In this instance the exchange you would have to make would be crippling startups and small businesses, which is where the vast majority of the growth of the economy happens.

As an aside, how many companies do you see actually building Snapchat for Etsy-linked tumblr posts? I see that criticism of Silicon Valley all the time, yet despite being in the heart of it I rarely see that kind of company. I’d guess an order of magnitude more money is going into building human transporting drones and supersonic jets than into the silly stuff people love to rail on the Valley for.

Look at the list of startups that just came out of YC and you’ll see maybe one or two companies that fit that kind of mockery.

We need to draw a distinction between "startups" and "small businesses." Options and RSUs, as a vehicle for engineering talent, is largely a VC/SV thing. I work on the east coast in a non-NYC city, and options/RSUs simply do not exist, even at what most people would consider tech/software companies, even the ones with venture investment. Certainly, Bill's Hardware down the street does not offer stock options.

By and large, taxation of options and RSU at any point will have negligible impact on the SMB sector of the US economy. It's probably very, very damaging for startups if your definition of startup matches Paul Graham's, but if your definition of startup is "new business that happens to use JavaScript for something" this is unlikely to change anything about your day to day competitiveness.

And that's why Silicon Valley is on its own for this one.

It hasn't loaned me its political power for anything that matters to me, and so for this issue that impacts me not at all, I will not be returning any favors.

The collapse of the 2002 bubble hurt everywhere else far more deeply than SV, with a more painful recovery, so I see anything that might curb irrationally exuberant investment in companies that are not likely to ever benefit rust belt economies as a good thing.

Furthermore, I am more in favor of simpler employee incentives that do not force people to invest where they work. At the income level of a typical tech employee outside of SV and NYC, any investments should likely be buy-and-ignore in a robot-managed index fund. I don't want all my net worth to be tied up in my employer, especially when we have no contract, no real control over its business strategy or tactics, and I can be fired at will. If you want to pay me $X, pay me $X.

That's just it. Where I am, I don't see new companies building anything. YC isn't here. I'd love to work for a startup with a like-brand-X-but-for-Y or a word-salad elevator pitch, that also offered a compensation package as good as any found in Silicon Valley.

But I don't get options or RSUs, or even cash bonuses. I get billed to a customer at $200-$400/hr and get maybe $50-$60 of that in total compensation. It's hard to tell, really, because my employers keep getting sold to other companies that proceed to change around the benefits plan. The details aren't very important. Those companies are getting a whole lot of money, and they are giving a smaller proportion of it to the leaf node workers, and a larger share to administration, management, business lubricators, and bureaucracy. The tech industry has very little political-economic clout outside of the handful of cities considered to be tech centers.

I'd love to have an alternative to that, beyond moving my family at least 500 miles away. Again. But that SV money is mostly staying in SV. It isn't going into helping out the industry in the rest of the country, or the rest of the world. It isn't spreading business opportunities to local economies outside of central California and the Pacific NW. SV has done little for me beyond offering me new things to buy. They have not given me the additional local economic activity that I'd need to buy them.

(That's not strictly true. SV has also exported business practices that get cargo-culted everywhere, usually to my detriment.)

I have zero reasons to support the small businesses of Silicon Valley. They can go piss up a tree, because even in a hurricane-force gale blowing directly east, it still won't land anywhere near me. I also won't ever be in a position where I'd actually be able to move there, and it seems the culture has an unnatural aversion to spreading itself somewhere else. So choke on it. SV is competitive with my local tech community, rather than cooperative, so crippling its startups and small businesses helps ours, even at the expense of a smaller overall tech economy. I'm fine with a smaller overall pie, if I get a bigger slice on my plate. I'd only care about bigger pie if there are bigger slices for everyone, not just the ones closest to the ovens.

So by all means, make options and RSUs untenable, and dry up the H1Bs, and let the major players collude with anti-poaching agreements, and let the NIMBYs drive up housing prices. I want Silicon Valley to fail, because in its success, it has been leaving me behind. It will take my money, but won't give it back by spending it in somewhere in my neighborhood. If the only way to claw that back is to vote it out of someone else pocket, so be it.

Edit: Besides that, it's a bit ironic that those working on defense systems like THAAD and Aegis and C-RAM and Iron Dome are largely out of range of North Korean missiles, while the NK propaganda videos depict the atomic destruction of San Francisco and all of its peacetime-tech startups. Pork barrel military-industrial spending might be wasteful, but it does spread the wealth to a lot of people who are otherwise completely ignored by the investment sector.

>SV is competitive with my local tech community, rather than cooperative, so crippling its startups and small businesses helps ours, even at the expense of a smaller overall tech economy. I'm fine with a smaller overall pie, if I get a bigger slice on my plate.

Bang on. I'm mostly glad that my particular corner of the Midwest doesn't seem terribly keen on aping the SV model of shitty business practices, at least. Small victories and all that.

> I'd love to work for a startup with a like-brand-X-but-for-Y or a word-salad elevator pitch

Why? I'd much rather actually deliver something to the client, even if...

> I get billed to a customer at $200-$400/hr and get maybe $50-$60 of that in total compensation.

Then it sounds like everything else around what you deliver is worth at least $140-350/hr. If it's really so easy I'm sure you could offer your services for $100/hr, take a nice big raise and save your clients hundreds of thousands a year.

> it seems the culture has an unnatural aversion to spreading itself somewhere else

Because even for a culture that bitches and moans about how old school business ways are out dated, they still insist you be within a 2 hour drive of your investors, so that when Ashton Kutcher gets mad at someone he can yell at them in person instead of over ~~email~~ ~~hipchat~~ Slack.

> It will take my money, but won't give it back by spending it in somewhere in my neighborhood.

Stop buying shit from startups

"Then it sounds like everything else around what you deliver is worth at least $140-350/hr. If it's really so easy I'm sure you could offer your services for $100/hr, take a nice big raise and save your clients hundreds of thousands a year."

Not everyone wants to, or is able to strike it out on their own.

Exactly. If I ran a lemonade stand, it could be the best lemonade within 100 miles, but it would also be bankrupt within an hour.

I would need a non-technical co-founder that I could trust to not stab me in the back, and an investor willing to give us enough runway to take off without putting any land mines in it. So far, those conditions have never been met. Business around here is very often more about who you know than what you can do, and since I don't know the right people, those customers are simply unavailable, even at a deep discount to $100/hr.

All that overhead is necessary to navigate the system that has been set up to favor those that support the system. The bureaucratic hoops are insurmountable barriers to entry to individuals, and very steep even for a hypothetical small company that is 51% owned by a disabled Indian veteran woman. It wouldn't be much of a military-industrial complex if it could be disrupted that easily. The "clients" are far less interested in saving money than with preserving their influence over the nature of the work, an end often pursued by spending every penny of the allocated budget, regardless of need.

A union could change it. A U.S. attorney with a forensic accountant, TS/SCI security clearance, and a stack of subpoenas could change it. A political party could change it. A handful of generals and admirals could change it. One software pro, working alone? Not so much.

This is really the best deal I can get right now, without dropping everything and moving again. It isn't great, but it is available to me, and I don't have to front capital, work owner-manager hours, or do types of work that I am not comparatively good at doing.

Besides that, I have already failed at going it alone once, and once was all I could afford. I didn't make it, and lost everything. The work was good enough, but not enough people wanted to buy it, and not enough customers recommended it to their friends. So that runway is gone, and I'm stuck workin' for The Man until I can retire. In retrospect, I would have been far better off not trying. But that's all anecdotal. You might succeed on your own. Maybe I just didn't work hard enough.

I cannot do the work I am currently doing--the work that people are willing to pay $400/hr to a contractor business for--as an individual without clearance. The other work available locally, subtracting those opportunities, pays less on average than I am now making as an employee. I don't want to move again without some sure way of paying those moving expenses. Taking remote jobs puts me in competition with both India and Indiana.

The math works out. I, specifically, am better off as an employee. I already took my shot at self-employment and blew it. I won't get another. I'm lucky that I even got one.

If I still lived in an area with more potential customers, with more money, the story might be different. If I wasn't absolutely crap at sales and administration, the story might be different. If I were better able to build a network, such by being more attractive or having better social skills, the story might be different. If I weren't still paying off debts from the first time around, the story might be different. But it's not.

I'm not blaming bureaucracy. It's me. I cannot run my own business. I tried it once already, in the Chicago market, which should be plenty big enough for anyone with an iota of business ability, and it didn't work out. It was a dismal failure. Nobody wanted to hire me. Nobody wanted to refer me. I couldn't get the customers. Therefore, I must have zero business ability--not an iota; zero. If a bunch of money magically dropped into my lap to start a business, I would still have to hire someone else to get me customers. But without already having a customer, I could not afford to hire that person. Easier all around to just find a person that does that already and be their employee.

Do you understand this? Can you fathom how a person might have one valuable skill and be completely unable to exploit it alone? What would you say the difference would be between an aircraft designer that worked as an employee for Boeing or Airbus and one that sold mail-order kits to hobbyist pilots? The former has a whole bunch of people multiplying the value of their labor, and probably gets a smaller share of the gross revenue. The latter might get 75% of their sales, and still make less total.

Besides that, people don't like me. You may underestimate how important that is in the realm of economics. People prefer to give money to other people that they know and like, rather than the people they don't. I know there are loads of resources out there on how to get other people to like you, but it seems like they all rely on some secret sauce that I just don't have.

You don't like what some of the startups in the current age are focusing on, so you want disincentivize all startups in general, for perpetuity? That's an incredibly extreme response.

Throwing the baby out with the bathwater, if I've ever seen it.

More like throwing out someone else's ugly ogre baby with the mud wallow.

I most definitely want to disincentivize startups that lure people that likely don't yet know any better to move to one of the highest cost-of-living markets in the world, to work long hours in exchange for empty promises and unicorn-lottery tickets. If you actually need top talent, you can pay for it with cash. If you can't get enough cash to pay for it, that might be because investors don't believe you can do what you say you can do, and they might be right.

There are plenty of startups that don't resort to flimflammery to attract employees, and many of them are forced to bootstrap on slim margins and angels because their model will never make them a unicorn, and certain types of investor are only attracted to the high-risk, high-reward ventures. That may be because the rules around the current system provide additional incentives to have that preference. Changing the rules might change the preference.

It is my personal preference that businesses that quietly fill a niche and make money from day 1 be preferred over those that burn their solid rocket booster at both ends, only to make big flashy explosions that do nothing and go nowhere. But I lack the funds and the risk tolerance to enforce my preference, so it doesn't really matter to the markets at all. But I still have one vote worth of political power, whenever that actually matters.

It sounds more like startups have not given them a reason to care about their fate.

At the same time, wouldn't that talent be equally wasted at "Uber for cat-sitters"?

I agree, it's a bad comparison.

What's more happening is that talent is being attracted to mid-stage startups, unicorns, and the big companies like Google and Amazon. Early-stage startups like "Tinder for people with green hair" don't employ enough people across the market for them to significantly impact it.

I don't think this is about government fighting against stock-paying companies for tech workers by fucking up RSUs. In reality it's probably just government incompetence. No need for strawmanning or conspiracy

At the same time, most early stage startups aren't actually doing much that requires such high levels of talent and specialization. They really just require good amounts of "get shit done". And there are plenty of people in this country that have adequate levels of that. They're just mostly not in SV.