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.
It's funny how that line of thinking should boil down to "capitalism, or at least the way we are practicing it, misallocates resources", but the thought-buck always stops with the smart people. There's no "well, I the incentives must say these people should work on sexting apps, and they are acting rationally, I wonder why the incentives are that way?", it's just "Ugh! You're smart! Stop it with the sexting and start with the curing!"
An expression of outrage and disgust with no follow-up -- someone else should work for the good of the world, I'm just a regular person trying to feed my family.
> 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.
I'm one of the engineers working on fixing healthcare.gov with a whole bunch of other Silicon Valley engineers. See relevant Time article and Hacker News discussion a couple of weeks ago:
There are certainly problems here, but that's why it's even more important to have talented people (especially engineers or SREs) come help. If you know anybody who'd like to help on a temporary rotation or permanently, please point them to:
I don't blame people choosing to work in other business areas rather than putting their efforts in fixing government, curing cancer, improving medicine, rebooting our space program, fixing education, etc.
Why? Because it's honestly very hard work, often with little recognition and less pay. People trying to innovate or 'disrupt' these fields are up against deep rooted political institutions, large corporations with millions to spend on lobbying efforts, and a broken legal/patent system that favors those who exploit its many loopholes.
That said, I have great respect for people who devote their time and effort for the greater good.
I found the article to be a nice summary of the current Silicon Valley zeitgeist. Someone who has never really followed developments in technology can get a nice overview by reading this article.
I think you should give the whole article a chance. It's about the dichotomy of tech industry and has more solid point of view if you read it the way through
I'd add a point. It's also because young people don't fully grasp the cost / benefit analysis - they don't know the pain, and they don't know how to develop & implement the solution.
I might have a cool idea to cure cancer, but it'd be a difficult search to even figure out if it's been done before: lot of learning to do.
Whereas a quick scan of app store and talking with a few buddies tells me if my idea for a sexting app has been done.
The subtitle reads "In start-up land, the young barely talk to the old (and vice versa)". WTF do the author get this observation from? Looks like an unsubstantiated assumption to me. Other than an making an allegation, there is no reference to this through out the very long article.
> 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?
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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 :)
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.
> 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.
> 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.
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.
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?
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.
> 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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
* 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."
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
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.
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".
> 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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
Now might be a good time to revisit a previous discussion on this: Schlep Blindness (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.
[+] [-] powera|12 years ago|reply
The whole article reads like a narrative that is grabbing random anecdotes to support a point, even when the facts say otherwise.
[+] [-] badman_ting|12 years ago|reply
An expression of outrage and disgust with no follow-up -- someone else should work for the good of the world, I'm just a regular person trying to feed my family.
[+] [-] krschultz|12 years ago|reply
If you didn't finish the article, then I don't think you are qualified to judge whether or not the author has a point.
[+] [-] Vervious|12 years ago|reply
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.
[+] [-] randy|12 years ago|reply
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=7312442
There are certainly problems here, but that's why it's even more important to have talented people (especially engineers or SREs) come help. If you know anybody who'd like to help on a temporary rotation or permanently, please point them to:
[email protected]
[+] [-] jmsduran|12 years ago|reply
Why? Because it's honestly very hard work, often with little recognition and less pay. People trying to innovate or 'disrupt' these fields are up against deep rooted political institutions, large corporations with millions to spend on lobbying efforts, and a broken legal/patent system that favors those who exploit its many loopholes.
That said, I have great respect for people who devote their time and effort for the greater good.
[+] [-] thewarrior|12 years ago|reply
[+] [-] nathanvanfleet|12 years ago|reply
[+] [-] xivzgrev|12 years ago|reply
I'd add a point. It's also because young people don't fully grasp the cost / benefit analysis - they don't know the pain, and they don't know how to develop & implement the solution.
I might have a cool idea to cure cancer, but it'd be a difficult search to even figure out if it's been done before: lot of learning to do.
Whereas a quick scan of app store and talking with a few buddies tells me if my idea for a sexting app has been done.
[+] [-] tungwaiyip|12 years ago|reply
[+] [-] pseut|12 years ago|reply
[+] [-] michaelochurch|12 years ago|reply
The substance/cool chasm is real (find my other post in this thread) and vicious.
[+] [-] raldi|12 years ago|reply
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?
[+] [-] dalke|12 years ago|reply
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.
[+] [-] king_jester|12 years ago|reply
[+] [-] lgieron|12 years ago|reply
[+] [-] gtirloni|12 years ago|reply
[+] [-] unknown|12 years ago|reply
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[+] [-] scarmig|12 years ago|reply
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|12 years ago|reply
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.
[+] [-] ryanmarsh|12 years ago|reply
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|12 years ago|reply
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 :)
[+] [-] MicroBerto|12 years ago|reply
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
[+] [-] applecore|12 years ago|reply
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.
[+] [-] jpmattia|12 years ago|reply
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|12 years ago|reply
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.
[+] [-] kelvin0|12 years ago|reply
[+] [-] aspensmonster|12 years ago|reply
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.
[+] [-] 10098|12 years ago|reply
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|12 years ago|reply
[+] [-] dkrich|12 years ago|reply
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|12 years ago|reply
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.
[+] [-] cushychicken|12 years ago|reply
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.
[+] [-] davidw|12 years ago|reply
[+] [-] unknown|12 years ago|reply
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[+] [-] slothario|12 years ago|reply
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[+] [-] mcguire|12 years ago|reply
* 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."
[+] [-] zenbowman|12 years ago|reply
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
[+] [-] sbierwagen|12 years ago|reply
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:
Ugghhhhh[+] [-] helmut_hed|12 years ago|reply
[+] [-] Cookingboy|12 years ago|reply
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|12 years ago|reply
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.
[+] [-] ZanyProgrammer|12 years ago|reply
[+] [-] abvdasker|12 years ago|reply
[+] [-] bsder|12 years ago|reply
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.
[+] [-] bhudman|12 years ago|reply
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|12 years ago|reply
[+] [-] nathanvanfleet|12 years ago|reply
"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.
[+] [-] dpweb|12 years ago|reply
[+] [-] digisth|12 years ago|reply
- 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