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Silicon Valley's Youth Problem
An anonymous reader writes "The NY Times has an article about the strange cultural rift around tech innovation in Silicon Valley. The companies getting all the press are the ones developing shiny new apps and attempting to reinvent their industry. This attention — and all the money that follows it — is drawing in many young, talented engineers. The result is that getting people to develop needed and useful existing technologies is a harder sell. 'For better or worse, these are the kinds of companies that seem to be winning the recruiting race, and if the traditional lament at Ivy League schools has been that the best talent goes to Wall Street, a newer one is taking shape: Why do these smart, quantitatively trained engineers, who could help cure cancer or fix healthcare.gov, want to work for a sexting app?' This is more evidence that the tech bubble is continuing to inflate: '[I]n the last 10 years in particular, there has been an exacerbation of the qualities for which it's been both feted and mocked: Valuations are absurdly high for companies with no revenue. The founders are younger; the pace is faster.'"
Are you saying that King Digital, maker of the wildly popular Candy Crush Crush Saga (tm)(r)(c) isn't worth 7.6 billion dollars? Surely you jest.
I would sooner do surgery on my leg with a spoon than work for the low-bidder, over-commit, under-deliver wreck of a shop that CGI represents.
One word: Money
35 is the new 65.
It has nothing to do with the products, and everything to do with how existing companies see workers(especially tech workers) as "cost centers". We're kind of reaping the results of a system that views employees as "at will temporary work power" through massive layoffs at the earliest convenience.
It was "Just the cost of doing business" and we weren't supposed to hold it against them, as it concentrated wealth upwards and made peoples' lives more fragile and terrified. You didn't know if you could count on your next check, but you had to live in a housing market that did assume that. No one really wants to be a whim. Or if they are, they'd like to be a whim of their own, at least.
Why would they cure cancer when they can join a start-up and possibly get bought out by the titans? The draw of the Valley is that you can be a millionaire by the time you're 24. This isn't "rocket surgery."
Because people are entitled to "Needs". Therefore, the only profits to be made are in areas that don't involve needs.
Why do these smart, quantitatively trained engineers, who could help cure cancer or fix healthcare.gov, want to work for a sexting app?
Because as an employee in America, your CEO makes on average over 273x your pay, whereas if you join a startup early enough you stand a chance of actually benefiting from your companies success.
Next stupid question?
So the younger coders are willing to risk a few of their early years in the hopes of a big stock win or buy-out.
Where's the problem?
If there are other systems that need programmers then hire programmers for those other systems. There are programmers who do not fit the "just out of school" demographic. Why not hire those programmers? Why focus on the "young" coders?
I don't live in the area anymore, but being a fresh college grad near that area around '05 it was hard finding work due to job requirements. I had no real-world experience, only a 4-year degree and a knack for computers and networking. No one was willing to train or even give an interview until I had 5+ years of server admin experience. The end result is that I moved out of the area and haven't thought about going back since. Maybe the older, established companies need to loosen job requirements and train good employees if they want people to work for them instead of the startups.
It's an artifact of the capital markets. The same thing happened in the late '50s with the 'Tronics Boom'
Going back 80 years earlier it was the railroads.
It's a side effect of the 'Extraordinary Popular Delusions and the Madness of Crowds".
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/...
Part of this can be attributed to stagnation. So many companies assume they can make money on ad revenue and selling user data that they focus on that exclusively.
The problem is that how long until there is a saturation. Once companies start logging every single click and character typed that a subscriber (i.e. their product) sends their site and selling that info, there is nothing else they can do other than demanding subscribers run adware on their local machines for access. Once this point is reached, there will be a bust for the Web 2.0 (FB, Twitter, services that do not charge their users for revenue.)
What might happen is that governments step in and desire social networks for their citizens, so companies will focus on trying to sell to countries as the main customer instead of advertisers.
I'm hoping the pendulum will swing in the direction back to paid services so the subscriber is the customer and not the product. However, it is harder to get a ton of people to pay a subscription a month than it is to just hand their data over to various third parties for a guaranteed purchase order every financial period.
" who could help cure cancer " BWHAAHAAHHA. I work in academia/research. The pay, compared to industry, is garbage. Pretty decent educational benefits, great paid time off...but the money coming in the door is, as I said, garbage.
Please help metamoderate.
It's about money, benefits, perks, and culture. Startups offer all this stuff, and the air of excitement. When you've finished crushing the culture in a company in the name of profit and efficiency, nobody wants to be there.
It is interesting to see a story like this after months of reading about companies bemoaning the fact that they can't find good engineers.
An internal system operation returned the error "The operation completed successfully.".
Obligatory SMBC
Thirty four characters live here.
It's been about 14 years since the dotcom bubble burst, and memories are short.
Yup, this sure is a NYT article. Hand wringing by an economically and technically illiterate journalist, asking a question which any 6 year old could answer.
Please do not read this sig. Thank you.
For how long has America been glorifying and aggrandizing the most useless among itself, pushing propaganda as product, you must be this sexy to participate...
You end up having people more interested in the latest fashionable trends and pointless endeavors than solving the real problems and challenges of substance that face society.
Personally, I couldn't give less of a shit about the latest trendy sexy whatever. But, I love tackling a challenging project that helps people get shit done.
Read the whole article. It's quite good.
It's not "youth" that's the problem. It's banality. "The best minds of my generation are thinking about how to make people click ads. That sucks." - Jeff Hammerbacher, Facebook. Most of the "app" companies are not "tech" companies. They're fad publishers. The technology for doing routine web apps and phone apps is pretty much standardized now.
The engineering that goes into phone hardware is just awe-inspiring. Electronic design today is brutal. You barely get to use any power, the budget for each function is tiny, the size has to be very small, you have to operate multiple radios without interference right next to each other, and there's a new product to get out every six months. Most of that engineering is not done in the US. That's a big concern. The US probably doesn't have the technology to build a cell phone any more.
It's not as bad as the first dot-com boom. This time, there's usually revenue. Income, even. Even Twitter claims to be profitable (although they're not, really. Look at the Generally Accepted Accounting Principles results, not the ones excluding "one-time expenses".)
"who could help cure cancer"
PhDs in the life sciences are more likely to be unemployed than employed at the time of graduation, and the trend is only getting worse
Why would a medical research lab hire some random coder to cure cancer, when PhDs in biology can't even find jobs?
Because the former is sustainable, while the latter is not.
See also: The entire human history of ethics. And even the evolution of social animals.
We know where leadership by an anti-intellectual "strongman" who scapegoats minorities and likes boisterous rallies goes
As the job based systems leads to them looking for ways to get out having to pay for it and anything can be used as an pre existing conditions if you get really sick.
They tell me I'm too young to understand ... /sarcasm>
So wake me up when it's all over
When I'm wiser and I'm older
Hmm, the humour and sarcasm seem to have been be lost on you.
The fact that you compare working for and established company to "curing cancer" and going to work for a start-up as "developing a sexting app" shows little knowledge of what start-up and established companies are actually doing. The fact of the matter is, working for a larger established company usually consists of maintaining or making trivial enhancements to existing software with the occasional new product being developed. Working for a start-up, however, usually includes a rampant amount of innovation simply because start-ups don't have much money to advertise their new products. The result result of this is they have a need to develop more interesting and innovative products in order to be able to compete with established companies. Another thing worth mentioning is the diversity that start-ups usually have, need I remind you that Tesla motors was a start-up, and many of the technologies, including some which show promise of curing cancer, were also developed at start-ups.
...different decade.
Bukowski said it. I believe it. That settles it.
If I graduate with a lot of student debt and my choice is between: working for a company that benefits humanity but pays little, or, working for a company that makes shitty apps for idiots to play with but pays very well what is the most rational choice?
The middle class in America is fucked. And 99% of those people who could "help cure cancer" would end up there if they chose to pursue more altruistic careers. Its a rat race and if you are smart and motivated and at prestigious school I think the path towards $$ is always going to be the most attractive.
Why do they not want to "fix healthcare.gov"? Because that's an uninteresting, almost clerical, job made worse by being part of a messy government procurement system. I can't think of any developers that want to do that sort of work -- been done already thousands of times (usually, of course, much better than HealthCare.gov). Most would only do it to pay the mortgage. Of course, the good developers can find something more interesting to do with less bureaucratic pain inflicted on them in the process.
Why is there an "insightful" mod and why isn't it "-1"? If I wanted insight, I wouldn't be reading
You do realize that insurance only works because there is a pool of healthy people who take out less than they put in. When the day comes that you need insurance you will appreciate how it works.
The biggest problem with our "old" healthcare system is that employer provided benefits hides the true costs involved and allows healthcare providers and insurance companies to ratchet up fees without free market competition. This ends up making it unaffordable for those not lucky enough to get insurance through their employer. ACA, while not without flaws, is the best hope to fix that problem by creating a lower barrier of entry to become insured and fostering more competition. That goal can only be achieved with a mandate that forces healthy people to participate.
I am becoming gerund, destroyer of verbs.
Start ups means a chance and some good money. Established companies, not so much.
Now, if comnpaie would reward internal group that create new thing well, it would shift.
For example:
I was on a team of 20 developers and 10 Business experts and testers. IN a year we created an application that saved the company 100 million dollars a year.
Are reward? a football.
Ironically, we used baseball as the theme.
Now, if we would have gotten a million dollars each, we would have stayed around and created other internal application that could saved them a lot of money.
The Kruger Dunning explains most post on
I'm a big fan of "desk checks". I find bugs in my own code when I do them - some of them are stupid bugs which I would have certainly found in testing (desk checking just catches them earlier and more economically), others are obscure ones (often race conditions) that might, or might not, actually be seen in the wild and some I would have been unlikely to find in testing (and QA would have even less chance of catching).
However, even among some oldsters who are relatively skilled, I find most developers are very bad at desk checking their own code. They think their shit smells good and can't detach themselves from their belief that since the author of the code is (in their not so humble opinion) a genius who, therefore, wouldn't write anything but perfect code. Doing it well requires a certain mindset. If I don't find any bugs when desk checking a significant body of code I've written, I assume I'm being sloppy and redouble my efforts and focus -- and if I find a bug in testing, I ask myself why I didn't catch it in desk checking (sometimes there's a good reason -- such as an API I'm calling doesn't work as advertised or I misunderstood the API and there's not much desk checking will do to catch those cases efficiently).
(BTW, "desk checking" really doesn't require paper and pencil anymore IMHO - I find a few IDE windows w/search et al features makes the process much easier and more thorough for me.)
Why is there an "insightful" mod and why isn't it "-1"? If I wanted insight, I wouldn't be reading
These useless apps are worth nothing.
They're certainly not "worth nothing." They're worth whatever a vulture capitalist is willing to fund, or whatever an IPO will bring in. Those people still have the ability to turn punching purple monkeys into a pile of quick cash. The few technologists who time their insider stock-option trades correctly will get rich, but almost everyone else will get pink slips and a hard slap of reality.
Everybody out there imagines they'll be the one who lucks into a lucrative stock market trade, just as every gold miner imagines he'll be the one to strike the motherlode. I wish them all luck, but that's all I'll give them. I'm still not dropping $0.99 on a fart app.
John
I fully support this, but somehow we need to identify people who do/don't make that decision by not buying insurance (or proving semi-liquid assets sufficient to cover the first hours of emergency care). This is so 911, ERs, and the government can know not to respond or care for such people.
Obviously, if a private hospital chooses to provide care they are free to do so but there should be no law requiring ER care for those making that choice. Presumably those hospitals choosing to provide such care either have donations to cover it or would end up pricing themselves out of the market because they have to amortize the cost of the uncompensated care over the paying customers.
Why is there an "insightful" mod and why isn't it "-1"? If I wanted insight, I wouldn't be reading
for youth... startups with no funding but the possibility of millions of users and being bought out for $19bn is a LOT more attractive than doing something meaningful for a good wage... that's what you do in your free time AFTER you become a billionaire... right?
Even the adherents of the basic principles themselves seem to stop short of explaining why they work. "Here, this is duplicate code. You should follow the DRY principle and get rid of it." "Why?" "Because it's a principle."
They should let the new kid do some sink-or-swim maintenance on code that doesn't follow the principles. You want to learn about DRY, try changing one branch of duplicated code without realizing there was a cut-and-paste copy elsewhere in the code base. Now you've gone from a solid bug to an intermittent bug, and your clients are still yelling at you. Thus beginneth the lesson.
John
They're worth whatever a vulture capitalist is willing to fund, or whatever an IPO will bring in.
Agreed. A con is worth whatever you can get out of it.
This is so 911, ERs, and the government can know not to respond or care for such people.
I would love to see such people left bleeding on the street, but unfortunately that will never happen.
I had to explain "Desk Checks"
Dang, I didn't know there was a name for it. Does it count as a new skill if I learned a buzzword for an old one I had?
When will this transfer of wealth from young to old stop?
When you get old.
I don't want to pay (subside) someone else healthcare.
I didn't want to pay for your K-12 education and subsidize your higher education. It would bother me a lot less though if you weren't so childish and self-centered.
This. I'm tired of losing most of my income to older generations while knowing that I'll get *none* of the same benefits.
Pray tell, how do you "know" this (other than by regurgitating canards).
They LOVE to slam CA and anybody over there. Now, Silicon valley remains far more innovative than NYC, so, they continue to gripe about it.
I prefer the "u" in honour as it seems to be missing these days.
You realize that the correct word for what you describe here is ... 'pyramid scheme.'
You do realize you have no clue what a pyramid scheme is, right?
I believe this is the argument Microsoft used at its antitrust trial.
The judge didn't buy it.
Once you have a lead position in something, it's very hard for a competitor to displace you without you being nothing more than an "also ran".
If nothing else, when someone becomes an actual threat, you have enough of a bankroll to litigate them out of business.
As best I can tell, CGI's competitors all suck also. Gov't contracting is a screwy industry that rewards screwy behavior and thus shapes screwy corporate behavior.
Table-ized A.I.
There is little movement of working to help for the greater good of society. It's how much can I get and how quickly can I get it?
The greater good of society?
I will be happy to work towards that as soon as our elected officials choose to lead by example.
Right around the time you become immune to cancer and hit-n-run car accidents, probably.
Obviously you think that insurance is something you only get if you already have a problem, not as "insurance" against going broke if something unforeseen happens. Perhaps when you're a grown-up you'll realize that not everything in your life is planned. Or maybe nothing will ever go wrong for you ever, because you're "young and healthy."
Alternately, since they can no longer deny coverage based on a preexisitng condition, why doesn't he just only buy the insurance the day before he goes into the doctor because he's feeling lousy, or the day after the preexisting cancer is diagnosed?
In reality, the only reasonable solution is actually a single payer system, potentially with a private insurance option on top of that, if you want to pay to jump the wait list when you have something that's not life threatening (or, like in the UK, they won't fix do a knee replacement because your job description is programming, and you don't need your knee to function optimally if your job involves sitting on your ass).
Of course, that would mean this TARP III bailout for the insurance companies would mean they fail because we've disintermediated healthcare, and thrown out the profit-taking middlemen whose only purpose in life is to deny claims because something got coded wrong by a clerk.
The root of the problem with healthcare.gov isn't really technical ... it's that it is healthcare.gov.
The priorities are political, not anything so silly as actually having to work and be effective.
because the math behind the system will no longer work.
company now:
- Pays less
- Is less secure
- Is a shitty environment
- Offers dwindling benefits
- And little respect
You're cannon fodder, that's all.
At startups and companies with that "hot startup" attitude (there are a few established companies that do this), you're the core of the business, the brains of the operation, worthy of any perks or cash they can throw at you.
Who wants to work where they're completely undervalued when they can work where they're (if anything) overvalued?
Make the salary at least reasonable, the hiring practices sane, the benefits good, and the job security reliable, and you'll find that a lot of young people are willing to work at stodgy old firms, just like they used to.
Employees are just tired of being treated like shit. These days hot startup > freelance/consult > established firm when it comes to the deal you get as a worker.
STOP . AMERICA . NOW
Companies want to talk about making yourself competitive in the labor market, then bitch and moan when those that will pay get all the hot talent?
Oh noez! Whatever will we do!?
I'd say that if someone gets paid $big_bucks at $hot_startup, they're entitled to it. If you want them, pony up.
STOP . AMERICA . NOW
Because:
- The pay is 2-3x what I could get paid at established firms
- The relationship-starting practices actually make sense (an interview amongst humans, often with C-levels, rather than with an HR-drone, and forms of testing that involve work on-product, rather than abstract and unrelated HR games).
- They are thankful to have me and pleasant to work with (as opposed to confronting the HR bureaucracy and middle management)
- I get better titles and better status/authority within the firm
I do good work, I produce value, and the startups that I work with see that and can measure it quantitatively. Established firms could if they wanted to, but that's the point: they don't want to. They want to pay you as little as they can get away with, and have you as silent and head-hung as they can get you to be.
I stopped working for stodgy HR- and middle-management-heavy firms years ago. It basically sucked, and was soul-sucking.
STOP . AMERICA . NOW
We live in a culture where status, identity, and self-worth is closely tied not only to how much money you have, but to how much money you make bankers.
So basicly, programmers are basicly living by the same values as the rest of mainstream society. The same values exhibited by both politicians and celebrities, and just about all people looked up to as role models.
People don't spend $50k on college to be the next Richard Stallman, a man who's altruism is a relic of the past. They spend it to be the next Bill Gates, or Steve Jobs, people who made billions exploiting the masses.
Name one cancer researcher off the top of your head. I can't. But we sure know who bill gates and steve jobs are. The rest of society holds them in far higher regard, and they have far more leyway in personal options. And if they ever get questioned on their contributions to society, they can tote how much money they poured into charity, and how much money they spend on curing diseases.
We all know Bill and Melinda Gates spent billions on fighting malaria in africa, by donating vaccines. No one ever lionizes the name of any of the people who did any of the research, manufacture, or phyiscal distribution of said vaccines.
Now, you went to a prestigious university, which aren't cheap by the way. Which person do you want to be in life? The scientist, or the millionare?
But it's in the interest of both the insurance company and those they cover that the need for such catastrophic care is minimized, by catching the problems early. This costs the insurance company less money overall, and of course means some people avoid health catastrophes. Thus, it's in the best interest of both groups that routine checks and other preventative care be covered. It's only the short-sighted nature of most insurance companies that such care wasn't free already.
It doesn't hurt to be nice.
We are not the sort of country that will ever let a photogenic minority lay dying in the streets. If the law were changed to allow this - in the way you suggest, or for example by eliminating the bare minimum safety net of social security - then there would be enough of an outcry that folks like you would be swept from office, and the law would swing way back towards socialism.
It doesn't hurt to be nice.
And the quality is far, far lower.
While I may be a luddite, I truly believe that the progress of software innovation reached its peak circa 2007. Since then the quality of applications, usability of UIs, and generally the overall value of software has declined overall. In some sectors precipitously (web pages, window managers, tablet/metro style interfaces), in others a a steadier pace (office suite, web browsers); at best the industry has managed to simply maintain a moderately acceptable quality level(clis, email clients).
But more critically, the progress in building the infrastructure we need has effectively stopped completely. We need encryption by default, a distributed web, and software which interacts seamlessly with all of this. I don't see that the current bloom of App-creators is either willing or technically able to carry the network or software in general into its next stage of development.
May the Maths Be with you!
I'm surprised they're hungry, due to being stuffed full of straw and all.
Confucius say, "Find worm in apple - bad. Find half a worm - worse."
I also didn't want to pay for your locale's use of the Federal resources for law enforcement, military forts, and promoting the general welfare of your locale. Really, where does our Federal Government get this idea that they have to fund these things?
From the summary:
Why do these smart, quantitatively trained engineers...
Quantitatively trained?? Is this just an extremely awkward waying of attempting to say that they're trained in the use of numbers? Or is the anonymous submitter casually throwing around large words (large for them at any rate) that they clearly have no idea the meaning of??
Actually, that's not the big problem. Right now, I get health insurance as part of a group of people that are not selected based on state of health. This means the insurance company can count on there being some healthy people and some less healthy people, and can set rates based on that. If health insurance were all individual, the insurance companies would face the problem that healthy people wouldn't bother with it, and really sick people would want it. Therefore, individual rates would go way up.
At least around here, there is cost competition, and when a HMO or insurance company gets too expensive employers will go to less expensive ones.
The ACA can work on the principle that there's one insurance pool, the people of the US. If everybody buys health insurance, then both the healthy and the sick can have it at reasonable prices. Since everybody is in one pool, there is no such thing as a pre-existing condition.
"When you have eliminated the unacceptable, whatever is left, however improbable, must be the truthiness" - Holmes
App development is something you can pick and contribute to fairly quickly. Similar to say building Facebook.
Contrast that with 'real problems'.
You want to cure cancer, build a new generation of graphics technology... then you need a whole swath of domain level knowledge that many companies today don't train for. More than that, when that technology is done, you can be easily discarded. So what's the purpose of getting deep into a really deep technical domain?
As to why not fix healthcare.gov? I'm pretty sure even the youngest and most naive tech student knows to stay away from CGI or Accenture... Sadly, these organization know how to get government and enterprise contracts. You're not solving any real problems with healthcare.gov. You're playing bureaucracy and checklists and billable hours.
You want people in the 'real problems'.
Train them, ensure they can have a long term viable career in that field, and pay them decently.
It's not rocket science.
Don't worry, I'll sit down with ya and hack some assembly for your new and improved cancer detecting nanobot transceiver
\Needless to say they've transformed the company from being profitable company which is good to work for into a sad shell of it's former glory circling the drain and shedding employees.
Hmmm, seems like you could make marketing gold with that situation. Let's try......
"Leveraging our lean and mean human resource infrastructure, we are uniquily poised to embrace work-class architectures to provide best-of-breed niche portfolio development, orchestrate mission-critical e-business, and provide our business partners with collaborative turn key e-solution deliverables."
What's your take-away? We'll make that 500 slide Power Point available to everyone.
The shepherds did so well protecting the flock that the sheep no longer believed that wolves existed.
A troll always asks a rhetorical question. That seems to be the critical definition of what they do. It can be abusive and confrontational as well as more socially acceptable, but the effect is the same, to push buttons.
Still, even if you suspect that the OP is trolling, you can answer the question straight, so not all trolls are to be dismissed outright and even the obvious bias of the question can be sidestepped. It might be the case that the premise of the question is false, not all SV workers are greedy and selfish youth, some might be diligent hardware engineers, for example, developing robotic systems for limb prosthesis. Even though I have been a sharp critic of Google's social media approach, there is no doubt that wearable technology or self driving cars have individual merit.
Suppose that the draw for talent is dissipation of merit in short-term profitable pursuits, social media, marketing, the pron industry. One may conclude that it is the venture capitalists and investors who are to blame, not the people who come to work for the companies they fund, and it is the management of the companies who solicit the funds from investors with dissipative ideas who are to blame. I have proposed the same fault WRT the lopsided economy and the acute housing shortage in the San Francisco Bay Area. Maybe it is good that those high rollers are looking over their shoulders at push back. Just recognize that people, no matter how smart, are still going to have lack of awareness ( the original meaning of stupid) and act with self interest mostly (selfishness) if the money is there. I feel that the criticism should be directed at investors, here.
Part of the problem is that research and development funding in this country is plummeting. Heck, you can't hire more engineers to work on cures for cancer, better healthcare systems if those scientists that are creating the innovations are fighting for (and losing) grants and jobs. You want people to do meaningful work, you need to support meaningful research. This whole "academics are useless" refrain is getting old. You know, that useless PhD did prove that they are capable of original thought and self-directed exploration. Seriously, the state of computer science and engineering research is appalling in the US and other fields have the same problems. Industrial research and development is under attack as well in the few places it still exists. And don't get me started about the long term threats to "liberal arts" and humanities education.
It's amazing how many people are under the spell of economic gain as the ultimate goal. The ultimate goal is a better, educated and thoughtful society. When the focus is too much on wealth and wealth accumulation, history shows us that time and time again, it ends up badly. Popular uprising can be very, very unpleasant for all involved.
I see you wrote another falsehood about the UK. In the UK you would get knee surgery if you needed it ,no matter what your occupation or whether you are employed or not.
You get put on a list of people who need the similar surgery. If your job involves a lot of walking around, then you are moved up the list. If your job involves sitting around, you are moved down the list. If you have no job, you are generally left in the middle of the list, so as to not limit your future job prospects to only those jobs involving sitting around; they would prefer that you are working and contributing to the social fabric. Then the surgeries are scheduled in list order, based on the availability of the surgeons.
If you pay for additional private insurance on top of this, then you can jump the wait list and have the surgery done by a private surgeon, or by another surgeon in another country through medical tourism. A lot of private insurers in the U.K. offer discounts if you are willing to fly somewhere to get your surgery via medical tourism; India is a popular place for this.
This is increasingly common in Canada, as well, and some U.S. insurance companies have also followed suit. For example, if you need a hip replacement, flying from Boston to Paris, staying a week in a good hotel, getting your hip replaced in a hospital there, and then flying back to the U.S., plus the normal followup visits in the U.S., assuming no complications, costs about half what it would cost to have the same surgery done in the U.S..
We're not talking aortic dissections here; this is not about emergency surgeries, these are quality of life surgeries/employability surgeries, and as a part of the social fabric, the health care system in the U.K. is first and foremost intended to benefit society at large, and secondarily to benefit the individual patient, in a manner that benefits society at large.
Or ar you going to tell me this report on surgery waiting lists in the U.K. is bogus?
http://www.dailymail.co.uk/hea...