Good. The best minds of a generation have wasted their talents figuring out how to best maximize media addiction and serve ads for Facebook and Google. Let’s hope a new generation engages in more socially productive endeavors.
Look at all the stuff this generation of workers have built in big tech — the amazing devices in all areas of the market, the progress in electric cars, the massive scale in compute infrastructure that enables most smaller companies to easily spin up entire regions rather than run their own hardware…
We now carry devices in our pockets that put more information at our fingertips than entire civilizations could access throughout all of human history. Mobile payments have enabled entrepreneurial capitalism in impoverished parts of the world. Anywhere we are, we can get a map of our location and directions to anywhere we want to go.
The scale and technology that makes remote work even possible for much of the population didn’t even exist a decade ago. Some pieces existed but they never would have scaled the way we needed them to. If you didn’t lose your job during the pandemic, you ought to be grateful to the major cloud providers for the fact that your video conferencing software was able to function while you and almost everyone else were piling onto it. You should also be grateful there were multiple delivery companies able to bring you groceries and restaurant food when you weren’t allowed to leave the house. I know restaurants are grateful for the delivery services — so many more would have gone out of business if in-person transactions were the only way to sell their product!
Anyone who owned a total market index fund in the past decade has benefitted massively from the success of big tech, including most pension funds, university endowments, and many individuals. The creation of wealth has been enormous in scale and enormously socially beneficial.
The big tech companies have delivered results to our economy like the space program did — most of the technology that smaller companies and startups depend on was developed by big tech and either turned into a line of business open to others (like AWS) or was open sourced (like Kubernetes, most of the major app frameworks, multiple programming languages, distributed consensus, distributed tracing, modern CI/CD…) The industry as a whole would be a lot worse off if that hadn’t happened. So what if some of it was used to sell ads?
The signal to noise ratio needs to be good, or there will be no point to reading the comments.
The number of people working on these is insignificantly irrelevant compared to the number of people working on the bad stuff.
It's good that the people you highlight exist because they maintain my faith in humanity, but for every engineer that worked on Webb, there are a thousand working on privacy-destroying addiction engines.
My employer can't find people to work on space-based synthetic aperture radar that will be used to monitor and potentially combat global climate change through detecting sea level rise, coastal erosion, and foliage cover (and health) because you can make more money working on an app. We can't pay more because we're funded through grants and apps are funded either through VCs or intrusive ad revenue and intrusive ads generate more revenue than university partnerships and piecemeal contracts from various international departments of the environment.
It's ridiculous because I make so much that I am the cause of gentrification, i.e. "Enough".
But it's not as much as an engineer at Facebook.
Even your comment focuses on the financial incentives....
I also mentioned the Renaissance of access to knowledge in our pockets, the way mobile payments help people, the access to maps, the ability of remote work to scale to a large portion of the population...
<new start-ups are all focused on AI art and LLMs that put hundreds of thousands if not millions out of jobs>
HN: "wait, not like that!"
- Maida AI, which automates health care administration tasks like patient intake and note-taking
- a platform that aggregates home furnishing listings from different stores into one place
- a software design and development studio
that's debatable.
Comments like this are why the general public feels like SWEs are stuck up elitist know-it-alls
If you win the lottery starting a company at the right time, are you really the best mind of the generation or just lucky?
I'm not sure if you're agreeing or disagreeing or neither.
But I think the "why didn't I think of that guy" is mostly luck.
Lots of people are smart and work hard and don't really get anywhere.
Those that I knew who went to Google/Amazon/etc. were more diverse personalities: ambitious, interested in hard problems, wanting a good life, etc.
Those going to Facebook though, I'm not sure I can put it in a polite way. Let me just say, in different times and different places I could imagine them joining a certain type of organization.
I have also noticed FBers have a certain kind of personality. Vaguely utopian but removed from reality with a heavy emphasis on hedonism.
“Fascism should more appropriately be called corporatism because it is a merger of state and corporate power”.
Italian philosopher & Minister of Public Education under Mussolini Giovanni Gentile, who was arguably the architect of 1930's Italian fascism.
He was told about the consequences pretty much from day 1. I don't think anyone at Facebook (especially not Zuckerberg) gets to be oblivious.
The CDC study is a lagging indicator; it describes the trendline of a mental health crisis that's self-evident to practitioners. On the research side, there have been many studies in the last 10 years associating Facebook use with poor mental health outcomes.
The Cambridge Analytica scandal broke out 5 years ago.
Smart, Fun and Nice: there are LOTS of people who have all three; don't settle for less!
FAANG unquestionably soaked up a lot of highly intelligent people, and built a lot of clever stuff and solved a lot of challenging technical problems.
To a worthwhile end, maybe not so much.