Silicon Valley: Third Party Insourcing
One of the key threads running through the first season of Silicon Valley is how technology, for as much as we rely on it, is as flawed and prone to breakdown as the people who create it. Nowhere is this most evident in this week’s episode than when poor Jared excitedly gets into a driverless car for a ride home but ends up on Peter Gregory’s personal island in the Pacific (which sits right on the International Date Line) before it is converted into a storage container and then shipped off with the skittish young man inside. (Let’s not quibble over the fact that Jared likely could have gotten out of the car at a stoplight when he realized something was amiss.)
That may spell the idea out in broad strokes, but consider how Richard has to scramble to save Pied Piper after a monumental screw-up by a young consultant they hire. Known as “The Carver” (but actually named Kevin), the high school-age programmer is brought in to help them set up the cloud service configuration for a fee of $20,000. Awed by the overly confident kid, Richard asks him to help with another aspect of the architecture, but when he comes back from the store, the whole system is, to use the show’s phrase, “skull-fucked” by a coding error the kid made.
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