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Comment by USNetizen | Hacker News Reader

Here's part of what I don't get - there are so many government organizations, state and federal, jumping over themselves to provide funding, incubation and support to IT product/app companies across the country claiming it creates jobs when, as this shows, it is entirely possible to operate at incredible scale nowadays with a mere skeleton staff. So why do so many government-run and government-funded programs fawn over such companies when their ultimate goal is job creation and these companies are designed to run with barely a couple dozen people at most?

This has nothing to do with private VC's; I completely understand why they are in the game. I'm talking about government programs or government-funded NGO programs that provide tax incentives and other funding or support to startups in the product/app space hoping it will create jobs. Maybe this isn't every state, but where I live this is the case.

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I guess they hope for startups that eventually will be tech giants like Apple and IBM, that actually do create jobs. It's only a fairly recent development that it's becoming evident that technology allows for a tremendous centralization and automation. Algorithms are invented by one person, implemented by ten and used by billions. Eventually, only a tiny elite will need to work, and at that point we will need some sort of basic income.

I totally agree with the idea of a basic guaranteed income, but who's going to do the grunt work? When are robots going to replace all jobs?

Grunt work gets more expensive when people aren't desperate for work, and that seems fair.

Because most of those politicians think Google employs roughly the same number of people that GM used to. Google has about 55k employees [0] and GM at it's peak had about 350k employees [1], a 6 fold difference. GM also had high competition in the marketplace with Ford and others, so the number of autoworkers was likely in the millions for the country. Since the car and the computer are synonymous for 'mental space' for most people, meaning they are about equally used in terms of time and resources, the 2 industries are considered roughly equal. Granted, there are a lot more tech companies out there than auto companies even in the 80's heyday, so the number of workers may be near parity.

Also, remember that Google and FB have put a lot of cash in to D.C. in terms of lobbying [2]. FB is essentially using the start-up scene as their R&D departments, occasionally having to fork out the moolah to buy WhatsAps and other viable competitors.

[0] https://www.quora.com/How-many-employees-does-Google-have

[1]https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/General_Motors#History

[2]https://www.washingtonpost.com/politics/how-google-is-transf...

GM manufactures their cars in their own factories. Electronics is largely made by fab foundries and electronics assemblers like Foxconn. The entirety of a Chevy Cruze is assembled by GM from parts sourced from other companies and GM itself. Apple iPhones are assembled by Foxconn and others. Foxconn is supposed to employ 300,000 people to assemble iPhone 5S in 2013 [1].

[1] http://fortune.com/2013/11/27/by-the-numbers-how-foxconn-chu...

Do people really equate Google and GM because of the amount of 'mental space' they take? I would imagine people look at market cap or revenue or pretax earnings etc.

My view is that government should stick to 'government' things like providing infrastructure, education, health care, and stuff like that. If there's money left over, lower taxes some, or even better, get rid of annoying fees and streamline things.

Part of this "streamline things" includes lots of IT infrastructure, though.

You can’t get electronic tax filing without technology, you can’t get full open data availability with nice diagrams like https://www.destatis.de/bevoelkerungspyramide/ without lots of IT workers in the government (this is available for every data collected by the German Federal Statistics Agency, btw), and you can’t get stuff like http://ims.kiel.de/extern/kielmaps/ which show even lanes and zoning for cities without people working on it.

Part of the job of governments is also always having reliable, high quality data about their country, for government purposes. But it also means they need to publish those for citizen, and they need people taking care of that.

Those are all things with very wide benefits, rather than incubators, where you get someone in the government trying to pick a company to give money to. So to me all those things still sound like 'infrastructure' that private companies probably would underprovision.

Effectively, the whole reason why governments exist to do things is because they can do things that are unprofitable. And they can do it well. Look at the US healthcare system vs. the social democracies. You have the same cost per person in taxes (the US actually spends more tax dollars per person on the healthcare system than most other countries), but the US has, additionally, people paying private on top of that, and you get worse results.

I have a suspicion that 'job creation' is just the new codeword for trickledown economics.

So why do so many government-run and government-funded programs fawn over such companies when their ultimate goal is job creation and these companies are designed to run with barely a couple dozen people at most?

The people rich enough for congress' ear says the jobs are hard to fill. What the employers mean is that they're expensive. What the government hears is high demand. Government will champion tech work until labor costs are driven down.

For startups where technology is not the only infrastructure of the platform your observation is likely not true.

Look at startups like Cloudfactory: http://www.cloudfactory.com/home (they are actually on a mission to create jobs for millions)

Why are you picking on the government :)?

There are many funded startups and publicly traded companies that are doing the same thing.

Because private sector investors have an interest in making a return on investment, which product companies do in spades, but government has an interest in creating jobs, which these product/app startups don't typically do well at all. So why should government pick the same types of "investments" as Silicon Valley VC's when their criteria and end goals are so completely different?

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