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> 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

> 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.

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.