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Bread and Circuses: The State of Web App Startups

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Re: Bread and Circuses: The State of Web App Startups

#111

Post by dingy »

timr wrote: post #101
dingy wrote: post #99

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Most of the people who are smashing atoms and charting the cosmos are economic martyrs. Baloney. Here in the Netherlands, scientists working at universities and research institutes get a pretty decent salary. Sure, they don't get filthy rich, but fortunately there are more than enough people who don't care about that. The thing is: if getting rich is your primary objective, you're not going to save the world anyway.…

"Baloney. Here in the Netherlands, scientists working at universities and research institutes get a pretty decent salary. Sure, they don't get filthy rich, but fortunately there are more than enough people who don't care about that." Maybe it's baloney in the Netherlands, but it's not baloney in the states. I do happen to know what a post-doc makes in the Netherlands (I had a job offer there), and it wasn't anything…

[http://live.uuapplicaties.dwsuu01.dc01.je-itc.com/uuvacature...]

€ 2800 per month is definitely not a bad salary. You're right, I can't speak for the US, but here you can live a comfortable life with that (and if you keep rising through the ranks, you'll have a nice retirement when you're done). And I should probably mention that getting your PhD is a paid job here as well (at least the first four years, in which you're expected to obtain your PhD). Anyone who thinks that is economic martyrdom isn't going to solve poverty, no matter how the system works. You just don't get to be a businessman and a hero at the same time.

Re: Bread and Circuses: The State of Web App Startups

#112

Post by rodh »

I've gone a couple of times to Social Innovation camps, here in the UK (http://www.sicamp.org/). For those who don't know, it's a get-together where hackers gather with social problem experts, such as youth offending teams (YOTs) and people who work for charities, etc.

It felt good to work on projects like that. Everyone was so excited about making change. As an example, a few months back I worked on one trying to reduce youth offending by providing a really usable sms gateway for young offenders to get in touch with local experts on certain problems.

The problem I've seen, is that it's not always easy to get people to follow up on them after the excitement of collaborative change has passed. Once people are working from their desks again, personal success seems to be once again the key motivator.

I don't know how to solve this.

Re: Bread and Circuses: The State of Web App Startups

#113

Post by maxawaytoolong »

timr wrote: post #22
replicatorblog wrote: post #15

I didn't find the reasoning in this article very sound and the heated "high school angst" quotes hurt its credibility. e.g. "These products feed and profit from our bovine adoration of mindless time-wasting." That said, to address her point, I don't understand why tech start ups would be the answer to everything, especially a complex problem like homelessness. Homelessness isn't going to be solved by some RoR hacker…

"Homelessness isn't going to be solved by some RoR hacker creating a website that matches the homeless with available space. Rather it is the challenge for social workers, mental health practitioners, etc." I think you're missing the larger point: when the best and the brightest technological minds are chasing the instant riches of social networks for dogs, they're not creating new antibiotics, energy efficient cars,…

People who are smart enough to be writing social networks are more than smart enough to be doing pharmaceutical research or inventing solar cookers for the third world.

This is the lament of the unhappy programmer. If only I didn't have to work my soul-less yuppie job tuning database queries for youface.com I could be curing cancer. It might be therapeutic to think this but it's mostly just a strange form of depressive narcissism. After years in this business I've come to exactly the opposite conclusion. All the people working here are doing exactly what they were meant to do. It's good society has Yahoos and Facebooks in which to employ all these self styled geniuses, because otherwise they'd be fucking up someone else's pharmaceutical research. If only I would have made Facebook I wouldn't have to sit at the crappy desk next to the fume hood.

Re: Bread and Circuses: The State of Web App Startups

#114

Post by DanielBMarkham »

I ran into a great quote the other day, "Civilization advances by extending the number of important operations which we can perform without thinking of them." I'm going to start keeping this in mind with every one of my technology interactions.

Two days before that, I spent probably 20 minutes of my day playing around with a flash gravity simulator somebody posted over here.

Why? Am I to be in charge of hand-manipulating the orbital mechanics for dozens of bodies any time soon? Probably not. Because the interface has become the app.

It's not about value any more, it's about stickiness. Tens of millions of folks spend hours on Farmville each day. Is this because they are just technically inept people who would be wasting their time doing something else anyway? I know this is what some folks would like to believe -- it makes them feel better about making more of the same stuff. But I don't buy it. Even if it were true for 90% of Farmville players, that still leaves 10% of the remaining users who would have done something that had more long-term value to them. Taking self-perceived long-term value away from millions of folks for days or weeks should be at least very noteworthy.

Many web startups have found the magic equation: stickiness beats value. Expect to see more of the same.

Re: Bread and Circuses: The State of Web App Startups

#116

Post by yummyfajitas »

kjksf wrote: post #18
yummyfajitas wrote: post #6

I find it rather ironic that many of the problems she claims the rest of the world should address aren't even real problems at all. Her problems: Many Americans can’t afford medical care....many parts of our public school system suck.... The real problems: Many Americans are unhealthy, many Americans lack the skills necessary to get a job. When you prematurely narrow the problem, you can't identify all solutions. Jol…

High cost of medical care is an orthogonal problem to a healthiness level of Americans. Even if Americans were the most healthy nation in the world, medical care and health care insurance would still be expensive. As to the school example: if dissatisfaction with schools system won't lead to improvement or replacement, then what will? Certainly not satisfaction. I don't see anything ironic in that post. Both the high…

To show that high cost of health care is not a problem, consider the following thought experiment: if you never visited the doctor but were healthy, would you be unhappy? Similarly, if we had no school system, but every person developed useful skills, would we be worse off?

Premature narrowing of the problem also leads you to solutions that might be counterproductive. For example, to reduce the cost of health care (or at least prevent further increases), we could deliberately stifle innovation. This would reduce costs because instead of spending $250,000/person on the (to be invented) Alzheimers cure, we just spend $10k/year warehousing them and waiting for them to die.

This is a partial solution to the stated problem of high costs. It isn't a solution to the real problem of poor health.

Re: Bread and Circuses: The State of Web App Startups

#117

Post by wlievens »

dingy wrote: post #111
timr wrote: post #101

Earlier quoted context omitted.

"Baloney. Here in the Netherlands, scientists working at universities and research institutes get a pretty decent salary. Sure, they don't get filthy rich, but fortunately there are more than enough people who don't care about that." Maybe it's baloney in the Netherlands, but it's not baloney in the states. I do happen to know what a post-doc makes in the Netherlands (I had a job offer there), and it wasn't anything…

[ http://live.uuapplicaties.dwsuu01.dc01.je-itc.com/uuvacature... ] € 2800 per month is definitely not a bad salary. You're right, I can't speak for the US, but here you can live a comfortable life with that (and if you keep rising through the ranks, you'll have a nice retirement when you're done). And I should probably mention that getting your PhD is a paid job here as well (at least the first four years, in which…

If that's a salary, it's a pre-tax number. I don't know the tax code in the Netherlands, but in Belgium that would amount to about EUR 1700 after taxes. That's enough to live a comfortable life, but don't even think about buying a house with that [alone].

Re: Bread and Circuses: The State of Web App Startups

#118

Post by edw519 »

Those relatively comfortable "problems" of modern life have already been solved to death, beginning with Alexander Bell and ending (sort of, for now) with Mark Zuckerberg, Sergey Brin and Larry Page.

I doubt that you'd get many of the 7 million small and mid-sized businesses in the United States to agree with this. Many of them have an unquenchable thirst for information: more, better, faster, in order to survive. Thousands of developers (and start-ups!) are working furiously to provide it to them. In fact, they're so busy that they don't have much time to tell you what they're doing.

Which may be why OP doesn't realize they exist.

Re: Bread and Circuses: The State of Web App Startups

#119

Post by dingy »

wlievens wrote: post #117
dingy wrote: post #111

Earlier quoted context omitted.

[ http://live.uuapplicaties.dwsuu01.dc01.je-itc.com/uuvacature... ] € 2800 per month is definitely not a bad salary. You're right, I can't speak for the US, but here you can live a comfortable life with that (and if you keep rising through the ranks, you'll have a nice retirement when you're done). And I should probably mention that getting your PhD is a paid job here as well (at least the first four years, in which…

If that's a salary , it's a pre-tax number. I don't know the tax code in the Netherlands, but in Belgium that would amount to about EUR 1700 after taxes. That's enough to live a comfortable life, but don't even think about buying a house with that [alone].

That's enough to live a comfortable life, but don't even think about buying a house with that [alone].

That's my point: it's not economic martyrdom. Sure, it's limiting, but it's not some huge sacrifice that you can't possibly expect people to make.

It just sounds as if TFA is saying "Woe me, I am smart and talented and I want to make the world better, but society expects me to do that for less than what I can make somehwere else." Well, boo hoo. How about you (the writer of TFA) be thankful for being "just" smart and talented and be satisfied with a decent salary? Or else, just quit claiming that you want to save the world.

(Disclaimer: I have a master's degree, not a PhD, and I make considerably less than 2800 pre-tax with a job that requires that master's degree. This is not abnormal. And yes, I live a comfortable life)

Re: Bread and Circuses: The State of Web App Startups

#120

Post by JabavuAdams »

timr wrote: post #22
replicatorblog wrote: post #15

I didn't find the reasoning in this article very sound and the heated "high school angst" quotes hurt its credibility. e.g. "These products feed and profit from our bovine adoration of mindless time-wasting." That said, to address her point, I don't understand why tech start ups would be the answer to everything, especially a complex problem like homelessness. Homelessness isn't going to be solved by some RoR hacker…

"Homelessness isn't going to be solved by some RoR hacker creating a website that matches the homeless with available space. Rather it is the challenge for social workers, mental health practitioners, etc." I think you're missing the larger point: when the best and the brightest technological minds are chasing the instant riches of social networks for dogs, they're not creating new antibiotics, energy efficient cars,…

when the best and the brightest technological minds are chasing the instant riches of social networks

Why do we always assume that techies are "the best and the brightest"? A lot of tech problems are just not that hard.

It's like the finance articles where they assume the best and the brightest are all going into finance. Everyone wants to think their peer group is the smartest.

I started University 3 years early. Okay. There were kids in elementary school who consistently did better on Math contests. They became doctors and lawyers.

If you want to feel dumb (and learn a lot), hang out on some rocketry or other hard-engineering mailing lists. Again, a lot of programming is not that hard. It's easy for a lone wolf to start a project that eventually becomes extremely complex.

This need to prove that we're the smartest kids in the class is juvenile.

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