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Silicon Valley’s Youth Problem

nytimes.com

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Re: Silicon Valley’s Youth Problem

#41

Post by SteveGerencser »

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

Which the private company paid a LOT more than the average person to create. Not sure why so many people seem to think that companies pay nothing fro infrastructure.

Re: Silicon Valley’s Youth Problem

#42

Post by JoeAltmaier »

dalke wrote: post #40
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…

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 require…

But, busses, really? They are evil now? With all the good they do, I think maybe they should be a protected class or something.

Re: Silicon Valley’s Youth Problem

#45

Post by abvdasker »

The amount of hyperbole and intentional provocation of anxiety in this article makes me think the writer isn't really looking to inform anyone of anything. Instead she just regurgitates one tech stereotype after another like it's news.

Re: Silicon Valley’s Youth Problem

#46

Post by 72deluxe »

cstavish wrote: post #6
bhudman wrote: post #2

I thought this would be a perfect article for testing our some summarize tools :). According to the osx summarizer tool, the following came up when I set to 1 sentence: It’s the angst of an early hire at a start-up that only he realizes is failing; the angst of a founder who raises $5 million for his company and then finds out an acquaintance from college raised $10 million; the angst of someone who makes $100,000 at…

How can you access the summarize tool in modern OS X? I remember Apple doing away with it or otherwise moving it after ~10.5 or so.

I too would like to know this. Looks a brilliant feature.

EDIT: Found! It is still there in System Preferences > Keyboard > Shortcuts > Services > Text > Summarize. It just isn't enabled by default.

Re: Silicon Valley’s Youth Problem

#47

Post by scott_s »

If this phenomenon exists, I'm not convinced it's a problem. We've only begun to explore what these core technologies enable. Even if hardware was mostly stagnant for, say, a decade, I still think we would see innovation in software and how software is integrated into society.

Re: Silicon Valley’s Youth Problem

#48

Post by nrao123 »

abvdasker wrote: post #45

The amount of hyperbole and intentional provocation of anxiety in this article makes me think the writer isn't really looking to inform anyone of anything. Instead she just regurgitates one tech stereotype after another like it's news.

I literally read this SF Gate article on how out of town writers should write the stereotypical article about SF an hour before I read the NYT article.

I smiled to myself when I saw the resemblances

http://m.sfgate.com/living/article/Handy-dandy-guide-to-writ...

Re: Silicon Valley’s Youth Problem

#49

Post by scott_s »

aspensmonster wrote: post #33
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,…

I don't think applecore was asking "Does the imbalance exist?", but rather, "Is the imbalance a problem?"

Re: Silicon Valley’s Youth Problem

#50

Post by powera »

I stopped reading this when I got to "Why do these smart, quantitatively trained engineers, who could help cure cancer or fix healthcare.gov, want to work for a sexting app?" - there was the cover article in Time Magazine not less than 2 weeks ago about these very engineers fixing healthcare.gov, and describing why they don't do it permanently (government procurement is awful and almost always unrelated to actual skill for websites, and the healthcare.gov site is generally described as incredibly badly written by the initial contractors).

The whole article reads like a narrative that is grabbing random anecdotes to support a point, even when the facts say otherwise.

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