the United States, the question of immigration status is part of the decision.

The authors devote the end of the book to routes they knew when they were writing.

One route discussed is studying in F-1 status, applying for Optional Practical Training, and seeking employer sponsorship for H-1B status or permanent residence.

OPT provides eligible F-1 students with limited authorization for work related to their studies. Eligible STEM graduates may be able to apply for an extension.

Restrictions apply to how long an OPT participant can be unemployed and what work qualifies.

The book also describes the H-1B route, including employer sponsorship and the annual selection process for employers subject to the cap.

It discusses the separate advanced-degree exemption for qualifying graduates of U.S. institutions. Procedures can change, so readers should consult U.S. Citizenship and Immigration Services for current details.

A related review discusses the National Interest Waiver, which is a route in the employment-based permanent residence system.

• Related reading by Nam Jeong-yong An Ordinary Office Worker Gets a U.S. Green Card

As a record of work and life in Silicon Valley, the book is especially good on the everyday meaning of ideas such as role ownership, feedback, and compensation.

Its immigration section reflects the period in which it was written. The accounts of how people work together remain a useful way into the book.

Book details

Sketching Silicon Valley

Authors

Kim Hye-jin, Park Jeong-ri, Song Chang-geol, Yoo Ho-hyeon, and Lee Jong-ho

Published

August 20, 2018

ISBN13

9791185541839

Read on Brunch

https://brunch.co.kr/magazine/svillustrated

View the book on YES24

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