Who says programmers are the greatest minds of our generation?
Generally their bank accounts.
There are pretty good ways to make a good deal more money more predictably than working at Google or playing the startup lottery...
Why the Fuck?
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Re: Why the Fuck?
#32Seeing how pharmaceutical companies and other medical related things have a lot of money thrown at them world wide, I think that isn't the case. Computing isn't the only place where 'the greatest minds of our generation' reside, there are a lot of them in the medical community.
Also there has been a recent trend of quantified self and medical start ups starting to gain traction, such as fitbit, mybasis.com, the tricorder xprize and so on. For quite a while it's been a software only world and just now we are starting to see an uptick in consumer electronics start ups.
Not everybody can work on curing cancer.
Re: Why the Fuck?
#33Re: Why the Fuck?
#34Probably because profit is only somewhat related to delivering actual utility.
Is profit the main driver? Should it be?
Maybe we can set up our economic system such that the only way to make profit is to deliver utility more cheaply than other companies.
That way, doing good wouldn't be something on the side -- it would be the main thrust of our competitive economic system.
(setting things up this way is my life goal)
Re: Why the Fuck?
#35Thats a very myopic view. Indeed its not good if everybody work on things that 'matter'; it is essential that some people do work on things that don't matter.
Not everybody can be doing and/or should be doing cancer research or whatever the author seems to perceive is important.
Re: Why the Fuck?
#36Because curing cancer and solving major issues doesn't make money right now. It takes major investment and years of research for something that may or may not give return.
Further, google is solving big problems. How bout better internet service, cars that drive themselves, making computers more accessible, a universal translater, etc.
How bout the fact that many of the top grads from schools go to work in finance. If we could get all those people to go work at google, the world would be a better place.
Re: Why the Fuck?
#37To launch a Facebook clone you sign up for Heroku or AWS, push some Rails code, and start promoting yourself. To launch a medical device you spend years cutting through regulation and red tape, negotiating with and marketing to an industry that is probably threatened by your existence and will do its best to stop you.
Screw up at Facebook, you get yelled at on Twitter and your share price dips for a few days. Screw up a medical device, you get sued out of existence.
This probably doesn't explain the whole thing, but it is certainly related.
Re: Why the Fuck?
#38Because most people, Facebook programmers included, don't have the patience and the resources to undergo the amount of schooling necessary to reach the level of understanding to make an impact in these areas; and after they do, the amount of bureaucracy they will need to fight to make a dent will drive even the most resilient minds to take a job getting people to click on ads.
Disagreed. It isn't a matter of patience, it's all about incentives.
Almost all people who are smart enough to make a difference aren't foolhardy enough to make terrible economic decisions that will drastically reduce their quality of life.
The existence of economics PhD students still baffles me.
Re: Why the Fuck?
#39Probably because profit is only somewhat related to delivering actual utility.
Is profit the main driver? Should it be?
Tautologically true.
Re: Why the Fuck?
#40Who says programmers are the greatest minds of our generation?
Well, I upvoted you, because yes, but I'll make a refinement to the question: just replace "greatest minds" with "greatest programmers".
Seriously, great programmers are needed in bioinformatics, engineering and infrastructure. Some already are there, but the field is generally unglamorous and you can get much better pay for a job that doesn't involve your deep knowledge of microcontrollers at all. Bah, even if you're a civil engineer starting with just a basic knowledge of programming, unless you get lucky you'll get incentives to switch into developing knock-off websites way too many times. The chance of return on improving your basic programming skill to average is just higher than on improving your decent material engineering skill to superb.