If you think Silicon Valley is collaborative, please think again.
I’m an engineer at a startup in the Bay Area. We like to tell ourselves that we are solving big problems for humanity and that the valley is very supportive, open and understanding. But under the hood of all of this? It’s cutthroat. Everyone is watching everyone like a hawk.
It starts small. You notice someone’s product launch on Product Hunt. You click, curious. Then, the comparisons begin. What features do they have that we don’t? How fast is their onboarding? Do they support international users yet?
At our weekly all-hands, someone inevitably brings up a competitor. “XYZ just raised $20 million,” or “ABC is hiring aggressively.” Then comes the scramble: do we need to reprioritize? Should we speed up this feature? Should marketing run an ad campaign to get ahead of them? The founders won’t say it out loud, but the subtext is clear: there’s only so much attention, so much market, so much VC money. If we don’t move fast enough, someone else will eat our lunch.
As developers, this constant undercurrent of competition bleeds into everything we work with. You push a feature just before it’s ready because the competitor launched something similar. You patch the bugs late at night because there’s always the fear of a negative tweet. You skip the tests because the board want metrics to look good at the end of each quarter. It’s exhausting.
And it doesn’t just stop at products or testing. Hiring is another battlefield. Candidates juggle five offers because there is never a certainty. The best engineers know their worth, and they want to play the game. “Meta just offered me X,” they tell us, “Can you match it?” Sometimes we can’t.
I’ve even seen friendships strained. Two friends at rival startups, unable to share much anymore. Too much risk of leaks, of giving the other side an edge.
And if you ask me, is all this healthy? Probably not. But it’s the air we breathe. And yet, with all this, competition sharpens you. You learn faster, cut bloat and listen to users more carefully. You want to make it happen before someone else does it.
I don’t think I have a decent ending to this post. Just a reminder that- behind the glossy medium articles about innovation and disruption, there’s a lot of anxiety, hustle, struggle and rivalry powering Silicon Valley. We compete, we design, and we build. Sometimes, maybe we even win, but that’s all left to fate.
