17 ms·

Silicon Valley’s Youth Problem

269 points by metermaid 13y ago

bhudman 13y ago
I thought this would be a perfect article for testing our some summarize tools :). According to the osx summarizer tool, the following came up when I set to 1 sentence: It’s the angst of an early hire at a start-up that only he realizes is failing; the angst of a founder who raises $5 million for his company and then finds out an acquaintance from college raised $10 million; the angst of someone who makes $100,000 at 22 but is still afraid that he may not be able to afford a house like the one he grew up in.
- cstavish 13y ago
  How can you access the summarize tool in modern OS X? I remember Apple doing away with it or otherwise moving it after ~10.5 or so.
  - 72deluxe 13y ago
    I too would like to know this. Looks a brilliant feature. EDIT: Found! It is still there in System Preferences > Keyboard > Shortcuts > Services > Text > Summarize. It just isn't enabled by default.
raldi 13y ago
> The backlash in recent months against the self-involvement and frivolity of the new guard has actually been a long time coming. Instagram photos of opulent tech holiday parties have been lambasted, Google buses blockaded In what universe is a carpooling system that gets dozens of cars off the road and allows each passenger to reclaim ten working hours a week classified as frivolous?
- deleted 13y ago
  [deleted]
  - melling 13y ago
    We are talking about California where they didn't build an extensively sufficient subway system.
    - stackcollision 13y ago
      It must suck to live in a third-world state.
      - zalzane 13y ago
        oh my god are you being serious? This isnt fucking reddit, take your sensationalism elsewhere. It's really easy to pick on transportation systems when you have absolutely no idea how spread out everything is.
    - jusben1369 13y ago
      Whenever you can land at an airport and take a train (BART) into the heart of the City in under 30 minutes you've got a subway system. BART could always be better (loop the Bay or go across the Golden Gate) but it is a real Subway system.
      - potatolicious 13y ago
        BART is more commuter rail than metro (what is usually meant by "subway"). It provides transport from other cities into the city (SF), but provides little coverage in the city itself. For people living in very specific parts of the city (see: the Mission) the lack of a real metro has made BART into a pseudo-subway, but at the end of the day it's still commuter rail (the seating arrangements in a BART car is telling as to its intended purpose). San Francisco doesn't really have a metro system - it has streetcars that don't have exclusive right of way through the majority of their run.
        jusben1369 13y ago
        That's a good point.
- gtirloni 13y ago
  The impact of carpooling is minimal and there are much more efficient ways at public transportation. Carpooling is a band-aid unlikely to reach the critical mass required to turn around the nightmare that public transportation is.
  - akgerber 13y ago
    Those more-efficient means of public transportation (commuter trains) only work if the destination is within walking distance of the train station. But Silicon Valley communities make it illegal to build office towers in their downtowns, so the existing rail transport isn't practical to commute from SF to Peninsula office parks.
- dalke 13y ago
  Have you not been following any of the discussion about this topic? Here are three frequently voiced objections: 1) If the city decided to put a new bus route outside of your house, with a bus every 10 minutes for the morning and evening rush hours, then you would expect there to be public meetings where people can voice concerns about the routing, increase in large traffic, noise, and so on. Why should private companies not be subject to the same sort of democratic decision making on how to use the local public roads and bus stops? 2) Some people moved to the city in part because of the knowledge that the private bus system would be there. Without those buses, they would have chosen somewhere else precisely because the lack of parking would have made the commute impossible. It's hard then to say that each bus replaces a dozen cars, when those people might not be there if there were no buses. 3) If getting cars off the road and reclaiming commuting time were paramount, then why not rezone the areas around Mountain View, Cupertino, etc. for medium density housing, like SF-style row houses, instead of the current preference for suburban detached housing? Then people could walk or bike to work in a matter of minutes. The densities for SF, MV, and C are 17K, 6K, and 5K/sq mile respectively, so there's plenty of opportunity for local population growth. Instead, the local (and democratic) resistance to zoning change in those smaller cities causes increased prices and bus traffic elsewhere, but the people in SF have no way to push back and cause the zoning laws of the smaller cities to change.
  - raldi 13y ago
    I think you need to look up the definition of the word "frivolous".
    - dalke 13y ago
      I thought I addressed your "frivolous" criterion directly. 1) It may be "frivolous" if the routing is only made based on the needs of the commuters, and has no input from the people who live on those routes. In an extreme case, if a bus goes down a narrow street in order to save one able-bodied person one block of walking, then that part is definitely frivolous even with the overall savings. Without that local input, neither you nor I have an idea of which parts are frivolous and which are not. And that local input has not occurred. 2) You made assumptions which might not be true. If the net effect of adding buses did not reduce car traffic at all, then your presumed advantages don't exist, and hence the effort is "frivolous." 3) If the goal is to reduce commute time and get cars off the streets, then long-distance bus traffic is not the solution. Improved access to nearby housing is the solution. Instead, long-term busing is a frivolous waste of money which should instead go towards zoning changes. But that involves getting into long-term local politics, which business people don't like doing. Instead, they would rather spend money on a technical solution which is achievable in the short-term, even if it doesn't really help your stated goals.
- king_jester 13y ago
  The Google bus issue is more about the self-involvement and less about the frivolity. Backlash against Google buses is about gentrification and the fact that a well paid group of workers comes in from a variety of locations and then dominates local politics.
  - davidf18 13y ago
    The real issue here is the higher costs of housing caused by the politics of zoning that creates artificial scarcity in housing. In a healthy market, there would be increased construction to offset the increased demand caused by people with higher incomes.
    - 205guy 13y ago
      Except if you have a neighborhood full of nice row houses (almost historic by American standards), friendly local businesses, etc., then the "politics of zoning" by the local residents has tended to the status quo, which they seem to like. In that case, where would you be able to increase construction? People want to live in those nice neighborhoods, not some new high rise in a "redeveloped" area. So the newcomers with google salaries buy up and price out the current residents of those pleasant neighborhoods. This creates friction. Why should all systems be designed for growth?
      - dalke 13y ago
        I've seen that the frequent opposition to zoning changes protests the replacement of single-family or row houses with "high rises", as you did. Why did you chose to use an extreme as contrast? That's not the only alternative. What about if they are replaced with a low-rise, or a mid-rise? These offer higher density than row houses but without the same visual impact as a high rise. Some in Manhattan love their 5-story brownstones. I lived in a city with lots of 4- and 5- story buildings, and think that - if well designed - they have a very nice feel to them. As to the "why", our economics system says that (in general) when there is demand either prices go up or supply expands. If the prices go up, then people who can't afford the new prices must move. Our primary economics system isn't really designed with people's emotions in mind, so this can cause stress and turmoil, leading even to protests and violence. One fix is to enforce rent controls, which leads to a different set of issues. If we don't want to force people to move, then we either must make SF less attractive ("protests and violence" can help!) in order to reduce demand, or build new housing to increase the supply. Not all systems are designed for growth. As a famous example (at least for beer aficionados) the Trappists breweries only serve the purpose of supporting their monastic way of life. The prices aren't raised to match demand, so some people end up buying and reselling the beer for a much higher price. As a remedy, the monks limit how much a single person can buy in a period of time. There are other economics models which may fit SF better. For example, in the co-op system, the residents own a share of the organization which owns the row houses, or the apartment. They can decide as a whole if they want to, for example, add a new floor to the building or gut and replace the building. Because it's a larger organization, with its own financials, it can afford to take on a larger task like that. The residents would want this because the larger number of people in the building would likely lead to a lower rent. While with single family ownership it's a lot harder to make this decision. This is a very different model than SF's row houses. I'm curious about how the choice of economic model affects how a city might transform itself, but can't do more than hypothesize about it like I just did.
- lgieron 13y ago
  Exactly, in my home town there's a large car factory (Fiat's), which is providing dozens of buses for its workers every day, and yet nobody is calling those workers entitled egoists.
ZanyProgrammer 13y ago
Too bad the article only gives a cursory nod towards ageism. that is a serious problem-the rest of the article was sorta meh and a bit inside baseball wanking.
applecore 13y ago
> The talent — and there's a ton of it — flowing into Silicon Valley cares little about improving these infrastructural elements. What they care about is coming up with more web apps. Is there evidence that this problem actually exists? This seems likely to be a manufactured story. The press simply isn't going to write as much about Meraki as they would a popular, consumer-oriented web or mobile startup. $1.2 billion is a big number (for the acquisition of Meraki), but ultimately it's a "boring" business that sells routers. It's never going to appeal to more than a small audience.
- kelvin0 13y ago
  Recently, many multi-billion dollars acquisitions made by Google/Yahoo/Facebook have had more than their share of Media attention. It`s not difficult to see where the spotlight shines these days. Hence the seeming reason why so many 'young' people would also want to emulate the acquired Startups ... no?
- jpmattia 13y ago
  > Is there evidence that this problem actually exists? and later on: > but it's ultimately a boring business that sells routers. The use of the word "boring" should answer your question. There was a time in the valley that stuff was far-out, interesting, and cool. I know, hard to believe, but I saw it happen, ancient history that it is. But hey, there was a time when being a mechE building cars was the ultimate in cool. Things change.
- mathattack 13y ago
  I don't think Cisco's problems are a lack of engineers. If it is, they can always pay them more, or train their managers to be good leaders. I agree - every time I hear, "People aren't going to work in X?" I wonder if there is a systemic imbalance, or something else at work. If consumers want to pay for apps, who are we as central planners to say otherwise? Maybe we shouldn't subsidize these things, but let the market decide. You could argue we should be funding basic research, but that's not routers.
- aspensmonster 13y ago
  Well, I'd love to be doing work on the hardware side of things. I'd love to even intern --despite the fact that I'm graduating-- at a company like Freescale or Intel or Qualcomm or Cisco or AMD. As long as I could continue to pay the bills --and feed the student loan monster-- I'd continue to live as a student. I'd consider it a fair trade-off while I was grinding for XP in a field that, for all intents and purposes, can't really be done in your garage any more. Yes, we can all play with 7400 chips and build radios and probe away at some cheap electronic gizmo, but nobody is going to be fabricating 45nm, 6-layer, N-core, superscalar, pipelined, cached, billion-transistor count CPU semiconductors in their basement labs. And nothing but years of experience at the interface of design, verification, and fabrication will ever produce a skilled engineer in those fields that understands all of the delicate interdependencies of that technological pipeline. It should go without saying at this point that no, I don't have any meaningful experience in the current state-of-the-art of semiconductor design, verification, or fabrication and I honestly don't see how it's reasonable to expect me to. Of course, while I've never had a professional software engineering gig either, I do have previous experience with development and other paid jobs in supporting roles like systems administration. I sometimes think that it's simply a consequence of the barrier to entry being so relatively low. Do you have a computer (or even access to one that you can install software on) and access to the net? Congratulations. You have everything you need to start learning about concepts and tools that are immediately applicable and relevant to the field. And they're Free as in Freedom to boot! So long as you have the time, you have all you need to get to a point where your horns aren't entirely green and the spaces behind your ears aren't entirely soaked. With guidance from more senior devs, you'll get to their level too in no time at all. But it seems no matter what I do, it's always the software guys that are interested in talking. They're so interested, it seems, that I don't even have to go to them. They'll come to me. Which is honestly shocking, given that I still consider myself a very sophomoric developer. By contrast, even getting the hardware folks to show up seems impossible. There was a recent STEM job fair at my university (Texas State) that really ought to have been billed as the Computer Science job fair. Sure, Freescale and National Instruments were there, but there weren't any members from their hardware or verification teams. It was all software and IT. Samsung was there, but I honestly don't know why. I didn't need a hard copy of the job description that was printed from the online job site. Apple was there, but they were only looking for at-home tech support. Intel wasn't even there. AMD wasn't even there. NVIDIA wasn't even there. Cisco wasn't even there. And those are all companies with established offices in the Austin area. My heart may be in hardware, but I still love software. And guess who's hiring. And guess who's got student loans to pay off :D tl;dr: Yes, I'd say the problem does exist. And perhaps the reason why web apps are so dominant and "infrastructural elements" so maligned is that the barriers to entry are so different in each field, and the corresponding willingness to train in each field seemingly reversed.
davidw 13y ago
I've mentioned this in the past, but I was happy to get out of that area. Padova, where I live now, has both young and old people, rich and poor, people who have always been here and immigrants. Most people work in different industries. It feels a lot more varied, and somehow more "real" than the bay area.
- slothario 13y ago
  I was a sciences undergrad at Stanford and now I've ventured into programming - at a decidedly uncool industry, in a relatively uncool metropolis - but I don't want to go back to Silcon Valley for the life of me. It just seems like such a hotbed of striving and buzzwords. Maybe it's unfair, but that's just how it seems to me. Here, at my corporate job, people seem to respect that I'm my own person and can work 40 hours a week. Silicon Valley seems rife with conformity that tries to disguise itself as freedom. Think outside of the box, as long as you're wearing the same clothes and using the same buzzwords as everyone else.
- deleted 13y ago
  [deleted]
  - davidw 13y ago
    It's not about age: Venice, which isn't far from here is very much in the "unreal" category.
nakedrobot2 13y ago
As every year goes by, the Bay Area seems more and more an inbred cesspool of narcissism. (Never mind the ridiculous cost of living, crime problem, homeless people, and pitiful public transport) Good place to visit but... well, no need to live there!
lucasnemeth 13y ago
This article make it seems that all infrastructural problems lies in the hardware world. The younger generation do care about problems that lies beneath the application, but a lot of those problems deal more with software than with hardware these days. Besides that, we've been moving to a open source infrastructure, where a larger number of companies that depends on softwares develop them in a collaborative way, we have moved from the proprietary paradigm that existed in the 90's. A simple texting app may depend on some innovative database to scale, and will contribute to it's development.
Dewie 13y ago
> The other night I was studying late for a midterm exam — I am a grad student in computer science at Columbia University — Heh, nice name-dropping.
scarmig 13y ago
Frivolous, perhaps, but the shitty sexting apps and the like[1] are low hanging fruit where we can afford to be cutting edge. It's best to view the current Silicon Valley euphoria as a testbed for new technologies and labor processes and as an incubation chamber for the next generation working class. All the awesome stuff the writer wants will happen in the next decade or two, and most of the technologies and technologists involved will have their roots in the present frothy period. It's also best to think comparatively: sure, maybe some capital is being allocated stupidly [2]. But lets compare to the second half of the 20th century and its great technological achievements. Technological development was uniformly directed toward the goals of state-building and war-waging. Given a choice between better sexting apps and barbarism, it's not even a real choice. One is clearly a significantly negative-sum game, and the other is neutral to mildly positive. We only ended up ahead after the 20th century through a combination of good luck and technology's tendency to adapt across domains and be used in novel ways. [1] A minority of the start ups that actually exist, but let's grant it for the sake of argument. [2] The article makes this entirely about the allocation of labor, even going so far as to imply it's character defects that cause workers to go work on stupid things instead of meaningful things. But fuck that noise: capital is the driving force here. I've never met an engineer who would prefer working on sexting apps to working on deep, fundamental problems. But our present system rewards capital for pursuing short-term profits at the expense of long-term economic growth. If you want that to change, fix the system. Hate the game, not the player.
- givehimagun 13y ago
  I'd like to expand your comments a bit further. Not only are these ideas low hanging fruit but they are low risk, innovation test beds. Imagine trying to do this kind of work on a medical device that could kill someone...you can't be nearly as wild and crazy. The internet is always going to be productized with ideas that are cheap to stand up, low risk and scalable....that's the beauty of it.
cushychicken 13y ago
This whole article is another iteration of the whole "the latest generation sucks and is ruining everything" metanarrative that's been quite popular in the last few years. If companies like Cisco wanted to hire engineers who are going to sexier companies like web startups, maybe they should learn a little more about what web startups have to offer to a hire. Namely, the autonomy to develop a solution to a problem in one's own way, rather than being a single cog in a gigantic organizational wheel.
datamatt 13y ago
"without Nvidia’s graphics processing unit, your BuzzFeed GIF is not going to make anyone laugh." Err....
- 72deluxe 13y ago
  Surely GIFs are hardware accelerated these days? Great article, right?
  - aspensmonster 13y ago
    Oh FFS. Where's the principle of charity when you need it? YES. Without graphics processing of one form or another, on one chip or another, over one cable or bus or another, to one screen or terminal or another, your GIF absolutely won't be visible. Or your PNG, or your JPG, or your desktop or movie or e-book. Nothing will be visible.
    - 72deluxe 13y ago
      Maybe I was a bit harsh. Now on to create something that's both cool and really matters (satisfying both the kids and the elders). If you're viewing GIFs on Windows and it is drawn using GDI or GDI+, nothing is accelerated. It's bust.
- 10098 13y ago
  you know all major browsers use hardware acceleration to draw stuff right?
72deluxe 13y ago
Ah but what hardware will these new web apps use? How will they get their network packets across from A to B if not going through the expensive Cisco hardware? They all need each other.
abvdasker 13y ago
The amount of hyperbole and intentional provocation of anxiety in this article makes me think the writer isn't really looking to inform anyone of anything. Instead she just regurgitates one tech stereotype after another like it's news.
- nrao123 13y ago
  I literally read this SF Gate article on how out of town writers should write the stereotypical article about SF an hour before I read the NYT article. I smiled to myself when I saw the resemblances http://m.sfgate.com/living/article/Handy-dandy-guide-to-writing-about-SF-if-you-re-5307139.php http://m.sfgate.com/living/article/Handy-dandy-guide-to-writ...
scott_s 13y ago
If this phenomenon exists, I'm not convinced it's a problem. We've only begun to explore what these core technologies enable. Even if hardware was mostly stagnant for, say, a decade, I still think we would see innovation in software and how software is integrated into society.
powera 13y ago
I stopped reading this when I got to "Why do these smart, quantitatively trained engineers, who could help cure cancer or fix healthcare.gov, want to work for a sexting app?" - there was the cover article in Time Magazine not less than 2 weeks ago about these very engineers fixing healthcare.gov, and describing why they don't do it permanently (government procurement is awful and almost always unrelated to actual skill for websites, and the healthcare.gov site is generally described as incredibly badly written by the initial contractors). The whole article reads like a narrative that is grabbing random anecdotes to support a point, even when the facts say otherwise.
- Vervious 13y ago
  > The whole article reads like a narrative that is grabbing random anecdotes to support a point, even when the facts say otherwise. I'm curious what facts you're talking about. The very problems you point out about healthcare.gov support part of the author's argument - that today's tech environment rewards the creation of a sexting app over more groundbreaking work, and therefore youth do the former. From my perspective, at least, few of Silicon Valley's startups will have a lasting dent in the human world. Funding for spaceship technology is limited, more people are working on note-taking apps than cleaning the air, and the hype is all on Snapchat (which does have a huge valuation). The real issue is how we change it; change inevitably comes from youth. And if today's youth come out of college excited about sexting apps, I have little trust in a better future. That being said, I'm not in a position to say much, being a college student myself.
  - fantnn 13y ago
    Government projects of x size require companies with a, b, c qualifications, such as size, income and other factors. I've worked for 2 such companies before, and it was a nightmare of micromanagement, changing requirements, and general feeling of "what I do isn't having an effect on the world." You clearly have never worked at such a place before or you'd understand.
  - zanny 13y ago
    Then blame consumers and investors that fund sexting over space travel or cancer cures, because that is why all the entrepreneurs jump on it. If there were monetary demand for a cancer cure, and I mean real billions a year in venture capital into R&D on the subject, that nobody was using - you would see a dearth of sexting apps, at least for a while, while that VC funding is consumed. Effort goes where the money is, because your legacy is a long term problem, and your ability to eat is todays issue.
michaelochurch 13y ago
This isn't a "youth problem". 20-year-olds and 50-year-olds aren't natural enemies, and most people don't think that way. Blaming this on one side is ridiculous. When 50-year-old chickenhawk VCs only want to fund 25-year-olds, that's not the fault of one generation or the other. (Can you blame it on the young for taking the opportunity? No. Can you blame it on the old when it's only a few making those decisions that are hurting most of them? No.) The real issue is the cool/substance chasm, which the article describes well. If you want substance, you can work for the government or a big corporation... your salary growth will average 5% per year, your advancement will be political, and you'll probably never be able to afford a house in the Bay Area or New York. You'll also be at the mercy of corporate actions (mergers, etc.) that might move you out of your fun R&D job and into the basement. If you play for cool, there's a 90% chance you waste years of your life you can never get back, a 9% chance you break even on opportunity cost, a 0.9% chance that you never have to work again (after wearing yourself out over 10 years of a manic-depressive startup existence, and "retirement" being an artifact of adrenal exhaustion, moderate wealth, and apathy), and a 0.1% chance of getting so rich that it was actually worth it. What we need is a middle path. We have the golden skill that makes us capable of 15-40% annual growth (in salary, economic value, etc.) Between criminally inefficient large organizations (which produce "substance", but inefficiently and with painful wastes of effort) and flash-seeking careerist venture capitalists ("cool")-- a path that might "average" 50%/year career returns but with so much noise that the median outcome is poor-- no one will let us. That's the problem.
- oskarth 13y ago
  This way of thinking about it is interesting. For many people, me included, entrepreneurship is first and foremost a existential choice. Do you have some examples of what this middle path might look like? For the entrepreneurial-minded, is it different from what is commonly viewed as "lifestyle business" or bootstrapped revenue-first side-project (that might later turn into a solid small-scale business)?
  - michaelochurch 13y ago
    Mid-risk/mid-growth businesses. Designed to grow at 15-40% per year and hire selectively (see: Valve). Can have a desirable culture (e.g. open allocation) that wouldn't survive 75%/year personnel growth. Too risky for bank loans (personal liability) but not the billions-or-bollocks long-shot gambits that are career-making for VCs. But still potentially very profitable if VCs took a portfolio mentality rather than a careerist "I want the next Facebook because of what it'll do for my reputation" approach.
zenbowman 13y ago
The author fails to see that while a large number of apps may be frivolous, we've also ended up with a world that allows collaboration at a global scale. The nature of engineering is changing, and what the last decade of "software innovation" has done is evolve an engineering practice that is superior to any that came before, even if it has only been used to build frivolous apps. I've worked as a government contractor and have been exposed to the inner workings of many of the companies building what the author would consider serious technology - jet planes, submarines and the like. And I think it is fair to say that the tools they use and the way they use them are clearly from the 70s - this is not a criticism, they create impressive technology, but I believe that once the practices of modern software development begin to take root in those industries, we'll be exposed the innovation we've actually created. facebook may not be considered a serious app, but certainly the technology facebook has built will start being used in other "serious" sectors in a few years, and then people will realize where the innovation lay. Things like proper version control, large-scale data warehousing etc will change serious industries, the frivolous apps are just a testbed in which we create them because the risks of failure are low. Cliffs: Web technology is serious business, even if what it is used for is currently frivolous
- ryandrake 13y ago
  > jet planes, submarines and the like. And I think it is fair to say that the tools they use and the way they use them are clearly from the 70s - this is not a criticism, they create impressive technology, but I believe that once the practices of modern software development begin to take root in those industries, we'll be exposed the innovation we've actually created. Or, we'll just end up with jet planes with zero day exploits and submarines that have to be patched every month when the next sprint gets pushed to deployment.
dpweb 13y ago
As a 40 something Gen Xer, it's tough to generalize about the younger generation. I detest arrogance and self-entitlement and that's definitely in the air, but I admire how smart these kids are and their energy. It's a wide world, there's room enough for both curing cancer and sexing apps.
dkrich 13y ago
I think there's a major flaw in the argument that "these people could be curing cancer!" To have any hope of doing something as ambitious as curing cancer you presumably have to have an unusually large amount of interest in the subject. Like enough to devote your entire education and career to. By taking jobs at tech companies they are demonstrating that they don't possess this necessary quality. Few people do. And as for the healthcare.gov debacle- being smart and a great programmer has absolutely no benefit when it comes to fixing that site. Yes there are likely major technical issues, but the main problems derive from layer upon layer of bureaucracy and policy that any project of that scope entails. I would advise smart young people to stay far, far away from any project of that nature, lest any will you had to do something meaningful will get sucked out of your body fairly quickly.
- theorique 13y ago
  an unusually large amount of interest in the subject Not to mention talent in the area. People aren't fungible, especially not later on in their careers. For example, Steve Jobs (pbuh) is not interchangeable with Eric Lander, even though both of them are/were highly creative and driven people who reached amazing success in their field. The kid who's a natural programmer and working on the latest messaging app or Flappy Bird would never have been happy doing bench work to cure cancer.
  - gaius 13y ago
    Jobs talent was 100% fungible - taking the credit for others work.
sbierwagen 13y ago
Man I hate the framing on that headline. I hate silicon valley just as much as anyone else who doesn't live there, and I'd gladly upvote an anti-valley piece; but when an old media outlet blames it on Those Damn Millenials right in the title, it leaves a bad taste in my mouth. EDIT: But that presumes that the talent at older companies is somehow subpar, less technically proficient, than it is at their younger counterparts. This seems unlikely if you look at Cisco’s list of patents. Ugghhhhh
- helmut_hed 13y ago
  I thought it was fairly balanced, and anyway the author is one of Those Damn Millenials.
  - sbierwagen 13y ago
    Authors don't write headlines, editors do.
angersock 13y ago
A big part of this, I think, has to do with the way the market is structured and the sorts of businesses that are getting rewarded. Once upon a time, right, engineering was really sensitive to time. We had to wirewrap circuits together, we had to punch cards, and in general we had to plan out what we did. Some thought leaders existed, usually little labs embedded in much larger companies (we all genuflect at Bell Labs, or Xerox PARC, or what have you). Nowadays the cost of prototyping something is super super low, even if it's hardware. Now, combine that with the "lean" meme going around, once which basically says (arguably, quite rightly so) that engineering is four or five orders removed from being a successful business. So, we see a lot of startups going for things which are not Big Ideas--and why should they, because Big Ideas are expensive to develop, because Big Ideas are hard to sell, and because Big Ideas are not profitable. What does sell well, reliably? Bread and circuses. Communication, and advertising, and search. Any sort of business where you can be technologically lazy and "disrupt" a market. Those are the things being selected for--not Big Ideas. Why don't you see these bright engineers working on public-sector stuff? Because .gov is insanely high barrier to entry, and in order to break into it you kind of have to assimilate. And it's a culture which is cynical, which isn't "lean" by any stretch, and which cares about tech even less than the next "X for Y with Z". Public sector stuff invariably has a bunch of egos and bullshit that have to be taken into account to do business, almost all of which is orthogonal to actually solving any problems. So, little surprise that people don't want to work on it. It's a lot of effort, and it doesn't change much, and it'll backslide the very second you turn your back on it--maybe even before. Medicine, incidentally, is exactly the same way--you've got to coddle a bunch of little snowflakes who are used to getting their way and who are (annoyingly enough) correct with enough frequency that they are considered elders on matters they know nothing about.
10098 13y ago
> young engineers ignore opportunities in less-sexy areas of tech like semiconductors, data storage and networking, [...] without Nvidia’s graphics processing unit, your BuzzFeed GIF is not going to make anyone laugh I don't know man. I mean, I'm fairly young (mid-twenties) and if someone told me I could work for nvidia I would take that opportunity. Things like graphics hardware/networking/data storage etc are a lot more interesting than 90% of the crap that most startups are working on, but they are also a lot harder too. The bar to entry is higher.
- nostrademons 13y ago
  It seems like a pretty good career move to work for an old-guard company - say Nvidia, or Yahoo, or Lockheed - and then go found a frivolous company. See eg. WhatsApp. You end up competing with all the young folks who don't have that breadth of engineering experience that you can only get by working in a big company with a fair number of greybeards, but playing in a hot market.
  - rgbrgb 13y ago
    How is building a robust SMS alternative frivolous? Is email frivolous? WhatsApp uses the internet to give low income families all over the world a first-class way to stay in touch. Writing communication apps for a Nokia N900 is not a sexy thing all the young kids are rushing to do.
    - nostrademons 13y ago
      ...and yet one of their main competitors is SnapChat, which the article specifically calls out as frivolous. I don't personally believe either one of them is frivolous, but I'm applying the standards of the article to this discussion. You can't have it both ways - if you believe Snapchat or Twitter are frivolous, WhatsApp's playing in the same market.
    - astrange 13y ago
      Since IM is just IM, you could have gone to the phone company and made SMS work. All other systems (Skype, LINE, Kik) are just second system effects with better monetization ideas.
ryanmarsh 13y ago
Like another commenter said "The substance/cool chasm is real" https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=7386061 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=7386061 It is and I'm loving it. The last thing I need is a wave of smart kids taking all of the low hanging fruit in un-cool flyover country (or what DHH has called the Fortune 1 Million). Right now I'm staring at an ocean that other people don't want to fish because the water is too cold. I'm working on something very unsexy that will hopefully buy me a yacht and a Ferrari. I have a list of things just like it, again, all very un-sexy. Let them have their sexting apps.
- Kluny 13y ago
  I feel exactly the same way, though you're clearly ahead of me. Right now I'm working in website development but trying to figure out how to get into the medical hardware industry, either with or without a software engineering degree. I'm signed up to take software engineering this fall, but if I can get the job I want without it... Anyway, can you mention the names of any unsexy companies that I ought to look at? PM if you don't want the smart kids to know about them :)
  - ryanmarsh 13y ago
    I'm a high school dropout. The people who take money out of their pocket and hand it to you for solving their problems don't care much about your education, they care that you understand their problem better than they do. Pick a "green light" market and start interviewing people in that market for their pain points. Something will emerge.
    - Hannan 13y ago
      >> Pick a "green light" market... Sorry, I haven't heard of this term before and a cursory search wasn't helpful. Do you mean a market that is commonly thought to be growing or something else?
- MicroBerto 13y ago
  Came here to say the exact same thing. I am working on something that I personally consider very sexy, but most hardcore techies do not. It brings about opportunity, even if what I'm doing is extremely boring to most others. I don't know if I needed to read 7000 words on the subject, but I overall agree with the thesis. I do know some brilliant guys working at old guard technical companies though -- those golden handcuffs are hard to cut! The problem is, this sector has created a different "bubble" of sorts, which has largely attracted a lot of "brogrammers" to the game who aren't in it for what most of us consider the right reasons. There seems to be a very low signal to noise ratio out there, and it's a huge reason why I don't bother a lot of startup meetups and the like. I don't believe the bubble will truly last. The ones left standing will be those who are truly passionate about it -- they have the knack -- especially if they can navigate hardware and software. Relevant: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=CmYDgncMhXw https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=CmYDgncMhXw
mcguire 13y ago
Heilmeier's Catechism, item 4 and 5: * Who cares? * If you're successful, what difference will it make? R.W. Hamming on problem selection: "[I]f what they were working on was not important, and was not likely to lead to important things, then why were they working on them?" "About four months later, my friend stopped me in the hall and remarked that my question had bothered him. He had spent the summer thinking about the important problems in his area, and while had had not changed his research he thought it was well worth the effort. I thanked him and kept walking. A few weeks later I noticed that he was made head of the department. Many years later he became a member of the National Academy of Engineering. The one person who could hear the question went on to do important things and all the others -- so far as I know -- did not do anything worth public attention."
Cookingboy 13y ago
This article got a lot of things right and a lot of things wrong, and I'm saying that as someone who did work for Cisco, then a YC startup, and is now working for Google. I think one of the fundamental differences in culture between the "old" and "new" is that the older businesses think about BUSINESS first and technology is the tool to thrive in that business, whether it's enterprise software of networking infrastructure. Where as many newer companies think about the PRODUCT first and business is merely a tool to prop up valuation and gather more resources to work on "cooler" products. Of course young engineers are more interested in products than businesses. How long can these companies last? I am not sure. Facebook will probably never make as much profit as Cisco but they are already valued at almost twice as much. But none of it matter until media hype and capital keeps flowing into the startup scene here in Silicon Valley. At least until the bubble bursts. I love Silicon Valley, but I'd hate for this place to turn into "app valley".
- noname123 13y ago
  > I love Silicon Valley, but I'd hate for this place to turn into "app valley". Isn't it good to sell shovels during a gold rush? I think now is the perfect time to build SaaS sites with "Enterprise/Startup/Hacker" pricing plans that function similar open-source tools. e.g., Heroku (AWS with more fluff), e-mail marketing tools, customized web hosting, Parse (backend for mobile apps), Airbrake.io (real time error reporting). I think it's a fad that people in startups are willing to pay for.
  - alaskamiller 13y ago
    Good to sell shovels in a gold rush but it's best to build a business that lasts.
bsder 13y ago
The problem is that the VC "lottery" creates a short horizon. The sexting app cashes out in 18-24 months. The semiconductor company won't cash out for 5-7 years, if ever. Want to fix the misallocation? Make the capital gains tax more than income tax instead of less. Suddenly all the smart boys will be off to companies that have profits instead of growth.
nathanvanfleet 13y ago
What a well written article. It really brilliantly summarizes why you really would and wouldn’t want to be part of the current tech field. I’ve been trying to go from IT at a University in Canada to working for companies like Apple. So far no luck, I feel like I’m 5 years behind every gold rush. There are so many articles these days stating “California is full, if you want to live here, bring your A game and a million dollars if you want to live someplace." "A few weeks ago, a programmer friend and I were talking about unhappiness, in particular the kind of unhappiness that arises when you are 21 and lavishly educated with the world at your feet. In the valley, it’s generally brought on by one of two causes: coming to the realization either that your start-up is completely trivial or that there are people your own age so knowledgeable and skilled that you may never catch up.” This is a great paragraph, again showing the dichotomy of power and impotency. I feel the same way having learned iOS development on my own but not feeling particularly “hireable” without a degree or full-time experience.
lnanek2 13y ago
> It provided an efficient solution to a niche problem — rich techies needed a ride home after a night on the town and couldn’t get one Wtf? Uber is better than a taxi in every way but price. It certainly isn't limited to just rich techies at night. I wonder if he has ever even tried calling a taxi in SF or the valley. In SF, half the time, it will never show up. It just picks up someone else on the way there. In the valley, half the companies you call up refuse you saying they have no one in that town right now. With Uber you get a ride immediately and can watch it come to you on the screen and down rate any driver that ditches you for an easier fare.
- helmut_hed 13y ago
  And with Uber X, it's even cheaper than cabs sometimes...
clinton_sf 13y ago
I don't see this as a "youth" problem. To reframe the discussion, this is about the ever present cycle of innovators that become incumbents and innovators that disrupt incumbents. If you haven't heard of Clayton Christensen's book, The Innovator's Dilemma, it's a good read. While some of the people mentioned in the article are young (Bicket and Miswas of Meraki are in their 20s/early 30s), other entrepreneurs in the news today are not: Acton and Koum of WhatsApp (recently bought by Facebook for $19B) are in their late 30s/early 40s. Google's founders, Larry and Sergey, are 40. Twitter: Jack Dorsey is 38. Biz Stone is 40. Evan Williams? 42. Steve Jobs' best work at Apple was when he was in his late 40s/early 50s. Arguably, the success of Apple today is due to Steve's leadership, not due to the company being saved by some young person who breathed new life into the company as this quote from the NYT article suggests: "The most innovative and effective companies are old-guard companies that have managed to reach out to the new guard, like Apple". (If you disagree with this, look at Apple between 1985-1997 and 2011-present, where plenty of young (and old) people worked at Apple) To simplify the claim here: there are those who know how to adapt to the current situation and those that don't (or can, but don't care). Some of those who know how to adapt are "old guard" and some are "new guard" -- it's not the age that is the determining factor. As for other items in the article, like the lack of young people "help[ing] cure cancer or fix healthcare.gov", there are plenty of old (older) people who don't want to work on those problems too. As for the claim that startups are the bastion of youth, that's not true either. I see plenty of 40-something founders and startup employees. While young startup people can easily afford to do a startup because their financial commitments are low (e.g., no mortgage or family to support), the older folks tend to do a startup for a similar reason: they've earned and saved a chunk of money where they're no longer worried about money and they can take on more risk.
im3w1l 13y ago
People don't understand numbers, on an emotional level. Saving just one animal from death feels more important than improving the way 100's of millions communicate. But is it really?
joesmo 13y ago
"Older engineers are not smart in the way that start-ups want them to be — or, if they are, they have reservations about the start-up lifestyle." The startup lifestyle is an unhealthy and dangerous where one essentially gives up one's life outside the startup. Can you blame these older engineers for not putting up with such bullshit (bullshit === startup lifestyle)? Startups should cease complaining about it. "Not smart in the way that start-ups want them to be" is ridiculous. Either one is smart or one isn't. This kind of thinking is just veiled discrimination from startups that want to overwork their employees and truly stupid writers who don't understand what they're writing about.
fatbat 13y ago
This quote of McDowell really highlighted the shift in mentality for me. Fast triumphs caution? "The problem is that they may be making more reasonable steps, but they’re making fewer steps. It’s hard to compete when you’re moving slower, even if you’re moving in a consistently correct direction."
parrotdoxical 13y ago
TL;DR: Grad student naval gazes about + waxes philosophical on occupation he feels predestined towards but actually has no real world experience with
digisth 13y ago
Now might be a good time to revisit a previous discussion on this: Schlep Blindness (https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=3465521 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=3465521) I'd also add (another part) of my take on it: - Creating the "new Snapchat" is a whole lot easier than curing cancer, which is not even a single disease. It's a constellation of diseases/conditions we still don't fully understand. - People need to eat, want to enjoy themselves, all that stuff. To do this, you need money. What's the easier way to do so? Making the new Snapchat. - People want raised status. You'd get a lot more from curing cancer(s), but it would take so much longer, and you're not guaranteed it'll really work. Making the new Snapchat is the much easier option. - You need piles of money to do research to cure cancers. You also need time. Short-termism (caused by the other side of accountability, transparency, and demands for ROI) means you may not get either of these. So where does the money come from, and is what you're getting enough? If it is, do you have time (and enough of the right type of skilled researchers) to do so? Modern medicine and research is not an individual endeavor; it requires teams, sometimes large ones. The incentives are just not there. Some of these things also do not always lend themselves to private investment; the risks are high, the time horizons are long, and the payoffs very uncertain. The way our current systems are set up, this is not an easy problem to solve. People who have already made their fortunes elsewhere (e.g., Elon Musk) and companies that have huge cash piles and lots of big ideas (like Google) seem like our current best bets until we collectively decide that we should fund more of these things via public money. My comment on the older article: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=3465754 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=3465754
Jonathan_Swift 13y ago
Please Don't Hit Me With Your Modem! === http://www.warplife.com/jobs/computer/ http://www.warplife.com/jobs/computer/

269 points by metermaid 13y ago

I thought this would be a perfect article for testing our some summarize tools :). According to the osx summarizer tool, the following came up when I set to 1 sentence: It’s the angst of an early hire at a start-up that only he realizes is failing; the angst of a founder who raises $5 million for his company and then finds out an acquaintance from college raised $10 million; the angst of someone who makes $100,000 at 22 but is still afraid that he may not be able to afford a house like the one he grew up in.

cstavish 13y ago
How can you access the summarize tool in modern OS X? I remember Apple doing away with it or otherwise moving it after ~10.5 or so.
- 72deluxe 13y ago
  I too would like to know this. Looks a brilliant feature. EDIT: Found! It is still there in System Preferences > Keyboard > Shortcuts > Services > Text > Summarize. It just isn't enabled by default.

raldi 13y ago

> The backlash in recent months against the self-involvement and frivolity of the new guard has actually been a long time coming. Instagram photos of opulent tech holiday parties have been lambasted, Google buses blockaded In what universe is a carpooling system that gets dozens of cars off the road and allows each passenger to reclaim ten working hours a week classified as frivolous?

deleted 13y ago
[deleted]
- melling 13y ago
  We are talking about California where they didn't build an extensively sufficient subway system.
  - stackcollision 13y ago
    It must suck to live in a third-world state.
    - zalzane 13y ago
      oh my god are you being serious? This isnt fucking reddit, take your sensationalism elsewhere. It's really easy to pick on transportation systems when you have absolutely no idea how spread out everything is.
  - jusben1369 13y ago
    Whenever you can land at an airport and take a train (BART) into the heart of the City in under 30 minutes you've got a subway system. BART could always be better (loop the Bay or go across the Golden Gate) but it is a real Subway system.
    - potatolicious 13y ago
      BART is more commuter rail than metro (what is usually meant by "subway"). It provides transport from other cities into the city (SF), but provides little coverage in the city itself. For people living in very specific parts of the city (see: the Mission) the lack of a real metro has made BART into a pseudo-subway, but at the end of the day it's still commuter rail (the seating arrangements in a BART car is telling as to its intended purpose). San Francisco doesn't really have a metro system - it has streetcars that don't have exclusive right of way through the majority of their run.
      - jusben1369 13y ago
        That's a good point.
gtirloni 13y ago
The impact of carpooling is minimal and there are much more efficient ways at public transportation. Carpooling is a band-aid unlikely to reach the critical mass required to turn around the nightmare that public transportation is.
- akgerber 13y ago
  Those more-efficient means of public transportation (commuter trains) only work if the destination is within walking distance of the train station. But Silicon Valley communities make it illegal to build office towers in their downtowns, so the existing rail transport isn't practical to commute from SF to Peninsula office parks.
dalke 13y ago
Have you not been following any of the discussion about this topic? Here are three frequently voiced objections: 1) If the city decided to put a new bus route outside of your house, with a bus every 10 minutes for the morning and evening rush hours, then you would expect there to be public meetings where people can voice concerns about the routing, increase in large traffic, noise, and so on. Why should private companies not be subject to the same sort of democratic decision making on how to use the local public roads and bus stops? 2) Some people moved to the city in part because of the knowledge that the private bus system would be there. Without those buses, they would have chosen somewhere else precisely because the lack of parking would have made the commute impossible. It's hard then to say that each bus replaces a dozen cars, when those people might not be there if there were no buses. 3) If getting cars off the road and reclaiming commuting time were paramount, then why not rezone the areas around Mountain View, Cupertino, etc. for medium density housing, like SF-style row houses, instead of the current preference for suburban detached housing? Then people could walk or bike to work in a matter of minutes. The densities for SF, MV, and C are 17K, 6K, and 5K/sq mile respectively, so there's plenty of opportunity for local population growth. Instead, the local (and democratic) resistance to zoning change in those smaller cities causes increased prices and bus traffic elsewhere, but the people in SF have no way to push back and cause the zoning laws of the smaller cities to change.
- raldi 13y ago
  I think you need to look up the definition of the word "frivolous".
  - dalke 13y ago
    I thought I addressed your "frivolous" criterion directly. 1) It may be "frivolous" if the routing is only made based on the needs of the commuters, and has no input from the people who live on those routes. In an extreme case, if a bus goes down a narrow street in order to save one able-bodied person one block of walking, then that part is definitely frivolous even with the overall savings. Without that local input, neither you nor I have an idea of which parts are frivolous and which are not. And that local input has not occurred. 2) You made assumptions which might not be true. If the net effect of adding buses did not reduce car traffic at all, then your presumed advantages don't exist, and hence the effort is "frivolous." 3) If the goal is to reduce commute time and get cars off the streets, then long-distance bus traffic is not the solution. Improved access to nearby housing is the solution. Instead, long-term busing is a frivolous waste of money which should instead go towards zoning changes. But that involves getting into long-term local politics, which business people don't like doing. Instead, they would rather spend money on a technical solution which is achievable in the short-term, even if it doesn't really help your stated goals.
king_jester 13y ago
The Google bus issue is more about the self-involvement and less about the frivolity. Backlash against Google buses is about gentrification and the fact that a well paid group of workers comes in from a variety of locations and then dominates local politics.
- davidf18 13y ago
  The real issue here is the higher costs of housing caused by the politics of zoning that creates artificial scarcity in housing. In a healthy market, there would be increased construction to offset the increased demand caused by people with higher incomes.
  - 205guy 13y ago
    Except if you have a neighborhood full of nice row houses (almost historic by American standards), friendly local businesses, etc., then the "politics of zoning" by the local residents has tended to the status quo, which they seem to like. In that case, where would you be able to increase construction? People want to live in those nice neighborhoods, not some new high rise in a "redeveloped" area. So the newcomers with google salaries buy up and price out the current residents of those pleasant neighborhoods. This creates friction. Why should all systems be designed for growth?
    - dalke 13y ago
      I've seen that the frequent opposition to zoning changes protests the replacement of single-family or row houses with "high rises", as you did. Why did you chose to use an extreme as contrast? That's not the only alternative. What about if they are replaced with a low-rise, or a mid-rise? These offer higher density than row houses but without the same visual impact as a high rise. Some in Manhattan love their 5-story brownstones. I lived in a city with lots of 4- and 5- story buildings, and think that - if well designed - they have a very nice feel to them. As to the "why", our economics system says that (in general) when there is demand either prices go up or supply expands. If the prices go up, then people who can't afford the new prices must move. Our primary economics system isn't really designed with people's emotions in mind, so this can cause stress and turmoil, leading even to protests and violence. One fix is to enforce rent controls, which leads to a different set of issues. If we don't want to force people to move, then we either must make SF less attractive ("protests and violence" can help!) in order to reduce demand, or build new housing to increase the supply. Not all systems are designed for growth. As a famous example (at least for beer aficionados) the Trappists breweries only serve the purpose of supporting their monastic way of life. The prices aren't raised to match demand, so some people end up buying and reselling the beer for a much higher price. As a remedy, the monks limit how much a single person can buy in a period of time. There are other economics models which may fit SF better. For example, in the co-op system, the residents own a share of the organization which owns the row houses, or the apartment. They can decide as a whole if they want to, for example, add a new floor to the building or gut and replace the building. Because it's a larger organization, with its own financials, it can afford to take on a larger task like that. The residents would want this because the larger number of people in the building would likely lead to a lower rent. While with single family ownership it's a lot harder to make this decision. This is a very different model than SF's row houses. I'm curious about how the choice of economic model affects how a city might transform itself, but can't do more than hypothesize about it like I just did.
lgieron 13y ago
Exactly, in my home town there's a large car factory (Fiat's), which is providing dozens of buses for its workers every day, and yet nobody is calling those workers entitled egoists.

ZanyProgrammer 13y ago

Too bad the article only gives a cursory nod towards ageism. that is a serious problem-the rest of the article was sorta meh and a bit inside baseball wanking.

applecore 13y ago

> The talent — and there's a ton of it — flowing into Silicon Valley cares little about improving these infrastructural elements. What they care about is coming up with more web apps. Is there evidence that this problem actually exists? This seems likely to be a manufactured story. The press simply isn't going to write as much about Meraki as they would a popular, consumer-oriented web or mobile startup. $1.2 billion is a big number (for the acquisition of Meraki), but ultimately it's a "boring" business that sells routers. It's never going to appeal to more than a small audience.

kelvin0 13y ago
Recently, many multi-billion dollars acquisitions made by Google/Yahoo/Facebook have had more than their share of Media attention. It`s not difficult to see where the spotlight shines these days. Hence the seeming reason why so many 'young' people would also want to emulate the acquired Startups ... no?
jpmattia 13y ago
> Is there evidence that this problem actually exists? and later on: > but it's ultimately a boring business that sells routers. The use of the word "boring" should answer your question. There was a time in the valley that stuff was far-out, interesting, and cool. I know, hard to believe, but I saw it happen, ancient history that it is. But hey, there was a time when being a mechE building cars was the ultimate in cool. Things change.
mathattack 13y ago
I don't think Cisco's problems are a lack of engineers. If it is, they can always pay them more, or train their managers to be good leaders. I agree - every time I hear, "People aren't going to work in X?" I wonder if there is a systemic imbalance, or something else at work. If consumers want to pay for apps, who are we as central planners to say otherwise? Maybe we shouldn't subsidize these things, but let the market decide. You could argue we should be funding basic research, but that's not routers.
aspensmonster 13y ago
Well, I'd love to be doing work on the hardware side of things. I'd love to even intern --despite the fact that I'm graduating-- at a company like Freescale or Intel or Qualcomm or Cisco or AMD. As long as I could continue to pay the bills --and feed the student loan monster-- I'd continue to live as a student. I'd consider it a fair trade-off while I was grinding for XP in a field that, for all intents and purposes, can't really be done in your garage any more. Yes, we can all play with 7400 chips and build radios and probe away at some cheap electronic gizmo, but nobody is going to be fabricating 45nm, 6-layer, N-core, superscalar, pipelined, cached, billion-transistor count CPU semiconductors in their basement labs. And nothing but years of experience at the interface of design, verification, and fabrication will ever produce a skilled engineer in those fields that understands all of the delicate interdependencies of that technological pipeline. It should go without saying at this point that no, I don't have any meaningful experience in the current state-of-the-art of semiconductor design, verification, or fabrication and I honestly don't see how it's reasonable to expect me to. Of course, while I've never had a professional software engineering gig either, I do have previous experience with development and other paid jobs in supporting roles like systems administration. I sometimes think that it's simply a consequence of the barrier to entry being so relatively low. Do you have a computer (or even access to one that you can install software on) and access to the net? Congratulations. You have everything you need to start learning about concepts and tools that are immediately applicable and relevant to the field. And they're Free as in Freedom to boot! So long as you have the time, you have all you need to get to a point where your horns aren't entirely green and the spaces behind your ears aren't entirely soaked. With guidance from more senior devs, you'll get to their level too in no time at all. But it seems no matter what I do, it's always the software guys that are interested in talking. They're so interested, it seems, that I don't even have to go to them. They'll come to me. Which is honestly shocking, given that I still consider myself a very sophomoric developer. By contrast, even getting the hardware folks to show up seems impossible. There was a recent STEM job fair at my university (Texas State) that really ought to have been billed as the Computer Science job fair. Sure, Freescale and National Instruments were there, but there weren't any members from their hardware or verification teams. It was all software and IT. Samsung was there, but I honestly don't know why. I didn't need a hard copy of the job description that was printed from the online job site. Apple was there, but they were only looking for at-home tech support. Intel wasn't even there. AMD wasn't even there. NVIDIA wasn't even there. Cisco wasn't even there. And those are all companies with established offices in the Austin area. My heart may be in hardware, but I still love software. And guess who's hiring. And guess who's got student loans to pay off :D tl;dr: Yes, I'd say the problem does exist. And perhaps the reason why web apps are so dominant and "infrastructural elements" so maligned is that the barriers to entry are so different in each field, and the corresponding willingness to train in each field seemingly reversed.

davidw 13y ago

I've mentioned this in the past, but I was happy to get out of that area. Padova, where I live now, has both young and old people, rich and poor, people who have always been here and immigrants. Most people work in different industries. It feels a lot more varied, and somehow more "real" than the bay area.

slothario 13y ago
I was a sciences undergrad at Stanford and now I've ventured into programming - at a decidedly uncool industry, in a relatively uncool metropolis - but I don't want to go back to Silcon Valley for the life of me. It just seems like such a hotbed of striving and buzzwords. Maybe it's unfair, but that's just how it seems to me. Here, at my corporate job, people seem to respect that I'm my own person and can work 40 hours a week. Silicon Valley seems rife with conformity that tries to disguise itself as freedom. Think outside of the box, as long as you're wearing the same clothes and using the same buzzwords as everyone else.
deleted 13y ago
[deleted]
- davidw 13y ago
  It's not about age: Venice, which isn't far from here is very much in the "unreal" category.

nakedrobot2 13y ago

As every year goes by, the Bay Area seems more and more an inbred cesspool of narcissism. (Never mind the ridiculous cost of living, crime problem, homeless people, and pitiful public transport) Good place to visit but... well, no need to live there!

lucasnemeth 13y ago

This article make it seems that all infrastructural problems lies in the hardware world. The younger generation do care about problems that lies beneath the application, but a lot of those problems deal more with software than with hardware these days. Besides that, we've been moving to a open source infrastructure, where a larger number of companies that depends on softwares develop them in a collaborative way, we have moved from the proprietary paradigm that existed in the 90's. A simple texting app may depend on some innovative database to scale, and will contribute to it's development.

Dewie 13y ago

> The other night I was studying late for a midterm exam — I am a grad student in computer science at Columbia University — Heh, nice name-dropping.

scarmig 13y ago

Frivolous, perhaps, but the shitty sexting apps and the like[1] are low hanging fruit where we can afford to be cutting edge. It's best to view the current Silicon Valley euphoria as a testbed for new technologies and labor processes and as an incubation chamber for the next generation working class. All the awesome stuff the writer wants will happen in the next decade or two, and most of the technologies and technologists involved will have their roots in the present frothy period. It's also best to think comparatively: sure, maybe some capital is being allocated stupidly [2]. But lets compare to the second half of the 20th century and its great technological achievements. Technological development was uniformly directed toward the goals of state-building and war-waging. Given a choice between better sexting apps and barbarism, it's not even a real choice. One is clearly a significantly negative-sum game, and the other is neutral to mildly positive. We only ended up ahead after the 20th century through a combination of good luck and technology's tendency to adapt across domains and be used in novel ways. [1] A minority of the start ups that actually exist, but let's grant it for the sake of argument. [2] The article makes this entirely about the allocation of labor, even going so far as to imply it's character defects that cause workers to go work on stupid things instead of meaningful things. But fuck that noise: capital is the driving force here. I've never met an engineer who would prefer working on sexting apps to working on deep, fundamental problems. But our present system rewards capital for pursuing short-term profits at the expense of long-term economic growth. If you want that to change, fix the system. Hate the game, not the player.

givehimagun 13y ago
I'd like to expand your comments a bit further. Not only are these ideas low hanging fruit but they are low risk, innovation test beds. Imagine trying to do this kind of work on a medical device that could kill someone...you can't be nearly as wild and crazy. The internet is always going to be productized with ideas that are cheap to stand up, low risk and scalable....that's the beauty of it.

cushychicken 13y ago

This whole article is another iteration of the whole "the latest generation sucks and is ruining everything" metanarrative that's been quite popular in the last few years. If companies like Cisco wanted to hire engineers who are going to sexier companies like web startups, maybe they should learn a little more about what web startups have to offer to a hire. Namely, the autonomy to develop a solution to a problem in one's own way, rather than being a single cog in a gigantic organizational wheel.

datamatt 13y ago

"without Nvidia’s graphics processing unit, your BuzzFeed GIF is not going to make anyone laugh." Err....

72deluxe 13y ago
Surely GIFs are hardware accelerated these days? Great article, right?
- aspensmonster 13y ago
  Oh FFS. Where's the principle of charity when you need it? YES. Without graphics processing of one form or another, on one chip or another, over one cable or bus or another, to one screen or terminal or another, your GIF absolutely won't be visible. Or your PNG, or your JPG, or your desktop or movie or e-book. Nothing will be visible.
  - 72deluxe 13y ago
    Maybe I was a bit harsh. Now on to create something that's both cool and really matters (satisfying both the kids and the elders). If you're viewing GIFs on Windows and it is drawn using GDI or GDI+, nothing is accelerated. It's bust.
10098 13y ago
you know all major browsers use hardware acceleration to draw stuff right?

72deluxe 13y ago

Ah but what hardware will these new web apps use? How will they get their network packets across from A to B if not going through the expensive Cisco hardware? They all need each other.

abvdasker 13y ago

The amount of hyperbole and intentional provocation of anxiety in this article makes me think the writer isn't really looking to inform anyone of anything. Instead she just regurgitates one tech stereotype after another like it's news.

nrao123 13y ago
I literally read this SF Gate article on how out of town writers should write the stereotypical article about SF an hour before I read the NYT article. I smiled to myself when I saw the resemblances http://m.sfgate.com/living/article/Handy-dandy-guide-to-writing-about-SF-if-you-re-5307139.php http://m.sfgate.com/living/article/Handy-dandy-guide-to-writ...

scott_s 13y ago

If this phenomenon exists, I'm not convinced it's a problem. We've only begun to explore what these core technologies enable. Even if hardware was mostly stagnant for, say, a decade, I still think we would see innovation in software and how software is integrated into society.

powera 13y ago

I stopped reading this when I got to "Why do these smart, quantitatively trained engineers, who could help cure cancer or fix healthcare.gov, want to work for a sexting app?" - there was the cover article in Time Magazine not less than 2 weeks ago about these very engineers fixing healthcare.gov, and describing why they don't do it permanently (government procurement is awful and almost always unrelated to actual skill for websites, and the healthcare.gov site is generally described as incredibly badly written by the initial contractors). The whole article reads like a narrative that is grabbing random anecdotes to support a point, even when the facts say otherwise.

Vervious 13y ago
> The whole article reads like a narrative that is grabbing random anecdotes to support a point, even when the facts say otherwise. I'm curious what facts you're talking about. The very problems you point out about healthcare.gov support part of the author's argument - that today's tech environment rewards the creation of a sexting app over more groundbreaking work, and therefore youth do the former. From my perspective, at least, few of Silicon Valley's startups will have a lasting dent in the human world. Funding for spaceship technology is limited, more people are working on note-taking apps than cleaning the air, and the hype is all on Snapchat (which does have a huge valuation). The real issue is how we change it; change inevitably comes from youth. And if today's youth come out of college excited about sexting apps, I have little trust in a better future. That being said, I'm not in a position to say much, being a college student myself.
- fantnn 13y ago
  Government projects of x size require companies with a, b, c qualifications, such as size, income and other factors. I've worked for 2 such companies before, and it was a nightmare of micromanagement, changing requirements, and general feeling of "what I do isn't having an effect on the world." You clearly have never worked at such a place before or you'd understand.
- zanny 13y ago
  Then blame consumers and investors that fund sexting over space travel or cancer cures, because that is why all the entrepreneurs jump on it. If there were monetary demand for a cancer cure, and I mean real billions a year in venture capital into R&D on the subject, that nobody was using - you would see a dearth of sexting apps, at least for a while, while that VC funding is consumed. Effort goes where the money is, because your legacy is a long term problem, and your ability to eat is todays issue.

michaelochurch 13y ago

This isn't a "youth problem". 20-year-olds and 50-year-olds aren't natural enemies, and most people don't think that way. Blaming this on one side is ridiculous. When 50-year-old chickenhawk VCs only want to fund 25-year-olds, that's not the fault of one generation or the other. (Can you blame it on the young for taking the opportunity? No. Can you blame it on the old when it's only a few making those decisions that are hurting most of them? No.) The real issue is the cool/substance chasm, which the article describes well. If you want substance, you can work for the government or a big corporation... your salary growth will average 5% per year, your advancement will be political, and you'll probably never be able to afford a house in the Bay Area or New York. You'll also be at the mercy of corporate actions (mergers, etc.) that might move you out of your fun R&D job and into the basement. If you play for cool, there's a 90% chance you waste years of your life you can never get back, a 9% chance you break even on opportunity cost, a 0.9% chance that you never have to work again (after wearing yourself out over 10 years of a manic-depressive startup existence, and "retirement" being an artifact of adrenal exhaustion, moderate wealth, and apathy), and a 0.1% chance of getting so rich that it was actually worth it. What we need is a middle path. We have the golden skill that makes us capable of 15-40% annual growth (in salary, economic value, etc.) Between criminally inefficient large organizations (which produce "substance", but inefficiently and with painful wastes of effort) and flash-seeking careerist venture capitalists ("cool")-- a path that might "average" 50%/year career returns but with so much noise that the median outcome is poor-- no one will let us. That's the problem.

oskarth 13y ago
This way of thinking about it is interesting. For many people, me included, entrepreneurship is first and foremost a existential choice. Do you have some examples of what this middle path might look like? For the entrepreneurial-minded, is it different from what is commonly viewed as "lifestyle business" or bootstrapped revenue-first side-project (that might later turn into a solid small-scale business)?
- michaelochurch 13y ago
  Mid-risk/mid-growth businesses. Designed to grow at 15-40% per year and hire selectively (see: Valve). Can have a desirable culture (e.g. open allocation) that wouldn't survive 75%/year personnel growth. Too risky for bank loans (personal liability) but not the billions-or-bollocks long-shot gambits that are career-making for VCs. But still potentially very profitable if VCs took a portfolio mentality rather than a careerist "I want the next Facebook because of what it'll do for my reputation" approach.

zenbowman 13y ago

The author fails to see that while a large number of apps may be frivolous, we've also ended up with a world that allows collaboration at a global scale. The nature of engineering is changing, and what the last decade of "software innovation" has done is evolve an engineering practice that is superior to any that came before, even if it has only been used to build frivolous apps. I've worked as a government contractor and have been exposed to the inner workings of many of the companies building what the author would consider serious technology - jet planes, submarines and the like. And I think it is fair to say that the tools they use and the way they use them are clearly from the 70s - this is not a criticism, they create impressive technology, but I believe that once the practices of modern software development begin to take root in those industries, we'll be exposed the innovation we've actually created. facebook may not be considered a serious app, but certainly the technology facebook has built will start being used in other "serious" sectors in a few years, and then people will realize where the innovation lay. Things like proper version control, large-scale data warehousing etc will change serious industries, the frivolous apps are just a testbed in which we create them because the risks of failure are low. Cliffs: Web technology is serious business, even if what it is used for is currently frivolous

ryandrake 13y ago
> jet planes, submarines and the like. And I think it is fair to say that the tools they use and the way they use them are clearly from the 70s - this is not a criticism, they create impressive technology, but I believe that once the practices of modern software development begin to take root in those industries, we'll be exposed the innovation we've actually created. Or, we'll just end up with jet planes with zero day exploits and submarines that have to be patched every month when the next sprint gets pushed to deployment.

dpweb 13y ago

As a 40 something Gen Xer, it's tough to generalize about the younger generation. I detest arrogance and self-entitlement and that's definitely in the air, but I admire how smart these kids are and their energy. It's a wide world, there's room enough for both curing cancer and sexing apps.

dkrich 13y ago

I think there's a major flaw in the argument that "these people could be curing cancer!" To have any hope of doing something as ambitious as curing cancer you presumably have to have an unusually large amount of interest in the subject. Like enough to devote your entire education and career to. By taking jobs at tech companies they are demonstrating that they don't possess this necessary quality. Few people do. And as for the healthcare.gov debacle- being smart and a great programmer has absolutely no benefit when it comes to fixing that site. Yes there are likely major technical issues, but the main problems derive from layer upon layer of bureaucracy and policy that any project of that scope entails. I would advise smart young people to stay far, far away from any project of that nature, lest any will you had to do something meaningful will get sucked out of your body fairly quickly.

theorique 13y ago
an unusually large amount of interest in the subject Not to mention talent in the area. People aren't fungible, especially not later on in their careers. For example, Steve Jobs (pbuh) is not interchangeable with Eric Lander, even though both of them are/were highly creative and driven people who reached amazing success in their field. The kid who's a natural programmer and working on the latest messaging app or Flappy Bird would never have been happy doing bench work to cure cancer.
- gaius 13y ago
  Jobs talent was 100% fungible - taking the credit for others work.

sbierwagen 13y ago

Man I hate the framing on that headline. I hate silicon valley just as much as anyone else who doesn't live there, and I'd gladly upvote an anti-valley piece; but when an old media outlet blames it on Those Damn Millenials right in the title, it leaves a bad taste in my mouth. EDIT: But that presumes that the talent at older companies is somehow subpar, less technically proficient, than it is at their younger counterparts. This seems unlikely if you look at Cisco’s list of patents. Ugghhhhh

helmut_hed 13y ago
I thought it was fairly balanced, and anyway the author is one of Those Damn Millenials.
- sbierwagen 13y ago
  Authors don't write headlines, editors do.

angersock 13y ago

A big part of this, I think, has to do with the way the market is structured and the sorts of businesses that are getting rewarded. Once upon a time, right, engineering was really sensitive to time. We had to wirewrap circuits together, we had to punch cards, and in general we had to plan out what we did. Some thought leaders existed, usually little labs embedded in much larger companies (we all genuflect at Bell Labs, or Xerox PARC, or what have you). Nowadays the cost of prototyping something is super super low, even if it's hardware. Now, combine that with the "lean" meme going around, once which basically says (arguably, quite rightly so) that engineering is four or five orders removed from being a successful business. So, we see a lot of startups going for things which are not Big Ideas--and why should they, because Big Ideas are expensive to develop, because Big Ideas are hard to sell, and because Big Ideas are not profitable. What does sell well, reliably? Bread and circuses. Communication, and advertising, and search. Any sort of business where you can be technologically lazy and "disrupt" a market. Those are the things being selected for--not Big Ideas. Why don't you see these bright engineers working on public-sector stuff? Because .gov is insanely high barrier to entry, and in order to break into it you kind of have to assimilate. And it's a culture which is cynical, which isn't "lean" by any stretch, and which cares about tech even less than the next "X for Y with Z". Public sector stuff invariably has a bunch of egos and bullshit that have to be taken into account to do business, almost all of which is orthogonal to actually solving any problems. So, little surprise that people don't want to work on it. It's a lot of effort, and it doesn't change much, and it'll backslide the very second you turn your back on it--maybe even before. Medicine, incidentally, is exactly the same way--you've got to coddle a bunch of little snowflakes who are used to getting their way and who are (annoyingly enough) correct with enough frequency that they are considered elders on matters they know nothing about.

10098 13y ago

> young engineers ignore opportunities in less-sexy areas of tech like semiconductors, data storage and networking, [...] without Nvidia’s graphics processing unit, your BuzzFeed GIF is not going to make anyone laugh I don't know man. I mean, I'm fairly young (mid-twenties) and if someone told me I could work for nvidia I would take that opportunity. Things like graphics hardware/networking/data storage etc are a lot more interesting than 90% of the crap that most startups are working on, but they are also a lot harder too. The bar to entry is higher.

nostrademons 13y ago
It seems like a pretty good career move to work for an old-guard company - say Nvidia, or Yahoo, or Lockheed - and then go found a frivolous company. See eg. WhatsApp. You end up competing with all the young folks who don't have that breadth of engineering experience that you can only get by working in a big company with a fair number of greybeards, but playing in a hot market.
- rgbrgb 13y ago
  How is building a robust SMS alternative frivolous? Is email frivolous? WhatsApp uses the internet to give low income families all over the world a first-class way to stay in touch. Writing communication apps for a Nokia N900 is not a sexy thing all the young kids are rushing to do.
  - nostrademons 13y ago
    ...and yet one of their main competitors is SnapChat, which the article specifically calls out as frivolous. I don't personally believe either one of them is frivolous, but I'm applying the standards of the article to this discussion. You can't have it both ways - if you believe Snapchat or Twitter are frivolous, WhatsApp's playing in the same market.
  - astrange 13y ago
    Since IM is just IM, you could have gone to the phone company and made SMS work. All other systems (Skype, LINE, Kik) are just second system effects with better monetization ideas.

ryanmarsh 13y ago

Like another commenter said "The substance/cool chasm is real" https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=7386061 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=7386061 It is and I'm loving it. The last thing I need is a wave of smart kids taking all of the low hanging fruit in un-cool flyover country (or what DHH has called the Fortune 1 Million). Right now I'm staring at an ocean that other people don't want to fish because the water is too cold. I'm working on something very unsexy that will hopefully buy me a yacht and a Ferrari. I have a list of things just like it, again, all very un-sexy. Let them have their sexting apps.

Kluny 13y ago
I feel exactly the same way, though you're clearly ahead of me. Right now I'm working in website development but trying to figure out how to get into the medical hardware industry, either with or without a software engineering degree. I'm signed up to take software engineering this fall, but if I can get the job I want without it... Anyway, can you mention the names of any unsexy companies that I ought to look at? PM if you don't want the smart kids to know about them :)
- ryanmarsh 13y ago
  I'm a high school dropout. The people who take money out of their pocket and hand it to you for solving their problems don't care much about your education, they care that you understand their problem better than they do. Pick a "green light" market and start interviewing people in that market for their pain points. Something will emerge.
  - Hannan 13y ago
    >> Pick a "green light" market... Sorry, I haven't heard of this term before and a cursory search wasn't helpful. Do you mean a market that is commonly thought to be growing or something else?
MicroBerto 13y ago
Came here to say the exact same thing. I am working on something that I personally consider very sexy, but most hardcore techies do not. It brings about opportunity, even if what I'm doing is extremely boring to most others. I don't know if I needed to read 7000 words on the subject, but I overall agree with the thesis. I do know some brilliant guys working at old guard technical companies though -- those golden handcuffs are hard to cut! The problem is, this sector has created a different "bubble" of sorts, which has largely attracted a lot of "brogrammers" to the game who aren't in it for what most of us consider the right reasons. There seems to be a very low signal to noise ratio out there, and it's a huge reason why I don't bother a lot of startup meetups and the like. I don't believe the bubble will truly last. The ones left standing will be those who are truly passionate about it -- they have the knack -- especially if they can navigate hardware and software. Relevant: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=CmYDgncMhXw https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=CmYDgncMhXw

mcguire 13y ago

Heilmeier's Catechism, item 4 and 5: * Who cares? * If you're successful, what difference will it make? R.W. Hamming on problem selection: "[I]f what they were working on was not important, and was not likely to lead to important things, then why were they working on them?" "About four months later, my friend stopped me in the hall and remarked that my question had bothered him. He had spent the summer thinking about the important problems in his area, and while had had not changed his research he thought it was well worth the effort. I thanked him and kept walking. A few weeks later I noticed that he was made head of the department. Many years later he became a member of the National Academy of Engineering. The one person who could hear the question went on to do important things and all the others -- so far as I know -- did not do anything worth public attention."

Cookingboy 13y ago

This article got a lot of things right and a lot of things wrong, and I'm saying that as someone who did work for Cisco, then a YC startup, and is now working for Google. I think one of the fundamental differences in culture between the "old" and "new" is that the older businesses think about BUSINESS first and technology is the tool to thrive in that business, whether it's enterprise software of networking infrastructure. Where as many newer companies think about the PRODUCT first and business is merely a tool to prop up valuation and gather more resources to work on "cooler" products. Of course young engineers are more interested in products than businesses. How long can these companies last? I am not sure. Facebook will probably never make as much profit as Cisco but they are already valued at almost twice as much. But none of it matter until media hype and capital keeps flowing into the startup scene here in Silicon Valley. At least until the bubble bursts. I love Silicon Valley, but I'd hate for this place to turn into "app valley".

noname123 13y ago
> I love Silicon Valley, but I'd hate for this place to turn into "app valley". Isn't it good to sell shovels during a gold rush? I think now is the perfect time to build SaaS sites with "Enterprise/Startup/Hacker" pricing plans that function similar open-source tools. e.g., Heroku (AWS with more fluff), e-mail marketing tools, customized web hosting, Parse (backend for mobile apps), Airbrake.io (real time error reporting). I think it's a fad that people in startups are willing to pay for.
- alaskamiller 13y ago
  Good to sell shovels in a gold rush but it's best to build a business that lasts.

bsder 13y ago

The problem is that the VC "lottery" creates a short horizon. The sexting app cashes out in 18-24 months. The semiconductor company won't cash out for 5-7 years, if ever. Want to fix the misallocation? Make the capital gains tax more than income tax instead of less. Suddenly all the smart boys will be off to companies that have profits instead of growth.

nathanvanfleet 13y ago

What a well written article. It really brilliantly summarizes why you really would and wouldn’t want to be part of the current tech field. I’ve been trying to go from IT at a University in Canada to working for companies like Apple. So far no luck, I feel like I’m 5 years behind every gold rush. There are so many articles these days stating “California is full, if you want to live here, bring your A game and a million dollars if you want to live someplace." "A few weeks ago, a programmer friend and I were talking about unhappiness, in particular the kind of unhappiness that arises when you are 21 and lavishly educated with the world at your feet. In the valley, it’s generally brought on by one of two causes: coming to the realization either that your start-up is completely trivial or that there are people your own age so knowledgeable and skilled that you may never catch up.” This is a great paragraph, again showing the dichotomy of power and impotency. I feel the same way having learned iOS development on my own but not feeling particularly “hireable” without a degree or full-time experience.

lnanek2 13y ago

> It provided an efficient solution to a niche problem — rich techies needed a ride home after a night on the town and couldn’t get one Wtf? Uber is better than a taxi in every way but price. It certainly isn't limited to just rich techies at night. I wonder if he has ever even tried calling a taxi in SF or the valley. In SF, half the time, it will never show up. It just picks up someone else on the way there. In the valley, half the companies you call up refuse you saying they have no one in that town right now. With Uber you get a ride immediately and can watch it come to you on the screen and down rate any driver that ditches you for an easier fare.

helmut_hed 13y ago
And with Uber X, it's even cheaper than cabs sometimes...

clinton_sf 13y ago

I don't see this as a "youth" problem. To reframe the discussion, this is about the ever present cycle of innovators that become incumbents and innovators that disrupt incumbents. If you haven't heard of Clayton Christensen's book, The Innovator's Dilemma, it's a good read. While some of the people mentioned in the article are young (Bicket and Miswas of Meraki are in their 20s/early 30s), other entrepreneurs in the news today are not: Acton and Koum of WhatsApp (recently bought by Facebook for $19B) are in their late 30s/early 40s. Google's founders, Larry and Sergey, are 40. Twitter: Jack Dorsey is 38. Biz Stone is 40. Evan Williams? 42. Steve Jobs' best work at Apple was when he was in his late 40s/early 50s. Arguably, the success of Apple today is due to Steve's leadership, not due to the company being saved by some young person who breathed new life into the company as this quote from the NYT article suggests: "The most innovative and effective companies are old-guard companies that have managed to reach out to the new guard, like Apple". (If you disagree with this, look at Apple between 1985-1997 and 2011-present, where plenty of young (and old) people worked at Apple) To simplify the claim here: there are those who know how to adapt to the current situation and those that don't (or can, but don't care). Some of those who know how to adapt are "old guard" and some are "new guard" -- it's not the age that is the determining factor. As for other items in the article, like the lack of young people "help[ing] cure cancer or fix healthcare.gov", there are plenty of old (older) people who don't want to work on those problems too. As for the claim that startups are the bastion of youth, that's not true either. I see plenty of 40-something founders and startup employees. While young startup people can easily afford to do a startup because their financial commitments are low (e.g., no mortgage or family to support), the older folks tend to do a startup for a similar reason: they've earned and saved a chunk of money where they're no longer worried about money and they can take on more risk.

im3w1l 13y ago

People don't understand numbers, on an emotional level. Saving just one animal from death feels more important than improving the way 100's of millions communicate. But is it really?

joesmo 13y ago

"Older engineers are not smart in the way that start-ups want them to be — or, if they are, they have reservations about the start-up lifestyle." The startup lifestyle is an unhealthy and dangerous where one essentially gives up one's life outside the startup. Can you blame these older engineers for not putting up with such bullshit (bullshit === startup lifestyle)? Startups should cease complaining about it. "Not smart in the way that start-ups want them to be" is ridiculous. Either one is smart or one isn't. This kind of thinking is just veiled discrimination from startups that want to overwork their employees and truly stupid writers who don't understand what they're writing about.

fatbat 13y ago

This quote of McDowell really highlighted the shift in mentality for me. Fast triumphs caution? "The problem is that they may be making more reasonable steps, but they’re making fewer steps. It’s hard to compete when you’re moving slower, even if you’re moving in a consistently correct direction."

parrotdoxical 13y ago

TL;DR: Grad student naval gazes about + waxes philosophical on occupation he feels predestined towards but actually has no real world experience with

digisth 13y ago

Now might be a good time to revisit a previous discussion on this: Schlep Blindness (https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=3465521 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=3465521) I'd also add (another part) of my take on it: - Creating the "new Snapchat" is a whole lot easier than curing cancer, which is not even a single disease. It's a constellation of diseases/conditions we still don't fully understand. - People need to eat, want to enjoy themselves, all that stuff. To do this, you need money. What's the easier way to do so? Making the new Snapchat. - People want raised status. You'd get a lot more from curing cancer(s), but it would take so much longer, and you're not guaranteed it'll really work. Making the new Snapchat is the much easier option. - You need piles of money to do research to cure cancers. You also need time. Short-termism (caused by the other side of accountability, transparency, and demands for ROI) means you may not get either of these. So where does the money come from, and is what you're getting enough? If it is, do you have time (and enough of the right type of skilled researchers) to do so? Modern medicine and research is not an individual endeavor; it requires teams, sometimes large ones. The incentives are just not there. Some of these things also do not always lend themselves to private investment; the risks are high, the time horizons are long, and the payoffs very uncertain. The way our current systems are set up, this is not an easy problem to solve. People who have already made their fortunes elsewhere (e.g., Elon Musk) and companies that have huge cash piles and lots of big ideas (like Google) seem like our current best bets until we collectively decide that we should fund more of these things via public money. My comment on the older article: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=3465754 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=3465754

Jonathan_Swift 13y ago

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