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Silicon Valley’s Youth Problem

nytimes.com

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Re: Silicon Valley’s Youth Problem

#31

Post by melling »

dalke wrote: post #15
raldi wrote: post #3

> 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 compa…

Shouldn't a bus near your house every 10 minutes be a good thing in most cities? Otherwise, it's a hassle to get anywhere that's not within walking distance.

Re: Silicon Valley’s Youth Problem

#32

Post by davidf18 »

king_jester wrote: post #27
raldi wrote: post #3

> 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?

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.

The real issue here is the higher costs of housing caused by the politics of zoning that creates artificial scarcity in housing. In a healthy market, there would be increased construction to offset the increased demand caused by people with higher incomes.

Re: Silicon Valley’s Youth Problem

#33

Post by aspensmonster »

applecore wrote: post #7

> 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…

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.

Re: Silicon Valley’s Youth Problem

#34

Post by ZanyProgrammer »

dalke wrote: post #26
raldi wrote: post #20

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I think you need to look up the definition of the word "frivolous".

I thought I addressed your "frivolous" criterion directly. 1) It may be "frivolous" if the routing is only made based on the needs of the commuters, and has no input from the people who live on those routes. In an extreme case, if a bus goes down a narrow street in order to save one able-bodied person one block of walking, then that part is definitely frivolous even with the overall savings. Without that local input,…

I agree wholeheartedly with your third point. I'd also add that SF iS perceived as sexier and more exciting than the South Bay. Drive along El Camino for any stretch in MV, SV or SC and your perception of the area as a suburban wasteland would be confirmed. Not to say there aren't nice areas in the South Bay, but you have to look for them (and they are expensive).

Re: Silicon Valley’s Youth Problem

#35

Post by cousin_it »

dalke wrote: post #15
raldi wrote: post #3

> 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 compa…

Your points 2 and 3 seem to be proving too much, because they could also be applied to building new roads and parking spots: it harms the community by making more people move in, and it's useless because rezoning is better. Right?

Re: Silicon Valley’s Youth Problem

#36

Post by jacobr1 »

melling wrote: post #31
dalke wrote: post #15

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 compa…

Shouldn't a bus near your house every 10 minutes be a good thing in most cities? Otherwise, it's a hassle to get anywhere that's not within walking distance.

except these aren't city busses but private shuttles for major companies. If the tech giants were providing funding for SFMTA rather than running a private fleet, then I suspect any objections would be quite different.

Re: Silicon Valley’s Youth Problem

#38

Post by JoeAltmaier »

dalke wrote: post #15
raldi wrote: post #3

> 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 compa…

Those all seem like a reach, perhaps made up after the fact.

For instance, who blockades a bus, commits violence on the riders and fakes a scene as a rider (pretending to be an entitled Google employee and yelling out the window while having it filmed)? Not somebody annoyed at a bus stop.

It all smells like protester-chic, finding something semiplausible to complain about then faking a protest. They didn't have drones in their neighborhood, but hey! how about the Google busses?

So, #2, the preference is to have no reason to move into the neighborhood? Somebody else would have lived there. That's a baffling argument.

#3 is the fault of the residents, not Google. Maybe its the point of the fake protests, to bring up this issue and make it newsworthy, I don't know. But its not SF's business to change the zoning laws of other cities. So no they don't have a way to 'push back' and rightly so.

Re: Silicon Valley’s Youth Problem

#39

Post by mjolk »

flgb wrote: post #29
pc86 wrote: post #23

Earlier quoted context omitted.

To point 1 - because private citizens do not generally have a democratic voice in the decisions of private companies unless they’re stockholders. You could make the argument that any decision made by any private company could impact the lives of $GROUP, therefore $GROUP should be able to vote on whether that private company should be able to do $THING or not. That’s not how it works, it never has been, and I don’t se…

The private company is making use of community owned resources so the community should have a say

Are they using more than the road?

Re: Silicon Valley’s Youth Problem

#40

Post by dalke »

pc86 wrote: post #23
dalke wrote: post #15

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 compa…

To point 1 - because private citizens do not generally have a democratic voice in the decisions of private companies unless they’re stockholders. You could make the argument that any decision made by any private company could impact the lives of $GROUP, therefore $GROUP should be able to vote on whether that private company should be able to do $THING or not. That’s not how it works, it never has been, and I don’t se…

Well, non-stockholder private citizens do get involved in some of the decisions of private companies. Anti-pollution and workplace safety laws are just two of many such examples.

You may object that those are "laws", and different from the views of private citizens in the local neighborhood. But even on that smaller scale, if a company wants to expand into a new building, it will need a building permit, which requires a public hearing. Private citizens have the right to attend the meeting and object or support the change. This is public input on the otherwise internal business decisions of the company, no?

A neighborhood can complain about commercial trucks going through a street which is a convenient shortcut for a company at the edge of town, but noisy and possibly dangerous to the people on the street. In response, the city might prohibit through truck traffic for that street, causing the company drivers to take a longer route.

Or the other way around, the city passed a law saying that alcohol could not be sold within distance X of a school, unless the parents of the school said otherwise. There was a 3 star restaurant just barely within distance X of my elementary school, who had to ask for, and got, permission to continue to serve alcohol with their meals.

There have always been tradeoffs in how to use shared public resources, so I don't understand why you say "That’s not how it works, it never has been."

In some sense you are right - I do argue that $GROUP = "the citizens" should always "be able to vote whether that private company should be able to do $THING or not." I don't think we should always do so, no, but that's not the issue.

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