171–180 of 246 posts
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When a school rejects qualified applicants because there are too many, doesn't that indicate a shortage of that kind of school?
No, because school prestige is a positional good. This is like saying you can address the shortage of Olympic gold medals by just manufacturing tons of them.
Different fields have different balance between these two things.
"Palo Alto-based Stanford University ... and MIT have historically been the primary talent pools for the tech industry" This is far from true. If you look at the total workforce in tech, the majority is by far from much larger, public schools, like Berkeley, Michigan, Illinois, Washington, Texas, Wisconsin, etc., etc. MIT and Stanford have had amazing great people, but they are far from the "primary" source of talent…
Yeah, it's honestly insulting copy, and ignores other North American schools like Waterloo that make up a disproportionate part of big tech.
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Classic modern HN comment. The hard working person with a history of success who is trying a risky ambitious project will fail, because they didn't consider the few things a commentor instantly spotted as problems.
You could flip it around and say that the commenter is the exact type of person that Schmidt needs to sell on this idea for it to be a success (people who would study tech and then go work for the government) and they aren't buying it. Schmidt failed to consider the perspective of one of the key stakeholders in the area he's trying to change. His idea would get laughed out of the room if he wasn't already a billionai…
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In order of ranking and total enrollment (sourced from us news) 1 Massachusetts Institute of Technology 3,130 2 Stanford University 3,444 ' 3 University of California--Berkeley 2,337 4 California Institute of Technology 536 5 Carnegie Mellon University 4,112 6 University of Michigan--Ann Arbor 3,247 7 Purdue University--West Lafayette 3,428 8 Georgia Institute of Technology 4,252 9 University of California--San Diego…
These are graduate school enrollment numbers. Without breaking down CS/EE versus most other engineering disciplines, are MS/PhDs the "primary" talent source for the tech industry? For comparison, GATech claims 61% of their students get engineering degrees and an enrollment of 14,142, thus ~8,626 undergraduate engineering students. https://coe.gatech.edu/about/facts-rankings Other school's engineering enrollment: UT A…
https://eecs.berkeley.edu/academics/undergraduate/eecs-cs-co...
I think this is a great idea. You must ask yourself why the government is able to retain word-class managers and jurists despite stiff competition from the private sector. James Comey was an executive at the world's largest hedge fund, why did he quit for a government job where he was making 100x less? Any federal judge could've made a fortune in corporate law, why didn't they choose to? Because there is a sense of p…
Gary Cohn, Trump's chief economic advisor did exactly this[0].
"The chief economic adviser was required to sell his Goldman Sachs shares -- and he did so tax-free and with perfect timing"
[0] https://www.marketwatch.com/story/a-rich-gary-cohn-got-even-...
> funnel tech workers into government work Government work doesn't pay well, so it will never be as prestigious as Stanford or MIT. EDIT - previous title had the headline part where it said it will "rival Stanford and MIT"
Not everything in the world can be measured by pay. Sure, an FBI Criminal Profiler earns a tiny fraction of what a google dev earns. But one can take serial killers off the street, and the other just makes ads more annoying. A Social Worker earns almost nothing, but they get to help the most needy of people get the help they need. A FB engineer earns 10x the pay, but just makes ads more annoying. A teacher earns almo…
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and most important of all: it created a new group of rent-seekers from scratch. well done!
Not sure what you are saying.
I think the only point, why you are seeing this "growth" is that you have an oligopolic structure which is just skimming money (mainly to the benefit of the 0.1 percenters) without creating any additional value compared to the traditional way of doing advertising? Or how again are you increasing available income with your smokescreen of targeted ads?
EDIT: actually I think wikipedia captured it perfectly https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rent-seeking - and no, financing some productive webbusiness (which there are?) with a minuscule fraction of the ad money or following personal spleens of the founders/crazy people is not altering the outcome.
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Prestige takes a LONG time to build. You’d basically need your graduates to becomes titans of industry. Bezos would be dead long before that happens.
I'm not sure that's literally true. Given sufficient money: - Desired faculty: We'll triple your salary and hire your spouse too. Oh, and give you unprecedented freedom. - Desired students: Free tuition and board and a great campus environment. At the least you could jump-start a pretty darned interesting educational institution at least within a certain focus. But I'm not sure the money is realistic, at least at a s…
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Very odd statement indeed. I have never heard anything even remotely corroborating this. In fact (highly anecdotally, take it as entertainment at best), I have read that public opinion holds NSA's technical capabilities in high esteem but in reality, the talent is vastly below that of the top consumer tech companies because most tech employees would never contribute to the type of work the government does.
> most tech employees would never contribute to the type of work the government does I don't even think it's ideological. The reason the defense industry lacks top tier talent is because it's quite literally the most stifling and frustrating place to work possible. You're mired in endless bureaucracy, incompetent management, arcane rules and regulations surrounding secrecy, and some of the world's least flexible work…
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Classic modern HN comment. The hard working person with a history of success who is trying a risky ambitious project will fail, because they didn't consider the few things a commentor instantly spotted as problems.
It is not a few things, but rather one of the core reasons governments cannot do technology well.