Earlier quoted context omitted.
So basically a member of the middle class in a developed country. How remarkable.
I don't know many middle class families who would buy 10s of thousands of dollars worth of equipment for their kid.
22-year-old builds chips in his parents’ garage
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Re: 22-year-old builds chips in his parents’ garage
#222Earlier quoted context omitted.
So basically a member of the middle class in a developed country. How remarkable.
I don't know many middle class families who would buy 10s of thousands of dollars worth of equipment for their kid.
Like yes that is a sizeable sum of money worthy of consideration but it's not at all prohibitive or unusual for a middle class family.
Re: 22-year-old builds chips in his parents’ garage
#223Earlier quoted context omitted.
Why not eBay? Usally things are more expensive but for small stuff you pay market price
eBay in the UK is just a platform for people to sell their old hardware near retail price. Some niches are decent value Finding a £1k electron microscope would never happen Edit: A quick search across Europen eBay, I could buy a used/broken SEM for £5000 ($6850) Then I'd need to rent somewhere to operate it
Re: 22-year-old builds chips in his parents’ garage
#224Earlier quoted context omitted.
On the order of millions of kids have parents who know semiconductor engineers, and 1 of them ended up manufacturing chips in the garage. Please don't try to pick apart his accomplishments to make a point. He's still doing something that almost nobody with equivalent resources took the initiative to do.
Please see this https://www.indeed.com/career/semiconductor-engineer/salarie... I promise you that there are not millions of kids. Your argument may still hold, but the was majority of children knows no one with this level of technical experience, let alone any programmers.
> There are ten thousand semiconductor engineers kicking around Silicon Valley and Albuquerque and Portland, and another hundred thousand in Shenzhen and Taipei and Seoul. So conservatively ten million people know a semiconductor engineer.
Nobody says they were best friend with one. You know a lot of people, and those engineers know a lot of people. I don't know why you're doubling down on this.
Re: 22-year-old builds chips in his parents’ garage
#225Earlier quoted context omitted.
The money being required to live a normal life is the problem. A Star Trek style cashless society would allow people to live their life as they see fit, and would undoubtedly unlock a huge jump in human ingenuity. But I don't think we are evolved enough to deal yet. We'd just end up in a communist prison life or something as people selfishly try to get more for themselves. Roddenberry thought an event like finding ex…
One thing I never understood is that star fleet and the federation are somehow post-scarcity utopias, but you still have "gold-plated latinum" driving a huge underground criminal counter-culture. What's the point? The ferenghi should be having a cultural existential crisis, but instead they are happy just charging people for drinks that can be replicated freely.
Re: 22-year-old builds chips in his parents’ garage
#226Earlier quoted context omitted.
I'm very interested in his childhood education. I want my kid to start early on something he is interested in too but I don't really know how to do that. I know the general rules (expose him to a lot of stuffs, watch him do things, etc.) but don't know how to implement them properly. I myself wasted a lot of time in my childhood so I guess that's why I don't know how to do it properly.
You probably can't go wrong with giving your child resources that's too expensive for other children to be exposed to for some free future competitive advantage (which translates to adult success), as a general first heuristic.
Re: 22-year-old builds chips in his parents’ garage
#227Earlier quoted context omitted.
Maybe “it’s not fair to have subordinates earn more” was the justification given to you, but businesses rarely make decisions based on what’s fair. Engineers are valuable, but individual engineers are largely replaceable. Being able to coordinate a large group successfully also has a lot of value.
Let's be honest. Engineer managers are largely replacable and more easily than individual engineers. The pool is larger and can accept more manager unrelated experience. There is more to this. As the person senior leadership communicates with this person is seen as more important than they are. Senior leadership wants to maintain a leveling system to separate groups of people. It's a hedge a flat organization which m…
Of course some random idiot nagging the engineers won't be worth much, they need to be experts at the specific business and domain to bring value in this situation. Which also makes them harder to replace.
Certainly, companies with engineers who are capable and independet problem-solvers, and who are experts at the company's needs and the domain it operates in, are the most valuable. These are not uncommon either. But a fast-growing company in a fast-growing industry has zero chance of solely hiring such people. They need to widen their net to people that require managing.
Re: 22-year-old builds chips in his parents’ garage
#228Earlier quoted context omitted.
My PhD is funded by a research council and my stipend is £12k. After rent, food and bills there is some room. But it's laughable to think I could repair and run an electron microscope. Already mentioned, finding a broken microscope for £1k wouldn't happen here. And you're seriously underestimating the resource requirements to operate such a machine
If my public middle school could do that in some back room closet it can’t be that bad. For reference in us costs and spend your public stipend is less than my city spends per person on homeless folks and half of minimum wage. I think we’re taking different scales of money. These kinds of projects are open to the top 5-10% of earners in the us so 15million or so folks could fund this but only 1-2 actually do it.
Not to detract from the achivement. But there's some respect to how the challenges were overcome by the large budget
A 22 year old in the top 5% of earns is a very lucky man
Re: 22-year-old builds chips in his parents’ garage
#229Amazing! "Zeloof says he doesn’t know for sure what he wants to do after graduating this spring" - I hope we don't hear later that he went to work for FAANG. One the saddest things about Big Tech is how they take young talent away from innovative, potentially competing enterprises and into busy work internal projects just because they can.
It's hard to compete with FAANG, Finance, and Consulting. Unfortunately, that's where a lot of people end up.
Who knows what this person wants? He probably doesn’t either.
Re: 22-year-old builds chips in his parents’ garage
#230Amazing! "Zeloof says he doesn’t know for sure what he wants to do after graduating this spring" - I hope we don't hear later that he went to work for FAANG. One the saddest things about Big Tech is how they take young talent away from innovative, potentially competing enterprises and into busy work internal projects just because they can.
There is a currently a window of opportunity to hire Sam before FAANG does.