Is Silicon Valley only interested in the problems of twentysomethings?

It's hard to design and create software for subjects you don't know much about. It's not really a surprise that people create software for their own lives.

A lot of open source is focused on programming languages, libraries and things to help you code. It's what most open source people know, and thus what they create.

I wonder if it would have been better for CS to have been only offered as a minor or double-major to another field of study, at least at the Bachelor level. We would have fewer pure CS people, but a lot more people with training in another domain.

good point. most of the startups are working on trivial problems faced by 20somethings.

If so, it's probably only because young adults are more likely to use the internet and therefore have problems that can be solved by the internet.

The internet can't really fix your problems if you don't use it in the first place. Or maybe it could, but you will never know better.

I second this! or something similar, at least. Having not really gone to college, myself, I was lucky enough to have had so many varied life experiences and interests before I took up tech; so when talking to my colleagues who are cs-equipped, I find their methodology is often very CS oriented, and focused more on the tech than on the problem. I think that's why "design" has become such a big fad these days - it's almost as if we just figured out that people buy products, not tech.

That being said, after speaking with quite a few tech-inclined people, I feel they would be a lot more comfortable with less technically inclined subjects if they were stripped of the general cultural pretensions that they come with. There is a very strong resistance to "acculturation" among techies, as it is usually seen - rightly, for the most part - as a mechanism of enforcing a "cool kids' club", so to speak, rather than an actual venue for intellectual exploration.

I think, that as techies, we are in a unique situation, as far as intellectual development is concerned. The vast majority of the population can't appreciate technical phenomena because it is culturally viewed as "too hard" or "robotic" or "blah blah, boring". We, OTOH, actively refuse to engage with humanistic pursuits, but not out of any perceived difficulty so much as discomfort with the pretensions that come with "cultured society". If effort can be made to induct some history and philosophy, and heck, maybe even theology into the the techie culture, we could have the best of both worlds and possibly even have some truly fresh ideas put out.

In short, it's easier to teach a physicist to write essays than it is to teach a poet Diff Eq

My university offered a undergrad CS major with a business minor that was pretty popular.