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Silicon Valley’s Youth Problem

nytimes.com

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Re: Silicon Valley’s Youth Problem

#131

Post by rgbrgb »

nostrademons wrote: post #129
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.

How is building a robust SMS alternative frivolous? Is email frivolous? WhatsApp uses the internet to give low income families all over the world a first-class way to stay in touch. Writing communication apps for a Nokia N900 is not a sexy thing all the young kids are rushing to do.

Re: Silicon Valley’s Youth Problem

#132

Post by angersock »

phaemon wrote: post #98
angersock wrote: post #81

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

Upvoted for honest expression. But you're doing exactly the same thing you're criticising: you haven't kicked the bastards out either, or gotten healthcare sorted because you're too busy chasing sex and thinking about your own life. In 20 years someone will be writing your post about you !

I actually am working at a startup in the healthcare space, and do mentoring and coach people to try and help give them skills they can earn a living with.

I still find time to try and chase tail--after all, it's the oldest game in the world, and if you're not playing, you might as well be dead, right?

:)

Re: Silicon Valley’s Youth Problem

#133

Post by nostrademons »

dalke wrote: post #51
JoeAltmaier wrote: post #38

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 drone…

The topic was if there are any arguments where "a carpooling system that gets dozens of cars off the road and allows each passenger to reclaim ten working hours a week [can be] classified as frivolous." I listed three that I considered to be reasonable in that context. They have come up in various discussions I've read about the situation. I fully realize that my view of "reasonable" is not universally shared. For on…

FWIW on #3, Google has been pushing for rezoning the North Bayshore area (the area by its campus, north of 101 around Shoreline) for mixed-use ground-level retail + high-rise apartments since I got here in 2009. This plan would create about 1100 housing units within walking distance of campus, taking that many cars (or more, including spouses) off of 101, off of Shoreline, and probably out of SF or Mountain View where they're currently driving up rents in existing housing. They have been consistently blocked by a 4-member voting bloc in the Mountain View City Council who don't want the character of Mountain View to change at all (even if the high-rises would go up north of 101, where it's all zoned industrial anyway). 3 of those members are retiring this year, so we'll see what happens.

Re: Silicon Valley’s Youth Problem

#134

Post by akgerber »

gtirloni wrote: post #13
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 impact of carpooling is minimal and there are much more efficient ways at public transportation. Carpooling is a band-aid unlikely to reach the critical mass required to turn around the nightmare that public transportation is.

Those more-efficient means of public transportation (commuter trains) only work if the destination is within walking distance of the train station. But Silicon Valley communities make it illegal to build office towers in their downtowns, so the existing rail transport isn't practical to commute from SF to Peninsula office parks.

Re: Silicon Valley’s Youth Problem

#135

Post by smtddr »

aswanson wrote: post #102
zanny wrote: post #93

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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,…

I can't help but be reminded of the quote: “You are going to let the fear of poverty govern your life and your reward will be that you will eat, but you will not live.”

This hits home for me.

It took a lot of courage for me to leave at&t when I did. It was my first job out of college, I just got saddled with a mortgage and was soon to be married to a lady who would be 100% dependent on me at first since I was bringing her to USA from Nigeria. When I told my soon-to-be-wife and the rest of my family that after nearly 6 years, I was leaving the well established corporation AT&T for a San Francisco start-up of less than 20 people.... they were not on board. This was back in 2007. Today, everything worked out.

Outside of this debate about tech, in general people should avoid living simply to survive. You will regret it later when you're 60yrs old and realize all you've done with your live was... not die.

Re: Silicon Valley’s Youth Problem

#136

Post by mmxiii »

metaphorm wrote: post #60
3pt14159 wrote: post #57

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

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".

And you exemplify the kind of self-righteous person that probably spews this kind of junk daily.

The reason people work on sexting apps over curing cancer is because it is a more human problem than curing cancer. In all your tunnel-visioned dash to label problems as "hard and "worthy" you are the one that missed the forest from the trees. All people will die, and while it would be great if they could stick around a bit longer without pain, the biggest difference is how people spend their lives today. If they can spend it connecting with other people they care about, and derive meaning from that, that is a thousandfold more compelling problem.

It's not that other people don't have their incentives and values right, it's that you don't recognize them.

Re: Silicon Valley’s Youth Problem

#137

Post by mtviewdave »

raldi wrote: post #69
dalke wrote: post #65

Earlier quoted context omitted.

How much did Google pay for the SF street infrastructure? I thought they didn't pay anything until this January, and even then it's $1 per each use of a bus stop. Also, why the comparison of an "average person" to a private company? Surely the private citizens of San Francisco, as a whole, have invested far more in the city infrastructure than Google has.

Street infrastructure is paid for by taxes, including payroll taxes, corporate income taxes, and gas taxes, all of which Google pays.

This is only true in the broadest possible sense, where "taxes", "government" and "streets" are considered collectively without regard to federal, state or local jurisdiction.

But in the U.S., jurisdiction matters a lot. For example, there is (apparently) a Google bus stop at the 18th and Dolores Streets in San Francisco. Dolores Street is a local street, which means it is the responsibility of the City of San Francisco. Maintenance of that street is thus paid for primarily with local and fees taxes collected within the City. Specifically property taxes, business license taxes, local sales taxes, and charges for local services. None of the taxes that you mentioned Google paying would directly fund the maintenance of Dolores Street.

Google does pay some of these local taxes, because they have a small office in San Francisco. But the purpose of these shuttles is primarily to transport people outside of San Francisco. It's the City of Mountain View that benefits (from a tax perspective) from these shuttles. That disconnect is at the heart of the complaint: that San Francisco taxpayers are shouldering the burden, while not accruing the benefits.

Re: Silicon Valley’s Youth Problem

#138

Post by nostrademons »

dalke wrote: post #79
raldi wrote: post #69

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Street infrastructure is paid for by taxes, including payroll taxes, corporate income taxes, and gas taxes, all of which Google pays.

Google is primarily located in Mountain View, in Santa Clara county. My question was how much of San Francisco's street infrastructure - a different city and county - was supported by Google. Did Google pay "a lot more" than the citizens of the city, as SteveGerencser suggested? The residents and businesses in SF pay about $1 billion in property taxes. How does that compare to specifically Google's contribution? Who…

FWIW, Google has a SF office that is about as large as Twitter.

I also agree with raldi that this line of reasoning is invalid, unless you want Wells Fargo to own & make most of the decisions in SF. (Most of the current SF infrastructure was financed by municipal bonds, many of which were funded by Wells and other Bay-Area financial institutions. My girlfriend used to be a bond-trader at Wells and specifically remembers buying the bonds used to fund construction of the new Bay Bridge.)

Re: Silicon Valley’s Youth Problem

#139

Post by akgerber »

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,…

Qualcomm was and is hiring quite vigorously, so far as I know. Are you studying CS or Computer Engineering?

Re: Silicon Valley’s Youth Problem

#140

Post by tungwaiyip »

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…

The subtitle reads "In start-up land, the young barely talk to the old (and vice versa)". WTF do the author get this observation from? Looks like an unsubstantiated assumption to me. Other than an making an allegation, there is no reference to this through out the very long article.
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