181–190 of 237 posts
I've mentioned this in the past, but I was happy to get out of that area. Padova, where I live now, has both young and old people, rich and poor, people who have always been here and immigrants. Most people work in different industries. It feels a lot more varied, and somehow more "real" than the bay area.
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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".
Sex and photo-sharing pays the bills. Thinking about "everyone" does not.
Honestly though, I suspect most of the people sitting there writing those silly apps wouldn't be able to do things like cure Cancer or aid in creating vaccines and etc. anyway, so I think the issue may be a tad overblown. Many of these "app developers" are actually people who simply learned to write code on some site and simply churn out games, sex-apps and such just hoping one will catch on and make them lots of money; thats really it.
I really don't think many pathologists, biologists, etc. are wasting most of their time making some silly app that "disrupts" how people share naked photos.
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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 Society (at least in the US) has withdrawn those incentives (a s…
Saving just one animal from death feels more important than improving the way 100's of millions communicate. But is it really?
I've mentioned this in the past, but I was happy to get out of that area. Padova, where I live now, has both young and old people, rich and poor, people who have always been here and immigrants. Most people work in different industries. It feels a lot more varied, and somehow more "real" than the bay area.
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The startup lifestyle is an unhealthy and dangerous where one essentially gives up one's life outside the startup. Can you blame these older engineers for not putting up with such bullshit (bullshit === startup lifestyle)? Startups should cease complaining about it. "Not smart in the way that start-ups want them to be" is ridiculous. Either one is smart or one isn't. This kind of thinking is just veiled discrimination from startups that want to overwork their employees and truly stupid writers who don't understand what they're writing about.
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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 Franci…
> Google does pay some of these local taxes, because they have a small office in San Francisco 350,000 sqft is not small. http://www.bizjournals.com/sanfrancisco/blog/2013/07/google-...
It's small relative to the number of people who commute from SF to Google by private bus. ("more than 3,500" in 2012, says http://www.sfbg.com/2012/04/18/private-bus-problem; I can't find newer numbers in all the noise, but it seems that more commute to MV than work in the SF office.)
It's small relative to the market. That is, there's some 84 million sq. ft. of office space in SF. https://www.cassidyturley.com/DesktopModules/CassidyTurley/D... . The vacancy rate is 8%. So Google has under 0.5% of the occupied office space in SF.
To double check, the biggest employers are the city/county (25,000), UCSF (20,000), Wells-Fargo (8,200), SF school district (8,200), and Gap (6,000). See http://www.bizjournals.com/sanfrancisco/blog/2014/01/top-5-l... . The Wells Fargo Bank headquarters building alone is 640,000 sq. ft.
I agree that it's mid-size were it a company primarily based in SF, but for most of the relevant metrics, it's small.
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What people miss is the incredible amount of infrastructure development done at Facebook. While it would be an honest statement that it's behind Google (which takes a different approach to infrastructure) in that respect, it also differs crucially from Google that much of it is open source. As a mater of fact, here is one example of code that Facebook contributed heavily to (and that I've worked on as well) that is b…
Did you intend to respond to me? I'm sure Facebook does lots of neat things, I'm not criticizing it. All I'm saying is that its a cop-out when companies and investors say that its legal challenges that prevent investment into curing cancer, or whatever it is people think smart kids should work on besides sexting apps or the infrastructure for sexting apps. Its cover for the fact that there's just not much money in sa…
The question for me is why is this true? It seems like there should be.
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Did you intend to respond to me? I'm sure Facebook does lots of neat things, I'm not criticizing it. All I'm saying is that its a cop-out when companies and investors say that its legal challenges that prevent investment into curing cancer, or whatever it is people think smart kids should work on besides sexting apps or the infrastructure for sexting apps. Its cover for the fact that there's just not much money in sa…
> Its cover for the fact that there's just not much money in saving the world. The question for me is why is this true? It seems like there should be.
"The problem is that they may be making more reasonable steps, but they’re making fewer steps. It’s hard to compete when you’re moving slower, even if you’re moving in a consistently correct direction."