What I mean to say is this. Series creator Mike Judge commonly explores themes around the absurdity of Corporate America, particularly the high tech industry. And he certainly explores them in Silicon Valley (see also: Office Space, Idiocracy). Typically in his work, large corporations and their management are viewed as the “bad guys”. Bureaucratic, greedy, moronic, apathetic institutions callously indifferent to their employees,
Now the show follows the exploits of Richard and his friends as they try to get their tech company, Pied Piper off the ground. Generally Judge follows the same themes from his earlier works portraying the Pied Piper team as constantly buffeted by the whims of their competitors, VC investors and potential customers.
However, when one looks at the show from the perspective of a regular employee working for Pied Piper, they appear potentially as bad, if not worse than any executive from Hooli or Intertech.
-All Pied Piper leadership team are socially awkward and narcissistic
-They are often neurotic, inappropriate and hostile to everyone around them.
-The company frequently goes through rapid leadership, product and staffing changes
-Personal issues are often brought into the workplace
-There is frequent in-fighting within the team and with their VC backers
-And what few employees we’ve seen, have been at best treated like unwanted outsiders.
IOW, it’s easy to imagine in ten years, Pied Piper is wildly successful and Richard turns into an eccentric, egotistical, billionaire like Gavin Belson. Or it’s acquired and he turns into Lundberg, an egotistical executive watching his stock climbing half a point.
I don’t know if they are the “good guys” but I don’t think they’re exactly “bad guys” either. I can imagine some of the engineers or other people who worked at the company for a short period of time wouldn’t be enthusiastically saying they were great, but they weren’t evil, just sometimes incompetent. I can’t think of anyone they’ve really wronged, other than maybe Bighead, but maybe I’m forgetting someone. I could imagine Richard becoming a Gavin Belson in the future, but I could also imagine him becoming a Peter Gregory type.
The only unambiguously good & strong character is the hot liaison with the VC company, and she is portrayed as fairly helpless with only occasional limited influence. Aside from the evil caricature Gavin Belson, almost everyone else seems to have some mix of strong traits and major weaknesses that render them dysfunctional. It’s hard to imagine that anyone here could ultimately succeed except through dumb luck. Perhaps that’s the message.
Richard seems to have morals. Other than what’s his name, the home owner, they are presented as talented. They are definitely protagonists you can root for. In fact that show gives you ulcers sometimes.
My memory is hazy on the details, but that programmer chick they hired last season or the season before is apparently still holding a grudge against them. When they tried to hire her back, she extorted $20 grand out of them.
I think it makes more sense to think of them as a sports team. They’re in a competition of talent, skill, and money. We root for them because we know them, and we watch some contract disputes play out, but by and large there isn’t moral content to the competition. Someplace like Hooli would be an exception analogous to the New York Yankees or the Dallas Cowboys, which are in fact objectively evil.
I agree, there are a lot of smart people, but a lot of the success has come from luck. No one’s really 100% good, but no one is 100% bad, it’s more that everyone is mainly out for themselves. Monica and Jared are maybe the best people on the show and are less selfish and wouldn’t want to screw over anyone else, but they’d also be pragmatic and see some things as just business.
I think she did have a bit of a grudge, I think from not getting paid, but I thought she was demanding that money because she saw how desperate they were and that she could get that money from them.
There does seem to be a recurring theme that anyone with any degree of social or business acumen tends to screw them over rather easily. Jared adds interesting skills beyond just programming, but he seems to be “on the spectrum” just as much as Richard. Jared picks up on some things with surprising insight, but he completely misses other completely obvious things.
The homeowner is Erlich Bachman and I seem to remember that his business acumen has been useful to Richard more than once. Wasn’t he the one who noticed that the data compression algorithm at the heart of Richard’s original business idea was more useful than whatever it was that Richard was trying to develop?
And another thing. Richard has morals but has let his ego get the better of him.
Elrich isn’t a total dummy… he did manage to get Aviato to succeed, after all. Despite the drug use, I seem to recall that he doesn’t code due to some crippling pain – perhaps hence the drug use?
Bachman busted out the wrist supports and hair clips for some power coding on one episode so he can be useful in a crunch. And he did inspire the jerking-off algorithm discussion that spawn the idea for middle-out compression.
I’ve really appreciated Richard’s evolution in this series. He went from the guy throwing up in his doctors office, to basically not giving a shit who he tells to fuck off.
Erlich’s problem is that he’s such an egotistical doofus (jerk is too strong a word, he’s too cuddly and incompetent for that), constantly devoting 99% of his energy to self-aggrandizement, that when he does come up with a gem of insight it’s hard to get people to pay attention.
Maybe “good” and “bad” are too strong a word. I just think it’s interesting how Mike Judge often portrays big corporations as amoral organizations run by greedy, egotistical jerks. But when you make the corporate leadership the “heroes” of the story, it’s actually easy to see how personal flaws (which everyone has) and dealing with difficult management decisions can potentially make for a shitty workplace if you told the story from a different perspective.
In all fairness though, Mike Judge does make these points. Like when Gavin calls out Richard’s hypocrisy about “not wanting to become a big, faceless corporation” as he tries to turn Pied Piper into a billion dollar business. Or how “Action Jack” wasn’t evil or a bad CEO. He was a seasoned business leader doing what the numbers told him would be the right decision for the business. Probably having seen a million Richards who thought they would become billionaires.
I do love it when Gavin brings out animals as part of his presentations.
Erlich was only partly responsible for blowing the $20 million that Bighead got. Remember that it was Bighead’s idea to move the in-ground pool and then to move it back. We were never told how much that cost, but it was presumably a lot.
Good point. I guess that takes him out of the egotistical-but-lovable-doofus category. He deserves all the failure he gets.
Erlich still tried to cheat him out of the money. The fact that Bighead had blown some, and the accountant had already stolen some, does not redeem Erlich.
