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?"