
Tech backlash has come to Stanford - ForHackernews
https://slate.com/technology/2019/08/stanford-tech-students-backlash-google-facebook-palantir.html
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compiler-guy
I did the Stanford thing a long time ago, but there were tech objectors even
then. A comparatively small number of activists protesting this or that, “Do
you really want to work for Microsoft/IBM/Oracle?” with most engineers just
keeping their head down and studying.

This is nothing new.

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zamfi
I think what’s new is the rapid fall in the number of CS grads from Stanford
(and other top schools) accepting offers from Facebook.

But I doubt it’s just about ethics. I remember when Facebook dethroned Google
too.

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nothal
The cynic in me thinks this is purely a factor of smart kids in tech realizing
Facebook is old news and provides little path for differentiation (or rapid
promotion). They better than anyone know the exciting startups their friends
and friends of friends are starting especially compared to the tedium of a
(cushy but) relatively non-challenging job at Facebook, Google, MS, etc. Plus,
there's more chance for a moonshot 10/100/1000x at a company that's not
already a behemoth. The smartest people I know are itching to work at
startups. They could care less about FAANG.

~~~
drawnwren
Also, fintech is paying significantly more than FAANG right now. The
interviews are harder, but there was an ~$60k premium to go to NYC over SF for
most of my friends in Harvard's last class. Combined with what is viewed as a
relatively low promotion curve vs NYC -- if they wanted a big company, most
students took NYC.

At 5 years of experience, the gap was even wider. A friend just took a 400%
pay raise to move from Google to a fintech firm. He shopped around at other
tech companies, but no one was above a 20-30% increase.

~~~
locallycompact
400% seems much higher than anything I've seen. assuming 200k at google
(likely conservative), this implies a 1m offer from a quant fund for someone
with no special complementarity for the role? i would be very surprised labor
market is this much out of alignment.

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drawnwren
I can't edit the original post. It was a 300% pay raise, salary was 400% of
original. 1m at a quant fund isn't unreasonable 5 years out, but it would be
extraordinarily high.

~~~
locallycompact
agree, but surprised at this number for someone without a proven track record
given the high false positive rate for success in these roles

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jasonhansel
I honestly think that there should be some sort of ethics course required of
CS students (like how MBA students are often required to take a class in
business ethics, and doctors are required to learn medical ethics).

Engineers who behave unethically without asking questions aren't good
engineers--at least, they're not the sort of engineers we want to be creating.

~~~
tomhoward
I have trouble with the notion that a single class during tertiary studies is
what will make the difference between ethical or unethical behaviour.

Ethical behaviour is - or should be - learned and refined over a lifetime, via
parents, peers, all levels of education, employers, wider society and one's
own contemplation.

I'm suspicious of the inclusion of ethics classes in MBA courses, given the
kind of work many MBAs end up doing. I suspect it can create a mindset in
which anything you convince yourself is OK according to what you learned in
your ethics class is acceptable, which is a very weak and inconsistent
standard.

To be clear, I'm fully supportive of the idea that engineers and everyone else
in tech companies should behave ethically. I'm just not sure ethics classes
will achieve that outcome.

If engineers, or any employees, are behaving unethically, it's because there's
a misalignment between the employee's own short-term incentives (i.e., keeping
their job, getting a promotion/raise), and societally-beneficial objectives.
It'll take more than an ethics class to fix that.

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randcraw
In my case, I never seriously thought about several hot button social issues
that were ethically troubled until I took a course on ethics. They simply
didn't intersect with my life, nor did I expect them to. Only once I was in
the class did I stop and think about costs incurred by choices and policies
and their outcomes, much less how I might simply ask "What choice is more just
(or less unjust)?"

College is about not only learning deliberately but allowing serendipity to
open your mind to the unexpected. In my experience, budding engineers are
among the last of us to become aware of social costs vs benefits and
alternative perspectives. Without a required course to open their eyes, it's
likely that many young techies will leap into life's choices before they look.

IMO, college is exactly the right time for all students to confront the cost
of living an unexamined life.

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killjoywashere
I can say, as someone currently hiring, that more than one applicant(1) has
cited our focus on cancer, and not killer robots, as a compelling factor in
applying. People in the killer robot jobs are actively looking for ways out.
As an aside, the killer robot jobs tend to pay about 10-15% under market, at
least according to Glassdoor.

What makes the comparison somewhat interesting, I think, is that we are still
a military group, in military installations. We just happen to be hunting
cancer because people in the military also get cancer.

(1) We're mainly talking STEM BS to PhD, mostly under 40.

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MarkMarine
Pretty sure you’re not supposed to discriminate by age when hiring

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nothal
He was describing the candidates he sees this behavior from. I don't think
it's discrimination to observe obvious information.

~~~
killjoywashere
Indeed, a classic example of bias is to refuse to discuss race information
explicitly in selection deliberations.

If you see people refusing to consider information given to them, it's a
signal, and it's implications may be less altruistic than they want you to
believe. Perhaps more than they want to believe themselves.

One of the most compelling examples of this I've seen was in a selection board
procedure where there were simply no black applicants (from a field of
potential applicants roughly 5-7% black). This was at a service academy, the
board was selecting for student leadership positions. The board members were
senior officers of the military (hate the military all you like, but
considered opinions have generally held the military up as a model of
integrative practices done right).

After selections were made, the demographics of the selectees and the pool
were compared. The glaring absence of blacks was deemed a problem by everyone
on the board. In prior boards, the white people on the board would have
immediately moved to revote with the explicit intent of elevating more blacks
into leadership positions. This was simply not possible, there were no black
applicants. A black woman who happened to be on the board (who was highly
accomplished) was deeply concerned and moved to reconvene after she could
review the entire field of potential black applicants.

A week later the board reconvened and she said she simply could not find a
black student she would recommend. The anguish in her face stays with me 15
years later. She felt that the black students who might qualify on other
grounds were on shaky academic ground and she felt it was her duty to make
sure they had the best possible chance of graduating.

To some extent it is surely a tale of small numbers (higher variance in
smaller populations leads to sad stories like this) but if there is a person
capable of understanding the problem, I would think a black female computer
scientist with a lifetime in government would understand. And she was clearly
troubled.

You can easily imagine the other version of this story, where one or a few
black students had applied and not been selected. The white majority would
have quickly added one or more of them to the student leadership coalition,
and the black woman's minority opinion would have been drowned out in a simple
majority vote.

What I see now, I think, some years removed, is the routine, callous use of
blacks by whites to avoid confronting their racist tendencies in the usual
board setting. Indeed, out of the many boards I participated it, it was this
one instance where the absence of black students forced everyone to
acknowledge the black leader's opinion carried weight.

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tehlike
7 years ago, i worked with a really smart undergrad. I asked him if he would
come to google, he said google is not cool. Went to spacex.

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ummonk
SpaceX is notorious for chewing up starry-eyed new grads and spitting them out
after they burn out from the lack of work life balance.

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tehlike
Maybe, then maybe not.

I had no wlb for quite a while after school, by choice. Some people just like
to do what they do.

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yoyo4658sld
I was the first full-time engineer at the previous company that I worked for.
We were acquired by one of the companies mentioned in this article. During the
acquisition, employees were given the choice to simply not join the acquiring
company. I pondered on it a lot given my ideological beliefs and stances. For
practical reasons, I decided to join while a close colleague opted out…looking
back, for a number of reasons (first-hand knowledge/exposure/experiences that
I prefer to not dive into), I wish I had done the same.

This was a bit of time ago and I am no longer employed by said company.

I applaud these students for standing up for what they believe in.

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Clubber
I lost my tech altruism after the Snowden revelations. I'd been in the
business professionally since the mid 90s and as a hobbyist since the mid 80s.
I still do it for a living because I gotta pay bills, but SV doesn't impress
me as world changing, for the better anyway.

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sp527
I had a similar epiphany, though I'm also a generally cynical person. It was
always easier for me to believe that human nature would see us ultimately
misuse technology for dystopian purposes. I also believe what's happened thus
far is just the tip of the iceberg.

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taurath
I don't suppose this is really news, given that Facebook and Google are the
Big Incumbents now. For many this is a Moral choice, and whether what you're
doing is really helping out the world.

I'd say also, I currently perceive Google/Facebook as a place to "slow down".
They're big enough and have enough resources to do anything they want, so it
seems like there's gonna be a lot of people just hanging out and going the
slow route.

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crazygringo
> _Google /Facebook as a place to "slow down"_

I don't know where you've gotten that impression. Neither of those two
companies got to where they are by having a culture of slowness.

Any team you're on doesn't have all of the company's financial resources at
its whim -- rather the team has a set budget and quarterly objectives and
everyone's breaking their back to meet them like in any other company. And if
your team doesn't deliver, then your promotion won't happen... and most people
are working towards that promotion.

There is absolutely nothing slow about it.

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whatever_dude
> I don't know where you've gotten that impression. Neither of those two
> companies got to where they are by having a culture of slowness.

My visibility is limited (don't work at FB/Google), but I have several friends
and ex-colleagues who do and I have to say, I have the same impression that
it's a company for people to slow down.

They're already at the top of their game and I think assuming everybody there
is an A-player is misguided. It's more likely you become another cog in a
giant machine with limited reach for better or worse.

There's a lot of politics and while it's true everybody wants a promotion,
it's clear to me (at least from my sources) that promotions are more about
learning to play a game according to their rules rather than being a fast,
high-achiever.

Not everybody wants to have financial resources at their whim. But some people
are happy getting to the office 11am, moving a button 1px to the right then
1px to the left once in a while, and then leaving at 4pom. From what I heard,
if you're ok with that, a place like Facebook or Google is great.

Again, I don't assume it's the norm, but I heard enough to make me think
"slowing down" is very doable.

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ng12
For every politically woke CS student there are two dozen completely
apolitical ones (and a sprinkling of wrongthinkers). I don't think Palantir is
really desperate for applicants.

~~~
aliston
Stanford has also dumbed down its undergrad CS major, removing all of the old
engineering requirements that tended to filter out the SJW types.

Edit: seems the downvoters don’t like what I have to say, but that doesn’t
make it less true. Compare the graduation requirements for CS at Stanford from
a few years ago to now - no compilers or os, no multivariable calculus, no
pointers. They literally eliminated all the hard classes. As a result, the
degree has become more liberal arts focused and the makeup of the class has
changed in sync. I’d guess more than 50% of cs majors at Stanford we’re asian
and foreign born just a few years ago - folks who you generally don’t see
leading direct action protests.

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tayo42
sounds like they are aligning the degree with the realities of a programing
career. did calculus really make you a better software engineer? Most
development happens at such a high level that not knowing OS and compilers
probably can get most people by. How much of development is made up of
frontend js programmers, mobile developers, web developers writing
php/wordpress stuff. If you do want to be good at it, it is a specialty.

If you do want to do science, there are still masters and phd programs.
Undergrad is job prep for most people and colleges are doing a disservice by
pretending it's not.

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rayiner
C'mon. This is Stanford. No OS, compilers, or pointers? Really?

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manfredo
This is somewhat misleading. You have to pick a specific track, and there are
hard requirements in each track. For instance in Graphics you make a ray
tracer and 3D renderer in 148 and a 3d mesh editor and a video game in 248.

In theory you dig heavy into algorithms and probabilistic running time, and
other things.

In the systems track operating systems is a required course as is compilers.

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ravenstine
While there's definitely backlash happening against companies like Google and
Facebook, I have another theory.

New graduates are less interested in these companies because they don't
represent their generation. When I was a kid, the idea of working for these
companies was cool not only because they had cool products but because they
were relatively _new_ and were something relevant to be a part of.

Today, these companies aren't so cool to graduates because they're old school
in tech years. Facebook and Google are _massive_ companies where your impact
will probably be a drop in the ocean. In a lot of ways, they're the IBM and
Xerox of today; why would a kid in the 70s or the 80s want to work for those
stuffy and slow-moving corporations when they could work for Apple or
Microsoft? Maybe millennial still view these companies the way they did in
their youth, but I doubt that Gen Z see them as the exciting new thing. Young
people naturally want to do something new and don't want to exist merely to be
the Atlas of the same world their elders built.

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zzzcpan
Probably. Also in the early days Google was publishing things that were at the
forefront of tech, which was interesting to everyone in tech. But over the
years they got bigger, started to lag behind, putting out boring crap for
strategic reasons. Big companies just cannot advance tech and be seen as
exciting, as they are the ones trying to hold it back to keep getting those
massive profits.

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kjgkjhfkjf
Idealism will lose some of its luster when the time comes for them to pay off
their enormous student loans.

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jdashg
Stanford's financial aid is /generous/. Most students aren't coming out
drowning in debt, despite the high sticker-price.

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a_imho
Blocked for the GDPR conscious.

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jmngomes
[https://outline.com/tWekNd](https://outline.com/tWekNd)

