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.
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.
Also: (b) is far more likely than (a).
Yet another third option: the people with opportunity to change the world do have the desire, but are working on something else at the moment.
It's a sad fact that the world has an extreme shortage of people with both competence and idealism, because our social system has a strange urge to exterminate idealism at all costs[1].
[1] -- http://www.thebaffler.com/past/practical_utopians_guide
These people then proceed to sulk in a corner at the general suckitude of our species while voting for more capitalism.
If you didn't finish the article, then I don't think you are qualified to judge whether or not the author has a point.
Meta irony!
I'm curious what facts you're talking about. The very problems you point out about healthcare.gov support part of the author's argument - that today's tech environment rewards the creation of a sexting app over more groundbreaking work, and therefore youth do the former.
From my perspective, at least, few of Silicon Valley's startups will have a lasting dent in the human world. Funding for spaceship technology is limited, more people are working on note-taking apps than cleaning the air, and the hype is all on Snapchat (which does have a huge valuation).
The real issue is how we change it; change inevitably comes from youth. And if today's youth come out of college excited about sexting apps, I have little trust in a better future. That being said, I'm not in a position to say much, being a college student myself.
Effort goes where the money is, because your legacy is a long term problem, and your ability to eat is todays issue.
It took a lot of courage for me to leave at&t when I did. It was my first job out of college, I just got saddled with a mortgage and was soon to be married to a lady who would be 100% dependent on me at first since I was bringing her to USA from Nigeria. When I told my soon-to-be-wife and the rest of my family that after nearly 6 years, I was leaving the well established corporation AT&T for a San Francisco start-up of less than 20 people.... they were not on board. This was back in 2007. Today, everything worked out.
Outside of this debate about tech, in general people should avoid living simply to survive. You will regret it later when you're 60yrs old and realize all you've done with your live was... not die.
I completely agree with you. I suppose that the angst comes from the idealism that always surrounded Silicon Valley, that we were here to build big things and change the world. And that arguably isn't happening right now, with the exception of the efforts of a few well-established companies.
Would love to hear from anyone interested: http://maybethismatters.org
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=7312442
There are certainly problems here, but that's why it's even more important to have talented people (especially engineers or SREs) come help. If you know anybody who'd like to help on a temporary rotation or permanently, please point them to:
Why? Because it's honestly very hard work, often with little recognition and less pay. People trying to innovate or 'disrupt' these fields are up against deep rooted political institutions, large corporations with millions to spend on lobbying efforts, and a broken legal/patent system that favors those who exploit its many loopholes.
That said, I have great respect for people who devote their time and effort for the greater good.
I think a big part of it is less pay. Important things pay very little compared to frivolous metoo.io apps and social advertising and whatever.
Capitalism is a greedy optimizer. When it finds a local maximum it goes all in. It does not explore the fitness landscape.
Fixing government? Yeah you might be able to modernize a lot of the tech stack that runs various governmental entities but you're not going to actually fix the entities. You'll be implementing failed or broken policies in node.js instead of cobol. It's a step in the right direction but it doesn't actually fix the core of what's broken.
Curing cancer? There's no Federal Department of Stopping Cancer, either you work for a big pharmaceutical company or you get a PhD and scramble for grant money.
Rebooting our space program? That happens every administration and it always starts with some kind of dream to do audacious thing X that won't get any significant funding.
Fixing education? I'm not really sure where to start here. You can't fix from within since there's a constant struggle by the administrators to stay in power because teachers don't have any upwards mobility besides administration. And trying to fix it from the outside? That's even tougher, Kahn Academy has some traction with people but little with teachers who fear it'll put them out of work.
Find me something inspiring that's not going to be mired in politics and bullshit and I'm all ears. I don't think any of those are all that inspiring. I'd even deal with less pay for something really impressive.
Actually, there is a Federal Department of Stopping Cancer - the National Cancer Institute.
But it's got a $5b a year budget which is pretty small in the biotech world. It's even worse when you consider that 42% of it is grant money. So my statement isn't quite right, but in my opinion, still close to right. Maybe 70% true.
http://www.cancer.gov/aboutnci/budget_planning_leg/plan-2013...
http://obf.cancer.gov/financial/factbook.htm
Inflation adjusted NASA's budget during the Apollo program was $30 billion a year or so. And that was in a realm that's better understood.
I'm not necessarily suggesting that we should start spending $50 billion or $100 billion a year on cancer research. But I would argue that it might take that kind of investment to really move the needle in a meaningful way and provide enough good paying opportunities for nerds to get them interested.
Thanks for the link though, even if it makes me look a little dumb.
Upvoted specifically for this line. That strikes me as a key insight into the free market's strengths and weaknesses.
Governments have immense disadvantages too. They are slow and inefficient and are absolutely horrible at taking things the "last mile" from lab prototype to product. Governments flat out suck at "shipping." Yet they have the ultimate guaranteed income stream -- taxes -- and so can afford to invest in "high risk, high payoff" R&D and basic science that might never produce direct payoff (but may produce large indirect payoffs later).
The optimum seems to be, as with many things in nature, a balance. There may also be third options that have yet to be discovered, such as innovations in finance that enable risk to be spread more intelligently.
-- There are a bunch of startups already in these areas...
-Curing cancer (i.e. biotech/biomedical research) often requires a lot of startup overhead. Engineering training is hard, and I am sure there are a lot of expensive hardware and laboratory equipment, as well as similar levels of bureaucracies and personalities to deal with. But a similar startup training path in bio requires - wet labs, animal labs, and associated support (including feeding, caring, ethics oversight which is important but adds additional time and effort to everything). The medical angle adds both additional regulatory, ethics, and safety considerations, as well as political egos from MD's, hospital admins, university chairmen, etc.
-Pay: in the commercial/private sector, I am sure things are probably a little better, but with more strings. But you can choose to fight in the VC funding space, for bigger pots of money, vs. jumping into the right for NIH R01s, R21s where the politics and competition are brutal. The basics are not dissimilar - VCs like founders with track records and ideally a minimum viable product or proof of concept, NIH grant reviewers like proposals from established labs (who have a lot of money and data already). Just that it seems the pot is a lot tighter for people trying to get money from the government. The DoD maybe better in this regard.
-Culture: Are you going to be a founder or early employee, with equity and potential for higher raises? Or are you going to be a postdoc making $40-60k for the next decade of your life?
That being said, I do know people do it, i.e. the "Craig Venter model". They don't tend to get a lot of press, though, and they often exit to big pharma or big devices (medtronic...)
Not everyone is a geneticist or a bioinformatician. Not everyone who has the capability to write code that Facebook need has the capability to become as good of a geneticists as they are a programmer. Yet, it's not fair to say that this talent is wasted: some Facebookers have contributed to open source, others have joined infrastructure companies (much as others have come from those companies).
Why haven't I instead went to work directly for, e.g., NASA or a national lab? Well first, as an undergraduate I deeply _wanted_ to take an internship at NASA (they had a great program for local students) but couldn't as only US citizens were permitted to do so.
I was already well into a full-time industry job when I became a US citizen (I've also worked at startups prior to attending college: again, I highly doubt NASA or a research lab would just hire a high school student ). Now I've already heard too many horror stories from classmates working for various government/aerospace/hardware/other traditional orgs about the low autonomy, office-space-esque working condition (be in the office by 8:30 AM, or there'll be a "talk", even if you've worked late into evening), but most importantly about how most of the folks working there are not doing the kind of work I am. Those that _did_ do that kind of work first had to expand a lot of energy proving what was apparently at the start -- that sometimes building something from scratch is less work (both now and later) than trying to shoehorn a problem to an existing but ill-fitting abstraction.
Fortunately, I am seeing this change for the better -- and many places (e.g., LLNL) already stand out -- but for now I'll quote Thiel: "rocket scientists go to Wall St for money, but also because aren't allowed to play with rockets anymore!"
Obligatory disclaimer: I'm a former Facebook employee and am holding on to my RSUs, but I've sad much the same long before I've worked at Facebook (indeed, this is why I chose to work there!). I am not speaking solely for myself, not on any company's behalf.
I do agree that it's B.S. to say that legal challenges prevent investment in cancer research (unless people mean "coconut oil cures cancer" type of research, in which case they well should). I would probably say that if anything current patent law makes cancer research more profitable that it would be without it (however, I don't have enough of legal background to speak definitively on this).
The question for me is why is this true? It seems like there should be.
I imagine power law holds in most disciplines: going from 99.99% uptime to 99.999% is far harder than going from 99.9 to 99.99% which in turn is harder then going from 99% to 99.9%. Likewise, I'd imagine same holds true with death tolls over N years from various illnesses (but obviously with different constants involved).
Can you explain to me what you meant by externalities here? Do you mean medical industry benefits from cures without contributing to funding the NIH grants?
I wonder if an X-Prize like model might work better here, with, e.g., individuals with genetic risk for a specific cancer "crowd funding" various grades of prizes, with the actual awarding of prizes, setting and advertising the prizes, being done by an organization/consortium that knows what they're doing.
As someone else noted, "saving the world" usually translates into economics as "generating large positive externalities". It's not just that you might have to give out cancer cures for free (in most countries the state will pay for health-care anyway), it's that you simply can't patent the Theory of General Relativity or the Germ Theory of Disease or the Dead Germ Method of Vaccination. Even improvements in nutrition and yield of crops can only partially be treated as private, excludable property.
Radical new discoveries are almost always nonexcludable, and thus can't really be treated as private commodities sold on a market. Note that I said can't, not shouldn't: trying to treat nonexcludable goods as private commodities leads to bankruptcy rather than sin.
I'd add a point. It's also because young people don't fully grasp the cost / benefit analysis - they don't know the pain, and they don't know how to develop & implement the solution.
I might have a cool idea to cure cancer, but it'd be a difficult search to even figure out if it's been done before: lot of learning to do.
Whereas a quick scan of app store and talking with a few buddies tells me if my idea for a sexting app has been done.
The substance/cool chasm is real (find my other post in this thread) and vicious.
Interestingly, in a lot of smaller startup scenes (not the SF bay) we're seeing the hipster/gentrification thing happening and they are talking about Public Health issues and throwing their weight against them.
But if you're under 35, the Public Health issue isn't cancer or heart-disease. It's cars. That's what kills young people. The sprawl-driven development and the constant political battle over decent human-scaled transit-driven urban development.
Y'see, people under 35 often don't have kids and their college days aren't far behind them (or are still happening). And that means dinky apartments and taking trains and buses and walking everywhere. Even if some of them have the money for a swanky suburban home and an awesome car, they at least remember what it was like without one.
And from the discussion on that, the fact that car accidents are one of the leading causes of death is an obvious part of the conversation.
I've seen young startup hackers fighting their cities for Open Data to develop better transit and planning tools, making websites for local political campaigns, etc.
Spend less time thinking about getting sex and sharing photos. Spend more time thinking about how to solve hard problems. Spend less time thinking about "us" and "them" and more time thinking about "everyone".
The reason people work on sexting apps over curing cancer is because it is a more human problem than curing cancer. In all your tunnel-visioned dash to label problems as "hard and "worthy" you are the one that missed the forest from the trees. All people will die, and while it would be great if they could stick around a bit longer without pain, the biggest difference is how people spend their lives today. If they can spend it connecting with other people they care about, and derive meaning from that, that is a thousandfold more compelling problem.
It's not that other people don't have their incentives and values right, it's that you don't recognize them.
There are many players in the game now who are in it more so for the hopes of striking in rich and social currency than the actual joy of solving problems, surprise surprise. This is why the app stores are flooded with endless spinoffs and knockoffs of the same things over and over again.
Substanceless apps are not only objectively easier than curing cancer, there are much lower barriers to entry. In fact, for some perverse reason, our society seems to feel that the most trustworthy process for handling real, major problems like cancer research is to erect the highest possible barriers to entry, throw even the survivors out of the field at every least opportunity, and then place absolute trust in the few who survive this winnowing process.
The concept that treating everything serious as a tournament-structured winnowing process might have some negative impact on the ability of our research institutions to actually treat and cure cancer does not seem to occur.
I took the side of the issue that I did because its what was discussed in the article; I definitely agree that the medical cartel system we have in place here is also a huge problem. Its the only industry I can think of where the number of new practitioners allowed to enter the field is a function of the number of existing practitioners.
You have a good point, but unfortunately you're still missing the point. Not being able to effectively cure cancer isn't the issue Silicon Valley is facing. As others have said, as software engineers, we would have gone to school to do bioinformatics and study the natural sciences if that's what we wanted. The issue is that a vast number of people are working on shitty, pointless, worthless apps.
It has nothing to do with barriers to entry. What kind of problems do you learn to solve in this field? Computational ones, i.e. things involving facets of computing. So why are less companies devoting resources to working on facets of networking, optimizing computer architecture, writing more efficient compilers and operating systems? Things that software engineers should have plenty of knowledge on, and would be much more beneficial to society than the next bullshit social app. Why is this not the case?
That is what the author is addressing. Churning out photosharing app #35875 isn't helping anyone. But maybe if people started taking pride in the notion of being a hacker and a computer scientist, and actually solving shit worth solving instead of stamping those phrases on their Twitter pages for social approval, then just maybe the Valley could gain some credibility back.
I can think of a couple reasons:
1) Because hardware/microarchitecture companies do devote effort to architecture and compilers.
2) Because low-level software/OS companies do devote effort to networking, compilers, and operating systems.
3) Because network effects mean that only a very few mutually incompatible languages and OS's can survive on the open market, with a larger but still fairly small variety surviving on open-source volunteer efforts.
>Not being able to effectively cure cancer isn't the issue Silicon Valley is facing.
Oh really? Aren't there some computational problems we could work on that have cancer-cure-level impacts?
"Spend less time thinking about getting sex" hahahahaha yeah okay.
Look, maybe when you're in your 30s or 40s and you've got the wife and the kids and the minivan and the bills and the mortgage you can focus on the more noble things in life, like making the world a better place so that your progeny will have an easier time of it.
But, in the meantime, for those of us without children, fucking is a pressing issue.
EDIT:
I'll be still more blunt--the people who gain the most from us "making the world a better place" are those with kids and a stake in society. You are trying to take advantage of us.
You should've gotten us healthcare, but you fucked it up. You should've gotten us a safety net, but you fucked it up. You should've gotten us cheaper student loans, but you fucked it up. You should've gotten us more affordable housing, but you fucked it up.
So, no, I'm not going to help you beat cancer so you can spend an extra year with your kids (who are going to be bankrupt the rest of their lives because of your medical bills).
EDIT2:
You couldn't even manage to kick out the bastards in office who are running the alphabet-soup agencies that are ruining our country. There. There's your fucking legacy.
In 20 years someone will be writing your post about you!
I still find time to try and chase tail--after all, it's the oldest game in the world, and if you're not playing, you might as well be dead, right?
:)
I think it may be overblown a bit sometimes, but there is definitely truth to this.
And further, where did they come from?
Honestly though, I suspect most of the people sitting there writing those silly apps wouldn't be able to do things like cure Cancer or aid in creating vaccines and etc. anyway, so I think the issue may be a tad overblown. Many of these "app developers" are actually people who simply learned to write code on some site and simply churn out games, sex-apps and such just hoping one will catch on and make them lots of money; thats really it.
I really don't think many pathologists, biologists, etc. are wasting most of their time making some silly app that "disrupts" how people share naked photos.
Incentives, please? I would guess that maybe 20 years earlier, being an engineer who spent all their time working on something that sounds boring like "making better semiconductor materials" probably got more recognition and social status than it does now. If I say something like "Oh yeah, I work on gallium arsenide diodes at [research company]", people at parties are going to nod off before I can get to 'diodes'.
Why would a 20-something want to work for the likes of, say, JPL, when they can get tons more pay and recognition by working at, say, Facebook?
No, I think it has more to do with the fact that people who work on things that matter more in the long run should be offered those "shallow incentives" as you call them by a societal structure. Society (at least in the US) has withdrawn those incentives (a stable family, recognition of intelligence vs. being popular); and the result is that people are moving away from anything that doesn't offer them more recognition -- of any kind.
I'm 30. I'm one of the young guys.
I also realize that (a) my odds of winning the VC-funded lottery are low and (b) all of us are going to be old one day.
No age is too young to die of cancer. One of my friends died last year at 31.
You guys are the ones running those companies and generally we don't like how you guys run companies.
I don't like how stodgy, checked-out, appearance-obsessed execs run companies. I also don't like how VC-funded egotistical frat boys run companies. It has nothing to do with age. Most people of any age are not equipped to run companies.
We want very flexible hours, self direction, relaxing lighting, productive work time and a near absence of meetings.
I agree 100% and that won't change when I'm 50. I'll probably be even grumpier about the corporate nonsense (if God decides to be a dick and I'm still working corporate jobs by then).
The people I know that are in their twenties and trying to fix cancer are being met with the horrible baby boomer mentality about everything.
Sure. I don't think you're wrong, and your observations are valid. Is it generational? I'm not sure. I don't like the Gen X, VC chickenhawk mentality or the Millennial-generation "move fast and never fix things" mindset either. People who gain power become short-sighted, flippant, emotionally insensitive and, over the long term, creatively and intellectually weak. This is true regardless of age.
I rail on "the Boomers" all the time because the political impact of that generation has been terrible, and their economic mismanagement has fucked us up big time, but I don't actually think it's a problem with the individuals.
Look, if the money were there and the environment was there we'd be there. It really is that simple.
I think the odds of winning the startup lottery are actually pretty high, at least for all reasonable definitions of "winning". Although that might be survivorship bias speaking on my end.
If more people were like Elon Musk we'd be working on these harder problems. I totally agree with you about your observations about people that gain power, at least in aggregate.
I'm reminded of a scene in The Dangerous Lives of Altar Boys, with Kieran Culkin and Emile Hirsch. (Great movie, btw.) Minor spoilers:
The boys are riding their bicycles along a country road, and happen upon a dog that's been struck by a passing vehicle, and is dying. Hirsch's character, Francis, says (paraphrased), "Someone needs to come for it. They need to do something." Tim, played by Culkin, responds, "There is no 'they'. We are they."
I trust the scene's relevance isn't too obscure.
What always stuck with me was the end: "No one was coming for this dog, I hope you realize that. Nobody around here, no one who passed it, not even the guy who hit it. I hope you realize that. Don't you ever tell me to get real. I know what fucking real is, okay?"
Google and Apple have record revenues and profits and are propping up everything else. Everyone, including Facebook, thinks they are going to be the next Google. And as long as money remains cheap, it will keep flowing into tech without bounds. You look at a company like LinkedIn—a company with a P/E near 1000—and you can see is clear as day. Even sustainable businesses like Amazon have had their stock price inflated through the roof with cheap money looking for a good return.
When the bubble pops things will reset in the Bay Area. Money will go somewhere else and only the companies which have real businesses will survive. Right now, money is still cheap. Investors will continue to invest in cool apps, and public companies will continue to purchase those apps with funds from the people's retirement to stay relevant. Just like with every bubble, the person on the hook at the end of the day is the average citizen.
The whole article reads like a narrative that is grabbing random anecdotes to support a point, even when the facts say otherwise.