Silicon Valley’s Youth Problem • Hacker News Board

Re: Silicon Valley’s Youth Problem

#121

Post by theorique » Wed, Mar 12, 2014, 5:45 PM UTC

dkrich wrote: post #95

I think there's a major flaw in the argument that "these people could be curing cancer!" To have any hope of doing something as ambitious as curing cancer you presumably have to have an unusually large amount of interest in the subject. Like enough to devote your entire education and career to. By taking jobs at tech companies they are demonstrating that they don't possess this necessary quality. Few people do. And a…

an unusually large amount of interest in the subject

Not to mention talent in the area. People aren't fungible, especially not later on in their careers.

For example, Steve Jobs (pbuh) is not interchangeable with Eric Lander, even though both of them are/were highly creative and driven people who reached amazing success in their field.

The kid who's a natural programmer and working on the latest messaging app or Flappy Bird would never have been happy doing bench work to cure cancer.

Re: Silicon Valley’s Youth Problem

#122

Post by badman_ting » Wed, Mar 12, 2014, 5:46 PM UTC

powera wrote: post #50

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 ski…

It's funny how that line of thinking should boil down to "capitalism, or at least the way we are practicing it, misallocates resources", but the thought-buck always stops with the smart people. There's no "well, I the incentives must say these people should work on sexting apps, and they are acting rationally, I wonder why the incentives are that way?", it's just "Ugh! You're smart! Stop it with the sexting and start with the curing!"

An expression of outrage and disgust with no follow-up -- someone else should work for the good of the world, I'm just a regular person trying to feed my family.

Re: Silicon Valley’s Youth Problem

#123

Post by Kluny » Wed, Mar 12, 2014, 5:49 PM UTC

ryanmarsh wrote: post #120

Like another commenter said "The substance/cool chasm is real" https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=7386061 It is and I'm loving it. The last thing I need is a wave of smart kids taking all of the low hanging fruit in un-cool flyover country (or what DHH has called the Fortune 1 Million). Right now I'm staring at an ocean that other people don't want to fish because the water is too cold. I'm working on something ver…

I feel exactly the same way, though you're clearly ahead of me. Right now I'm working in website development but trying to figure out how to get into the medical hardware industry, either with or without a software engineering degree. I'm signed up to take software engineering this fall, but if I can get the job I want without it...

Anyway, can you mention the names of any unsexy companies that I ought to look at? PM if you don't want the smart kids to know about them :)

Re: Silicon Valley’s Youth Problem

#124

Post by parennoob » Wed, Mar 12, 2014, 5:50 PM UTC

metaphorm wrote: post #119

parennoob wrote: post #111

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Spend less time thinking about getting sex and sharing photos. Incentives, please? I would guess that maybe 20 years earlier, being an engineer who spent all their time working on something that sounds boring like "making better semiconductor materials" probably got more recognition and social status than it does now. If I say something like "Oh yeah, I work on gallium arsenide diodes at [research company]", people…

I think the problem has a lot to do with the fact that too many people are motivated by those really shallow incentives (a little bit of money, a little bit of fame) than by things that matter more in the long run.

"Too many people are motivated by those really shallow incentives (a little bit of money, a little bit of fame) than by things that matter more in the long run"

No, I think it has more to do with the fact that people who work on things that matter more in the long run should be offered those "shallow incentives" as you call them by a societal structure. Society (at least in the US) has withdrawn those incentives (a stable family, recognition of intelligence vs. being popular); and the result is that people are moving away from anything that doesn't offer them more recognition -- of any kind.

Re: Silicon Valley’s Youth Problem

#125

Post by pron » Wed, Mar 12, 2014, 5:53 PM UTC

zanny wrote: post #93

Vervious wrote: post #68

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> The whole article reads like a narrative that is grabbing random anecdotes to support a point, even when the facts say otherwise. I'm curious what facts you're talking about. The very problems you point out about healthcare.gov support part of the author's argument - that today's tech environment rewards the creation of a sexting app over more groundbreaking work, and therefore youth do the former. From my perspect…

Then blame consumers and investors that fund sexting over space travel or cancer cures, because that is why all the entrepreneurs jump on it. If there were monetary demand for a cancer cure, and I mean real billions a year in venture capital into R&D on the subject, that nobody was using - you would see a dearth of sexting apps, at least for a while, while that VC funding is consumed. Effort goes where the money is,…

Sure, but that's a culture problem. If you give people drugs, they get hooked and want more, so you sell them what they want and make a lot of money. "Dumb-tech" works like drugs. How can you stop consumers' addiction to those drugs without making them illegal? That's a hard question. But the thing we must remember is that something the market wants and pays a lot of money for is not always good for society – it is often harmful. You can easily turn most people into junkies; putting them all through rehab is hard (but worthwhile).

Re: Silicon Valley’s Youth Problem

#126

Post by ryanmarsh » Wed, Mar 12, 2014, 5:53 PM UTC

Kluny wrote: post #123

ryanmarsh wrote: post #120

Like another commenter said "The substance/cool chasm is real" https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=7386061 It is and I'm loving it. The last thing I need is a wave of smart kids taking all of the low hanging fruit in un-cool flyover country (or what DHH has called the Fortune 1 Million). Right now I'm staring at an ocean that other people don't want to fish because the water is too cold. I'm working on something ver…

I feel exactly the same way, though you're clearly ahead of me. Right now I'm working in website development but trying to figure out how to get into the medical hardware industry, either with or without a software engineering degree. I'm signed up to take software engineering this fall, but if I can get the job I want without it... Anyway, can you mention the names of any unsexy companies that I ought to look at? PM…

I'm a high school dropout. The people who take money out of their pocket and hand it to you for solving their problems don't care much about your education, they care that you understand their problem better than they do.

Pick a "green light" market and start interviewing people in that market for their pain points. Something will emerge.

Re: Silicon Valley’s Youth Problem

#127

Post by Pxtl » Wed, Mar 12, 2014, 5:54 PM UTC

3pt14159 wrote: post #57

michaelochurch wrote: post #53

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You're missing the forest for the trees. Yes, there are systemic problems with governments contracting out software. The substance/cool chasm is real (find my other post in this thread) and vicious.

Maybe we're just interested in solving the problems we have. We're mostly young and getting sex or sharing photos is something that is socially rewarding and fun. We're not dying of cancer yet, that's you guys. You guys are the ones running those companies and generally we don't like how you guys run companies. We want very flexible hours, self direction, relaxing lighting, productive work time and a near absence of…

On the subject of "solving problems we have":

Interestingly, in a lot of smaller startup scenes (not the SF bay) we're seeing the hipster/gentrification thing happening and they are talking about Public Health issues and throwing their weight against them.

But if you're under 35, the Public Health issue isn't cancer or heart-disease. It's cars. That's what kills young people. The sprawl-driven development and the constant political battle over decent human-scaled transit-driven urban development.

Y'see, people under 35 often don't have kids and their college days aren't far behind them (or are still happening). And that means dinky apartments and taking trains and buses and walking everywhere. Even if some of them have the money for a swanky suburban home and an awesome car, they at least remember what it was like without one.

And from the discussion on that, the fact that car accidents are one of the leading causes of death is an obvious part of the conversation.

I've seen young startup hackers fighting their cities for Open Data to develop better transit and planning tools, making websites for local political campaigns, etc.

Re: Silicon Valley’s Youth Problem

#128

Post by overgryphon » Wed, Mar 12, 2014, 5:56 PM UTC

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,…

Who shows up to the career fair may have more to do with the university you happen to attend than a lack of hardware related internships. Cisco, Qualcomm, Intel, AMD, and Nvidia all hire college interns, and all go to college career fairs. Apple does hire college interns at college career fairs for more than home tech support.

Companies only hire so many recruiters to go to so many university career fairs (which the company often pays to attend), and this has an unfortunate effect on how easy it is to be hired at a particular company from a particular university.

Re: Silicon Valley’s Youth Problem

#129

Post by nostrademons » Wed, Mar 12, 2014, 6:01 PM UTC

10098 wrote: post #109

> young engineers ignore opportunities in less-sexy areas of tech like semiconductors, data storage and networking, [...] without Nvidia’s graphics processing unit, your BuzzFeed GIF is not going to make anyone laugh I don't know man. I mean, I'm fairly young (mid-twenties) and if someone told me I could work for nvidia I would take that opportunity. Things like graphics hardware/networking/data storage etc are a lot…

It seems like a pretty good career move to work for an old-guard company - say Nvidia, or Yahoo, or Lockheed - and then go found a frivolous company. See eg. WhatsApp. You end up competing with all the young folks who don't have that breadth of engineering experience that you can only get by working in a big company with a fair number of greybeards, but playing in a hot market.

Re: Silicon Valley’s Youth Problem

#130

Post by kevincrane » Wed, Mar 12, 2014, 6:03 PM UTC

angersock wrote: post #81

metaphorm wrote: post #60

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You have just exemplified the issue completely. Spend less time thinking about getting sex and sharing photos. Spend more time thinking about how to solve hard problems. Spend less time thinking about "us" and "them" and more time thinking about "everyone".

Yeah, fuck that noise. "Spend less time thinking about getting sex" hahahahaha yeah okay. Look, maybe when you're in your 30s or 40s and you've got the wife and the kids and the minivan and the bills and the mortgage you can focus on the more noble things in life, like making the world a better place so that your progeny will have an easier time of it. But, in the meantime, for those of us without children, fucking i…

I can tell by the fading font color that this isn't a popular post, but I fucking love it.