The point is that not that smart people who went into finance and law somehow fucked up. It may be a perfectly rational and good choice for them.
The point is that smart, hard-working people tend to get funneled into one of a handful of professions, and at this point, I would even include software in that handful. It would better if we had smart people also going into other, more underserved fields that are in dire need of innovation.
With software specifically, it feels very much like a case of too many chefs in the kitchen at this point. Just look at facebook trying to build one website with 10000 engineers. It's some of the most ridiculous bullshit and it's incredibly distracting even as an outside observer. There are clean and reusable patterns that solve problems for 99.9% of use cases, but most of the discussion and energy these days is spent rehashing the same boring front-end UI story over and over and over.
Sure, I can ignore all the noise on HN, et. al. if I want to get work done, but then I risk missing out on the occasional insight that can potentially give me an integer factor increase in productivity or product quality. As it currently stands, I have to wade through a cesspool of the same boring amateur concepts on a daily basis in order to find the rare fundamental insights that meaningfully move the state of the art forward.
This single website is making billions of dollars in profits and used billions daily. It is good for us that Facebook have 10000 people working on this. Thanks to Facebook we have now flow, react, react-native, GraphQL, Redux, immutable.js, ReasonML, jest and create-react-app just to mention few things that were open sourced or worked by people hired by Facebook. No other company contributed as much to "boring front-end UI story"
The added value of all of that is dubious when you see the result from the creators themselves. The analogy "too many chefs in the kitchen" is pretty spot on. The front-end UI is not the back-end, it doesn't scale with the number of users, so when too many smart engineers work on it you see the result.
One-way bindings and isolation of effects help a lot.
Same thing for Twitter and all these other social media sites. How does Google have so many engineers yet so many failed products? It’s a narrow perspective to take on and a wrong one.
Actually the division of labour at large companies is impressive and it becomes apparent if you look at the amount of actual output from them.
These FAANG companies aren’t just building websites. They are managing larges amounts of complex infrastructure, because scaling the amount of engineers a company can have requires it.
They are designing incredibly complex products. Apple’s products are descriptively simple and don’t represent the amount of work required to get there.
They are maintaining and insane amount of code and ensuring it works reliably. It’s easy to point at the one day with the Google Maps SDK failure or the Facebook SDK failure while forgetting the many days there wasn’t one.
Lately they are investing in privacy and security, which is another huge effort that I think the public underestimates. It’s easy to ensure data is deleted in a database, but it’s a completely different problem to ensure that data is deleted across all your infrastructure and to ensure it stays that way while teams rapidly develop software.
Startups and smaller companies can compete with large behemoths because they are only focusing on one or two things (or should be). But when you focus on one thing you lose sight of how hard it is to focus on one thousand things.
Sure,they do some other cool stuff, are useful in other ways, but on the side really.
Same af really smart folks working in high frequency trading. Also wasted talent IMO
Keep in mind that most most these engineers are paid for the fact that they don't work for another company that is perhaps competing with Facebook. They are given "sensible-looking" work to make them feel important and keep them busy (feel free to call this a "bullshit job" (https://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=Bullshit_Jobs&old... ) if you desire).
Now, this group also contains the more risk taking ones who want glory and outsized returns. These pioneers would go into other more underserved fields in dire need of innovation if they saw opportunity. If they don't see opportunity, there are likely structural factors in play that prohibit innovation. And these structural factors are necessarily difficult to change for any but the most already powerful subgroups of these pioneers -- any less powerful actors will be so easily dispatched by incumbents that they would be foolish to try. So they don't, because as previously established, we're talking about smart people here.
I think your point would be served better by going into more detail about just which other underserved fields are the ones that are in dire need of innovation. My previous points notwithstanding, I do believe that there still exist a significant amount of underserved fields in dire need of innovation that are also completely tractable for the more pioneer oriented group of intelligent people without requiring billionaire level resources to solve. Messy, unsexy problems that customers would jump in line to pay for. But these problems tend to be require solutions by sharp pioneer generalists with a ton of intellectual horsepower _who_ are also capable recruiting and working well with industry insiders.
Having worked at such a company before, I think it's the latter part that's rarer than the former. I can grab a bucket of sharp STEM grads from top 10 universities that could make progress on a lot of hard problems that I know folks would pay good money for, but will they have the humility, spongelike curiosity and flexibility to work well enough with top industry insiders to not just be able to keep up with them but add something unique that wouldn't be doable otherwise? That's the hard part, and I think those kinds of folks are hard to find and will always be hard to find, no matter what kind of society you have.
Better for humanity as a whole. Do you seriously think that if money and status weren't factors, every one of the "smart people" that went into finance or law would have exactly the same choice?
Of course not, and they would have excelled in another field with less competition and advanced our knowledge in that domain instead.
Are money and status actually contributing to human progress? Barely, if at all. In some ways, it has even caused regress.
Yes. Money and status are among the most core notions of the human societal experience. They represent success, continuity, surplus, achievement, ranking, collective opinions. Any attempts to remove or repress them invariably fail due to proxies that spring up to substitute the utility they provide.
This doesn't mean they they are intrinsically "good" for humanity, just that they are useful abstractions that humans use to maximize the throughput of their Dunbar number. If you tried to remove them without providing suitable replacements, people just go about recreating them.
In other words, they would not have made the same choice, because the circumstances surrounding status and finances would be different.
No one is talking about removing social incentives. Musk was saying that finance and law are given more status and financial incentives as professions than they deserve by their contributions to humanity, in a similar manner that some stocks in the stock market become overvalued and eventually undergo corrections.
Finance in particular absolutely, unequivocally requires a social correction in how it's perceived and how much influence it has.
If this is the point, then it's even weaker. Two things are being conflated here, which is neoliberal value judgments (what professions "deserve by their contributions to humanity", as if value could ever be assigned or assessed in such a uniform way) and emergent behavior (when "some stocks in the stock market become overvalued and eventually undergo corrections"). To want the former to result in the latter is not enough; a concrete feedback mechanism must exist for that correction.
For Marx, this was historical materialism, wherein the capitalist mode of production evolutionarily existed in between the feudal mode of production and the communist mode of production. Weaknesses in the feudal mode of production left it vulnerable to being outexecuted by the emerging capitalist mode of production. Likewise, a systemic weakness in the capitalist mode of production leaves it weaker compared to the operationally superior communist mode of production, which is evolutionarily poised to supplant it as it collapses. For many Marxist thinkers, the Weimar-esque features of our current period of post LBO raider baron capitalism has earned our current episteme the reluctant brand of "late capitalism", a phrase which marries this time's absurd and banal social credit flavored cruelties with its evident dysfunctions and blank spaces that almost beg to be replaced with superior communist alternatives. I can't say I'm fully convinced by them, but they've at least done the legwork of slotting their explanations and predictions into a sufficiently detailed framework of historical context.
But I can't say the same for Elon here, or for your argument. What's notable for such Marxists is not that finance or law disappear. Their innovations exist and continue to be developed, but the surplus value they create is distributed and aggregated differently. This is a far cry from a belief that professions involving knowledge work (particularly those with such a wide variety of labor requirements and work product outputs) can be treated as stocks in that some are "undervalued" and some are "overvalued", because such an assertion is "not even wrong".
What is more likely to me is that in every profession, just as in every other kind of socioeconomic strata or societal hierarchy in human history, there exists caste-like stratification between the most successful and wealthy practitioners and the rest. Consider the paralegal who works full workweeks for barely more than minimum wage compared to the partner that rakes in eight figures. Or consider the lowly analyst at a bulge bracket . The top practitioners of each field (or to be more direct, the most well compensated executive class of each field) have much more in common with each other than with others in their field, for they have all learned the most primal, modern human skill of expanding and aggregating political power. That is to say, they have learned the skill of empire building.
Does it really matter what your formal profession is when opportunistic general managers can fluidly move from one managerial, executive or political role to another? And furthermore, hasn't it always been this way with empire-builders? If I asked you to consider that a frame that encouraged you to take profession as a proxy for identity was potentially a red herring to distract you from class identity, would you consider that a possibility?
"Deserve" and "over valued" are not conflated, they are in fact inextricably linked. Market value is aggregated value, and what someone or some profession "deserves" as recompense is also an expression of market value. Of course, our markets are heavily skewed with negative externalities and perverse incentives, which is exactly why finance and law are over valued by any impartial measure of the functions they ought to serve in a free society.
Finance and law no longer serve to facilitate free enterprise, commerce and national development, but as a means of escaping responsibility and legal jurisdiction.
[1] Some balance of happier, healthier, and wealthier.
Okay, fantastic, now we're getting to the juicy part here. So I agree with you that our markets are heavily skewed with negative externalities and perverse incentives. I also agree with you that these negative externalities and perverse incentives are present in finance and law. I can even agree with you that in terms of the utility functions they ought to serve in an ideal society, it's plausible that they would be commodities rather than this strange realm of both commodity and luxury that they currently occupy. But, I can't agree with you here:
> Finance and law no longer serve to facilitate free enterprise, commerce and national development, but as a means of escaping responsibility and legal jurisdiction.
Finance and law never served to do any of those things. Nor does it necessarily serve purely as a means of escaping responsibility and legal jurisdiction. Finance and law, much like politics, exists to serve empire. In the golden age of expansion of an empire, you see emergent phenomena such as free enterprise, commerce and national development. You may even see people express that such emergent phenomena are the goals of the empire. But I am never convinced by this. The purpose of an empire is furthering its own existence, and once it exhausts the more palatable ways to achieve growth, it turns to less palatable ways.
To reiterate it again, to argue that people would be better off if smart people worked in fields other than finance or law is, in most senses, neither factual or counterfactual, because it doesn't attempt to engage with reality. The reality is that we live in a world that in many ways is not expanding. We live in a world that is increasingly has zero-sum dynamics. When one lives in a world that increasingly has zero-sum dynamics, people start thinking about securing safety and power, which tends to stratify along the caste lines of the professional managerial class, the lines of finance and law.
When you live in an unsafe world, you don't want to try and follow the rules of the game. You want to write the rules of the game. None of this superficial speculation about whether people would be better if more Xs were doing Y actually addresses this root dynamical interaction, or its increasing chaos. And so it would necessarily miss it. That's why I don't think you're wrong. I think you are missing the point.
I respect people who take low-paying jobs when they don't have to. In many ways, they're donating money to society, and that's pretty damn cool of them to be doing it.
First job out of school - low pay, worked in a crappy cube farm in an old building outside of a city center at an industrial park. Had to be there at 8 and stay til 5 no matter what. Middle management sucked. Pay raises were low. Health benefits were horrible. No vacation for a full year (yea I could've negotiated that, but why should that even be negotiable? absurd.)
Switched into software and never looked back. Better hours, better pay, better benefits. More respect for work life balance. Better office locations. Younger colleagues.
It's easy to see why people don't go into the sciences. The sciences are attacked on a daily basis in this country. From vaccines to global warming to covid19. The pay is low. Outside of engineering, the jobs suck, and you almost certainly need at least a masters. Academia is filled with tenured has-beens who exert undue influence over everyone.
The richest engineers I known became sales engineers. The ones who worked on problems were never rewarded for the problems they worked on - thus they instead went to selling and made boat loads instead. Who can blame them?
It's in my opinion more complicated:
My first point is that the metric that you are interested in is not maximum salary, but "salary minus costs of living". The highest paying job does not necessarily maximize this metric.
My second point is that companies that offer worse salaries (or are worse in the sense of the metric of the first point) have to compensate to stay attractive. Be it via better working environment (no open plan or cubicle farm), be it by offering really interesting work, etc. I consider this to be a feature.
Even after netting all that out, though, society often "commands" us to work at jobs that seem relatively useless. I suppose you could counter that "seeming useful" is itself a form of compensation. But still, it seems a bit dreary. I don't have any answers.
As far as non-monetary comp offered by companies (e.g., more interesting work), the problem is that it's really hard to tell whether such offers will actually pan out. It's very much luck of the draw whether you will get to do interesting work, or perhaps just end up sitting beside someone who is, while you are tasked with something meaningless. Been there. It's very difficult for companies to be credible on this.
I feel like so many fields have fallen behind, because of the way incentives are set up. It pays better to be a banker, or a lawyer, developing antibiotics isn't profitable enough, it pays better to work at a company that gathers data about people and pumps advertisements to them. It's rather sad, really.
Epidemiology and Public Health. The capability for disaster response hasn't increased with gains in technology. Clearly, the way technology has increased the dangers of contagious disease has far outstripped the technology driven capacity for containing outbreaks.
Discourse and News Media. Right now, the incentives and technology align in such a way, that Social Media becomes an outrage spreading and viral amplification machine.
(Obligatory link. It's practically my personal religion by now: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=rE3j_RHkqJc )
It turns out the Internet isn't for raising human discourse and encouraging brilliant thought. It's for preventing good thinking by fomenting interfering emotions and replacing actual thought with its doppelganger, ideology. And what's big tech's response to the above? Things which aren't technically censorship, but which insidiously have the same effect. Clearly, something is wrong with this picture.
That is part of the problem. The tech giants created infrastructure that 1) has enabled a cottage industry of independent journalism and 2) has completely disrupted traditional news business models. Then, the same large companies proceed to ink sweetheart deals with the dying large media companies, while jerking around the small independent journalists. Just as in the music industry, the endless supply of new aspiring media stars, combined with their control of the technology and their lobbying for favorable laws, has gained them carte blanche to say, "my way, or the highway" to the emerging independents. All the above basically sets them up to control most all future societal discourse -- particularly by less than completely transparent means that strangely resemble censorship.
The tech giants control the newest, best conduits for future information and media. Given what we've seen of their stewardship, citizens should indeed be concerned.
Maybe the only area where the (inexperienced and thus enthusiastic) supply exceeds demand is game development.