6 ms·

If you guys think social media and advertising is big business, wait until commercial space flight clicks.

z3t4 9y ago
It's kinda sad that social media and advertising is the most lucrative businesses and so many bright minds work on that instead of for example ...
- fashionrob 9y ago
  Just needs a little time. It wasn't that long ago when only a few people had Twitter and FB accounts. IG even took a while to gain main stream traction.
- icc97 9y ago
  Plus unfortunately Musk is fairly well known for underpaying his staff. So you have to choose to take a paycut to switch from Google / Facebook. To be fair all of Apple/Amazon/Microsoft do at least sell actual products. Perhaps this is why Google / Facebook open source so much of what they do, so that talented engineers don't just have to say 'I get paid to make people click'.
  - Denzel 9y ago
    Underpaying what baseline? A recently hired software engineer at Tesla, while not giving specific figures, said that the base comp was competitive and the options were $100k+ over the standard 4-year vesting schedule. I've heard similarly from a handful of others; I'd expect the comp to be inline at SpaceX. Not to mention the growth potential for your stock options between SpaceX and Tesla may be higher than comparable companies.
    - icc97 9y ago
      > Underpaying what baseline? Facebook / Google
      - qaq 9y ago
        well most companies "underpay" if baseline is FB and Google
    - arcticfox 9y ago
      This doesn't look good: https://www.glassdoor.com/Salary/Tesla-Software-Engineer-Salaries-E43129_D_KO6,23.htm https://www.glassdoor.com/Salary/Tesla-Software-Engineer-Sal...
- fsloth 9y ago
  "It's kinda sad that social media and advertising is the most lucrative businesses and so many bright minds work on that instead of for example ..." So, how would you employ the engineers instead? Industrial society is about producing garbage for the masses to consume. The huge churn of capital and labor creates as it's byproducts from time to time items of actual human value. But those things would be fragile and complicated without the industrial economy surrounding them. If we look at this stage in our species history from far away, currently the industrial economy is supposed to be predictable and mundane. So, "producing useless crap" is a required feature of our economy so it can occasionally produce science, art, medicine and the other things that actually improve us as a species. Now, consumer goods fall into two categories: physical and digital. Physical consumer society is turning our biosphere to shit. Digital commodities, on the other hand, are much more lenient on the environment. So, if we look at it this way, and presume that producing consumer crap is necessary for economic growth and stability, it's much better to work in producing digital goods and services rather than physical ones. Within this framework, the actual question is not why do the brightest minds work at facebooks, but, will our economy ever develop beyond the point where producing useless crap is not so much a necessity for systemic stability rather than an occasional indulgence.
  - enraged_camel 9y ago
    >>Industrial society is about producing garbage for the masses to consume. As the saying goes, one man’s garbage is another man’s treasure. So don’t be so judgmental. :)
    - fsloth 9y ago
      No, it's garbage. Individuals living in industrial societies are consuming way more than the ecosystem can support. So, either we need to get rid of people or they need to consume less. I prefer the option where they consume less. If it's not needed for a wholesome life it's "crap". I consume as much as I can but only because the society lets me, and I'm too burdened at the moment to actively change my way of life.
      - 9y ago
- dmihal 9y ago
  That's because the only real monetization on the internet is advertising, and ecommerce (which relies heavily on advertising). Pretty much every consumer website on the internet deals with one of those areas. If it becomes easier to movie money on the internet, we might start seeing new dominating players other than Google (ads), Facebook (ads) and Amazon (ecommerce).
- api 9y ago
  A generation or two ago all the brightest minds in the world were working on ways to kill the most people as efficiently as possible. This is progress.
- gimmeDatCheddar 9y ago
  It's not actually sad. Social media and advertising involve incredibly complex and vast search spaces. The problem domains are massive and solving the issues in those fields, like scaling software and hardware, enables us to build tooling and infrastructure that every field can use. So those businesses are the bootstrapper for other businesses. Example: SpaceX wouldn't exist if Paypal didn't exist first.
le-mark 9y ago
Who thought the future would be giant chemical rockets (100x BFR?)thundering around the solar system? Transportation infrastructure for the solar system, Rail Road Tycoons of space. The potential is immense.
- jerf 9y ago
  "Who thought the future would be giant chemical rockets (100x BFR?)thundering around the solar system?" It's not. The math doesn't work, the rocket equation bites too hard. This is one of the reasons to be keeping an eye on the recent claims over the past few years that fusion reactors may be something that could be shrunk down to shipping container sizes in the relatively near future. Get a functioning fusion reactor into space and suddenly the solar system is, if not your backyard, something very reachable. But it's possible we won't see any practical way to lift off from Earth other than chemical rockets for a while.
  - alex_stoddard 9y ago
    Does the rocket equation still bite to hard if fuel production is outside Earth's gravity well?
    - le-mark 9y ago
      That's why Musk had art of BFR sitting on a Jovian moon, for the same delta v to get into earth orbit, you can get anywhere else in the solar system, quick (relatively). Big rockets and large mass fractions enable all that, as my comment above indicates. Rocket equation is for real, but so are economies of scale.
    - jerf 9y ago
      There's some opinion there, but personally I would still say yes. There's a lot hiding in the "relatively" in le-mark's sibling comment. We really need to be able to get places in a couple of weeks, and chemical rocketry just gets absurd for that; even if you can do it, you've got to fling massive refueling stations around and such. A fusion-based system would have power density sufficient to not just fly to Mars in a reasonable period of time, but to fly back without having to be refueled, which means we can go places without first figuring out how to build a fairly expensive and massive infrastructure that allows us to get back.

z3t4 9y ago

It's kinda sad that social media and advertising is the most lucrative businesses and so many bright minds work on that instead of for example ...

fashionrob 9y ago
Just needs a little time. It wasn't that long ago when only a few people had Twitter and FB accounts. IG even took a while to gain main stream traction.
icc97 9y ago
Plus unfortunately Musk is fairly well known for underpaying his staff. So you have to choose to take a paycut to switch from Google / Facebook. To be fair all of Apple/Amazon/Microsoft do at least sell actual products. Perhaps this is why Google / Facebook open source so much of what they do, so that talented engineers don't just have to say 'I get paid to make people click'.
- Denzel 9y ago
  Underpaying what baseline? A recently hired software engineer at Tesla, while not giving specific figures, said that the base comp was competitive and the options were $100k+ over the standard 4-year vesting schedule. I've heard similarly from a handful of others; I'd expect the comp to be inline at SpaceX. Not to mention the growth potential for your stock options between SpaceX and Tesla may be higher than comparable companies.
  - icc97 9y ago
    > Underpaying what baseline? Facebook / Google
    - qaq 9y ago
      well most companies "underpay" if baseline is FB and Google
  - arcticfox 9y ago
    This doesn't look good: https://www.glassdoor.com/Salary/Tesla-Software-Engineer-Salaries-E43129_D_KO6,23.htm https://www.glassdoor.com/Salary/Tesla-Software-Engineer-Sal...
fsloth 9y ago
"It's kinda sad that social media and advertising is the most lucrative businesses and so many bright minds work on that instead of for example ..." So, how would you employ the engineers instead? Industrial society is about producing garbage for the masses to consume. The huge churn of capital and labor creates as it's byproducts from time to time items of actual human value. But those things would be fragile and complicated without the industrial economy surrounding them. If we look at this stage in our species history from far away, currently the industrial economy is supposed to be predictable and mundane. So, "producing useless crap" is a required feature of our economy so it can occasionally produce science, art, medicine and the other things that actually improve us as a species. Now, consumer goods fall into two categories: physical and digital. Physical consumer society is turning our biosphere to shit. Digital commodities, on the other hand, are much more lenient on the environment. So, if we look at it this way, and presume that producing consumer crap is necessary for economic growth and stability, it's much better to work in producing digital goods and services rather than physical ones. Within this framework, the actual question is not why do the brightest minds work at facebooks, but, will our economy ever develop beyond the point where producing useless crap is not so much a necessity for systemic stability rather than an occasional indulgence.
- enraged_camel 9y ago
  >>Industrial society is about producing garbage for the masses to consume. As the saying goes, one man’s garbage is another man’s treasure. So don’t be so judgmental. :)
  - fsloth 9y ago
    No, it's garbage. Individuals living in industrial societies are consuming way more than the ecosystem can support. So, either we need to get rid of people or they need to consume less. I prefer the option where they consume less. If it's not needed for a wholesome life it's "crap". I consume as much as I can but only because the society lets me, and I'm too burdened at the moment to actively change my way of life.
    - 9y ago
dmihal 9y ago
That's because the only real monetization on the internet is advertising, and ecommerce (which relies heavily on advertising). Pretty much every consumer website on the internet deals with one of those areas. If it becomes easier to movie money on the internet, we might start seeing new dominating players other than Google (ads), Facebook (ads) and Amazon (ecommerce).
api 9y ago
A generation or two ago all the brightest minds in the world were working on ways to kill the most people as efficiently as possible. This is progress.
gimmeDatCheddar 9y ago
It's not actually sad. Social media and advertising involve incredibly complex and vast search spaces. The problem domains are massive and solving the issues in those fields, like scaling software and hardware, enables us to build tooling and infrastructure that every field can use. So those businesses are the bootstrapper for other businesses. Example: SpaceX wouldn't exist if Paypal didn't exist first.

le-mark 9y ago

Who thought the future would be giant chemical rockets (100x BFR?)thundering around the solar system? Transportation infrastructure for the solar system, Rail Road Tycoons of space. The potential is immense.

jerf 9y ago
"Who thought the future would be giant chemical rockets (100x BFR?)thundering around the solar system?" It's not. The math doesn't work, the rocket equation bites too hard. This is one of the reasons to be keeping an eye on the recent claims over the past few years that fusion reactors may be something that could be shrunk down to shipping container sizes in the relatively near future. Get a functioning fusion reactor into space and suddenly the solar system is, if not your backyard, something very reachable. But it's possible we won't see any practical way to lift off from Earth other than chemical rockets for a while.
- alex_stoddard 9y ago
  Does the rocket equation still bite to hard if fuel production is outside Earth's gravity well?
  - le-mark 9y ago
    That's why Musk had art of BFR sitting on a Jovian moon, for the same delta v to get into earth orbit, you can get anywhere else in the solar system, quick (relatively). Big rockets and large mass fractions enable all that, as my comment above indicates. Rocket equation is for real, but so are economies of scale.
  - jerf 9y ago
    There's some opinion there, but personally I would still say yes. There's a lot hiding in the "relatively" in le-mark's sibling comment. We really need to be able to get places in a couple of weeks, and chemical rocketry just gets absurd for that; even if you can do it, you've got to fling massive refueling stations around and such. A fusion-based system would have power density sufficient to not just fly to Mars in a reasonable period of time, but to fly back without having to be refueled, which means we can go places without first figuring out how to build a fairly expensive and massive infrastructure that allows us to get back.