YeS but have you watched…

Everyone knows about the TV shows Silicon Valley, The IT Crowd, and Mr Robot, Black Mirror etc. Each offers a great spin on working in IT and in particular working with tech startups but often when I mention my favorites they are not so well known. So I can easily just give friends a link to what they need to know and possibly even add to the list here they are…

Valley of the Boom

2019 – IMDB

This one gives great documentary vibes but is also weird and funny. It even has musical numbers and you want to find out how much of it was true. It’s too short with only six great episodes. You probably have to have been around in IT a while (like in the 90s!!) to really enjoy this one that really captures the birth of Silcon Valley (the place).

A Los Angeles Times review captured its essence:

The tale is told largely through the rise and fall of three companies – web browser Netscape, Facebook precursor TheGlobe and the earliest promise of a streaming site, Pixelon— in hour-long episodes. Together they paint a picture of a tech revolution that was a mystery to most of America, a point that’s exemplified in old “Today” show footage that shows Bryant Gumbel and Katie Couric asking, “What is the internet, anyway?”

Each hour-long episode chronicles the excitement, and investment capital, generated by new breakthroughs on the World Wide Web. Dial-up modem?! Chat rooms with icons?! Video in real time?!

The public naiveté and insider fervor characterized here illustrate a business where innovation was hard to measure. As one expert puts it, it was “Every level of truth and fantasy existing at the same time.”

Halt and Catch Fire

2014 – 2017 IMDB

With four seasons Halt and Catch Fire stretches from the 1980s into the 1990s. It has the time and space (and increasing budget) to build a dramatic narrative arc and visuals that really make you feel you are living through the ups and downs of startup life during 1990s ‘peak’ Silicon Valley. Great technical jargon and lots of ‘pre-Cloud’ old school tech issues – did we really do it like that?

Also carried by the great dramatic lead roles of Lead Programmer Cameron Howe (Mackenzie David) and ex-IBM whiz-kid and would be entrepreneur Joe MacMillan(Lee Pace). I call this one the ‘Mad Men’ of tech startup TV. It even has great opening titles.

“Halt and Catch Fire was a TV series that premiered in 2014, ran for four seasons, and went hugely unnoticed. That it flew so far under the radar is a pity, because its decades-spanning story about technological innovators, their successes, failures, and the friendships that pin it all together, is as compelling and addictive as any of the better-known “prestige” shows that captured awards and imaginations at the time.

I found events in Halt and Catch Fire’s fourth season so deeply affecting, even after a second viewing, that I still find myself thinking about it in quiet moments. I love these characters for their friendships that falter and strengthen, and for their willingness to dream big and resilience to fail bigger”.

A Guardian review had some nice words on the show:

VEEP Season 3 Episode 4 ‘Clovis’

2014 IMDB

The Tech Whisperer and Smartch watches…

Engage family filters…

This episode of VEEP shows why the Washington, D.C. elite and Palo Alto’s and The Valley’s biggest tech brains should never mix. Selina and her entourage tour Clovis, a Google-like internet company headed by Craig (it’s pronounced Craaaaaig) who doesn’t keep a schedule and insists on calling the veep by her first name. The company is valued at 4.3 Billion dollars so Selina and her staff are in Silicon Valley to fundraise for her newly announced Presidential Campaign.

Is a great day out of the office. Melissa the CLOVIS CFO pulls Amy aside and offers her a job. Initially Amy declines, believing the “sheer positivity of this place” would break her. She reconsiders once Melissa reveals the enormous (but unknown) salary.