> There’s not all that much being done that demands thirty years of experience
That is key isn't it. I don't live either in the Valley, but observe it through HN goggles.
There seems to be an infinite amount of money thrown to vastly similar projects. That's like brute forcing as much marketing ideas as possible and see what sticks, using cheap resources cajoled into that life by ego boosting measures: countless meet-up, conferences, conveniently all across the country (amazing how traveling makes people feel important). You are no mere developers, you are talents. Only you can do it, and your time is running short: by the time you are 30 you are braindead. Do it, you only have one chance to show the world who you really are.
Reminds me of the 90's, it used to be selling stuff online, now it is distributing ads. Hopefully this time it will not stop violently like it did last time, and for the time being that is at least a sector where money go to the younger generation.
The negative point IMO, is that prominent figures try too hard to drive people off school.
Sure education price is absurd in the US and I understand that a ROI is necessary, however, there are many many industries that will not look at you without that piece of paper. When time get tough (and they will, a career is 40 years long !) even the company that are hip and open right now will use that token when scanning a stack of similar looking resume.
They did the same trick during the Internet bubble. Countless of people self learned development, change career, and paid the price after the bubble had exploded. PHP God / Web Developer was a golden ticket to any company or sector, but as of 2002, you better had that backed by some formal education to catch a high paying job, or even a job at all.
Yeah I think that's the crux of the age-ism too. Anything that's going to lead anywhere in the same solar system as consciousness uploading is going to be a wee bit harder than serving ads at volume from the cloud. The lack of a large enough market for skills at that level speaks of the lack of problems that hard being tackled.
You're right about SV being underpaid, too. Those salaries look big until you factor in the cost of living and the number of hours you work.
Hint:
If you make $120,000/year and work 60 hours a week, you actually make about $80,000/year when compared to someone who works 40 hours a week and makes $80,000/year. Now plug that into your cost of living calculator in a city with $3000/month for entry level rent. Now you make the same as someone who makes $50,000/year in Austin, Texas.
Six figure recent college grads in SF/SV are cheap labor.
Oh, and I wonder who owns all that real estate? It couldn't be the same people who own a lot of the VC funds and large shares of the tech companies could it? Think about the journey the money is taking from the point it reaches your pocket. If that's true, it ends up right back where it started in short order minus taxes.
Bottom line:
You are a business selling your labor. Your net profit per hour worked is what you make, not your gross income. If you live check to check, you make nothing.
Edit:
The only minor wrinkle here is debt. If you have a lot of debt, then making the numbers bigger works to your advantage provided you use those bigger numbers to reduce your debt in nominal terms. Example: paying 10% of a 100k income against your debt will pay it off exponentially faster than paying 10% of a 60k income. This is why politicians love inflation. So if you have a 200k student loan maybe you should chase big numbers in nominal terms until that's gone.
It's not cognitive dissonance for two groups of people to have different goals, and ways to reach those goals.
Fresh young startup CEOs only hire other young people because they're more interested in getting paid to play Xbox than they are in actually getting work done. The goal isn't to make money, it's to make friends and network. Programmers don't need 20 years of experience to write a shopping cart in Rails.
The companies who actually solve hard problems are still hiring anyone they can get their hands on, regardless of age, because if HR's willing to spring for an extra $100k a year they can hire the co-inventor of TCP instead of a new grad who wrote their first client-server app a month ago.
I enjoy seeing these introspective posts and hope they become prevalent among technical people all over the world. What technical people need to understand is that the system that we operate in is just as important, if not more so, than our own aspirations and potential contributions.
Politics, economics and culture are usually taken for granted by technologists and scientists. Some are informed pessimists, and some are apathetically uninformed. The truth is that these systems serve as the silicon upon which we must build. We often try to abstract our way out of it, but if we want real change, we have to go right down to the hardware and begin making changes.
The OP correctly identifies the cognitive dissonance in SV, as well as some aspects of classical capitalism. The reality is that we are running a society based upon assumptions made hundreds of years ago as to what a society constitutes and how it should work. These factors are all changing rapidly, and it’s becoming clear that our systems aren't keeping up.
In the USA, we face an unprecedented technological tidal wave in a winner-take-all capitalist society. This has massive upsides for the winners (entrepreneurs, VCs, hedge funds, banks, etc.) and devastating consequences for the losers (unskilled labor, outdated/sidelined skilled labor, the sick, poor, unemployed, etc.). Furthermore, this type of laissez-faire economy incentivizes short term investments at the cost of long term projects (Apollo, Human Genome, etc.). As the role of government and its spending becomes increasingly demonized, we will undoubtedly see these trends strengthen, leading to more emphasis on the present at the expense of the future. Projects that don’t have immediate benefits will be cancelled, and long term research will grind to a halt. We are already seeing this with the plateau and decline of government research institutions, soon to be followed by the demise of publicly funded research in academia.
What we really have to ask ourselves is this: what is the most optimal contribution we can make during these times? Is it better to dedicate some time to rethink these foundations, or do we just push forward on our own high level projects in hopes of making small positive contributions? When do we start treating government and politics like an engineered system, which can be planned and optimized for certain outcomes? And finally, when do we start talking about which outcomes we want to see in the long term?
I am cautiously hopeful, but it is going to take a lot of individual introspection by the technical community to reach the critical mass required to enact long-term positive change.
That's how capitalism works, I am afraid. Strong AI and mind uploading would take enormous research budget without strong guarantees. Also it would make more sense to persuade people to graduate in neuroscience-computer science double major rather than preaching to generic software developers.
age-ism is for the "over 40" folks in the Valley except when the next rule applies
transhumanism is for the folks who've made the money, and age doesn't matter for transhumans
and Silicon Valley’s Cognitive Dissonance is how it looks for the folks outside of the Valley to whom the above mentioned distinction blurs away due to the distance (in mental and real space).
The reason why youth is preferentially valued is that wisdom is not: the youth work within existing systems and frameworks with agility and without questioning them, they don't yet have the experience to deeply challenge those frameworks.
It's not that there are no older people at companies, it's that there are few at the top, who don't want to be challenged. They want people who will efficiently follow orders. The best kind of person to follow orders is one who doesn't even know how to begin questioning them yet because he simply does not have enough experience yet.
Ironically then, the preference for youth exists in order to prop up old paradigms. This is a cultural artifact of the current era not some timeless principle.
That is key isn't it. I don't live either in the Valley, but observe it through HN goggles.
There seems to be an infinite amount of money thrown to vastly similar projects. That's like brute forcing as much marketing ideas as possible and see what sticks, using cheap resources cajoled into that life by ego boosting measures: countless meet-up, conferences, conveniently all across the country (amazing how traveling makes people feel important). You are no mere developers, you are talents. Only you can do it, and your time is running short: by the time you are 30 you are braindead. Do it, you only have one chance to show the world who you really are.
Reminds me of the 90's, it used to be selling stuff online, now it is distributing ads. Hopefully this time it will not stop violently like it did last time, and for the time being that is at least a sector where money go to the younger generation.
The negative point IMO, is that prominent figures try too hard to drive people off school. Sure education price is absurd in the US and I understand that a ROI is necessary, however, there are many many industries that will not look at you without that piece of paper. When time get tough (and they will, a career is 40 years long !) even the company that are hip and open right now will use that token when scanning a stack of similar looking resume.
They did the same trick during the Internet bubble. Countless of people self learned development, change career, and paid the price after the bubble had exploded. PHP God / Web Developer was a golden ticket to any company or sector, but as of 2002, you better had that backed by some formal education to catch a high paying job, or even a job at all.