>"Silicon Valley companies attract employees by giving them options which vest over time."
Just another of example of how this story is being spun in the tech media. Skype is not a Silicon Valley company in any meaningful sense. Most of their development team is in Estonia and their headquarters is in Luxemburg.
Neither is San Francisco or Mountain View technically Silicon Valley. I always thought that SV is used more as a metaphor for the tech startup scene than the specific location.
Mountain View is directly adjacent to Silicon Valley. Like Silicon Valley it is a suburb of San Francisco.
I'm not sure how you can say developing in a county adjacent to silicon valley is the same thing as developing in a country more than 3000 miles away.
If Silicon Valley is a metaphor then the term is meaningless. New York is Silicon Valley. So is Chicago. So is Vancover, and London.
If it isn't---because of the unique legal structure, cultural consciousness, and developer concentration in and around Silicon Valley---then its unfair to say that a Luxumburg company operating under EU rules is a silicon valley company.
That makes no sense. Mountain View is a real place. Silicon Valley is a nickname for the region, so saying "MV is directly adjacent to SV" makes no sense to me.
Mountain View is pretty solidly in Silicon Valley (as is Palo Alto and Stanford); a lot of people draw the line at the Santa Clara/San Mateo county line (so Menlo Park isn't in), although one might consider San Mateo, Foster City, Redwood City, and Menlo Park in, too.
Why would you think it was a metaphor? It is a physical place and when you see in it mentioned in the press, they quite literally mean this particular location. Also, having grown up in Silicon Valley, I can tell you that Mountain View is in SV.
When I was a kid, San Jose was the "gateway to Silicon Valley" which basically was anywhere in Santa Clara county (at that time, mostly the 415 area code).
Skype isn't part of the tech startup scene either. They have not been since 2005 when ebay acquired them for two billion dollars - and now they have been resold twice. The erroneous Silicon Valley references just facilitates the misinterpretation of Skype as a startup to support the linkbait article title.
Frankly it would seem that analysis of the stock vesting expectations of hackers in Tallinn is more relevant to the story and the structure of the Silverlake partner agreement than the expectations of Silicon Valley programmers when it comes to attracting and retaining technical talent at Skype and among the people mentioned in the techpress, it has been difficult to find any in key technical roles.
Just another of example of how this story is being spun in the tech media. Skype is not a Silicon Valley company in any meaningful sense. Most of their development team is in Estonia and their headquarters is in Luxemburg.
[http://jobs.skype.com/lifeatskype.html]