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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."
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 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.
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
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.
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
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.
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.
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.
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.
Oh, indeed they do. But I have a few buddies who worked there. They tell of engineering decisions over-ridden by .gov policy weenies, a specification that changed so much it was effectively liquid, and minor, unimportant things like NOT EVEN STARTING WORK on the code until late February or so of 2013. . . .
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
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?