Is Silicon Valley only interested in the problems of twentysomethings?
washingtonpost.com
washingtonpost.com
"Imagine how odd it would be to read an article saying that the people who work for manufacturing firms are really just out to make money, or that they don’t seem interested enough in current events. It is only because Silicon Valley has done such an extraordinary job branding itself that articles about their social conscience, or lack thereof, seem completely reasonable. But the tech sector is, on the whole, much more like other sectors of the economy than it likes to believe, or than it likes anyone else to believe."
May I ask: what is it about this story that you dislike? (I'm not disagreeing with you. The article doesn't feel great. But there's potential: People sometimes wonder about what problems need solving, yet this group is mostly young, mostly white, mostly male; mostly well educated. How do these people burst that bubble to find the problems that other people have?)
Also, going to [new] and upvoting good stories is important and a good thing to do.
But seriously this whole angle frustrates me.
Who decided that Silicon Valley had to be held over hot coals for building software companies that solve problems and make money. Why does it always read like "they alone inherited the problems of the universe, and are choosing to build dickpic apps instead".
Everywhere in the world there are smart people working on dumb things. In SV there's lots more smart people, but the percentage doesn't change. Also some things look dumb but are actually genius in hindsight, so it's easy to criticise these as problems for twentysomethings today, but fast forward a decade and they're 'problems for the masses'
It would appear that Silicon Valley did. Every mundane piece of software is going to 'change the world.' People are just waiting for that to happen.
They could've written a different book, more like one Warren Buffet might write, about the business of software and online services, and running a profitable company in the industry. But they don't appear to consider that to be the bar for success.
On the other hand, yet another social network, photoshop filter app, todo list app, instant messaging app, advertising app, these are not going to change the world, though often heralded as such.
Doing expensive R&D without a money maker generally requires government help. I don't think Google wants to go that route.
Other than that, the continued development of AI/ML techniques mostly isn't changing the world. Miniaturizing the code and data, so that the masses can own their own AI/ML processors, that will change the world.
It's much easier to get young people to buy into a dream of changing the world and making money than it is to buy into a dream of making money w/o changing the world.
Reminds me a bit of the Capone quote something like "You get more with a gun and a smile than a smile alone.."
I wonder if Jobs thought in 2001 that selling MP3 players was the kind of thing he was thinking about when he said "change the world".
Or they need to feed their family.
Seeings as a lot (MOST!) developers are not "rock stars" by any stretch of the imagination, don't make that much, and some are not willing to relocate to another state/city.
Startups will categorically enfeeble more people than any war. And we'll do it in the name of GTD and competition with our own machines.
I suspect that's what gets things laid on the shoulders of SV. If its teeming with smart, driven, visionary people with Yankee Know-How and a Can Do Attitude (tm), surely they can do something genuinely spectacular, instead of just inventing a clever way to order pizza.
A lot of open source is focused on programming languages, libraries and things to help you code. It's what most open source people know, and thus what they create.
I wonder if it would have been better for CS to have been only offered as a minor or double-major to another field of study, at least at the Bachelor level. We would have fewer pure CS people, but a lot more people with training in another domain.
That being said, after speaking with quite a few tech-inclined people, I feel they would be a lot more comfortable with less technically inclined subjects if they were stripped of the general cultural pretensions that they come with. There is a very strong resistance to "acculturation" among techies, as it is usually seen - rightly, for the most part - as a mechanism of enforcing a "cool kids' club", so to speak, rather than an actual venue for intellectual exploration.
I think, that as techies, we are in a unique situation, as far as intellectual development is concerned. The vast majority of the population can't appreciate technical phenomena because it is culturally viewed as "too hard" or "robotic" or "blah blah, boring". We, OTOH, actively refuse to engage with humanistic pursuits, but not out of any perceived difficulty so much as discomfort with the pretensions that come with "cultured society". If effort can be made to induct some history and philosophy, and heck, maybe even theology into the the techie culture, we could have the best of both worlds and possibly even have some truly fresh ideas put out.
In short, it's easier to teach a physicist to write essays than it is to teach a poet Diff Eq
It reminds me of the parody of the academic left in sci fi such as the novels of Neal Stephenson and Vernor Vinge. And the parodies of religion and philosophy are even worse.
It certainly came as a shock to me to realize that much of academia is simultaneously incoherent and pretentious, and full of deep insights.
Most UK universities do offer CS as a joint degree with other subjects, though in many cases they are limited to mainly other STEM subjects. I don't know anyone who studied joint CS/art history for example.
Though these courses often have a stigma amongst people who consider themselves "techies".
During my time as an interest rate risk analyst, I had the displeasure of working with a horrible piece of software. It crashed at the most inopportune times, usually near the end of a run. Considering that one run could be on the order of a few hours, you could lose a significant portion of your computing time, something in short-supply when other business processes don't get you your input until seven to ten business days within a new monthly reporting cycle. When it did finish, the probability that there was a problem with the final output was much larger than it should have been. Furthermore, the software could not even be used for actually analyzing your results. You still needed to dump out the calculations to Excel before finishing your analysis.
On the surface, it would seem that the hardest part of solving this problem would be implementing the software as it's a highly specialized area of finance with lots of mathematics. When you break it down, however, what needs to be done on the software side is pretty straightforward.
I had to document this stuff for regulatory purposes at my old job. To document this stuff, I had to do a lot of "reverse engineering" of this software, basically building in Excel the same calculations performed by the software. If any person or group of people near Mountain View are looking for a problem to solve, I'd gladly sit down with you one evening and answer questions about this space.
What this comes down to is safety/reliability vs speed and efficiency. If you can get a workable extraction, even if we are talking GB's of data (never happened to me, we are always below 1GB and we struggle with it because all has to go in Excel), you could work out a good solution. However, most companies use software that makes extracting data impossible (welcome to SAP). Partly this is due to complexity in users rights, partly is just people ignorance.
This is a very complex domain problem, especially because a SaaS most of the times is not an option because we are talking about very sensible data.
The internet can't really fix your problems if you don't use it in the first place. Or maybe it could, but you will never know better.
We are software people, we solve problems with software - not just with the internet, and not just for the mass public.
Today was the launch day of the bike-sharing program in NYC and I've taken a few bikes out for a spin. The whole system is plugged into a (supposedly) impressive backend that will allow the city to gain an unprecedented insight into cycling patterns and drive the future of not only bike sharing but also cycling infrastructure development in general.
Why is it that when we think "startup" we don't think about problems like this, and instead we only think about mass market consumer internet applications used exclusively by young adults?
We solve problems with software. The fact that we've pigeonholed Silicon Valley into strictly solving end-user-young-adult-internet problems is our fault.
I'm 60 years old, and while I'm somewhat unusual in that computers and tech have been part of my life, both personally and professionally, for half my life, I would have to think pretty hard to come up with someone in my circle of friends and relatives in the 50-80 age range who doesn't use the Internet. My 80 year old aunt has a desktop, an iPad and an iPhone. My 81 year old landlady spends an average of 4 hours a day online. Just examples.
We could debate their "expertise" in using the Web or software/apps in general. On the whole, given the kinds of questions I end up fielding from them and others, it isn't particularly high. But then again, that may actually be the fault of the software itself, much of which is difficult for someone for whom tech is not an abiding interest to understand. I spent 10 years reviewing software full-time, and it was often a struggle for me to forget what I knew and judge it from the standpoint of the average Joe.
At any rate, I think it's a canard to say that older adults (or even senior citizens, since I guess I am one now) don't use the Internet. They may not use it the way someone younger does, but that doesn't mean they don't use it.
I suppose SV companies are going to tend to solve young adult problems because they are composed of young adults. It's what they know.
>I suppose SV companies are going to tend to solve young adult problems because they are composed of young adults. It's what they know.
It's not only what they know, it's what they think is cool as well. And that's okay - I think a lot of the software I look at today is cool, too. But is it useful to me? Nope.
I'm no student of business, but it does seem to me that historically an awful lot of companies have been started by young people who saw a market or niche that needed to be filled, and filled it. How hard would it be for a start-up (or existing tech company) to get a couple of panels of 50-80 year olds together and find out what they'd find useful, and then produce it? You can make the argument that 20-somethings have more disposable income, but I doubt a couple dollar smartphone app or ten buck piece of desktop software is going to break any senior citizen's budget.
This rings true for a number of issues in San Francisco. Let's underfund our public transportation and make taxis inefficient and hard to find -- we'll let the free market solve those problems! Corporate shuttles and a thousand taxi hailing apps will make up the difference.
Except they don't. I can't take a corporate shuttle to buy groceries or go out at night, and the cab situation in San Francisco is embarrassing. How do people here think they're living in the future when they can't even run basic infrastructure?
You can order food or hail a cab with your phone in any city. I only know of one city where idiots who will tell you this is revolutionary.
I am a 20-something and was drawn to Silicon Valley to work on payroll specifically because I saw it as a sign that SV was 'growing up.' Not every company is working on social-local-mobile-freemium-gaming, and that is incredibly refreshing.
I don't think they're stubborn, they're just different. I also don't think they're cheap either, because an iPad (let alone a MacBook) is still a consumer electronic luxury.
I've been all around the US (literally: the 48 states), and those are like 1% of the youth population, if that.
I'm 33 years old and living in Europe. Between my passions there is dancing tango. This actually involves a lot of traveling to international festivals where to meet and dance different people. There are many of these events and many dancers are really dedicated, traveling around a lot, sometimes almost every weekend. In this situation it gets really helpful to travel on a budget, even if there are not many people in their 20s in the community. As a result Airbnb is getting the de facto choice for the community of the 30-40 years old international traveling dancers.
Some of these businesses should spend more time planning the logistical and strategic side of rolling out satellites to other markets (maybe even as a franchise model) to see if uptake rates change based on cost off living, regional preference, different geographical factors, etc.
What plays in tech saavy SV, the NW, New York, and Austin might be different than in Tampa, Pittsburgh, St. Paul, and Phoenix.
Does anyone agree?
It's probably easier to persuade a 20 something to try something new. I know middle aged people who choose smartphones by waiting for their kids to each buy different ones and then choosing one of these for themselves.
One wave of things I'm looking for (and it's seems to be foreshadowed with things like the maker movement) is spontaneous manufacturing. Places where you need something built and a bunch of people, using tools in their garage or workshop, contribute parts where a co-ordinator assembles into widgets.
The cultural one is simply that Silicon Valley and the tech sector in general currently constitute one of the last remaining vestiges of the upper-middle class and the petite bourgeoisie in an otherwise recessionary and degrading Western society. Others refer to us occasionally as the "Tech Sector Master Race". Forgive the 4chan slang, but that is how we come across sometimes: as a little nerdy subculture that smugly walks through a world we don't quite belong to, demanding coffee and consumer electronics and thinking about our investment accounts while other people think about making rent. And the worse the rest of society gets, the worse this effect will become. See below.
The individual one is that, frankly, I have too easy a time contenting myself with my gadgetry to see wide-open markets, and when I do see an idea, I expect the corporate behemoths to colonize it first. An undergrad here at Technion once came and talked to me about starting a groceries-delivery service here in Israel. I immediately thought of Stop&Shop's Peapod, before realizing we don't have anything like that here. Then my next thought was, "What, people can't be bothered to go to the market?" It's easy to overlook opportunities to solve others' pain points just because you personally don't have a lot of pain points (which ties right back in to techies being so massively fortunate!).
The legal/economic one is that productizing technology has gotten very hard. I'm always glad to see more hardware start-ups and such, but people often hesitate to commit money to unknown companies. Then software is more and more functionally impossible to sell in a shrink-wrapped box as a product (due to piracy and upgrades), people hate advertisements, non-corporate users hate paying subscription fees for software because they think they bought their copy, and people are still demanding ever more quality for fixed or shrinking prices. Lastly, technology has gotten less and less "do it yourself" and more and more "black box", pushing all kinds of things underground. Overall, the path from tinkering to a product to a sale to tinkering again has gotten longer, and that's what drives the endless rounds of "social-mobile-local Big Data cat-picture analytics apps". And of course, this also goes right back to large parts of society being unable to afford innovative luxury goods produced by the tech sector. A game console that costs $400 now instead of $200 ten years ago wouldn't be that much of a problem if the cost of living had stayed the same or if wages had doubled (before inflation, even). They haven't.
So until we find some ways to fix this stuff, Silicon Valley is going to be stuck catering to the one audience who will consistently buy into Silicon Valley, that being Silicon Valley.
(Though admittedly, that makes the financial outlook of games companies even worse.)
But maybe, like the article theorises in the start, because the person that had the idea was in that group himself (my associate, and CEO of the company, had the idea to make apps for children after not finding enough apps for his own children and hearing comments from his similarly-aged friends about the same subject).
Google - Founded by 20 somethings Apple - Founded by 20 something Facebook - Founder by 20 something Amazon - Founded by 20 something
So they solve problems for a younger generation.
Also, I wouldn't categorize Amazon as solving problems for a younger generation.
Cab-sharing is not interesting to everyone. Staying in strangers' homes instead of a hotel isn't interesting to everyone. Taking photos of your meals and sharing it with friends is not interesting to everyone.
That adds a degree of self-indulgence to the description. It's not just twentysomethings solving the problems of people their age, tackling the questions of their generation, but solving the problems of (at least culturally) affluent, employed tech workers with disposable income.
Is Betteridge's Law of Headlines correct?
And any shoplifting guide worth its weight will tell you that those farmers are screwing you over in at least 3 different ways via strict affiliations with government and taxation, price gouging the market, and transportation costs, along with manipulative garned relationships with the GroceryStoreCartel(tm), all while you fancy the philosophical scenario of whether they're interested in your problems.
You as a driver should move along, or learn the road.
The only response to "Does some large group X care about me?" is Hanlon's Razor.
One group that displays much 'irritating self-regard' are east-coast pundits who write on subjects they don't understand.