13 ms·
Tech backlash has come to Stanford
- taurath 7y agoI don't suppose this is really news, given that Facebook and Google are the Big Incumbents now. For many this is a Moral choice, and whether what you're doing is really helping out the world. I'd say also, I currently perceive Google/Facebook as a place to "slow down". They're big enough and have enough resources to do anything they want, so it seems like there's gonna be a lot of people just hanging out and going the slow route.
- choppaface 7y agoIt’s news when hiring stats come out, e.g. Stanford students are no longer accepting Palantir. For example, one report found that Facebook’s new grad acceptance rate has fallen below 50% this year: https://www.google.com/amp/s/www.bizjournals.com/sanjose/news/2019/05/17/facebook-hiring-recruiting-challenges-reputation.amp.html https://www.google.com/amp/s/www.bizjournals.com/sanjose/new... These stats are important for disseminating competitive information about the job market to job seekers and small companies. If Google et al own all the salary and resume data, then they have an unfairly outsized effect on the market.
- username90 7y agoWhy did you link an amp page?
- UncleMeat 7y agoIt loads faster on mobile.
- kahnjw 7y ago>I'd say also, I currently perceive Google/Facebook as a place to "slow down". They're big enough and have enough resources to do anything they want, so it seems like there's gonna be a lot of people just hanging out and going the slow route. Having worked in a startup and midsize environment and now at Google my experience has been the opposite. Getting to focus intensely on one or two projects at a time allowed me to push the needle on velocity. I don't push as many LOC, sure, but that isn't how I measure impact or progress. At Google I can make measurable, verifiable impact using a development cycle the loops over a few days. It's very hard to do that even at midsize companies.
- taurath 7y agoThanks for sharing, that is reassuring. Do you think the focus is more of a specialization thing and having all the people around to deal with other specializations (IE, clear lines)?
- kahnjw 7y agoOf course. I didn't start out my career thinking I'd solve all the problems a given company has. I think that hero mentality is the reason a lot of startups fail, at least in a technical sense. I always viewed engineering in general as a process of abstracting complexity into easily understood components. Why do the hard work of making good abstractions if you don't put them to use by specializing your employees?
- crazygringo 7y ago> Google/Facebook as a place to "slow down" I don't know where you've gotten that impression. Neither of those two companies got to where they are by having a culture of slowness. Any team you're on doesn't have all of the company's financial resources at its whim -- rather the team has a set budget and quarterly objectives and everyone's breaking their back to meet them like in any other company. And if your team doesn't deliver, then your promotion won't happen... and most people are working towards that promotion. There is absolutely nothing slow about it.
- sp527 7y agoLethargy isn't the issue. It's the growth plateau (after ~ year one) and stifled upward mobility that are the real dealbreakers, for some. The phrase "slow down" is imo accurate insofar as a fairly middling effort exerted by any sufficiently smart person will ensure continuity of employment at GooFace.
- whatever_dude 7y ago> I don't know where you've gotten that impression. Neither of those two companies got to where they are by having a culture of slowness. My visibility is limited (don't work at FB/Google), but I have several friends and ex-colleagues who do and I have to say, I have the same impression that it's a company for people to slow down. They're already at the top of their game and I think assuming everybody there is an A-player is misguided. It's more likely you become another cog in a giant machine with limited reach for better or worse. There's a lot of politics and while it's true everybody wants a promotion, it's clear to me (at least from my sources) that promotions are more about learning to play a game according to their rules rather than being a fast, high-achiever. Not everybody wants to have financial resources at their whim. But some people are happy getting to the office 11am, moving a button 1px to the right then 1px to the left once in a while, and then leaving at 4pom. From what I heard, if you're ok with that, a place like Facebook or Google is great. Again, I don't assume it's the norm, but I heard enough to make me think "slowing down" is very doable.
- skybrian 7y agoEx-Googler here. I found working at Google to be slower pace than the previous startups I worked at due to the code review process (reviewers sometimes being in different time zones or just being slow for whatever reason) and the time to takes for tests to run. (Global presubmits often had to run overnight for example.) You can get around it by having multiple changes going in parallel, but it's still a lot of overhead. I don't think it was just me either. This seemed to be a common complaint. Maybe it's fixed by now? This is going to vary a lot depending on the team and where you are working in the stack. Lumping Google and Facebook together and saying "there is absolutely nothing slow about it" seems too strong, though.
- tehlike 7y ago7 years ago, i worked with a really smart undergrad. I asked him if he would come to google, he said google is not cool. Went to spacex.
- ummonk 7y agoSpaceX is notorious for chewing up starry-eyed new grads and spitting them out after they burn out from the lack of work life balance.
- tehlike 7y agoMaybe, then maybe not. I had no wlb for quite a while after school, by choice. Some people just like to do what they do.
- skgoa 7y agoSo he wasn't that smart after all.
- tehlike 7y agoHe was, he is
- forgotmylogin2 7y agoYou're not going to convince anybody of that if the only thing we know about him is that he turned down Google for SpaceX.
- C1sc0cat 7y agoI doubt that google is hiring many mech engineers or those targeting space/aerospace.
- tehlike 7y agoThis guy was a CS.
- deleted 7y ago[deleted]
- compiler-guy 7y agoI did the Stanford thing a long time ago, but there were tech objectors even then. A comparatively small number of activists protesting this or that, “Do you really want to work for Microsoft/IBM/Oracle?” with most engineers just keeping their head down and studying. This is nothing new.
- zamfi 7y agoI think what’s new is the rapid fall in the number of CS grads from Stanford (and other top schools) accepting offers from Facebook. But I doubt it’s just about ethics. I remember when Facebook dethroned Google too.
- nothal 7y agoThe cynic in me thinks this is purely a factor of smart kids in tech realizing Facebook is old news and provides little path for differentiation (or rapid promotion). They better than anyone know the exciting startups their friends and friends of friends are starting especially compared to the tedium of a (cushy but) relatively non-challenging job at Facebook, Google, MS, etc. Plus, there's more chance for a moonshot 10/100/1000x at a company that's not already a behemoth. The smartest people I know are itching to work at startups. They could care less about FAANG.
- freyr 7y ago> The smartest people I know are itching to work at startups. What's stopping them? In my experience, the people who actually want to work at startups tend to be either (a) very young engineers, who have more risk tolerance and perhaps more naiveté, or (b) people who worked at a successful company (e.g., FANG) and set aside a comfortable nest egg, and therefore also have high risk tolerance.
- magashna 7y agoYou wouldn't go to any startup, you'd pick the most promising one.
- ng12 7y agoFor every politically woke CS student there are two dozen completely apolitical ones (and a sprinkling of wrongthinkers). I don't think Palantir is really desperate for applicants.
- aliston 7y agoStanford has also dumbed down its undergrad CS major, removing all of the old engineering requirements that tended to filter out the SJW types. Edit: seems the downvoters don’t like what I have to say, but that doesn’t make it less true. Compare the graduation requirements for CS at Stanford from a few years ago to now - no compilers or os, no multivariable calculus, no pointers. They literally eliminated all the hard classes. As a result, the degree has become more liberal arts focused and the makeup of the class has changed in sync. I’d guess more than 50% of cs majors at Stanford we’re asian and foreign born just a few years ago - folks who you generally don’t see leading direct action protests.
- likhuva 7y ago>> seems the downvoters don’t like what I have to say, but that doesn’t make it less true. Except that it isn't true. A quick look at https://cs.stanford.edu/degrees/ug/Requirements.shtml https://cs.stanford.edu/degrees/ug/Requirements.shtml paints a completely diffrent picture.
- Clubber 7y agoI lost my tech altruism after the Snowden revelations. I'd been in the business professionally since the mid 90s and as a hobbyist since the mid 80s. I still do it for a living because I gotta pay bills, but SV doesn't impress me as world changing, for the better anyway.
- sp527 7y agoI had a similar epiphany, though I'm also a generally cynical person. It was always easier for me to believe that human nature would see us ultimately misuse technology for dystopian purposes. I also believe what's happened thus far is just the tip of the iceberg.
- wideasleep1 7y agoReminds me of a SFGate story a few years back, tech whiz 'retires' to scrubbing barnacles off boat bottoms, and finds it more gratifying.
- segmondy 7y agoMeh, do your part and fix it. We can fight tech with tech, case in point, cryptography, PGP, Signal, OpenBSD. Adblockers, the battle of privacy will be fought, won or lost with tech. Pick your side, but apathy doesn't help.
- Clubber 7y agoI appreciate your enthusiasm, but none of what you listed fixes anything, it just allows us to hide better, for now. We're against the terminator and all we can do is hope it doesn't find us. The only solution is through legislation, but both political parties seem content with their side of the spying relationship.
- draw_down 7y agoIt’s common for college students to have more idealistic political notions than the overall population.
- kjgkjhfkjf 7y agoIdealism will lose some of its luster when the time comes for them to pay off their enormous student loans.
- jasonhansel 7y agoI honestly think that there should be some sort of ethics course required of CS students (like how MBA students are often required to take a class in business ethics, and doctors are required to learn medical ethics). Engineers who behave unethically without asking questions aren't good engineers--at least, they're not the sort of engineers we want to be creating.
- ganduG 7y agoMost CS programs in the US have a mandatory ethics class.
- clintonb 7y agoDo you have data to support that claim? I did not have an explicit ethics subject at MIT. The closest we got was discussing Therac in 6.033.
- kjeetgill 7y agoData point of one (school) but I did at University of California, Davis.
- jayd16 7y agoSame here...but also UCD.
- JimiofEden 7y agoData point 2, Drexel University requires it
- manfredo 7y agoStanford had a specific mandatory CS ethics requirement when I attended.
- weber111 7y agoNice idea in theory; in practice, it might be tricky to have the organizational incentives aligned to make sure such a course is rigorous enough to be useful, rather than yet another worthless and trivial humanities requirement (at my large public research university with a strong CS program, faculty essentially compete for students based on how little work their gen ed courses are---no joke---and our required CS ethics class was similarly light).
- killjoywashere 7y agoI can say, as someone currently hiring, that more than one applicant(1) has cited our focus on cancer, and not killer robots, as a compelling factor in applying. People in the killer robot jobs are actively looking for ways out. As an aside, the killer robot jobs tend to pay about 10-15% under market, at least according to Glassdoor. What makes the comparison somewhat interesting, I think, is that we are still a military group, in military installations. We just happen to be hunting cancer because people in the military also get cancer. (1) We're mainly talking STEM BS to PhD, mostly under 40.
- MarkMarine 7y agoPretty sure you’re not supposed to discriminate by age when hiring
- nothal 7y agoHe was describing the candidates he sees this behavior from. I don't think it's discrimination to observe obvious information.
- killjoywashere 7y agoIndeed, a classic example of bias is to refuse to discuss race information explicitly in selection deliberations. If you see people refusing to consider information given to them, it's a signal, and it's implications may be less altruistic than they want you to believe. Perhaps more than they want to believe themselves. One of the most compelling examples of this I've seen was in a selection board procedure where there were simply no black applicants (from a field of potential applicants roughly 5-7% black). This was at a service academy, the board was selecting for student leadership positions. The board members were senior officers of the military (hate the military all you like, but considered opinions have generally held the military up as a model of integrative practices done right). After selections were made, the demographics of the selectees and the pool were compared. The glaring absence of blacks was deemed a problem by everyone on the board. In prior boards, the white people on the board would have immediately moved to revote with the explicit intent of elevating more blacks into leadership positions. This was simply not possible, there were no black applicants. A black woman who happened to be on the board (who was highly accomplished) was deeply concerned and moved to reconvene after she could review the entire field of potential black applicants. A week later the board reconvened and she said she simply could not find a black student she would recommend. The anguish in her face stays with me 15 years later. She felt that the black students who might qualify on other grounds were on shaky academic ground and she felt it was her duty to make sure they had the best possible chance of graduating. To some extent it is surely a tale of small numbers (higher variance in smaller populations leads to sad stories like this) but if there is a person capable of understanding the problem, I would think a black female computer scientist with a lifetime in government would understand. And she was clearly troubled. You can easily imagine the other version of this story, where one or a few black students had applied and not been selected. The white majority would have quickly added one or more of them to the student leadership coalition, and the black woman's minority opinion would have been drowned out in a simple majority vote. What I see now, I think, some years removed, is the routine, callous use of blacks by whites to avoid confronting their racist tendencies in the usual board setting. Indeed, out of the many boards I participated it, it was this one instance where the absence of black students forced everyone to acknowledge the black leader's opinion carried weight.
- a_imho 7y agoBlocked for the GDPR conscious.
- jmngomes 7y agohttps://outline.com/tWekNd https://outline.com/tWekNd
- yoyo4658sld 7y agoI was the first full-time engineer at the previous company that I worked for. We were acquired by one of the companies mentioned in this article. During the acquisition, employees were given the choice to simply not join the acquiring company. I pondered on it a lot given my ideological beliefs and stances. For practical reasons, I decided to join while a close colleague opted out…looking back, for a number of reasons (first-hand knowledge/exposure/experiences that I prefer to not dive into), I wish I had done the same. This was a bit of time ago and I am no longer employed by said company. I applaud these students for standing up for what they believe in.
- ravenstine 7y agoWhile there's definitely backlash happening against companies like Google and Facebook, I have another theory. New graduates are less interested in these companies because they don't represent their generation. When I was a kid, the idea of working for these companies was cool not only because they had cool products but because they were relatively new and were something relevant to be a part of. Today, these companies aren't so cool to graduates because they're old school in tech years. Facebook and Google are massive companies where your impact will probably be a drop in the ocean. In a lot of ways, they're the IBM and Xerox of today; why would a kid in the 70s or the 80s want to work for those stuffy and slow-moving corporations when they could work for Apple or Microsoft? Maybe millennial still view these companies the way they did in their youth, but I doubt that Gen Z see them as the exciting new thing. Young people naturally want to do something new and don't want to exist merely to be the Atlas of the same world their elders built.
- zzzcpan 7y agoProbably. Also in the early days Google was publishing things that were at the forefront of tech, which was interesting to everyone in tech. But over the years they got bigger, started to lag behind, putting out boring crap for strategic reasons. Big companies just cannot advance tech and be seen as exciting, as they are the ones trying to hold it back to keep getting those massive profits.
- segmondy 7y agoThe founders were also young! Today to the 18 or 22yrs old, Google founders are old men!