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Silicon Valley’s Youth Problem

nytimes.com

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Re: Silicon Valley’s Youth Problem

#191

Post by dsernst »

Vervious wrote: post #68
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 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…

Not all youth wants to work on sexting apps. I'm 20 and working on a group problem-solving platform using a bug-tracking approach to address real world issues. And it's open-source :-)

Would love to hear from anyone interested: http://maybethismatters.org

Re: Silicon Valley’s Youth Problem

#192

Post by cc439 »

badman_ting wrote: post #122
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…

Smart people are rational and cleverness is combined with ambition you find calculated risk. As long as you're willing to risk your youth for filthy amounts of money you're being rational since you'll still have a respectable resume and those unsexy jobs will always be there waiting.

Re: Silicon Valley’s Youth Problem

#193

Post by [deleted] »

bicknergseng wrote: post #176
krschultz wrote: post #166

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Approximately 2296 days ago I started reflexively down voting anyone that starts a comment with 'I stopped reading this when X ...'. If you didn't finish the article, then I don't think you are qualified to judge whether or not the author has a point.

Did you stop reading the comment at 'I stopped reading this when X ...'? Meta irony!

[deleted]

Re: Silicon Valley’s Youth Problem

#194

Post by jljljl »

bicknergseng wrote: post #176
krschultz wrote: post #166

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Approximately 2296 days ago I started reflexively down voting anyone that starts a comment with 'I stopped reading this when X ...'. If you didn't finish the article, then I don't think you are qualified to judge whether or not the author has a point.

Did you stop reading the comment at 'I stopped reading this when X ...'? Meta irony!

They never said they stopped reading. Maybe you didn't read the parent post :)

Re: Silicon Valley’s Youth Problem

#196

Post by strlen »

rayiner wrote: post #189
harryh wrote: post #188

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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.

I think its an issue of discounting the return by probability, and being able to internalize positive externalities. You can spend $10 billion trying to cure cancer, but how much do you have to get in return for the risk that you won't? And if you need to make a 50x return in the successful case to justify the failure risk, how will you do it while society is demonizing you for withholding cancer cures from dying peo…

I think part of it also diminishing returns: life of cancer patients has been greatly improved, with early detection it's no longer a death sentence and at times not even a major handicap. See, e.g., quality of life after treatment of prostate cancer now vs. quality of life after treatment of prostate cancer treatment just 20-30 years ago.

I imagine power law holds in most disciplines: going from 99.99% uptime to 99.999% is far harder than going from 99.9 to 99.99% which in turn is harder then going from 99% to 99.9%. Likewise, I'd imagine same holds true with death tolls over N years from various illnesses (but obviously with different constants involved).

Can you explain to me what you meant by externalities here? Do you mean medical industry benefits from cures without contributing to funding the NIH grants?

Re: Silicon Valley’s Youth Problem

#197

Post by msandford »

api wrote: post #113
jmsduran wrote: post #99

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I don't blame people choosing to work in other business areas rather than putting their efforts in fixing government, curing cancer, improving medicine, rebooting our space program, fixing education, etc. Why? Because it's honestly very hard work, often with little recognition and less pay. People trying to innovate or 'disrupt' these fields are up against deep rooted political institutions, large corporations with m…

"fixing government, curing cancer, improving medicine, rebooting our space program, fixing education, etc." I think a big part of it is less pay. Important things pay very little compared to frivolous metoo.io apps and social advertising and whatever. Capitalism is a greedy optimizer. When it finds a local maximum it goes all in. It does not explore the fitness landscape.

I think another part of the problem is that there aren't really any important things in the public sector right now. The last public sector thing that engineers got excited about was the Apollo program.

Fixing government? Yeah you might be able to modernize a lot of the tech stack that runs various governmental entities but you're not going to actually fix the entities. You'll be implementing failed or broken policies in node.js instead of cobol. It's a step in the right direction but it doesn't actually fix the core of what's broken.

Curing cancer? There's no Federal Department of Stopping Cancer, either you work for a big pharmaceutical company or you get a PhD and scramble for grant money.

Rebooting our space program? That happens every administration and it always starts with some kind of dream to do audacious thing X that won't get any significant funding.

Fixing education? I'm not really sure where to start here. You can't fix from within since there's a constant struggle by the administrators to stay in power because teachers don't have any upwards mobility besides administration. And trying to fix it from the outside? That's even tougher, Kahn Academy has some traction with people but little with teachers who fear it'll put them out of work.

Find me something inspiring that's not going to be mired in politics and bullshit and I'm all ears. I don't think any of those are all that inspiring. I'd even deal with less pay for something really impressive.

Re: Silicon Valley’s Youth Problem

#198

Post by judk »

randy wrote: post #171
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…

I'm one of the engineers working on fixing healthcare.gov with a whole bunch of other Silicon Valley engineers. See relevant Time article and Hacker News discussion a couple of weeks ago: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=7312442 There are certainly problems here, but that's why it's even more important to have talented people (especially engineers or SREs) come help. If you know anybody who'd like to help on a te…

Since the SRE dream team fixed healthcare.gov so quickly, it seems it must have been mostly done decently well, but lacking a bit in QA and followthrough. Or do you think you could have put a web/db system in place from a cold start just about as fast?

Re: Silicon Valley’s Youth Problem

#199

Post by judk »

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…

Are you saying you wish you lived 30 years earlier, because life is better for gat generation than yours?

Re: Silicon Valley’s Youth Problem

#200

Post by judk »

Jaiguss wrote: post #178
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…

Okay, if you actually need an app to help you get some ass, I suspect there might be another significant underlying issue there, and the app probably wont help you anyway. Besides there being hundreds of these silly things out already, I don't see why you or someone else getting sex should necessitate some brilliant programmers help who could otherwise be spending her time on problems far more worthwhile(e.g. perhaps…

What makes you think that the people getting rich off Poke apps are the brilliant ones? That is the fallacy of it all.
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