
Silicon Valley’s Youth Problem - metermaid
http://www.nytimes.com/2014/03/16/magazine/silicon-valleys-youth-problem.html
======
powera
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 skill for websites, and the
healthcare.gov site is generally described as incredibly badly written by the
initial contractors).

The whole article reads like a narrative that is grabbing random anecdotes to
support a point, even when the facts say otherwise.

~~~
badman_ting
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 with the curing!"

An expression of outrage and disgust with no follow-up -- someone _else_
should work for the good of the world, I'm just a regular person trying to
feed my family.

~~~
michaelt
People who believe incentives are destiny tend not to take jobs writing for
the New York Times. It's not like journalists enjoy high pay or great job
security.

Maybe the author of this piece believes "I don't do X for the money, I do X to
make the world a better place / for the love of X". Many people in the arts,
education, charities, research etc act as if they believe this.

Perhaps it's never occurred to the author that people with the opportunity to
change the world (a) might not care about changing the world or (b) might
think a photo sharing app is the best possible way to do it.

~~~
bertil
There is a third, and far more likely option: they applied, and were rejected.
Recruitment process are terrible through out, and world-changing institutions
are no exception. Let me know when I can fix cancer or neurological disease: I
know how well enough to make a significant contribution. While I wait, three
head-hunters have called about that virtual good start-up…

Also: (b) is far more likely than (a).

------
raldi
_> The backlash in recent months against the self-involvement and frivolity of
the new guard has actually been a long time coming. Instagram photos of
opulent tech holiday parties have been lambasted, Google buses blockaded_

In what universe is a carpooling system that gets dozens of cars off the road
and allows each passenger to reclaim ten working hours a week classified as
frivolous?

~~~
dalke
Have you not been following any of the discussion about this topic?

Here are three frequently voiced objections:

1) If the city decided to put a new bus route outside of your house, with a
bus every 10 minutes for the morning and evening rush hours, then you would
expect there to be public meetings where people can voice concerns about the
routing, increase in large traffic, noise, and so on. Why should private
companies not be subject to the same sort of democratic decision making on how
to use the local public roads and bus stops?

2) Some people moved to the city in part because of the knowledge that the
private bus system would be there. Without those buses, they would have chosen
somewhere else precisely because the lack of parking would have made the
commute impossible. It's hard then to say that each bus replaces a dozen cars,
when those people might not be there if there were no buses.

3) If getting cars off the road and reclaiming commuting time were paramount,
then why not rezone the areas around Mountain View, Cupertino, etc. for medium
density housing, like SF-style row houses, instead of the current preference
for suburban detached housing? Then people could walk or bike to work in a
matter of minutes. The densities for SF, MV, and C are 17K, 6K, and 5K/sq mile
respectively, so there's plenty of opportunity for local population growth.
Instead, the local (and democratic) resistance to zoning change in those
smaller cities causes increased prices and bus traffic elsewhere, but the
people in SF have no way to push back and cause the zoning laws of the smaller
cities to change.

~~~
JoeAltmaier
Those all seem like a reach, perhaps made up after the fact.

For instance, who blockades a bus, commits violence on the riders and fakes a
scene as a rider (pretending to be an entitled Google employee and yelling out
the window while having it filmed)? Not somebody annoyed at a bus stop.

It all smells like protester-chic, finding something semiplausible to complain
about then faking a protest. They didn't have drones in their neighborhood,
but hey! how about the Google busses?

So, #2, the preference is to have no reason to move into the neighborhood?
Somebody else would have lived there. That's a baffling argument.

#3 is the fault of the residents, not Google. Maybe its the point of the fake
protests, to bring up this issue and make it newsworthy, I don't know. But its
not SF's business to change the zoning laws of other cities. So no they don't
have a way to 'push back' and rightly so.

~~~
dalke
The topic was if there are any arguments where "a carpooling system that gets
dozens of cars off the road and allows each passenger to reclaim ten working
hours a week [can be] classified as frivolous."

I listed three that I considered to be reasonable in that context. They have
come up in various discussions I've read about the situation.

I fully realize that my view of "reasonable" is not universally shared. For
one, I'm one of those people who think that commuting is a waste of my life,
even with on-board wifi. My 10 minute drive from Mt. View to Palo Alto was
about the limit of what I wanted to do. (My next job was a joy, at 6 minutes.
It then became a horrid 20 minutes, until I complained enough to get my own
parking garage space, saving 6 minutes of walking from the city lot.)

Then again, your objection to perceived protester-chic smell is also not
universally shared.

Anyway, could you explain your objection to #2? I was objecting to the
premise. If the goal is to "get dozens of cars off the road and allow each
passenger to reclaim ten working hours as week", then the full analysis would
need to look at the people who would have lived there had there not been the
private buses. Hypothetically speaking, their commutes could have been shorter
and using city buses, bicycles, or walking. Thus, long-distance private buses
in that situation does not achieve the purported goal.

I have not done this analysis, nor do I know if one exists, but it's not
clearly unreasonable, and thus is a valid reason to classify the private bus
system as "frivolous."

I mostly agree with you on #3. That is, after all, my point. If the goal is to
"get dozens of cars ...", then funding a private bus system, which is an
expensive technical fix to a political problem, is "frivolous" to someone who
wants to address the actual underlying social problem, which is the opposition
to change away from traditional suburban zoning for those cities. In that
case, the inability to push back politically expresses itself as protest.

In this view, it's the fault of Google's for not pushing for more medium
density housing in Mountain View and its immediate neighbor cities. For
business reasons, I can understand why they want to stay on the good side of
the city council, who are in turn guided by their constituents, who mostly
have single family detached housing and want to keep their neighborhoods
unchanged. In this view, Google is doing the politically expedient thing, not
the socially correct thing.

~~~
nostrademons
FWIW on #3, Google has been pushing for rezoning the North Bayshore area (the
area by its campus, north of 101 around Shoreline) for mixed-use ground-level
retail + high-rise apartments since I got here in 2009. This plan would create
about 1100 housing units within walking distance of campus, taking that many
cars (or more, including spouses) off of 101, off of Shoreline, and probably
out of SF or Mountain View where they're currently driving up rents in
existing housing. They have been consistently blocked by a 4-member voting
bloc in the Mountain View City Council who don't want the character of
Mountain View to change at all (even if the high-rises would go up north of
101, where it's all zoned industrial anyway). 3 of those members are retiring
this year, so we'll see what happens.

~~~
alanlewis
Lemme guess: google employee? Part of what the city council has been blocking
is (according to the linked Verge article) stopping Google from doing an
environmental report necessary to develop land adjacent to one of their
campuses. Why? Because, surprise!, the council members noticed that the
environment reports paid for by large companies always happen to come back
with a result favorable to the company who paid for the report.

In short, read the article -- lots of sides to the story:
[http://www.theverge.com/2014/2/26/5444030/company-town-
how-g...](http://www.theverge.com/2014/2/26/5444030/company-town-how-google-
is-taking-over-mountain-view)

~~~
JoeAltmaier
In fact, by law, if you pay for the report, it has to come back as favorable
to you as possible. Its something to do with 'agency' and fiduciary
responsibility.

------
scarmig
Frivolous, perhaps, but the shitty sexting apps and the like[1] are low
hanging fruit where we can afford to be cutting edge. It's best to view the
current Silicon Valley euphoria as a testbed for new technologies and labor
processes and as an incubation chamber for the next generation working class.
All the awesome stuff the writer wants will happen in the next decade or two,
and most of the technologies and technologists involved will have their roots
in the present frothy period.

It's also best to think comparatively: sure, maybe some capital is being
allocated stupidly [2]. But lets compare to the second half of the 20th
century and its great technological achievements. Technological development
was uniformly directed toward the goals of state-building and war-waging.
Given a choice between better sexting apps and barbarism, it's not even a real
choice. One is clearly a significantly negative-sum game, and the other is
neutral to mildly positive. We only ended up ahead after the 20th century
through a combination of good luck and technology's tendency to adapt across
domains and be used in novel ways.

[1] A minority of the start ups that actually exist, but let's grant it for
the sake of argument.

[2] The article makes this entirely about the allocation of labor, even going
so far as to imply it's character defects that cause workers to go work on
stupid things instead of meaningful things. But fuck that noise: capital is
the driving force here. I've never met an engineer who would prefer working on
sexting apps to working on deep, fundamental problems. But our present system
rewards capital for pursuing short-term profits at the expense of long-term
economic growth. If you want that to change, fix the system. Hate the game,
not the player.

~~~
givehimagun
I'd like to expand your comments a bit further.

Not only are these ideas low hanging fruit but they are low risk, innovation
test beds. Imagine trying to do this kind of work on a medical device that
could kill someone...you can't be nearly as wild and crazy. The internet is
always going to be productized with ideas that are cheap to stand up, low risk
and scalable....that's the beauty of it.

------
ryanmarsh
Like another commenter said "The substance/cool chasm is real"
[https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=7386061](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=7386061)

It is and I'm loving it. The last thing I need is a wave of smart kids taking
all of the low hanging fruit in un-cool flyover country (or what DHH has
called the Fortune 1 Million). Right now I'm staring at an ocean that other
people don't want to fish because the water is too cold. I'm working on
something very unsexy that will hopefully buy me a yacht and a Ferrari. I have
a list of things just like it, again, all very un-sexy.

Let them have their sexting apps.

~~~
Kluny
I feel exactly the same way, though you're clearly ahead of me. Right now I'm
working in website development but trying to figure out how to get into the
medical hardware industry, either with or without a software engineering
degree. I'm signed up to take software engineering this fall, but if I can get
the job I want without it...

Anyway, can you mention the names of any unsexy companies that I ought to look
at? PM if you don't want the smart kids to know about them :)

~~~
ryanmarsh
I'm a high school dropout. The people who take money out of their pocket and
hand it to you for solving their problems don't care much about your
education, they care that you understand their problem better than they do.

Pick a "green light" market and start interviewing people in that market for
their pain points. Something will emerge.

~~~
Hannan
>> Pick a "green light" market...

Sorry, I haven't heard of this term before and a cursory search wasn't
helpful. Do you mean a market that is commonly thought to be growing or
something else?

------
applecore
_> The talent — and there's a ton of it — flowing into Silicon Valley cares
little about improving these infrastructural elements. What they care about is
coming up with more web apps._

Is there evidence that this problem _actually_ exists? This seems likely to be
a manufactured story.

The press simply isn't going to write as much about Meraki as they would a
popular, consumer-oriented web or mobile startup.

$1.2 billion is a big number (for the acquisition of Meraki), but ultimately
it's a "boring" business that sells routers. It's never going to appeal to
more than a small audience.

~~~
aspensmonster
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, can't really be done in your garage
any more. Yes, we can all play with 7400 chips and build radios and probe away
at some cheap electronic gizmo, but nobody is going to be fabricating 45nm,
6-layer, N-core, superscalar, pipelined, cached, billion-transistor count CPU
semiconductors in their basement labs. And nothing but years of experience at
the interface of design, verification, and fabrication will ever produce a
skilled engineer in those fields that understands all of the delicate
interdependencies of that technological pipeline. It should go without saying
at this point that no, I don't have any meaningful experience in the current
state-of-the-art of semiconductor design, verification, or fabrication and I
honestly don't see how it's reasonable to expect me to.

Of course, while I've never had a _professional_ software engineering gig
_either_ , I _do_ have previous experience with development and other paid
jobs in supporting roles like systems administration. I sometimes think that
it's simply a consequence of the barrier to entry being so relatively low. Do
you have a computer (or even access to one that you can install software on)
and access to the net? Congratulations. You have everything you need to start
learning about concepts and tools that are immediately applicable and relevant
to the field. And they're Free as in Freedom to boot! So long as you have the
time, you have all you need to get to a point where your horns aren't entirely
green and the spaces behind your ears aren't entirely soaked. With guidance
from more senior devs, you'll get to their level too in no time at all.

But it seems no matter what I do, it's always the software guys that are
interested in talking. They're so interested, it seems, that I don't even have
to go to them. They'll come to me. Which is honestly shocking, given that I
still consider myself a very sophomoric developer. By contrast, even getting
the hardware folks to _show up_ seems impossible. There was a recent STEM job
fair at my university (Texas State) that really ought to have been billed as
the Computer Science job fair. Sure, Freescale and National Instruments were
there, but there weren't any members from their hardware or verification
teams. It was all software and IT. Samsung was there, but I honestly don't
know why. I didn't need a hard copy of the job description that was printed
from the online job site. Apple was there, but they were only looking for at-
home tech support. Intel wasn't even there. AMD wasn't even there. NVIDIA
wasn't even there. Cisco wasn't even there. And those are all companies with
established offices in the Austin area.

My heart may be in hardware, but I still love software. And guess who's
hiring. And guess who's got student loans to pay off :D

tl;dr: Yes, I'd say the problem does exist. And perhaps the reason why web
apps are so dominant and "infrastructural elements" so maligned is that the
barriers to entry are so different in each field, and the corresponding
willingness to train in each field seemingly reversed.

~~~
overgryphon
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 company often pays to attend), and this has an unfortunate
effect on how easy it is to be hired at a particular company from a particular
university.

~~~
aspensmonster
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...](https://apps.engr.utexas.edu/ecac/events/expo/Students/browse.cfm)

[2] Texas State:
[https://www.myinterfase.com/txstate/Search/ViewEmployers/Ind...](https://www.myinterfase.com/txstate/Search/ViewEmployers/Index/K0FYdWRjelo5bEhlREw1eHlacnNCWDJFUHNVc1ZNNlNnc3MwUFlnSGk0UT01)

[3]
[https://apps.engr.utexas.edu/ecac/events/expo/Students/showC...](https://apps.engr.utexas.edu/ecac/events/expo/Students/showCompany.cfm?id=3207)

------
10098
> young engineers ignore opportunities in less-sexy areas of tech like
> semiconductors, data storage and networking, [...] without Nvidia’s graphics
> processing unit, your BuzzFeed GIF is not going to make anyone laugh

I don't know man. I mean, I'm fairly young (mid-twenties) and if someone told
me I could work for nvidia I would take that opportunity. Things like graphics
hardware/networking/data storage etc are a lot more interesting than 90% of
the crap that most startups are working on, but they are also a lot harder
too. The bar to entry is higher.

~~~
nostrademons
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.

~~~
rgbrgb
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.

~~~
astrange
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.

------
dkrich
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 as for the healthcare.gov debacle- being smart and a great programmer has
absolutely no benefit when it comes to fixing that site. Yes there are likely
major technical issues, but the main problems derive from layer upon layer of
bureaucracy and policy that any project of that scope entails. I would advise
smart young people to stay far, far away from any project of that nature, lest
any will you had to do something meaningful will get sucked out of your body
fairly quickly.

~~~
theorique
_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
Flappy Bird would never have been happy doing bench work to cure cancer.

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

------
cushychicken
This whole article is another iteration of the whole "the latest generation
sucks and is ruining everything" metanarrative that's been quite popular in
the last few years.

If companies like Cisco wanted to hire engineers who are going to sexier
companies like web startups, maybe they should learn a little more about what
web startups have to offer to a hire. Namely, the autonomy to develop a
solution to a problem in one's own way, rather than being a single cog in a
gigantic organizational wheel.

------
davidw
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.

------
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."

------
zenbowman
The author fails to see that while a large number of apps may be frivolous,
we've also ended up with a world that allows collaboration at a global scale.
The nature of engineering is changing, and what the last decade of "software
innovation" has done is evolve an engineering practice that is superior to any
that came before, even if it has only been used to build frivolous apps.

I've worked as a government contractor and have been exposed to the inner
workings of many of the companies building what the author would consider
serious technology - jet planes, submarines and the like. And I think it is
fair to say that the tools they use and the way they use them are clearly from
the 70s - this is not a criticism, they create impressive technology, but I
believe that once the practices of modern software development begin to take
root in those industries, we'll be exposed the innovation we've actually
created. facebook may not be considered a serious app, but certainly the
technology facebook has built will start being used in other "serious" sectors
in a few years, and then people will realize where the innovation lay. Things
like proper version control, large-scale data warehousing etc will change
serious industries, the frivolous apps are just a testbed in which we create
them because the risks of failure are low.

Cliffs: Web technology is serious business, even if what it is used for is
currently frivolous

~~~
ryandrake
> jet planes, submarines and the like. And I think it is fair to say that the
> tools they use and the way they use them are clearly from the 70s - this is
> not a criticism, they create impressive technology, but I believe that once
> the practices of modern software development begin to take root in those
> industries, we'll be exposed the innovation we've actually created.

Or, we'll just end up with jet planes with zero day exploits and submarines
that have to be patched every month when the next sprint gets pushed to
deployment.

------
sbierwagen
Man I hate the framing on that headline.

I hate silicon valley just as much as anyone else who doesn't live there, and
I'd gladly upvote an anti-valley piece; but when an old media outlet blames it
on Those Damn Millenials right in the title, it leaves a bad taste in my
mouth.

EDIT:

    
    
      But that presumes that the talent at older companies is 
      somehow subpar, less technically proficient, than it is 
      at their younger counterparts. This seems unlikely if you 
      look at Cisco’s list of patents.
    

Ugghhhhh

~~~
helmut_hed
I thought it was fairly balanced, and anyway the author is one of Those Damn
Millenials.

~~~
sbierwagen
Authors don't write headlines, editors do.

------
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".

~~~
noname123
> 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.

~~~
alaskamiller
Good to sell shovels in a gold rush but it's best to build a business that
lasts.

------
ZanyProgrammer
Too bad the article only gives a cursory nod towards ageism. _that_ is a
serious problem-the rest of the article was sorta meh and a bit inside
baseball wanking.

------
abvdasker
The amount of hyperbole and intentional provocation of anxiety in this article
makes me think the writer isn't really looking to inform anyone of anything.
Instead she just regurgitates one tech stereotype after another like it's
news.

~~~
nrao123
I literally read this SF Gate article on how out of town writers should write
the stereotypical article about SF an hour before I read the NYT article.

I smiled to myself when I saw the resemblances

[http://m.sfgate.com/living/article/Handy-dandy-guide-to-
writ...](http://m.sfgate.com/living/article/Handy-dandy-guide-to-writing-
about-SF-if-you-re-5307139.php)

------
bsder
The problem is that the VC "lottery" creates a short horizon.

The sexting app cashes out in 18-24 months.

The semiconductor company won't cash out for 5-7 years, if ever.

Want to fix the misallocation? Make the capital gains tax _more_ than income
tax instead of less. Suddenly all the smart boys will be off to companies that
have profits instead of growth.

------
bhudman
I thought this would be a perfect article for testing our some summarize tools
:). According to the osx summarizer tool, the following came up when I set to
1 sentence:

It’s the angst of an early hire at a start-up that only he realizes is
failing; the angst of a founder who raises $5 million for his company and then
finds out an acquaintance from college raised $10 million; the angst of
someone who makes $100,000 at 22 but is still afraid that he may not be able
to afford a house like the one he grew up in.

~~~
cstavish
How can you access the summarize tool in modern OS X? I remember Apple doing
away with it or otherwise moving it after ~10.5 or so.

~~~
72deluxe
I too would like to know this. Looks a brilliant feature.

EDIT: Found! It is still there in System Preferences > Keyboard > Shortcuts >
Services > Text > Summarize. It just isn't enabled by default.

------
nathanvanfleet
What a well written article. It really brilliantly summarizes why you really
would and wouldn’t want to be part of the current tech field. I’ve been trying
to go from IT at a University in Canada to working for companies like Apple.
So far no luck, I feel like I’m 5 years behind every gold rush. There are so
many articles these days stating “California is full, if you want to live
here, bring your A game and a million dollars if you want to live someplace."

"A few weeks ago, a programmer friend and I were talking about unhappiness, in
particular the kind of unhappiness that arises when you are 21 and lavishly
educated with the world at your feet. In the valley, it’s generally brought on
by one of two causes: coming to the realization either that your start-up is
completely trivial or that there are people your own age so knowledgeable and
skilled that you may never catch up.”

This is a great paragraph, again showing the dichotomy of power and impotency.
I feel the same way having learned iOS development on my own but not feeling
particularly “hireable” without a degree or full-time experience.

------
dpweb
As a 40 something Gen Xer, it's tough to generalize about the younger
generation. I detest arrogance and self-entitlement and that's definitely in
the air, but I admire how smart these kids are and their energy. It's a wide
world, there's room enough for both curing cancer and sexing apps.

------
digisth
Now might be a good time to revisit a previous discussion on this: Schlep
Blindness
([https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=3465521](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=3465521))
I'd also add (another part) of my take on it:

\- Creating the "new Snapchat" is a whole lot easier than curing cancer, which
is not even a single disease. It's a constellation of diseases/conditions we
still don't fully understand.

\- People need to eat, want to enjoy themselves, all that stuff. To do this,
you need money. What's the easier way to do so? Making the new Snapchat.

\- People want raised status. You'd get a lot more from curing cancer(s), but
it would take so much longer, and you're not guaranteed it'll really work.
Making the new Snapchat is the much easier option.

\- You need piles of money to do research to cure cancers. You also need time.
Short-termism (caused by the other side of accountability, transparency, and
demands for ROI) means you may not get either of these. So where does the
money come from, and is what you're getting enough? If it is, do you have time
(and enough of the right type of skilled researchers) to do so? Modern
medicine and research is not an individual endeavor; it requires teams,
sometimes large ones.

The incentives are just not there. Some of these things also do not _always_
lend themselves to private investment; the risks are high, the time horizons
are long, and the payoffs very uncertain. The way our current systems are set
up, this is not an easy problem to solve. People who have already made their
fortunes elsewhere (e.g., Elon Musk) and companies that have huge cash piles
and lots of big ideas (like Google) seem like our current best bets until we
collectively decide that we should fund more of these things via public money.

My comment on the older article:

[https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=3465754](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=3465754)

------
lnanek2
> It provided an efficient solution to a niche problem — rich techies needed a
> ride home after a night on the town and couldn’t get one

Wtf? Uber is better than a taxi in every way but price. It certainly isn't
limited to just rich techies at night. I wonder if he has ever even tried
calling a taxi in SF or the valley. In SF, half the time, it will never show
up. It just picks up someone else on the way there. In the valley, half the
companies you call up refuse you saying they have no one in that town right
now. With Uber you get a ride immediately and can watch it come to you on the
screen and down rate any driver that ditches you for an easier fare.

~~~
helmut_hed
And with Uber X, it's even cheaper than cabs sometimes...

------
angersock
A big part of this, I think, has to do with the way the market is structured
and the sorts of businesses that are getting rewarded.

Once upon a time, right, engineering was really sensitive to time. We had to
wirewrap circuits together, we had to punch cards, and in general we had to
plan out what we did. Some thought leaders existed, usually little labs
embedded in much larger companies (we all genuflect at Bell Labs, or Xerox
PARC, or what have you).

Nowadays the cost of prototyping something is super super low, even if it's
hardware.

Now, combine that with the "lean" meme going around, once which basically says
(arguably, quite rightly so) that engineering is four or five orders removed
from being a successful business.

So, we see a lot of startups going for things which are not Big Ideas--and why
should they, because Big Ideas are expensive to develop, because Big Ideas are
hard to sell, and because Big Ideas are not profitable.

What does sell well, reliably? Bread and circuses. Communication, and
advertising, and search. Any sort of business where you can be technologically
lazy and "disrupt" a market. Those are the things being selected for--not Big
Ideas.

Why don't you see these bright engineers working on public-sector stuff?
Because .gov is insanely high barrier to entry, and in order to break into it
you kind of have to assimilate. And it's a culture which is cynical, which
isn't "lean" by any stretch, and which cares about tech even less than the
next "X for Y with Z".

Public sector stuff invariably has a bunch of egos and bullshit that have to
be taken into account to do business, almost all of which is orthogonal to
actually solving any problems. So, little surprise that people don't want to
work on it. It's a lot of effort, and it doesn't change much, and it'll
backslide the very second you turn your back on it--maybe even before.

Medicine, incidentally, is exactly the same way--you've got to coddle a bunch
of little snowflakes who are used to getting their way and who are (annoyingly
enough) correct with enough frequency that they are considered elders on
matters they know nothing about.

------
datamatt
"without Nvidia’s graphics processing unit, your BuzzFeed GIF is not going to
make anyone laugh."

Err....

~~~
72deluxe
Surely GIFs are hardware accelerated these days?

Great article, right?

~~~
aspensmonster
Oh FFS. Where's the principle of charity when you need it?

YES. Without graphics processing of one form or another, on one chip or
another, over one cable or bus or another, to one screen or terminal or
another, your GIF absolutely won't be visible. Or your PNG, or your JPG, or
your desktop or movie or e-book. Nothing will be visible.

~~~
72deluxe
Maybe I was a bit harsh. Now on to create something that's _both_ cool and
really matters (satisfying both the kids and the elders).

If you're viewing GIFs on Windows and it is drawn using GDI or GDI+, nothing
is accelerated. It's bust.

------
joesmo
"Older engineers are not smart in the way that start-ups want them to be — or,
if they are, they have reservations about the start-up lifestyle."

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.

------
clinton_sf
I don't see this as a "youth" problem. To reframe the discussion, this is
about the ever present cycle of innovators that become incumbents and
innovators that disrupt incumbents. If you haven't heard of Clayton
Christensen's book, The Innovator's Dilemma, it's a good read.

While some of the people mentioned in the article are young (Bicket and Miswas
of Meraki are in their 20s/early 30s), other entrepreneurs in the news today
are not: Acton and Koum of WhatsApp (recently bought by Facebook for $19B) are
in their late 30s/early 40s.

Google's founders, Larry and Sergey, are 40.

Twitter: Jack Dorsey is 38. Biz Stone is 40. Evan Williams? 42.

Steve Jobs' best work at Apple was when he was in his late 40s/early 50s.
Arguably, the success of Apple today is due to Steve's leadership, not due to
the company being saved by some young person who breathed new life into the
company as this quote from the NYT article suggests: "The most innovative and
effective companies are old-guard companies that have managed to reach out to
the new guard, like Apple". (If you disagree with this, look at Apple between
1985-1997 and 2011-present, where plenty of young (and old) people worked at
Apple)

To simplify the claim here: there are those who know how to adapt to the
current situation and those that don't (or can, but don't care). Some of those
who know how to adapt are "old guard" and some are "new guard" \-- it's not
the age that is the determining factor.

As for other items in the article, like the lack of young people "help[ing]
cure cancer or fix healthcare.gov", there are plenty of old (older) people who
don't want to work on those problems too.

As for the claim that startups are the bastion of youth, that's not true
either. I see plenty of 40-something founders and startup employees. While
young startup people can easily afford to do a startup because their financial
commitments are low (e.g., no mortgage or family to support), the older folks
tend to do a startup for a similar reason: they've earned and saved a chunk of
money where they're no longer worried about money and they can take on more
risk.

------
lucasnemeth
This article make it seems that all infrastructural problems lies in the
hardware world.

The younger generation do care about problems that lies beneath the
application, but a lot of those problems deal more with software than with
hardware these days.

Besides that, we've been moving to a open source infrastructure, where a
larger number of companies that depends on softwares develop them in a
collaborative way, we have moved from the proprietary paradigm that existed in
the 90's. A simple texting app may depend on some innovative database to
scale, and will contribute to it's development.

------
scott_s
If this phenomenon exists, I'm not convinced it's a problem. We've only begun
to explore what these core technologies _enable_. Even if hardware was mostly
stagnant for, say, a decade, I still think we would see innovation in software
and how software is integrated into society.

------
fatbat
This quote of McDowell really highlighted the shift in mentality for me. Fast
triumphs caution?

"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."

------
im3w1l
People don't understand numbers, on an emotional level.

Saving just one animal from death _feels_ more important than improving the
way 100's of millions communicate. But is it really?

------
72deluxe
Ah but what hardware will these new web apps use? How will they get their
network packets across from A to B if not going through the expensive Cisco
hardware?

They all need each other.

------
parrotdoxical
TL;DR: Grad student naval gazes about + waxes philosophical on occupation he
feels predestined towards but actually has no real world experience with

------
michaelochurch
This isn't a "youth problem". 20-year-olds and 50-year-olds aren't natural
enemies, and most people don't think that way. Blaming this on one side is
ridiculous. When 50-year-old chickenhawk VCs only want to fund 25-year-olds,
that's not the fault of one generation or the other. (Can you blame it on the
young for taking the opportunity? No. Can you blame it on the old when it's
only a few making those decisions that are hurting most of them? No.)

The real issue is the cool/substance chasm, which the article describes well.

If you want substance, you can work for the government or a big corporation...
your salary growth will average 5% per year, your advancement will be
political, and you'll probably never be able to afford a house in the Bay Area
or New York. You'll also be at the mercy of corporate actions (mergers, etc.)
that might move you out of your fun R&D job and into the basement.

If you play for cool, there's a 90% chance you waste years of your life you
can never get back, a 9% chance you break even on opportunity cost, a 0.9%
chance that you never have to work again (after wearing yourself out over 10
years of a manic-depressive startup existence, and "retirement" being an
artifact of adrenal exhaustion, moderate wealth, and apathy), and a 0.1%
chance of getting so rich that it was actually worth it.

What we need is a middle path. We have the golden skill that makes us capable
of 15-40% annual growth (in salary, economic value, etc.) Between criminally
inefficient large organizations (which produce "substance", but inefficiently
and with painful wastes of effort) and flash-seeking careerist venture
capitalists ("cool")-- a path that might "average" 50%/year career returns but
with so much noise that the median outcome is poor-- no one will let us.
That's the problem.

~~~
oskarth
This way of thinking about it is interesting. For many people, me included,
entrepreneurship is first and foremost a existential choice.

Do you have some examples of what this middle path might look like? For the
entrepreneurial-minded, is it different from what is commonly viewed as
"lifestyle business" or bootstrapped revenue-first side-project (that might
later turn into a solid small-scale business)?

~~~
michaelochurch
Mid-risk/mid-growth businesses. Designed to grow at 15-40% per year and hire
selectively (see: Valve). Can have a desirable culture (e.g. open allocation)
that wouldn't survive 75%/year personnel growth. Too risky for bank loans
(personal liability) but not the billions-or-bollocks long-shot gambits that
are career-making for VCs. But still potentially very profitable if VCs took a
portfolio mentality rather than a careerist "I want the next Facebook because
of what it'll do for my reputation" approach.

~~~
nostrademons
You're describing basically a high-end consultancy or niche enterprise
business. These jobs exist, and they aren't particularly hard to find, but you
do have to go out and actively search for them. Companies like this don't make
the news; they build personal relationships with companies in their industry
and then quietly get contracts. You find out about them through your network;
once you've worked in an industry for a while you'll know all the niche
players, and probably be able to get a job there if you're any good.

I interned at one of these in college. I found it wasn't personally for me,
because a.) the pace of work was too slow and b.) customers can be a bitch,
with often conflicting requirements, and when you're a mid-size enterprise
business you don't get to aggregate many customers together into a product.
But for someone with a different risk/reward tradeoff from myself, they can be
very pleasant places to work.

------
Dewie
> The other night I was studying late for a midterm exam — I am a grad student
> in computer science at Columbia University —

Heh, nice name-dropping.

------
Jonathan_Swift
Please Don't Hit Me With Your Modem!

===
[http://www.warplife.com/jobs/computer/](http://www.warplife.com/jobs/computer/)

