7 ms·

Where are the builders?

turtleyacht 2y ago
After setting up static IP between two computers, (1) it was not so bad, and (2) I estimate I am two decades behind. The only way to catch up is to foster an environment where one must create the things one wants to do. Make a game to play one. Write the screenplay instead of watching the movie. Make paper models, sketch wireframes, and read books. All I can do is block, block, block. Be bored or burning calories. Be the only one--for a while, maybe--who can quit vi or compile a program. Fundamentally, mechanics, math, and programming. Write adventures, design levels, and port Photoshop tutorials to Gimp. Foster a network, but (locally) not many may subscribe to this quirky constellation.
kazinator 2y ago
One reason someone might build a virtual video card instead of a real one at Nvidia is that they don't have the EE and computer engineering skills to build video cards. The two are not comparable.
- fragmede 2y ago
  In order to build a virtual video card, you have to understand the EE and CE and CS stuff to the point where you're able to do that. That's the point of the article, is that there are ways in which they are comparable. In one you're using minecraft as the UI to implement things. At Nvidia you'd use Cadence as the UI instead.
  - deleted 2y ago
    [deleted]
  - 1234554321a 2y ago
    This is not even comparable. Yes you can implement a simple graphics card or a RISC CPU in a video game. But that doesn’t mean you have the skill to build any practical modern graphics card or design a modern CISC CPU. You can learn about the basics of these things during a single semester at university and that’s likely what these “video gamers” did. It’s nothing impressive to recreate a RISC-V CPU in some game, only people who have no knowledge in this subject are somehow “impressed” by such things every time it’s brought up.
    - immibis 2y ago
      Building a slow CPU means you're much closer to being able to build a fast CPU than people who can't build any CPU. Companies that want to build fast CPUs should be preferentially hiring these people.
      - 1234554321a 2y ago
        You have no idea what you’re talking about. There’s a huge learning gap between this and a modern consumer CPU. Assembling together logic gates and understanding a simple RISC-V implementation is literally almost nothing when compared to the years you’d have to spend intensively learning just so you could get to the level of being able to design a Pentium 4 from scratch.
        immibis 2y ago
        Now try teaching someone who's never touched a computer to build a Pentium 4.
conductr 2y ago
Builders also can have whimsical side projects like those highlighted in the article
ynniv 2y ago
They're doing what they love.
- glasss 2y ago
  This is what I was gonna say - they're building, they just may not be building the next venture capitalist funded business. Who says we need more of those anyway?
- brigadier132 2y ago
  You don't really get it, take away the wrapper of minecraft and it's the same thing. At that point it's literally just a change of perspective from putting a ton of effort towards building something that helps others vs building something that helps no one.
  - ynniv 2y ago
    lol, no. No it's not.
  - TeMPOraL 2y ago
    Well, that wrapper makes all the difference!
kazinator 2y ago
On the job, you have to care about what other people think. Often, you have to care about it more than what you think. You have to document your work, and produce test plans. You have to execute part of someone else's plan, or prepare a plan such that someone else can execute part of it. You have to juggle multiple tasks. You have to write status reports and attend meetings; if you're lucky there isn't a lot of this. You may have something enjoyable to work on, only to have that task cancelled or indefinitely shelved when you're many weeks or months into it and it's 85% complete, and then be put onto something that you like a lot less.
nostrademons 2y ago
So I was the kid playing SimCity and Civ and Legos and all these other "builder" toys growing up, who now has a 7-figure job at a FANG and still plays these sort of constructivist games on the side. I'm also the parent of a kindergartner who spends a bunch of time playing Factorio and Cities/Skylines and Kingdoms Reborn and Legos. I'll tell you why I think people prefer to create elaborate worlds inside games rather than get that 6/7-figure job at a tech company: You are not actually a builder at a modern large tech company. My day job consists of lots and lots of org politics. I'm technically in management (though I tried to keep my SWE title as long as possible), and I view my job as "I put up with the political bullshit so that my reports don't have to." But realistically, they are not builders either. They are spelunkers, hackers, maybe even developers - but the majority of their job consists of digging around in a 5M-line codebase to understand what is possible, communicating that back up to management, and then implementing a trivial change because trivial changes are realistically all you can do in a 5M-line codebase. The builders were the folks I learned from, who were employed as SWEs 20 years ago. Computer games create just enough of an artificial, static sandbox that you can learn the rules and get really good at putting together parts. In a big tech company, some executive is going to change the rules in 3 months, and everything you know will be obsolete in a year. And that's not because the execs are stupid or capricious (although sometimes they are), but because the market's rules change every 3 months or so. Like it or not, a market economy's function is to satisfy people's desires, and as the article notes, people's desires are fleeting. But building requires foundations, it requires stability, and so we create that artificial stability with games so that you can build.
- dexwiz 2y ago
  I think you’ve hit the nail on the head on why I would rather “waste” time in Factorio than program at my enterprise SWE job. Because it’s closer to being a historian than a builder.
  - fragmede 2y ago
    We just need to make a market for "I'll pay you $500 to upgrade this save game file's factory from yellow to red belt", and have buyers and sellers, and then we can have it actually be a job. Because there's some parts of factorio I enjoy, and some that I don't, but that's the addictiveness of it.
r0ckarong 2y ago
I find this article incredibly ignorant right from the start. The basic assumption is "people are doing incredible things inside of video games, why aren't they doing this outside?". And then the next portion reads: > Why are you building a graphics card inside minecraft instead of inside nvidia? Minecraft is more enjoyable Minecraft is more addictive Minecraft found them first They don’t know the latter option exists, or how they would do it, or think they’d fail at it Not that interviews are impossibly hard even if you have the necessary ungodly expensive college degrees and certificates to prove your prowess, have your life entirely together, have plenty of cash lying around to risk relocating to a job where you might fail etc. This idea where "why don't you just overcome all the stuff in your reality that is holding you back to be like all the people who don't struggle with these things" is just such a fundamentally idiotic brainspace. Then they bring up names like Carnegie, Ford and John Rockefeller and how early they got started working and comparing that to themselves how they would "have killed for a tech internship at 14". Carnegie born 1888, John Ford born 1894, John Rockefeller born 1839. They weren't even born in the CENTURY that our concepts of work and education come from let alone the millenial shift in technology that changed literally everything about how we evaluate and view people. But sure, an internship at 14 at FAANG is feasible if your own parents know someone in that space, you have a school that looks at that as an opportunity and you have enough pre-existing access to technology and knowledge to do ANYTHING at one of these companies than fetch coffee or whatever the equivalent of stacking paper is these days. UGH!
deleted 2y ago
[deleted]
booleandilemma 2y ago
Building things on your own time for fun is completely different than building things while being beholden to a manager, having to attend daily scrums, having to take direction from Product people, UI designers, UX experts, filling out Jira tickets, arguing with your coworkers about what a variable should be called, what an endpoint route should be, being asked to point your work, logging your time, thinking about how things will be compatible with the other systems, getting two PR reviews and approval from architecture, being asked to attend the town hall, being questioned about why you used an abstract class instead of an interface. The list goes on and on. It's like night and day.
- intelVISA 2y ago
  There should be only two arms of software business: sales and building. When you add in unnecessary layers is where the problems begin...
  - fragmede 2y ago
    what about legal and HR?
    - intelVISA 2y ago
      True, I was thinking more scrappy startup but you're right.
Animats 2y ago
They should be working on adtech, like good little drones. The stuff that really needs to be worked on doesn't pay that well and isn't appreciated. Fast factory automation. Security for the power grid and Internet backbone. Non-AI systems to monitor AI systems to keep them from doing something dangerous. "We wanted self-driving cars. We got retracting door handles." - me.
- moffkalast 2y ago
  On the contrary, a fair bit of the stuff that really needs to be worked on pays super well but is boring, stressful and tedious. You don't get self driving cars without hand labelling billions of images or civil projects without dealing with the worst kind of politics.
  - aleph_minus_one 2y ago
    > You don't get [...] civil projects without dealing with the worst kind of politics. But this does not need builder skills, but robber baron skills. :-(
- fragmede 2y ago
  We have self-driving cars. Waymo's doing great in SF and LA, soon Austin and elsewhere.
- thriftwy 2y ago
  > doesn't pay that well and isn't appreciated I believe the current sad state of robotics is because many people seem to be wanting to build robots, so employers think they can afford paying peanuts. And for peanuts, you may hire a lot of personalities, but by definition you cannot hire people striving for swift commercial success. So those people will just have their highly paying job at a bank, aforementioned adtech or big tech. Which are all not build many robots. I always think if I was building robots, they will do all the things you may imagine and serve coffee when they're done.
  - Animats 2y ago
julianeon 2y ago
The answer to "why were builders able to create so much economic value two decades ago?" is "its a much more mature industry now: most of the empty space is filled." Here are several real-life examples. 3 decades ago, you could've gotten rich by buying 'simple noun' domain names: beer, pinotgrigio, moving on down the list, stuff like that. You could literally just buy ad space on Google for next to nothing, pump money in, get more money out. You could decide to be the Internet expert on 'potato guns' and build an entire business off that, by writing blog posts alone. You could film yourself all day and become a rich YouTuber, just by showing up and recording videos daily. Try doing that now! You can't live off the profit of any of these methods as written. So naturally the builders, who are upstream of that, can't do it either.
- TZubiri 2y ago
  Literally go build a couple of houses and become a millionaire, building physical things is in high demand, low supply.
  - shadowgovt 2y ago
    As someone who's relatives did this full time: n'ah. You will live a comfortable life (except for all the hard work and heavy lifting, of course) but you'll never save up a million. Not unless you're in the real estate speculation side of the equation and you get lucky. The biggest benefit house building skill gives you is that you don't have to pay someone else to fix your own house.
  - immibis 2y ago
    Build them where? Underlying the housing crisis is a land allocation crisis (entirely government manufactured).
- spencerchubb 2y ago
  This is a common misconception. With hindsight we can say "It was so easy to succeed back then!" Why didn't you do those things? Why aren't you trying to catch the next trend? It's extremely difficult to know which trend will actually stick around for the long term. TikTok could be a current example since they are pushing the shop so hard.
analognoise 2y ago
"Why aren't you getting paid 300k at NVidia" Well gee maybe NVidia has it wrong asking for Masters and PhD's with a background in semiconductor devices to even be able to play ball! NVidia's wrong! They're so wrong about what they need they're only the 4th most valuable company in the world. OR doing stuff like that might be clever but doesn't translate to useful skills or products?
- mordae 2y ago
  > They're so wrong about what they need they're only the 4th most valuable company in the world. Valued at a stock exchange != valuable.
  - fragmede 2y ago
    valued at a stock exchange = $$$
awfulneutral 2y ago
The article is asserting that there's some meaningful absence of famous outliers in this generation, but it doesn't really support that assertion...are you sure there aren't any? It took a while for me to be aware of the people listed in the article, they were already very successful before I knew who most of them were. There are plenty of people building graphics cards at Nvidia currently, why don't they count? Plenty of young people are still striking it rich making video games and software, why don't they count? Even if it is true, I would suspect it has more to do with there being fewer low-hanging-fruit opportunities regarding internet tech, rather than the younger generation being too addicted to video games.
asdf6969 2y ago
> Why are you building a graphics card inside minecraft instead of inside nvidia? Before you can build inside NVIDIA, you have to convince the people in charge that this is a project worth building. They're not going to hire some guy that plays Minecraft all day and the people within the company that do build things are at least 2 layers removed from anyone who directs the new projects. The most I can do within my own company is make small tweaks to an existing project. Anything that will need multiple people turns into a political battle.
nitwit005 2y ago
These people are doing something enjoyable. Having fun is rarely profitable. If working for nVidia was non-stop fun, they wouldn't need to pay people. They could charge for it.
- moffkalast 2y ago
  Exhibit A: Game development. Fun job, consequently paid comparatively terribly to other software roles, and includes poor treatment from the management side since if anyone burns out they just take the next one standing in line.
- brigadier132 2y ago
  As I said in another comment, it's really all a matter of perspective. Why is minecraft fun and coding something not?
  - ynniv 2y ago
    Why is playing Minecraft fun, but digging mines is not? Seems the same to me
    - brigadier132 2y ago
      Digging mines involves actual physical toil. Coding and minecraft both involve sitting and clicking things on a screen. Let's try another analogy
      - ynniv 2y ago
        The corporate world beckons you.
        brigadier132 2y ago
        I've worked in big tech, my side projects and hobbies are not in any way equivalent to work in a job while on the surface they both involve coding. But even corporate work can be fun if you approach it in a detached way while understanding (accurately) that it doesn't really matter. This is a privilege you have when you don't have children or debt.
passwordle 2y ago
[flagged]
Terr_ 2y ago
> [Founding of Facebook, Stripe, Snapchat.] > I offer several potential answers: 4: The ability to find obsessive geniuses with projects is greater thanks to cheap social media, but most of them (still) aren't born into the entrepreneurial class which has the economic safety-nets and social connections etc. for creating an actual business and retaining control of it.
constantcrying 2y ago
This is something I have questioned myself, in many many places there are extremely talented young people who are doing impressive, labor intensive work which is completely useless. On the one hand there is obviously immense value to doing useless things (almost everything I ever learned was from doing useless things) and I think it is impossible to begrudge them in any way. But again and again I see people who are doing nothing else with their immense talent and whose entire life revolves around a singular vanity obsession (video game speed running, as just one example). Surely, there has to be some reason that these people won't/can't live out their obsessions in a way that both financially benefits them and society at large.
- awfulneutral 2y ago
  What makes you think they are doing nothing else with their talent? Lots of speed runners are just high achievers and are doing it on the side while they work through college. Some have built a career on speed running. Some do it for charity at GDQ. It is a thing mainly young people do while they have free time. It is also a good social outlet.
- immibis 2y ago
  We've run out of useful things.
  - constantcrying 2y ago
    That's like saying we have run our of problems.
    - immibis 2y ago
      Many of our problems are caused by the useless things we are doing because we have run out of useful things. Some wars, for example. We can't allocate more people to making things from scratch, so the excess goes towards stealing them from our neighbors.
tennisflyi 2y ago
The person who builds a graphics card in Minecraft isn’t passing an interview and 2+ additional rounds. Plus, requirements are high AF - almost asinine
hoc 2y ago
Why not make your kids do the dishes with some gamification instead of having them play video games and see how it goes. That builder might just be the wrong suspect in this two-party relationship issue. Maybe your products need more awe, your attitude needs more respect and you might just give it a try to look at the person and not just see their exploitable potential as a start. With your kids, reward them with more responsibilty, choice and partial ownership of your household and its direction and decor, and it might actually work out. Share your assets and see what they will be used for by those you see so much potential in. In a way that is what those interships and simple tinkering allowed when companies were smaller and the industry was less complex. Finding ways to encourage them and supporting their ideas instead of looking for work force for your own projects might just be a real investment in everbody's future. You might just have to give up the idea that it's now your turn to lead (from that inherited spot). It just has always been your turn to add value. Invest your (real) assets.
Turing_Machine 2y ago
Want more people with the builder mindset? Bring back high school and junior high shop classes, along with the obligatory grizzled shop teacher who dispenses cautionary tales ("Yeah, I had a student with long hair who leaned over the drill press that way. Scalped herself." "Yeah, I had a student who spilled some molten aluminum in his shoe. Learned to do the Highland Fling without any lessons.") Those used to be available to all students. Now, when they even exist, they're shoved off into "vocation" programs, which in practice serve as a dumping ground for those deemed unfit for a college education (its own form of bigotry... you can't be a skilled machinist, programming CNC tools, or even machining by hand, if you're stupid).
- thriftwy 2y ago
  Why would you want to do that? Realistically you are not going to manufacture stuff by hand in your life. Having 3D printing shop in every school would be useful but perhaps not that much of a fun. I, for one, never wanted to craft stuff with my hands. Isn't that's what machine does for you.
  - Turing_Machine 2y ago
    > Why would you want to do that? The same reason people cook fancy dinners, or knit, or paint -- the desire to create. > I, for one, never wanted to craft stuff with my hands. You're not everybody.
    - thriftwy 2y ago
      You're also not everybody. Have you gone around asking people how much of them will craft anything with their hands without a lot of guidance? I imagine most of the stuff will be collecting dust almost all the time, especially as the safety requirements will preclude students using them without supervision.
      - Turing_Machine 2y ago
        > You're also not everybody. No, of course not. > Have you gone around asking people how much of them will craft anything with their hands without a lot of guidance? I do in fact know dozens of people who knit, paint, cook, engage in home improvement projects, sew, and do many other things with their hands, with essentially zero "guidance". Are you claiming that you do not?
pxeger1 2y ago
> Minecraft is more enjoyable I think this bears expanding on. Building video cards in Minecraft, you don’t have to do what you’re told, and there’s no project managers or HR.
gumby 2y ago
What a sad essay with a simple answer to its title: “Not everything need be monetized”. This essay could be easily transposed into other domains, for example “why are some good musicians not trying to get record contracts?” From the essay: > Many of our values are locally-set by our environment and peers The mentality that $$ reflects social value is a social sickness that to some degree of course has existed in all societies, but it has become particularly pernicious in the USA over the past 40+ years. I was shocked that my tween/teen stepkids knew the financial arrangements of their favorite professional athletes and which of their friends’ parents were on the Forbes Midas list (which I hadn’t even heard of). Culture has become professionalized to the point where I never see kids wearing homemade Halloween costumes — they are all branded. Apparently “doing something because you want to” is no longer considered a mainstream attitude.
beefnugs 2y ago
This is a fairly good article, but doesn't take into account that now everyone knows how unfair capitalism is through information sharing using the internet... you already lost before you were born. Why play hard into a game of monopoly where everyone already owned all the property and you just keep rolling around the board landing on everyone else's stuff paying them rent? If there was something besides getting an investor who will take over control and make your stock useless by any means possible... then maybe builders would participate more?
Marietta040 2y ago
[dead]
fuzzfactor 2y ago
>Where are the builders? They're not going to wait around for a financial opportunity, they're just going to go ahead and build. Some of them are going to start early too. People are trying to screw you financially all the time anyway. Might as well build whatever the fuck they want. So what if it's world class? As long as it doesn't cost hardly anything or require other people's money, look what can be done when some of these outstanding efforts reach a milestone. The leverage is through the roof. Just imagine if some of these people had actual capital to work with. Sheesh. Naturally, it's all about the terms, always has been. Nothing but an indictment of capitalists who don't know how to do their part and leverage technology as good as they should. The builders are there, they have not left the building.

After setting up static IP between two computers, (1) it was not so bad, and (2) I estimate I am two decades behind. The only way to catch up is to foster an environment where one must create the things one wants to do. Make a game to play one. Write the screenplay instead of watching the movie. Make paper models, sketch wireframes, and read books. All I can do is block, block, block. Be bored or burning calories. Be the only one--for a while, maybe--who can quit vi or compile a program. Fundamentally, mechanics, math, and programming. Write adventures, design levels, and port Photoshop tutorials to Gimp. Foster a network, but (locally) not many may subscribe to this quirky constellation.

kazinator 2y ago

One reason someone might build a virtual video card instead of a real one at Nvidia is that they don't have the EE and computer engineering skills to build video cards. The two are not comparable.

fragmede 2y ago
In order to build a virtual video card, you have to understand the EE and CE and CS stuff to the point where you're able to do that. That's the point of the article, is that there are ways in which they are comparable. In one you're using minecraft as the UI to implement things. At Nvidia you'd use Cadence as the UI instead.
- deleted 2y ago
  [deleted]
- 1234554321a 2y ago
  This is not even comparable. Yes you can implement a simple graphics card or a RISC CPU in a video game. But that doesn’t mean you have the skill to build any practical modern graphics card or design a modern CISC CPU. You can learn about the basics of these things during a single semester at university and that’s likely what these “video gamers” did. It’s nothing impressive to recreate a RISC-V CPU in some game, only people who have no knowledge in this subject are somehow “impressed” by such things every time it’s brought up.
  - immibis 2y ago
    Building a slow CPU means you're much closer to being able to build a fast CPU than people who can't build any CPU. Companies that want to build fast CPUs should be preferentially hiring these people.
    - 1234554321a 2y ago
      You have no idea what you’re talking about. There’s a huge learning gap between this and a modern consumer CPU. Assembling together logic gates and understanding a simple RISC-V implementation is literally almost nothing when compared to the years you’d have to spend intensively learning just so you could get to the level of being able to design a Pentium 4 from scratch.
      - immibis 2y ago
        Now try teaching someone who's never touched a computer to build a Pentium 4.

conductr 2y ago

Builders also can have whimsical side projects like those highlighted in the article

ynniv 2y ago

They're doing what they love.

glasss 2y ago
This is what I was gonna say - they're building, they just may not be building the next venture capitalist funded business. Who says we need more of those anyway?
brigadier132 2y ago
You don't really get it, take away the wrapper of minecraft and it's the same thing. At that point it's literally just a change of perspective from putting a ton of effort towards building something that helps others vs building something that helps no one.
- ynniv 2y ago
  lol, no. No it's not.
- TeMPOraL 2y ago
  Well, that wrapper makes all the difference!

kazinator 2y ago

On the job, you have to care about what other people think. Often, you have to care about it more than what you think. You have to document your work, and produce test plans. You have to execute part of someone else's plan, or prepare a plan such that someone else can execute part of it. You have to juggle multiple tasks. You have to write status reports and attend meetings; if you're lucky there isn't a lot of this. You may have something enjoyable to work on, only to have that task cancelled or indefinitely shelved when you're many weeks or months into it and it's 85% complete, and then be put onto something that you like a lot less.

nostrademons 2y ago

So I was the kid playing SimCity and Civ and Legos and all these other "builder" toys growing up, who now has a 7-figure job at a FANG and still plays these sort of constructivist games on the side. I'm also the parent of a kindergartner who spends a bunch of time playing Factorio and Cities/Skylines and Kingdoms Reborn and Legos. I'll tell you why I think people prefer to create elaborate worlds inside games rather than get that 6/7-figure job at a tech company: You are not actually a builder at a modern large tech company. My day job consists of lots and lots of org politics. I'm technically in management (though I tried to keep my SWE title as long as possible), and I view my job as "I put up with the political bullshit so that my reports don't have to." But realistically, they are not builders either. They are spelunkers, hackers, maybe even developers - but the majority of their job consists of digging around in a 5M-line codebase to understand what is possible, communicating that back up to management, and then implementing a trivial change because trivial changes are realistically all you can do in a 5M-line codebase. The builders were the folks I learned from, who were employed as SWEs 20 years ago. Computer games create just enough of an artificial, static sandbox that you can learn the rules and get really good at putting together parts. In a big tech company, some executive is going to change the rules in 3 months, and everything you know will be obsolete in a year. And that's not because the execs are stupid or capricious (although sometimes they are), but because the market's rules change every 3 months or so. Like it or not, a market economy's function is to satisfy people's desires, and as the article notes, people's desires are fleeting. But building requires foundations, it requires stability, and so we create that artificial stability with games so that you can build.

dexwiz 2y ago
I think you’ve hit the nail on the head on why I would rather “waste” time in Factorio than program at my enterprise SWE job. Because it’s closer to being a historian than a builder.
- fragmede 2y ago
  We just need to make a market for "I'll pay you $500 to upgrade this save game file's factory from yellow to red belt", and have buyers and sellers, and then we can have it actually be a job. Because there's some parts of factorio I enjoy, and some that I don't, but that's the addictiveness of it.

r0ckarong 2y ago

I find this article incredibly ignorant right from the start. The basic assumption is "people are doing incredible things inside of video games, why aren't they doing this outside?". And then the next portion reads: > Why are you building a graphics card inside minecraft instead of inside nvidia? Minecraft is more enjoyable Minecraft is more addictive Minecraft found them first They don’t know the latter option exists, or how they would do it, or think they’d fail at it Not that interviews are impossibly hard even if you have the necessary ungodly expensive college degrees and certificates to prove your prowess, have your life entirely together, have plenty of cash lying around to risk relocating to a job where you might fail etc. This idea where "why don't you just overcome all the stuff in your reality that is holding you back to be like all the people who don't struggle with these things" is just such a fundamentally idiotic brainspace. Then they bring up names like Carnegie, Ford and John Rockefeller and how early they got started working and comparing that to themselves how they would "have killed for a tech internship at 14". Carnegie born 1888, John Ford born 1894, John Rockefeller born 1839. They weren't even born in the CENTURY that our concepts of work and education come from let alone the millenial shift in technology that changed literally everything about how we evaluate and view people. But sure, an internship at 14 at FAANG is feasible if your own parents know someone in that space, you have a school that looks at that as an opportunity and you have enough pre-existing access to technology and knowledge to do ANYTHING at one of these companies than fetch coffee or whatever the equivalent of stacking paper is these days. UGH!

deleted 2y ago

[deleted]

booleandilemma 2y ago

Building things on your own time for fun is completely different than building things while being beholden to a manager, having to attend daily scrums, having to take direction from Product people, UI designers, UX experts, filling out Jira tickets, arguing with your coworkers about what a variable should be called, what an endpoint route should be, being asked to point your work, logging your time, thinking about how things will be compatible with the other systems, getting two PR reviews and approval from architecture, being asked to attend the town hall, being questioned about why you used an abstract class instead of an interface. The list goes on and on. It's like night and day.

intelVISA 2y ago
There should be only two arms of software business: sales and building. When you add in unnecessary layers is where the problems begin...
- fragmede 2y ago
  what about legal and HR?
  - intelVISA 2y ago
    True, I was thinking more scrappy startup but you're right.

Animats 2y ago

They should be working on adtech, like good little drones. The stuff that really needs to be worked on doesn't pay that well and isn't appreciated. Fast factory automation. Security for the power grid and Internet backbone. Non-AI systems to monitor AI systems to keep them from doing something dangerous. "We wanted self-driving cars. We got retracting door handles." - me.

moffkalast 2y ago
On the contrary, a fair bit of the stuff that really needs to be worked on pays super well but is boring, stressful and tedious. You don't get self driving cars without hand labelling billions of images or civil projects without dealing with the worst kind of politics.
- aleph_minus_one 2y ago
  > You don't get [...] civil projects without dealing with the worst kind of politics. But this does not need builder skills, but robber baron skills. :-(
fragmede 2y ago
We have self-driving cars. Waymo's doing great in SF and LA, soon Austin and elsewhere.
thriftwy 2y ago
> doesn't pay that well and isn't appreciated I believe the current sad state of robotics is because many people seem to be wanting to build robots, so employers think they can afford paying peanuts. And for peanuts, you may hire a lot of personalities, but by definition you cannot hire people striving for swift commercial success. So those people will just have their highly paying job at a bank, aforementioned adtech or big tech. Which are all not build many robots. I always think if I was building robots, they will do all the things you may imagine and serve coffee when they're done.
- Animats 2y ago

julianeon 2y ago

The answer to "why were builders able to create so much economic value two decades ago?" is "its a much more mature industry now: most of the empty space is filled." Here are several real-life examples. 3 decades ago, you could've gotten rich by buying 'simple noun' domain names: beer, pinotgrigio, moving on down the list, stuff like that. You could literally just buy ad space on Google for next to nothing, pump money in, get more money out. You could decide to be the Internet expert on 'potato guns' and build an entire business off that, by writing blog posts alone. You could film yourself all day and become a rich YouTuber, just by showing up and recording videos daily. Try doing that now! You can't live off the profit of any of these methods as written. So naturally the builders, who are upstream of that, can't do it either.

TZubiri 2y ago
Literally go build a couple of houses and become a millionaire, building physical things is in high demand, low supply.
- shadowgovt 2y ago
  As someone who's relatives did this full time: n'ah. You will live a comfortable life (except for all the hard work and heavy lifting, of course) but you'll never save up a million. Not unless you're in the real estate speculation side of the equation and you get lucky. The biggest benefit house building skill gives you is that you don't have to pay someone else to fix your own house.
- immibis 2y ago
  Build them where? Underlying the housing crisis is a land allocation crisis (entirely government manufactured).
spencerchubb 2y ago
This is a common misconception. With hindsight we can say "It was so easy to succeed back then!" Why didn't you do those things? Why aren't you trying to catch the next trend? It's extremely difficult to know which trend will actually stick around for the long term. TikTok could be a current example since they are pushing the shop so hard.

analognoise 2y ago

"Why aren't you getting paid 300k at NVidia" Well gee maybe NVidia has it wrong asking for Masters and PhD's with a background in semiconductor devices to even be able to play ball! NVidia's wrong! They're so wrong about what they need they're only the 4th most valuable company in the world. OR doing stuff like that might be clever but doesn't translate to useful skills or products?

mordae 2y ago
> They're so wrong about what they need they're only the 4th most valuable company in the world. Valued at a stock exchange != valuable.
- fragmede 2y ago
  valued at a stock exchange = $$$

awfulneutral 2y ago

The article is asserting that there's some meaningful absence of famous outliers in this generation, but it doesn't really support that assertion...are you sure there aren't any? It took a while for me to be aware of the people listed in the article, they were already very successful before I knew who most of them were. There are plenty of people building graphics cards at Nvidia currently, why don't they count? Plenty of young people are still striking it rich making video games and software, why don't they count? Even if it is true, I would suspect it has more to do with there being fewer low-hanging-fruit opportunities regarding internet tech, rather than the younger generation being too addicted to video games.

asdf6969 2y ago

> Why are you building a graphics card inside minecraft instead of inside nvidia? Before you can build inside NVIDIA, you have to convince the people in charge that this is a project worth building. They're not going to hire some guy that plays Minecraft all day and the people within the company that do build things are at least 2 layers removed from anyone who directs the new projects. The most I can do within my own company is make small tweaks to an existing project. Anything that will need multiple people turns into a political battle.

nitwit005 2y ago

These people are doing something enjoyable. Having fun is rarely profitable. If working for nVidia was non-stop fun, they wouldn't need to pay people. They could charge for it.

moffkalast 2y ago
Exhibit A: Game development. Fun job, consequently paid comparatively terribly to other software roles, and includes poor treatment from the management side since if anyone burns out they just take the next one standing in line.
brigadier132 2y ago
As I said in another comment, it's really all a matter of perspective. Why is minecraft fun and coding something not?
- ynniv 2y ago
  Why is playing Minecraft fun, but digging mines is not? Seems the same to me
  - brigadier132 2y ago
    Digging mines involves actual physical toil. Coding and minecraft both involve sitting and clicking things on a screen. Let's try another analogy
    - ynniv 2y ago
      The corporate world beckons you.
      - brigadier132 2y ago
        I've worked in big tech, my side projects and hobbies are not in any way equivalent to work in a job while on the surface they both involve coding. But even corporate work can be fun if you approach it in a detached way while understanding (accurately) that it doesn't really matter. This is a privilege you have when you don't have children or debt.

passwordle 2y ago

[flagged]

Terr_ 2y ago

> [Founding of Facebook, Stripe, Snapchat.] > I offer several potential answers: 4: The ability to find obsessive geniuses with projects is greater thanks to cheap social media, but most of them (still) aren't born into the entrepreneurial class which has the economic safety-nets and social connections etc. for creating an actual business and retaining control of it.

constantcrying 2y ago

This is something I have questioned myself, in many many places there are extremely talented young people who are doing impressive, labor intensive work which is completely useless. On the one hand there is obviously immense value to doing useless things (almost everything I ever learned was from doing useless things) and I think it is impossible to begrudge them in any way. But again and again I see people who are doing nothing else with their immense talent and whose entire life revolves around a singular vanity obsession (video game speed running, as just one example). Surely, there has to be some reason that these people won't/can't live out their obsessions in a way that both financially benefits them and society at large.

awfulneutral 2y ago
What makes you think they are doing nothing else with their talent? Lots of speed runners are just high achievers and are doing it on the side while they work through college. Some have built a career on speed running. Some do it for charity at GDQ. It is a thing mainly young people do while they have free time. It is also a good social outlet.
immibis 2y ago
We've run out of useful things.
- constantcrying 2y ago
  That's like saying we have run our of problems.
  - immibis 2y ago
    Many of our problems are caused by the useless things we are doing because we have run out of useful things. Some wars, for example. We can't allocate more people to making things from scratch, so the excess goes towards stealing them from our neighbors.

tennisflyi 2y ago

The person who builds a graphics card in Minecraft isn’t passing an interview and 2+ additional rounds. Plus, requirements are high AF - almost asinine

hoc 2y ago

Why not make your kids do the dishes with some gamification instead of having them play video games and see how it goes. That builder might just be the wrong suspect in this two-party relationship issue. Maybe your products need more awe, your attitude needs more respect and you might just give it a try to look at the person and not just see their exploitable potential as a start. With your kids, reward them with more responsibilty, choice and partial ownership of your household and its direction and decor, and it might actually work out. Share your assets and see what they will be used for by those you see so much potential in. In a way that is what those interships and simple tinkering allowed when companies were smaller and the industry was less complex. Finding ways to encourage them and supporting their ideas instead of looking for work force for your own projects might just be a real investment in everbody's future. You might just have to give up the idea that it's now your turn to lead (from that inherited spot). It just has always been your turn to add value. Invest your (real) assets.

Turing_Machine 2y ago

Want more people with the builder mindset? Bring back high school and junior high shop classes, along with the obligatory grizzled shop teacher who dispenses cautionary tales ("Yeah, I had a student with long hair who leaned over the drill press that way. Scalped herself." "Yeah, I had a student who spilled some molten aluminum in his shoe. Learned to do the Highland Fling without any lessons.") Those used to be available to all students. Now, when they even exist, they're shoved off into "vocation" programs, which in practice serve as a dumping ground for those deemed unfit for a college education (its own form of bigotry... you can't be a skilled machinist, programming CNC tools, or even machining by hand, if you're stupid).

thriftwy 2y ago
Why would you want to do that? Realistically you are not going to manufacture stuff by hand in your life. Having 3D printing shop in every school would be useful but perhaps not that much of a fun. I, for one, never wanted to craft stuff with my hands. Isn't that's what machine does for you.
- Turing_Machine 2y ago
  > Why would you want to do that? The same reason people cook fancy dinners, or knit, or paint -- the desire to create. > I, for one, never wanted to craft stuff with my hands. You're not everybody.
  - thriftwy 2y ago
    You're also not everybody. Have you gone around asking people how much of them will craft anything with their hands without a lot of guidance? I imagine most of the stuff will be collecting dust almost all the time, especially as the safety requirements will preclude students using them without supervision.
    - Turing_Machine 2y ago
      > You're also not everybody. No, of course not. > Have you gone around asking people how much of them will craft anything with their hands without a lot of guidance? I do in fact know dozens of people who knit, paint, cook, engage in home improvement projects, sew, and do many other things with their hands, with essentially zero "guidance". Are you claiming that you do not?

pxeger1 2y ago

> Minecraft is more enjoyable I think this bears expanding on. Building video cards in Minecraft, you don’t have to do what you’re told, and there’s no project managers or HR.

gumby 2y ago

What a sad essay with a simple answer to its title: “Not everything need be monetized”. This essay could be easily transposed into other domains, for example “why are some good musicians not trying to get record contracts?” From the essay: > Many of our values are locally-set by our environment and peers The mentality that $$ reflects social value is a social sickness that to some degree of course has existed in all societies, but it has become particularly pernicious in the USA over the past 40+ years. I was shocked that my tween/teen stepkids knew the financial arrangements of their favorite professional athletes and which of their friends’ parents were on the Forbes Midas list (which I hadn’t even heard of). Culture has become professionalized to the point where I never see kids wearing homemade Halloween costumes — they are all branded. Apparently “doing something because you want to” is no longer considered a mainstream attitude.

beefnugs 2y ago

This is a fairly good article, but doesn't take into account that now everyone knows how unfair capitalism is through information sharing using the internet... you already lost before you were born. Why play hard into a game of monopoly where everyone already owned all the property and you just keep rolling around the board landing on everyone else's stuff paying them rent? If there was something besides getting an investor who will take over control and make your stock useless by any means possible... then maybe builders would participate more?

Marietta040 2y ago

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fuzzfactor 2y ago

>Where are the builders? They're not going to wait around for a financial opportunity, they're just going to go ahead and build. Some of them are going to start early too. People are trying to screw you financially all the time anyway. Might as well build whatever the fuck they want. So what if it's world class? As long as it doesn't cost hardly anything or require other people's money, look what can be done when some of these outstanding efforts reach a milestone. The leverage is through the roof. Just imagine if some of these people had actual capital to work with. Sheesh. Naturally, it's all about the terms, always has been. Nothing but an indictment of capitalists who don't know how to do their part and leverage technology as good as they should. The builders are there, they have not left the building.