Silicon Inquiry: A personal inquiry into the tech industry
notesfrombelow.org
Silicon Inquiry: A personal inquiry into the tech industry
1–10 of 28 posts
Re: Silicon Inquiry: A personal inquiry into the tech industry
#2[deleted]
Re: Silicon Inquiry: A personal inquiry into the tech industry
#3Re: Silicon Inquiry: A personal inquiry into the tech industry
#4The article felt extremely relatable, but it did not arrive at any concrete point and has nothing original to say. It is talking about personal motivation and then leaps to describing the underpaid workers. Yes, I think most people in the valley can see your points and numerous discussions have already been had about them. So what?
Edit: what I would have liked/expected to read is a story of someone making the aforementioned $300k+ year, making enough, leaving and the difficulties/joys of adapting to their new life exploring what they want.
Re: Silicon Inquiry: A personal inquiry into the tech industry
#5The article felt extremely relatable, but it did not arrive at any concrete point and has nothing original to say. It is talking about personal motivation and then leaps to describing the underpaid workers. Yes, I think most people in the valley can see your points and numerous discussions have already been had about them. So what? Edit: what I would have liked/expected to read is a story of someone making the aforem…
I believe the author, Wendy Liu, is currently working to try to find those points. She's working on a masters thesis on this subject, taking notes from a number of books on labor, tech, culture (see http://bookmarker.dellsystem.me/complete )
Re: Silicon Inquiry: A personal inquiry into the tech industry
#6The article felt extremely relatable, but it did not arrive at any concrete point and has nothing original to say. It is talking about personal motivation and then leaps to describing the underpaid workers. Yes, I think most people in the valley can see your points and numerous discussions have already been had about them. So what? Edit: what I would have liked/expected to read is a story of someone making the aforem…
The piece's conclusion seems to be unions are a panacea which I am highly skeptical of.
Re: Silicon Inquiry: A personal inquiry into the tech industry
#7[flagged]
Re: Silicon Inquiry: A personal inquiry into the tech industry
#8The article felt extremely relatable, but it did not arrive at any concrete point and has nothing original to say. It is talking about personal motivation and then leaps to describing the underpaid workers. Yes, I think most people in the valley can see your points and numerous discussions have already been had about them. So what? Edit: what I would have liked/expected to read is a story of someone making the aforem…
I felt similarly about it. The piece lacked cohesion, but the author still made some good points and I think it's fine that they have been discussed frequently before.
Regarding start-ups, I think Wendy is a little bit too willing to make generalizations based on her own experience. There are some exciting high-tech start-ups out there in other spaces than advertising (Perfect Day comes to mind, which is working on synthetic milk). There are definitely opportunities out there for doing rewarding work.
Besides that, I agreed with Wendy's dismal assessment of the tech giants. I find it sad that some talented engineers choose to devote their careers working for companies like Facebook.
Re: Silicon Inquiry: A personal inquiry into the tech industry
#9This article does a great job of highlighting how broken the message is for people coming into the market these days. From the article: Google was supposed to be the goal, the reward people worked so hard for.
When I was at Google and after I left people would ask me, "How can I get a job at Google?" or "Can you get my resume to someone at Google?" And I would always ask this person "Why do you want to work at Google?"
I can only recall one person, of the dozen or so who asked, that answered the question with something other than (paraphrased) "Because its Google dude, you know the best of the best."
Here is the thing, if the only reason you can come up with for why you should work at Google is because you want to enjoy the free food, schwag, or bus rides then you will have, like the author, a very poor experience.
Then this, "I found such an escape ... through startups.", followed by this "... it soon became clear that the only profitable avenue was to become an advertising technology startup."
Computer scientists in this role are engineers, not researchers. Engineers are people that take existing practice and solve problems that other people are having in a way that is better than the previous solution. If you decide you want to be a "data science" startup then you need to know up front who is going to pay for your data. And the people who will pay? Are most likely ones that can evaluate their own performance with and without your data and get an idea of the difference in income or efficiency etc. This is easy to do with marketing data, you sell more stuff, bueno. You sell less stuff, no bueno. It is more difficult to do with things like recycle awareness campaigns.
If you want to work at a job that has meaning, then work at a company that is solving a real problem. The definition of "real problem" is one that enough people are willing to pay enough money to support a company that is solving that problem. Public Benefit Companies (PBCs) and Non-Government Organizations (NGOs) are solving problems that some organization is willing to fund them to solve it.
That said, during Bubble 2.0 the latecomers especially have lacked a lot of imagination and so are just piling on solving the same problem that others are solving, whether that is intermediating between buyers and sellers (I think of these as virtual market makers) or greasing ecommerce (branding, virality, advertising, shipping/billing logistics, Etc.)
Re: Silicon Inquiry: A personal inquiry into the tech industry
#10Tangent: the way the author talks about sites like Reddit and 4chan and certain personalities as elements from a type of internet "hey day" makes me feel....old. I recall reading Atwood's piece in 2007 like it was yesterday, even though it was a decade ago now in actual time-passed.
Only brought up because I've felt similarly disillusioned with my participation in tech lately, but I wonder if that's just due to growing older and shifting priorities, assumptions and expectations of this sector of civilization.