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Wow. HN commenters really missed the point here. The point is that not that smart people who went into finance and law somehow fucked up. It may be a perfectly

Wow. HN commenters really missed the point here. The point is that not that smart people who went into finance and law somehow fucked up. It may be a perfectly rational and good choice for them. The point is that smart, hard-working people tend to get funneled into one of a handful of professions, and at this point, I would even include software in that handful. It would better if we had smart people also going into other, more underserved fields that are in dire need of innovation.

DevopsQuestions 6y ago
Can you list fields that you feel are in dire need of innovation? Genuinely curious.
- marviel 6y ago
  We could use a lot more high-quality therapists and teachers to reduce the effective price of mental health and a good education.
- bob33212 6y ago
  Construction, tunneling, automated manufacturing, vaccine creation
- jwr 6y ago
  Biotech! (witness the virus problem that we have known about for a while now, and did pretty much nothing about) Energy generation! Energy storage! Space exploration! New materials! I feel like so many fields have fallen behind, because of the way incentives are set up. It pays better to be a banker, or a lawyer, developing antibiotics isn't profitable enough, it pays better to work at a company that gathers data about people and pumps advertisements to them. It's rather sad, really.
- iancmceachern 6y ago
  Medical devices, medtech, etc.
- UnpossibleJim 6y ago
  I watched the "episode" and I believe he was calling for more of the these intelligent, driven young people to be incentivised to pursue careers in engineering, medical research and things that would build a better future for humanity going forward, in the long term. I may be wrong, I had it on as back ground noise while I was working.
- stcredzero 6y ago
  Teaching. In all the fields, both the popular and unpopular ones. Epidemiology and Public Health. The capability for disaster response hasn't increased with gains in technology. Clearly, the way technology has increased the dangers of contagious disease has far outstripped the technology driven capacity for containing outbreaks. Discourse and News Media. Right now, the incentives and technology align in such a way, that Social Media becomes an outrage spreading and viral amplification machine. (Obligatory link. It's practically my personal religion by now: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=rE3j_RHkqJc https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=rE3j_RHkqJc ) It turns out the Internet isn't for raising human discourse and encouraging brilliant thought. It's for preventing good thinking by fomenting interfering emotions and replacing actual thought with its doppelganger, ideology. And what's big tech's response to the above? Things which aren't technically censorship, but which insidiously have the same effect. Clearly, something is wrong with this picture.
  - deleted 6y ago
    [deleted]
  - cameronbrown 6y ago
    Until teaching salaries are as good as what you can get in law or software, it will not happen. Smart people require incentives unless they're dedicated to the cause (and those types are rare).
  - nsgi 6y ago
    There are already more people who want to be journalists than there is work. I imagine it's the same situation with funding for public health research. I'd imagine that's the main limiting factor.
    - stcredzero 6y ago
      There are already more people who want to be journalists than there is work. That is part of the problem. The tech giants created infrastructure that 1) has enabled a cottage industry of independent journalism and 2) has completely disrupted traditional news business models. Then, the same large companies proceed to ink sweetheart deals with the dying large media companies, while jerking around the small independent journalists. Just as in the music industry, the endless supply of new aspiring media stars, combined with their control of the technology and their lobbying for favorable laws, has gained them carte blanche to say, "my way, or the highway" to the emerging independents. All the above basically sets them up to control most all future societal discourse -- particularly by less than completely transparent means that strangely resemble censorship. The tech giants control the newest, best conduits for future information and media. Given what we've seen of their stewardship, citizens should indeed be concerned.
- not_a_moth 6y ago
  How about Silicon Valley related fields? Big tech companies have long claimed there are labor shortages and thus need to bring in overseas workers.
bob1029 6y ago
I would certainly include software in that same bucket. Not only would other fields be better served with more attention, but taking some of the noise out of these arguably over-crowded professions might allow for more innovation to take place within them. With software specifically, it feels very much like a case of too many chefs in the kitchen at this point. Just look at facebook trying to build one website with 10000 engineers. It's some of the most ridiculous bullshit and it's incredibly distracting even as an outside observer. There are clean and reusable patterns that solve problems for 99.9% of use cases, but most of the discussion and energy these days is spent rehashing the same boring front-end UI story over and over and over. Sure, I can ignore all the noise on HN, et. al. if I want to get work done, but then I risk missing out on the occasional insight that can potentially give me an integer factor increase in productivity or product quality. As it currently stands, I have to wade through a cesspool of the same boring amateur concepts on a daily basis in order to find the rare fundamental insights that meaningfully move the state of the art forward.
- Chyzwar 6y ago
  > With software specifically, it feels very much like a case of too many chefs in the kitchen at this point. Just look at facebook trying to build one website with 10000 engineers. It's some of the most ridiculous bullshit and it's incredibly distracting even as an outside observer. There are clean and reusable patterns that solve problems for 99.9% of use cases, but most of the discussion and energy these days is spent rehashing the same boring front-end UI story over and over and over. This single website is making billions of dollars in profits and used billions daily. It is good for us that Facebook have 10000 people working on this. Thanks to Facebook we have now flow, react, react-native, GraphQL, Redux, immutable.js, ReasonML, jest and create-react-app just to mention few things that were open sourced or worked by people hired by Facebook. No other company contributed as much to "boring front-end UI story"
  - tarsinge 6y ago
    > Thanks to Facebook we have now flow, react, react-native, GraphQL, Redux, immutable.js, ReasonML, jest and create-react-app The added value of all of that is dubious when you see the result from the creators themselves. The analogy "too many chefs in the kitchen" is pretty spot on. The front-end UI is not the back-end, it doesn't scale with the number of users, so when too many smart engineers work on it you see the result.
ironman1478 6y ago
I don't know if teaching needs 'innovation', but we need to incentivize people to go into teaching more, specifically by paying them a whole bunch of money and giving them a secure environment to teach in. I'd drop out of tech immediately if I knew I could have a good salary teaching in a public school.
- MiroF 6y ago
  We also need to start desegregating schools again.
yowlingcat 6y ago
I'd agree with you that HN commenters missed the point here, but maybe for different reasons. I don't agree that "it would be better if we had smart people also going into other, more underserved fields that are in dire need of innovation" -- better for whom according to who? Smart hard-working people don't get passively "funneled", they make their own choices, and they seek the same things most people seek -- comfort, material security, intellectual stimulation, and societal recognition. Now, this group also contains the more risk taking ones who want glory and outsized returns. These pioneers would go into other more underserved fields in dire need of innovation if they saw opportunity. If they don't see opportunity, there are likely structural factors in play that prohibit innovation. And these structural factors are necessarily difficult to change for any but the most already powerful subgroups of these pioneers -- any less powerful actors will be so easily dispatched by incumbents that they would be foolish to try. So they don't, because as previously established, we're talking about smart people here. I think your point would be served better by going into more detail about just which other underserved fields are the ones that are in dire need of innovation. My previous points notwithstanding, I do believe that there still exist a significant amount of underserved fields in dire need of innovation that are also completely tractable for the more pioneer oriented group of intelligent people without requiring billionaire level resources to solve. Messy, unsexy problems that customers would jump in line to pay for. But these problems tend to be require solutions by sharp pioneer generalists with a ton of intellectual horsepower _who_ are also capable recruiting and working well with industry insiders. Having worked at such a company before, I think it's the latter part that's rarer than the former. I can grab a bucket of sharp STEM grads from top 10 universities that could make progress on a lot of hard problems that I know folks would pay good money for, but will they have the humility, spongelike curiosity and flexibility to work well enough with top industry insiders to not just be able to keep up with them but add something unique that wouldn't be doable otherwise? That's the hard part, and I think those kinds of folks are hard to find and will always be hard to find, no matter what kind of society you have.
- naasking 6y ago
  > I don't agree that "it would be better if we had smart people also going into other, more underserved fields that are in dire need of innovation" -- better for whom according to who? Better for humanity as a whole. Do you seriously think that if money and status weren't factors, every one of the "smart people" that went into finance or law would have exactly the same choice? Of course not, and they would have excelled in another field with less competition and advanced our knowledge in that domain instead. Are money and status actually contributing to human progress? Barely, if at all. In some ways, it has even caused regress.
ghostwriter 6y ago
Innovation is not compatible with heavy regulations. The reason why so many people look towards Software is because the Internet and app stores of the world are relatively free to improvise and innovate at, compared to other industries such as Education or Healthcare or even Finance (FinTech is an island of relative freedom in the ocean of financial regulations). If you are given a choice to spend the most productive years of your life either in an industry where results of your work are most likely going to be banned by an unnamed bureaucrat, or in a software shop with a weekly public release process, the preference is obvious. Yes, the impact is smaller, yet it's out there and you know that you made it possible.
downerending 6y ago
I've spent a lot of my career thinking about this and bouncing between low-paying and high-paying jobs. In the end, it's hard to ignore the fact that society as a whole is "commanding" us to work at the highest-paying jobs available to us (keeping in mind that some remuneration is non-monetary). I respect people who take low-paying jobs when they don't have to. In many ways, they're donating money to society, and that's pretty damn cool of them to be doing it.
- ntsplnkv2 6y ago
  Went to school for mechanical engineering. First job out of school - low pay, worked in a crappy cube farm in an old building outside of a city center at an industrial park. Had to be there at 8 and stay til 5 no matter what. Middle management sucked. Pay raises were low. Health benefits were horrible. No vacation for a full year (yea I could've negotiated that, but why should that even be negotiable? absurd.) Switched into software and never looked back. Better hours, better pay, better benefits. More respect for work life balance. Better office locations. Younger colleagues. It's easy to see why people don't go into the sciences. The sciences are attacked on a daily basis in this country. From vaccines to global warming to covid19. The pay is low. Outside of engineering, the jobs suck, and you almost certainly need at least a masters. Academia is filled with tenured has-beens who exert undue influence over everyone. The richest engineers I known became sales engineers. The ones who worked on problems were never rewarded for the problems they worked on - thus they instead went to selling and made boat loads instead. Who can blame them?
  - jimmydddd 6y ago
    Couldn't agree more. Worked at a traditional eletrical engineering job for 9 years. Went to law school at night and came out (with zero law job experience) making twice what I was making in my engineering job. (Caveat -- EE degree was pre-FAANG).
  - rorykoehler 6y ago
    Good example of a perverse incentive that is built into capitalism. How can we as a society reverse this without resorting to nanny state behaviour?
krtong 6y ago
If there isnt a name for this there needs to be, somehow being a 'tragedy of commons', while being 'economy of scale' at the same time. The more smart people go into finance, the bigger finance gets, the more jobs in finance there are, the more job security and competition in finance, the fewer opportunities outside of finance, the economy becomes woefully lopsided and crucial industries like domestic manufacturing are crushed. Maybe it's just called 'late stage capitalism.'
nine_k 6y ago
If too many smart people went to software engineering, there wouldd be a glut of them, and wages would be depressed. The opposite is observed. Reasonably good engineers are in short supply and can choose which company to join. Maybe the only area where the (inexperienced and thus enthusiastic) supply exceeds demand is game development.
mam2 6y ago
Its also true for "boring" médical imaging girls versus the "sexy" vidéo games industry

DevopsQuestions 6y ago

Can you list fields that you feel are in dire need of innovation? Genuinely curious.

marviel 6y ago
We could use a lot more high-quality therapists and teachers to reduce the effective price of mental health and a good education.
bob33212 6y ago
Construction, tunneling, automated manufacturing, vaccine creation
jwr 6y ago
Biotech! (witness the virus problem that we have known about for a while now, and did pretty much nothing about) Energy generation! Energy storage! Space exploration! New materials! I feel like so many fields have fallen behind, because of the way incentives are set up. It pays better to be a banker, or a lawyer, developing antibiotics isn't profitable enough, it pays better to work at a company that gathers data about people and pumps advertisements to them. It's rather sad, really.
iancmceachern 6y ago
Medical devices, medtech, etc.
UnpossibleJim 6y ago
I watched the "episode" and I believe he was calling for more of the these intelligent, driven young people to be incentivised to pursue careers in engineering, medical research and things that would build a better future for humanity going forward, in the long term. I may be wrong, I had it on as back ground noise while I was working.
stcredzero 6y ago
Teaching. In all the fields, both the popular and unpopular ones. Epidemiology and Public Health. The capability for disaster response hasn't increased with gains in technology. Clearly, the way technology has increased the dangers of contagious disease has far outstripped the technology driven capacity for containing outbreaks. Discourse and News Media. Right now, the incentives and technology align in such a way, that Social Media becomes an outrage spreading and viral amplification machine. (Obligatory link. It's practically my personal religion by now: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=rE3j_RHkqJc https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=rE3j_RHkqJc ) It turns out the Internet isn't for raising human discourse and encouraging brilliant thought. It's for preventing good thinking by fomenting interfering emotions and replacing actual thought with its doppelganger, ideology. And what's big tech's response to the above? Things which aren't technically censorship, but which insidiously have the same effect. Clearly, something is wrong with this picture.
- deleted 6y ago
  [deleted]
- cameronbrown 6y ago
  Until teaching salaries are as good as what you can get in law or software, it will not happen. Smart people require incentives unless they're dedicated to the cause (and those types are rare).
- nsgi 6y ago
  There are already more people who want to be journalists than there is work. I imagine it's the same situation with funding for public health research. I'd imagine that's the main limiting factor.
  - stcredzero 6y ago
    There are already more people who want to be journalists than there is work. That is part of the problem. The tech giants created infrastructure that 1) has enabled a cottage industry of independent journalism and 2) has completely disrupted traditional news business models. Then, the same large companies proceed to ink sweetheart deals with the dying large media companies, while jerking around the small independent journalists. Just as in the music industry, the endless supply of new aspiring media stars, combined with their control of the technology and their lobbying for favorable laws, has gained them carte blanche to say, "my way, or the highway" to the emerging independents. All the above basically sets them up to control most all future societal discourse -- particularly by less than completely transparent means that strangely resemble censorship. The tech giants control the newest, best conduits for future information and media. Given what we've seen of their stewardship, citizens should indeed be concerned.
not_a_moth 6y ago
How about Silicon Valley related fields? Big tech companies have long claimed there are labor shortages and thus need to bring in overseas workers.

bob1029 6y ago

I would certainly include software in that same bucket. Not only would other fields be better served with more attention, but taking some of the noise out of these arguably over-crowded professions might allow for more innovation to take place within them. With software specifically, it feels very much like a case of too many chefs in the kitchen at this point. Just look at facebook trying to build one website with 10000 engineers. It's some of the most ridiculous bullshit and it's incredibly distracting even as an outside observer. There are clean and reusable patterns that solve problems for 99.9% of use cases, but most of the discussion and energy these days is spent rehashing the same boring front-end UI story over and over and over. Sure, I can ignore all the noise on HN, et. al. if I want to get work done, but then I risk missing out on the occasional insight that can potentially give me an integer factor increase in productivity or product quality. As it currently stands, I have to wade through a cesspool of the same boring amateur concepts on a daily basis in order to find the rare fundamental insights that meaningfully move the state of the art forward.

Chyzwar 6y ago
> With software specifically, it feels very much like a case of too many chefs in the kitchen at this point. Just look at facebook trying to build one website with 10000 engineers. It's some of the most ridiculous bullshit and it's incredibly distracting even as an outside observer. There are clean and reusable patterns that solve problems for 99.9% of use cases, but most of the discussion and energy these days is spent rehashing the same boring front-end UI story over and over and over. This single website is making billions of dollars in profits and used billions daily. It is good for us that Facebook have 10000 people working on this. Thanks to Facebook we have now flow, react, react-native, GraphQL, Redux, immutable.js, ReasonML, jest and create-react-app just to mention few things that were open sourced or worked by people hired by Facebook. No other company contributed as much to "boring front-end UI story"
- tarsinge 6y ago
  > Thanks to Facebook we have now flow, react, react-native, GraphQL, Redux, immutable.js, ReasonML, jest and create-react-app The added value of all of that is dubious when you see the result from the creators themselves. The analogy "too many chefs in the kitchen" is pretty spot on. The front-end UI is not the back-end, it doesn't scale with the number of users, so when too many smart engineers work on it you see the result.

ironman1478 6y ago

I don't know if teaching needs 'innovation', but we need to incentivize people to go into teaching more, specifically by paying them a whole bunch of money and giving them a secure environment to teach in. I'd drop out of tech immediately if I knew I could have a good salary teaching in a public school.

MiroF 6y ago
We also need to start desegregating schools again.

yowlingcat 6y ago

I'd agree with you that HN commenters missed the point here, but maybe for different reasons. I don't agree that "it would be better if we had smart people also going into other, more underserved fields that are in dire need of innovation" -- better for whom according to who? Smart hard-working people don't get passively "funneled", they make their own choices, and they seek the same things most people seek -- comfort, material security, intellectual stimulation, and societal recognition. Now, this group also contains the more risk taking ones who want glory and outsized returns. These pioneers would go into other more underserved fields in dire need of innovation if they saw opportunity. If they don't see opportunity, there are likely structural factors in play that prohibit innovation. And these structural factors are necessarily difficult to change for any but the most already powerful subgroups of these pioneers -- any less powerful actors will be so easily dispatched by incumbents that they would be foolish to try. So they don't, because as previously established, we're talking about smart people here. I think your point would be served better by going into more detail about just which other underserved fields are the ones that are in dire need of innovation. My previous points notwithstanding, I do believe that there still exist a significant amount of underserved fields in dire need of innovation that are also completely tractable for the more pioneer oriented group of intelligent people without requiring billionaire level resources to solve. Messy, unsexy problems that customers would jump in line to pay for. But these problems tend to be require solutions by sharp pioneer generalists with a ton of intellectual horsepower _who_ are also capable recruiting and working well with industry insiders. Having worked at such a company before, I think it's the latter part that's rarer than the former. I can grab a bucket of sharp STEM grads from top 10 universities that could make progress on a lot of hard problems that I know folks would pay good money for, but will they have the humility, spongelike curiosity and flexibility to work well enough with top industry insiders to not just be able to keep up with them but add something unique that wouldn't be doable otherwise? That's the hard part, and I think those kinds of folks are hard to find and will always be hard to find, no matter what kind of society you have.

naasking 6y ago
> I don't agree that "it would be better if we had smart people also going into other, more underserved fields that are in dire need of innovation" -- better for whom according to who? Better for humanity as a whole. Do you seriously think that if money and status weren't factors, every one of the "smart people" that went into finance or law would have exactly the same choice? Of course not, and they would have excelled in another field with less competition and advanced our knowledge in that domain instead. Are money and status actually contributing to human progress? Barely, if at all. In some ways, it has even caused regress.

ghostwriter 6y ago

Innovation is not compatible with heavy regulations. The reason why so many people look towards Software is because the Internet and app stores of the world are relatively free to improvise and innovate at, compared to other industries such as Education or Healthcare or even Finance (FinTech is an island of relative freedom in the ocean of financial regulations). If you are given a choice to spend the most productive years of your life either in an industry where results of your work are most likely going to be banned by an unnamed bureaucrat, or in a software shop with a weekly public release process, the preference is obvious. Yes, the impact is smaller, yet it's out there and you know that you made it possible.

downerending 6y ago

I've spent a lot of my career thinking about this and bouncing between low-paying and high-paying jobs. In the end, it's hard to ignore the fact that society as a whole is "commanding" us to work at the highest-paying jobs available to us (keeping in mind that some remuneration is non-monetary). I respect people who take low-paying jobs when they don't have to. In many ways, they're donating money to society, and that's pretty damn cool of them to be doing it.

ntsplnkv2 6y ago
Went to school for mechanical engineering. First job out of school - low pay, worked in a crappy cube farm in an old building outside of a city center at an industrial park. Had to be there at 8 and stay til 5 no matter what. Middle management sucked. Pay raises were low. Health benefits were horrible. No vacation for a full year (yea I could've negotiated that, but why should that even be negotiable? absurd.) Switched into software and never looked back. Better hours, better pay, better benefits. More respect for work life balance. Better office locations. Younger colleagues. It's easy to see why people don't go into the sciences. The sciences are attacked on a daily basis in this country. From vaccines to global warming to covid19. The pay is low. Outside of engineering, the jobs suck, and you almost certainly need at least a masters. Academia is filled with tenured has-beens who exert undue influence over everyone. The richest engineers I known became sales engineers. The ones who worked on problems were never rewarded for the problems they worked on - thus they instead went to selling and made boat loads instead. Who can blame them?
- jimmydddd 6y ago
  Couldn't agree more. Worked at a traditional eletrical engineering job for 9 years. Went to law school at night and came out (with zero law job experience) making twice what I was making in my engineering job. (Caveat -- EE degree was pre-FAANG).
- rorykoehler 6y ago
  Good example of a perverse incentive that is built into capitalism. How can we as a society reverse this without resorting to nanny state behaviour?

krtong 6y ago

If there isnt a name for this there needs to be, somehow being a 'tragedy of commons', while being 'economy of scale' at the same time. The more smart people go into finance, the bigger finance gets, the more jobs in finance there are, the more job security and competition in finance, the fewer opportunities outside of finance, the economy becomes woefully lopsided and crucial industries like domestic manufacturing are crushed. Maybe it's just called 'late stage capitalism.'

nine_k 6y ago

If too many smart people went to software engineering, there wouldd be a glut of them, and wages would be depressed. The opposite is observed. Reasonably good engineers are in short supply and can choose which company to join. Maybe the only area where the (inexperienced and thus enthusiastic) supply exceeds demand is game development.

mam2 6y ago

Its also true for "boring" médical imaging girls versus the "sexy" vidéo games industry