Finally getting around to watching the series “Silicon Valley” and it got me to thinking - when did the stereotypical “Silicon Valley Guy(Gal)” change from being a semiconductor design engineer to being a programmer? I’ve been in the semiconductor industry for 35+ years, but never worked in the valley (I’ve always found very lucrative jobs in places that I could actually afford a nice place to live) so I haven’t been there to witness the evolution (or de-evolution). While there are certainly still a lot of IC companies with headquarters or facilities in Silicon Valley, the first thing that comes to people’s minds these days seems to be software.
Funny, when I think of Silicon Valley I think of a bunch of hog farms and Naval blimp operations …
Intel was founded there in 1968 … just makes logical sense that the software folk would gather near the hardware folk … it also makes sense that technological innovations should happen in a place of great social innovation …
A relative on my mum’s side worked there, but he was on the bi-magnetic core side of the operations … [rolls eyes] … smaller than a grain of rice, just amazing an entire bit of information could be stored on such a small thing …
- Beginning of the Internet boom. That is when the valley started becoming known more for software and services than hardware.
Of course, there were plenty of software companies big and small there at the time, but in the public consciousness, late 1990s Silicon Valley == nerds doing this “internetwork” thing.
We are not nerds!
Well, throughout the 80s and 90s whenever I told someone I was an IC designer I would always be asked, “When are you moving to Silicon Valley?” or, “Don’t you need to work in Silicon Valley to do that?” Haven’t been asked either question this century (except by headhunters trying to convince me to look at Valley jobs).
I wonder how much of the shift has to do with the startup culture? Semiconductor startups are quite rare these days. During the fabless revolution in the 80s and 90s there was a window where you could start an IC company with relatively modest seed money - you didn’t need to build a fab, you could prototype pretty inexpensively, and there were a lot of applications for fairly simple chips. As chips got more complex, they needed a lot more resources to design. In the late 80s a team of 3-4 engineers could design a marketable chip for a couple hundred $k. These days it a few million to get to your first silicon (except for some very niche applications). Hell, a single license for the design tools start at $100k/year. You need access to serious angel money to even get to the point where you can shop your product to investors.
Conversely, you can get a new app prototyped and functional with just a few programmers and open source development tools. You have very little capital needed to get enough together to show investors.
Of course this could just be the rantings of an aging hardware design engineer who still deep down considers “software engineering” to be an oxymoron :D.
I’m a software engineer and I agree with you.
Does anyone remember when the Rte. 128 corridor around Boston was supposed to be the center of the new tech universe?
Yup - I worked around there for a time. DEC, Data General, Wang Labs, Polaroid - all long gone. Analog Devices is still going strong, and the area is still pretty tech-heavy.
And a bit further south, orchards–lots and lots of orchards. Up until the mid-sixties it was The Valley of Heart’s Delight. Del Monte and Libby’s had major canning facilities here. We moved to San Jose in the late 60s when my dad got a job at IBM. Our subdivision was surrounded by orchards back then. Not many of those fruit trees left. 
The Libby’s can water tower still stands in Sunnyvale, near downtown. It’s a landmark.
I thought a lot of computer hardware stuff was done in NY, IBM had a very large research center outside Poughkeepsie for instance.
Yes there was a big center there in Poughkeepsie NY. There was also one in San Jose CA too.
Closed down now, the Poughkeepsie one. Its actually surprising how much high tech work has gone from New York State since the 1990’s, Grumman was in Long Island; gone, Kodak, screwed etc.
I was in school near Boston in the mid 70s, and DEC was the place to work if you were a tech guy. It was happening in Nashua!!
Another thing that contributed to the OP’s issue is the cost of wafer fabrication in Silicon Valley in particular and the US in general. Wafer fabrication left the valley decades ago, and so did most manufacturing. So you might have design guys still here (I live “here”), but hardly any manufacturing guys.
Yup! I remember those signs when I was in college in late 80s
c.f. John Steinbeck …
These days, hardware engineers are just software engineers that can’t program.
Your subdivision was almost certainly an orchard before it became that subdivision.
Saratoga (South and West of San Jose) has a “Heritage Orchard Park” near the city offices that are maintained as a sort of link to the past. And just a wee bit down the road from there is still an actual, living, breathing working orchard. You can buy cherries, apricots, and plums. You turn off in to this long driveway, arrive at a Victorian farmhouse with a little fruit stand next to it, and you’ll feel like you’ve been transported back 50 years in time (or more).
When and if those guys ever decide to sell the land for housing, they will be crazy rich. Across the road, homes sell for ~ $5M.
Nah. Software engineers could be hardware engineers but they have really short attention spans.
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There is still a lot of wafer fab capacity in the US. What really went offshore was almost all assembly and a lot of test. Typical for me was to have wafers gabbed in the US, shipped to Malaysia for assembly, shipped back to the US for test, then shipped to OEM assembly (usually back overseas).
There is an excellent chance California doesn’t really want any new wafer fans. Every decommissioned fab that I know of is a pretty bad toxic waste site, some are actually Superfund sites.
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