Alexis Ohanian on Solving America’s Innovation Crisis
slate.com
slate.com
A single twenty something is going to have far more flexible hours and than a 37 year old man with a wife and two kids one of which has a disability and needs extra care. I would imagine the 37 year old does a lot more in a day than the 20 something although not all of that is at work.
While he has less business value he still has a ton of value as a human being and should be treated as such. If we expect our businesses to treat humans just like machine or office appliance than I guess not making that distinction is ok. But if we want to live in a society were we value people and make room for everyone to be successful than this matters.
The second part of this is spot on. College doesn't give you everything you need and code schools don't teach you everything you need either.
I'm over 30. I have more time to work because I'm not dating and partying and backpacking.
While trying to elicit sympathy, this narrative actually does more harm than good.
Besides, it's just not true, at least with me and my peers. We're more financially stable, harder working, honed, and more focused than we were when we were 20.
I tend to agree with your assertion of better stability.
How about those with wives and children would rather spend time with them than at work?
Is a work-life balance to be looked down upon?
Why should the endless march of capital win at all costs vs human labor?
I had more work/life balance in my 20s than I do now. Some people are the opposite.
But it's an individual's choice to make, not some sort of natural law as it's often presented.
Whether it's financial responsibilities or familial responsibilities, ignoring how life usually works out for the average person because your situation is different is a bit selfish. As much as kids in their 20s like to think they have their life planned out step by step, life has a way of throwing a wrench into those plans. I don't think its disingenuous at all to assume that people have less responsibilities in their 20s than in their 30s. A personal anecdote to the contrary doesn't really change that.
As people have kids perhaps they create new relationships with other couples with kids but they often grow apart from those that don't.
Work commitments have varied through the years depending more on the company culture.
It is absolutely true that life adds its demands up - family, parents, Ill relations, children with special needs.
If you have none of these count yourself lucky.
First, there are innovation issues. As Tyler Cowen goes over in his books, we've already picked much or all of the low-hanging innovation fruit, and will have to work much harder (collectively and individually) to innovate. Ohanian's statements and implications about education (which I would argue is more about knowledge, practice, and spending time actually thinking about problems and solutions, rather than formal credentials) are correct. Autodidacts are likely to be at the forefront of innovation for the foreseeable future. Those willing to focus on learning and building things for themselves will reap the gains compared to those who want to just live their lives (spend time with others for fun, party, have hobbies, and all those other things people in earlier generations were promised once they "put in their dues") will struggle. While this was probably always true, we're entering a new era of hypercompetition where (in the US at least) it'll be what divides those in poverty from those with plenty (see Autor's work for more on this.) Which brings us to the second crisis:
Jobs. In the coming decades, as we continue to automate people out of jobs permanently (turning them into Zero Marginal Product workers) those left /solidly in/ the job market will be eventually able to command much higher salaries and benefits, while the ZMPs scrape by with either a) welfare if we leave things as they are, b) live a decent life off a guaranteed basic income if we're wise enough to do that, or c) starve, if we continue to do what we've been doing for 30 years. Those on the margins will be the ones dealing with the hypercompetition and will have to work harder and harder to stay above the line. So he's right again about "they instantly show who is resourceful and who isn't—who will go the extra mile and who will coast to the finish", but not for the reasons he thinks. The way we got here wasn't some grand choice by the people, it's the result of political choices: radical deregulation (mostly a bad story), the destruction of labor unions (had to happen), automation (technological unemployment as the result, unstoppable), and as a result, a changed culture of doing more with less. He uses the term "welcomes", but aside from those who enjoy meritocracy and all its upsides AND downsides, I would say most do NOT welcome it. If given the choice, most would choose to bring back some semblance the Golden Age (which I believe is impossible and should not even be considered, as the landscape has changed far too much to make that a possibility.)
So there is overlap in the two stories: hypercompetition leading to people having to work harder and harder to stay alive at the margins, and low-hanging fruit being picked requiring us to work harder to innovate. The unspoken idea that if everyone works harder we will all be able to succeed and innovate is naive; working harder to _innovate_ will be necessary but not sufficient. Working harder to _succeed financially_ will only work for /some/, and as time goes by, a smaller and smaller slice of the population.
Mr. Ohanian has romanticized a (for most) tough new reality. I believe this is unwise. We should look at it clearly and with eyes wide open so we can improve the future by putting in policies that support the innovators while keeping all the jobless and medium-term future jobless people from starving; telling people that they can succeed if they only work harder and obtain more education should be considered dangerously misguided.
Now to nit-pick:
-Is talking about "marginal" innovators as the only people with safe work really accurate? I think many jobs which rely on people interaction and soft skills will not be killed off by technological advancement.
-I think telling people to get education is absolutely a fine thing.... if we replace the word "education" with "value adding skills". There are still going to be plethora of non-innovating positions that require skills. The problem is that the majority of students go to college to learn stuff that is mentally comfortable and are sustained on student debt that might well never be paid back. Yes, historically an education has always paid back over one's lifetime earnings, but I'm not sure that will continue in the future described.
Woah, woah, woah! Speak for yourself man, I like steady jobs.
The best thing about a steady job is that it takes worries out of your mind, you're not always stressing about losing your job and making ends meet. That's the most important thing that many tend to underplay.
This is the scenario that worries me- a massive race to the bottom in order to get "ahead". Most jobs aren't that important, and don't merit that much of the employee's time. At an e-commerce place I used to work, I overheard a c-level exec tell a guy who was putting in lots of overtime, "Remember, we're not curing cancer here." I think it's great that the exec was encouraging the guy to not place too much importance on his job, but it's too bad that it was necessary in the first place.
It's clearly the right approach (particularly in tech) but corporate culture is what dictates if this is accepted where you're actually working. If you work at $OLD_SLOW_COMPANY then it's less likely to be understood then at $SMART_YOUNG_CORP.
> And I don't think many of us expect to work for only one or two companies our entire lives.
Spot on. The usual advice I give is to plan on staying at a gig (as an employee, not a founder) for 2 years. Year one is for learning, year two is for shining. By the start of year three you should be either off to apply what you learned elsewhere or doing something new internally. The two year number is somewhat tied to the bonus/promotion cycle of the financial services industry but I think the general idea applies to all fields.
He also pooh-poohs a scheme by Peter Thiel which is a privately financed personal pilot project for 20 talented young adults a year by investing in their work without requiring ownership of whatever they come up with. He criticizes this plan for only applying to 20 people even though it was never meant to scale to the populace, it has always been about giving very talented young adults who are already working on something interesting an alternative to college debt. He then as a counter example points to a system with literally millions of students as input which has produced a student in Mongolia who was accepted to MIT, the same student who is mentioned in numerous articles as the great success of this system.
And we have his credentials as having cashed in with Reddit. Reddit it cool and valuable, but it's also not profitable after all these years, which should be considered when talking about things that are expected to yield some sort of economic value and not just a cash out for a property that never manages to create positive cash flow.
From what I've read it seems that Reddit is unprofitable more by choice than by anything else though. They refuse any serious attempt to monetize with ads, thinking (foolishly, I would say) that it would scare their audience away. The types of ads they do run are silly and light-hearted. An Amazon affiliate ad for the book "Crafting With Cat Hair" was a personal favorite. So while you do have a valid point -- they're not (or barely) profitable, I think it should be framed in this context for understanding: they're not profitable by choice. I personally don't think making a switch and putting "real" ads up on their site would make a damn bit of difference. Why should anyone care? They're a business, they should make money. People are used to ads. They're No Big Deal at all. Besides, where else would be people go? It's not like there's a better alternative.
Alexis' article has a lot of truths in it, supplemental education is a necessity in the IT field, tech changes sooo fast. Most people wont attend a college that is a front runner in its respective fields. Often times the professors are teaching slightly outdated technologies or versions of technologies. MOOC (massive open online courses) and learn to code sites help fill this gap. Perhaps they may become more common as people take a look back on how much they invested in school and how they could make it more cost effective while still becoming knowledgable in their interests/professions.
From what I can see real innovation slowed dramatically in the '70s. The world my grandfather died in was dramatically different than the one to which he'd been born - transportation, medicine, and communications had all taken dramatic leaps. If I live to the same age it's likely the only really dramatic change during my life will have been the introduction of the internet.
He seems like a great guy who cares about people and the future.
What are you working on these days?
I wrote about my experience meeting Alexis just this morning (http://dmtri.com/posts/28/alexis_ohanian_-_%22i_don%27t_regr...).