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You're comparing apples and oranges. Cancer research is a gamble: You spend years of your life pipetting liquids in the hope that you'll discover something new

You're comparing apples and oranges. Cancer research is a gamble: You spend years of your life pipetting liquids in the hope that you'll discover something new that improves upon the current standard methods of treating cancer. The equivalent in CS is, well, CS research: You spend years of your life poring over journals in the hope that you'll discover something that dramatically improves the standards of computing. Like a lot of research, these are highly worthwhile activities but they aren't big business. That's why, if you want to see more of them, the bottleneck isn't finding the talent: It's the funding, which generally comes from taxpayers. (I assure you from very personal experience that there is a large and consistent oversupply of people who would be willing to conduct cancer research, or any other kind of research, so long as the funding is there.) Whereas sending cat pictures is not a gamble. It is an established business. It reliably, demonstrably, and very inexpensively improves the lives of tens of millions of average people, to the extent that it and similar businesses are consistently profitable ($355 million earned at Facebook on revenues of $1.2 billion, for example). And cancer treatment - doing more of what we already know how to do to treat cancer - is likewise not a gamble but a business, which is presumably why it's a huge and growing sector of the economy that dwarfs Facebook and everything else that's fun – $128 billion per year in the USA alone: http://www.cancer.gov/aboutnci/servingpeople/cancer-statistics/costofcancer http://www.cancer.gov/aboutnci/servingpeople/cancer-statisti... For comparison: Global advertising revenue is estimated at around $420 billion per year: http://www.reuters.com/article/2010/12/05/magnaglobal-idUSN0513556820101205 http://www.reuters.com/article/2010/12/05/magnaglobal-idUSN0... So given that the USA is only 309 million people out of seven billion, we can guess with some confidence that the world spends more on cancer treatment than on advertising of any sort, let alone on the tiny percentage of ads that suffice to pay for all the cat pictures that any cat lover could want.

xaa 15y ago
They are comparable in the sense that a new Stanford CS grad might conceivably be deciding between working in cancer research or cat picture startups. Your overall point about funding is correct, but typically the very best students and researchers don't have trouble finding funding. Thus the problem is how to attract the very best students away from Wall Street and cat picture startups, and stories like Instagram don't help with that.
- Retric 15y ago
  Your assuming everyone is equally good at building cat picture start-ups and doing Cancer research which I don't think is particularly accurate. Also, I suspect Cancer is over funded and we would be much better off diverting 1/10th of that talent and resources to building cheap self driving cars.
  - SimHacker 15y ago
    I read that as "cheap self driving cats."
- mechanical_fish 15y ago
  I don't really feel that the sight of one company in fifty thousand cashing out for one billion dollars has a profound influence on the career decisions of a cancer researcher. One thing that even beginners in that field understand is elementary statistics. The simpler explanation is that any programmer -- COBOL for bankers, CRUD apps, even "maintainer of Office installations for the IT department" -- commands a salary larger than that of a decently-paid Ivy League postdoctoral researcher. With minimal effort at steering one's career, the multiplier is two; according to rumors coming from the general direction of (e.g.) Google, if you've got talent and experience the number is a multiple of three. You don't have to win the lottery. You start winning on the day of your first paycheck and you never lose, relative to research, because programming is a safer career than research. Be careful about cherry-picking Wall Street and Instagram when choosing examples: Those are just the sensational ones. If Wall Street disappeared tomorrow, and venture funding with it, plumbers would still make more money than the average researcher. (Remember: A lot of research work is done by grad students, whose salaries make postdocs look pampered.) "The very best students and researchers don't have trouble finding funding" - this is like saying "talented farmers have no trouble growing food". First, you're selecting a group of winners and then looking for evidence of winning. Lo, you found some! The second problem is that this statement doesn't account for effort: Farmers work hard and take risks for the money, and researchers do as well. As a researcher who wants to succeed you must have grants in the front of your mind one third of the time, and in the back your your mind most of the rest of the time, because success is measured in grants: Your pay, promotion, rate of progress, and reputation are directly contingent on the amount of grant money you can raise. Unless you're Einstein, maybe, but see above under "winning the lottery". Face it, society doesn't value research as highly as going concerns. When you think about it, why should that surprise anyone? Businesses are a sure thing by comparison. You turn the crank, profits fall out. Often, happiness and human health fall out, too. Nursing, for example, saves lives. It saves them one at a time, but they get saved, and it's a sure thing: You don't need to make a bet against long odds. Change a bedpan, make someone considerably happier; notice that the patient has stopped breathing, save a life. Turn the crank. Turn the wheel the world has given you.

xaa 15y ago

They are comparable in the sense that a new Stanford CS grad might conceivably be deciding between working in cancer research or cat picture startups. Your overall point about funding is correct, but typically the very best students and researchers don't have trouble finding funding. Thus the problem is how to attract the very best students away from Wall Street and cat picture startups, and stories like Instagram don't help with that.

Retric 15y ago
Your assuming everyone is equally good at building cat picture start-ups and doing Cancer research which I don't think is particularly accurate. Also, I suspect Cancer is over funded and we would be much better off diverting 1/10th of that talent and resources to building cheap self driving cars.
- SimHacker 15y ago
  I read that as "cheap self driving cats."
mechanical_fish 15y ago
I don't really feel that the sight of one company in fifty thousand cashing out for one billion dollars has a profound influence on the career decisions of a cancer researcher. One thing that even beginners in that field understand is elementary statistics. The simpler explanation is that any programmer -- COBOL for bankers, CRUD apps, even "maintainer of Office installations for the IT department" -- commands a salary larger than that of a decently-paid Ivy League postdoctoral researcher. With minimal effort at steering one's career, the multiplier is two; according to rumors coming from the general direction of (e.g.) Google, if you've got talent and experience the number is a multiple of three. You don't have to win the lottery. You start winning on the day of your first paycheck and you never lose, relative to research, because programming is a safer career than research. Be careful about cherry-picking Wall Street and Instagram when choosing examples: Those are just the sensational ones. If Wall Street disappeared tomorrow, and venture funding with it, plumbers would still make more money than the average researcher. (Remember: A lot of research work is done by grad students, whose salaries make postdocs look pampered.) "The very best students and researchers don't have trouble finding funding" - this is like saying "talented farmers have no trouble growing food". First, you're selecting a group of winners and then looking for evidence of winning. Lo, you found some! The second problem is that this statement doesn't account for effort: Farmers work hard and take risks for the money, and researchers do as well. As a researcher who wants to succeed you must have grants in the front of your mind one third of the time, and in the back your your mind most of the rest of the time, because success is measured in grants: Your pay, promotion, rate of progress, and reputation are directly contingent on the amount of grant money you can raise. Unless you're Einstein, maybe, but see above under "winning the lottery". Face it, society doesn't value research as highly as going concerns. When you think about it, why should that surprise anyone? Businesses are a sure thing by comparison. You turn the crank, profits fall out. Often, happiness and human health fall out, too. Nursing, for example, saves lives. It saves them one at a time, but they get saved, and it's a sure thing: You don't need to make a bet against long odds. Change a bedpan, make someone considerably happier; notice that the patient has stopped breathing, save a life. Turn the crank. Turn the wheel the world has given you.