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Silicon Valley’s Youth Problem

nytimes.com

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Re: Silicon Valley’s Youth Problem

#141

Post by nostrademons »

rgbrgb wrote: post #131
nostrademons wrote: post #129

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

...and yet one of their main competitors is SnapChat, which the article specifically calls out as frivolous.

I don't personally believe either one of them is frivolous, but I'm applying the standards of the article to this discussion. You can't have it both ways - if you believe Snapchat or Twitter are frivolous, WhatsApp's playing in the same market.

Re: Silicon Valley’s Youth Problem

#142

Post by gaius »

theorique wrote: post #121
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 Flap…

Jobs talent was 100% fungible - taking the credit for others work.

Re: Silicon Valley’s Youth Problem

#143

Post by greenrice »

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…

Hit the nail on the head. There is a plethora of important and difficult problems to solve, and the millenial generation has to trudge through the pile of shit that's been left accumulating for the past several decades. Our most pressing matters involve navigating a new world that is built on the internet.

Re: Silicon Valley’s Youth Problem

#144

Post by aspensmonster »

akgerber wrote: post #139
aspensmonster wrote: post #33

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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?

"Electrical Engineering with a Computer Engineering Focus." Don't ask me why Texas State calls it that. Take a look at my degree plan and it's more or less identical to that of an ECE degree.

Indeed I have heard that Qualcomm is hiring like crazy. And I have applied to several positions both in their Austin office --which does admittedly seem to only be looking for experienced engineers-- and their San Diego office --which has many listings for graduates in various branches of the field.

My frustration with simply filling out an online application form for a company lies in the fact that it bears a striking resemblance to this gesture:

$ cat RESUME.md > /dev/null

Of course, I'm probably being just a tad hyperbolic here :P... but the benefit of actually meeting someone at a job fair --or anywhere else, really-- is that it has far better results. At a bare minimum your details at least seem to go into some priority folders. And you'll likely get an initial phone call, even if nothing further results from it.

Re: Silicon Valley’s Youth Problem

#145

Post by astrange »

rgbrgb wrote: post #131
nostrademons wrote: post #129

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

Since IM is just IM, you could have gone to the phone company and made SMS work. All other systems (Skype, LINE, Kik) are just second system effects with better monetization ideas.

Re: Silicon Valley’s Youth Problem

#146

Post by mcguire »

Heilmeier's Catechism, item 4 and 5:

* Who cares?

* If you're successful, what difference will it make?

R.W. Hamming on problem selection: "[I]f what they were working on was not important, and was not likely to lead to important things, then why were they working on them?"

"About four months later, my friend stopped me in the hall and remarked that my question had bothered him. He had spent the summer thinking about the important problems in his area, and while had had not changed his research he thought it was well worth the effort. I thanked him and kept walking. A few weeks later I noticed that he was made head of the department. Many years later he became a member of the National Academy of Engineering. The one person who could hear the question went on to do important things and all the others -- so far as I know -- did not do anything worth public attention."

Re: Silicon Valley’s Youth Problem

#147

Post by aspensmonster »

overgryphon wrote: post #128
aspensmonster wrote: post #33

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

Indeed. It's kinda depressing to compare the company lists between Texas State and UT Austin [1,2]. Sure, many of the same companies are there. But others --like NVIDIA, Texas Instruments, Raytheon, Toshiba, Verizon-- are only to be found on UT Austin's list. And of course the sizes are quite different. Texas State had 50 something companies in total while UT Austin was able to pull in over 200. And UT Austin certainly seemed able to pull in far more CS companies too. Rackspace's absence at Texas State's career fair was particularly conspicuous to me.

A part of me would love to chalk this up to the privileges of hailing from a more elite alma mater, but I also wouldn't be too surprised if the EE and CE students at UT Austin ran into the same issues that we did here at Texas State. While many of the companies at the Cockrell School of Engineering's "EXPO", as they call it, bill themselves as looking at "Electrical & Computer Engineering" students, the actual "concentration areas" look more like: "Computational Science, Engineering, and Mathematics." Texas Instruments is but one example [3]. Granted, seeing as I'm not a student at UT Austin, I couldn't tell anyone whether my suspicions bear any resemblance to reality or not.

[1] UT-Austin: https://apps.engr.utexas.edu/ecac/events/expo/Students/brows...

[2] Texas State: https://www.myinterfase.com/txstate/Search/ViewEmployers/Ind...

[3] https://apps.engr.utexas.edu/ecac/events/expo/Students/showC...

Re: Silicon Valley’s Youth Problem

#148

Post by Cookingboy »

This article got a lot of things right and a lot of things wrong, and I'm saying that as someone who did work for Cisco, then a YC startup, and is now working for Google.

I think one of the fundamental differences in culture between the "old" and "new" is that the older businesses think about BUSINESS first and technology is the tool to thrive in that business, whether it's enterprise software of networking infrastructure. Where as many newer companies think about the PRODUCT first and business is merely a tool to prop up valuation and gather more resources to work on "cooler" products.

Of course young engineers are more interested in products than businesses. How long can these companies last? I am not sure. Facebook will probably never make as much profit as Cisco but they are already valued at almost twice as much. But none of it matter until media hype and capital keeps flowing into the startup scene here in Silicon Valley. At least until the bubble bursts.

I love Silicon Valley, but I'd hate for this place to turn into "app valley".

Re: Silicon Valley’s Youth Problem

#149

Post by ahomescu1 »

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.

Money and fame impact who you marry and have kids with. That can have a significant effect in the long run (where long == your own lifetime).

Re: Silicon Valley’s Youth Problem

#150

Post by noname123 »

Cookingboy wrote: post #148

This article got a lot of things right and a lot of things wrong, and I'm saying that as someone who did work for Cisco, then a YC startup, and is now working for Google. I think one of the fundamental differences in culture between the "old" and "new" is that the older businesses think about BUSINESS first and technology is the tool to thrive in that business, whether it's enterprise software of networking infrastru…

> I love Silicon Valley, but I'd hate for this place to turn into "app valley".

Isn't it good to sell shovels during a gold rush? I think now is the perfect time to build SaaS sites with "Enterprise/Startup/Hacker" pricing plans that function similar open-source tools. e.g., Heroku (AWS with more fluff), e-mail marketing tools, customized web hosting, Parse (backend for mobile apps), Airbrake.io (real time error reporting). I think it's a fad that people in startups are willing to pay for.

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