Silicon Valley’s Youth Problem

The whole article reads like a narrative that is grabbing random anecdotes to support a point, even when the facts say otherwise.

In what universe is a carpooling system that gets dozens of cars off the road and allows each passenger to reclaim ten working hours a week classified as frivolous?

It's also best to think comparatively: sure, maybe some capital is being allocated stupidly [2]. But lets compare to the second half of the 20th century and its great technological achievements. Technological development was uniformly directed toward the goals of state-building and war-waging. Given a choice between better sexting apps and barbarism, it's not even a real choice. One is clearly a significantly negative-sum game, and the other is neutral to mildly positive. We only ended up ahead after the 20th century through a combination of good luck and technology's tendency to adapt across domains and be used in novel ways.

[1] A minority of the start ups that actually exist, but let's grant it for the sake of argument.

[2] The article makes this entirely about the allocation of labor, even going so far as to imply it's character defects that cause workers to go work on stupid things instead of meaningful things. But fuck that noise: capital is the driving force here. I've never met an engineer who would prefer working on sexting apps to working on deep, fundamental problems. But our present system rewards capital for pursuing short-term profits at the expense of long-term economic growth. If you want that to change, fix the system. Hate the game, not the player.

It is and I'm loving it. The last thing I need is a wave of smart kids taking all of the low hanging fruit in un-cool flyover country (or what DHH has called the Fortune 1 Million). Right now I'm staring at an ocean that other people don't want to fish because the water is too cold. I'm working on something very unsexy that will hopefully buy me a yacht and a Ferrari. I have a list of things just like it, again, all very un-sexy.

Let them have their sexting apps.

Is there evidence that this problem actually exists? This seems likely to be a manufactured story.

The press simply isn't going to write as much about Meraki as they would a popular, consumer-oriented web or mobile startup.

$1.2 billion is a big number (for the acquisition of Meraki), but ultimately it's a "boring" business that sells routers. It's never going to appeal to more than a small audience.

I don't know man. I mean, I'm fairly young (mid-twenties) and if someone told me I could work for nvidia I would take that opportunity. Things like graphics hardware/networking/data storage etc are a lot more interesting than 90% of the crap that most startups are working on, but they are also a lot harder too. The bar to entry is higher.

To have any hope of doing something as ambitious as curing cancer you presumably have to have an unusually large amount of interest in the subject. Like enough to devote your entire education and career to. By taking jobs at tech companies they are demonstrating that they don't possess this necessary quality. Few people do.

And as for the healthcare.gov debacle- being smart and a great programmer has absolutely no benefit when it comes to fixing that site. Yes there are likely major technical issues, but the main problems derive from layer upon layer of bureaucracy and policy that any project of that scope entails. I would advise smart young people to stay far, far away from any project of that nature, lest any will you had to do something meaningful will get sucked out of your body fairly quickly.

If companies like Cisco wanted to hire engineers who are going to sexier companies like web startups, maybe they should learn a little more about what web startups have to offer to a hire. Namely, the autonomy to develop a solution to a problem in one's own way, rather than being a single cog in a gigantic organizational wheel.

* Who cares?

* If you're successful, what difference will it make?

R.W. Hamming on problem selection: "[I]f what they were working on was not important, and was not likely to lead to important things, then why were they working on them?"

"About four months later, my friend stopped me in the hall and remarked that my question had bothered him. He had spent the summer thinking about the important problems in his area, and while had had not changed his research he thought it was well worth the effort. I thanked him and kept walking. A few weeks later I noticed that he was made head of the department. Many years later he became a member of the National Academy of Engineering. The one person who could hear the question went on to do important things and all the others -- so far as I know -- did not do anything worth public attention."

I've worked as a government contractor and have been exposed to the inner workings of many of the companies building what the author would consider serious technology - jet planes, submarines and the like. And I think it is fair to say that the tools they use and the way they use them are clearly from the 70s - this is not a criticism, they create impressive technology, but I believe that once the practices of modern software development begin to take root in those industries, we'll be exposed the innovation we've actually created. facebook may not be considered a serious app, but certainly the technology facebook has built will start being used in other "serious" sectors in a few years, and then people will realize where the innovation lay. Things like proper version control, large-scale data warehousing etc will change serious industries, the frivolous apps are just a testbed in which we create them because the risks of failure are low.

Cliffs: Web technology is serious business, even if what it is used for is currently frivolous

I hate silicon valley just as much as anyone else who doesn't live there, and I'd gladly upvote an anti-valley piece; but when an old media outlet blames it on Those Damn Millenials right in the title, it leaves a bad taste in my mouth.

EDIT:

  But that presumes that the talent at older companies is 
  somehow subpar, less technically proficient, than it is 
  at their younger counterparts. This seems unlikely if you 
  look at Cisco’s list of patents.

I think one of the fundamental differences in culture between the "old" and "new" is that the older businesses think about BUSINESS first and technology is the tool to thrive in that business, whether it's enterprise software of networking infrastructure. Where as many newer companies think about the PRODUCT first and business is merely a tool to prop up valuation and gather more resources to work on "cooler" products.

Of course young engineers are more interested in products than businesses. How long can these companies last? I am not sure. Facebook will probably never make as much profit as Cisco but they are already valued at almost twice as much. But none of it matter until media hype and capital keeps flowing into the startup scene here in Silicon Valley. At least until the bubble bursts.

I love Silicon Valley, but I'd hate for this place to turn into "app valley".

The sexting app cashes out in 18-24 months.

The semiconductor company won't cash out for 5-7 years, if ever.

Want to fix the misallocation? Make the capital gains tax more than income tax instead of less. Suddenly all the smart boys will be off to companies that have profits instead of growth.

It’s the angst of an early hire at a start-up that only he realizes is failing; the angst of a founder who raises $5 million for his company and then finds out an acquaintance from college raised $10 million; the angst of someone who makes $100,000 at 22 but is still afraid that he may not be able to afford a house like the one he grew up in.

"A few weeks ago, a programmer friend and I were talking about unhappiness, in particular the kind of unhappiness that arises when you are 21 and lavishly educated with the world at your feet. In the valley, it’s generally brought on by one of two causes: coming to the realization either that your start-up is completely trivial or that there are people your own age so knowledgeable and skilled that you may never catch up.”

This is a great paragraph, again showing the dichotomy of power and impotency. I feel the same way having learned iOS development on my own but not feeling particularly “hireable” without a degree or full-time experience.

- Creating the "new Snapchat" is a whole lot easier than curing cancer, which is not even a single disease. It's a constellation of diseases/conditions we still don't fully understand.

- People need to eat, want to enjoy themselves, all that stuff. To do this, you need money. What's the easier way to do so? Making the new Snapchat.

- People want raised status. You'd get a lot more from curing cancer(s), but it would take so much longer, and you're not guaranteed it'll really work. Making the new Snapchat is the much easier option.

- You need piles of money to do research to cure cancers. You also need time. Short-termism (caused by the other side of accountability, transparency, and demands for ROI) means you may not get either of these. So where does the money come from, and is what you're getting enough? If it is, do you have time (and enough of the right type of skilled researchers) to do so? Modern medicine and research is not an individual endeavor; it requires teams, sometimes large ones.

The incentives are just not there. Some of these things also do not always lend themselves to private investment; the risks are high, the time horizons are long, and the payoffs very uncertain. The way our current systems are set up, this is not an easy problem to solve. People who have already made their fortunes elsewhere (e.g., Elon Musk) and companies that have huge cash piles and lots of big ideas (like Google) seem like our current best bets until we collectively decide that we should fund more of these things via public money.

My comment on the older article:

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=3465754

Wtf? Uber is better than a taxi in every way but price. It certainly isn't limited to just rich techies at night. I wonder if he has ever even tried calling a taxi in SF or the valley. In SF, half the time, it will never show up. It just picks up someone else on the way there. In the valley, half the companies you call up refuse you saying they have no one in that town right now. With Uber you get a ride immediately and can watch it come to you on the screen and down rate any driver that ditches you for an easier fare.

Once upon a time, right, engineering was really sensitive to time. We had to wirewrap circuits together, we had to punch cards, and in general we had to plan out what we did. Some thought leaders existed, usually little labs embedded in much larger companies (we all genuflect at Bell Labs, or Xerox PARC, or what have you).

Nowadays the cost of prototyping something is super super low, even if it's hardware.

Now, combine that with the "lean" meme going around, once which basically says (arguably, quite rightly so) that engineering is four or five orders removed from being a successful business.

So, we see a lot of startups going for things which are not Big Ideas--and why should they, because Big Ideas are expensive to develop, because Big Ideas are hard to sell, and because Big Ideas are not profitable.

What does sell well, reliably? Bread and circuses. Communication, and advertising, and search. Any sort of business where you can be technologically lazy and "disrupt" a market. Those are the things being selected for--not Big Ideas.

Why don't you see these bright engineers working on public-sector stuff? Because .gov is insanely high barrier to entry, and in order to break into it you kind of have to assimilate. And it's a culture which is cynical, which isn't "lean" by any stretch, and which cares about tech even less than the next "X for Y with Z".

Public sector stuff invariably has a bunch of egos and bullshit that have to be taken into account to do business, almost all of which is orthogonal to actually solving any problems. So, little surprise that people don't want to work on it. It's a lot of effort, and it doesn't change much, and it'll backslide the very second you turn your back on it--maybe even before.

Medicine, incidentally, is exactly the same way--you've got to coddle a bunch of little snowflakes who are used to getting their way and who are (annoyingly enough) correct with enough frequency that they are considered elders on matters they know nothing about.

Err....

The startup lifestyle is an unhealthy and dangerous where one essentially gives up one's life outside the startup. Can you blame these older engineers for not putting up with such bullshit (bullshit === startup lifestyle)? Startups should cease complaining about it. "Not smart in the way that start-ups want them to be" is ridiculous. Either one is smart or one isn't. This kind of thinking is just veiled discrimination from startups that want to overwork their employees and truly stupid writers who don't understand what they're writing about.

While some of the people mentioned in the article are young (Bicket and Miswas of Meraki are in their 20s/early 30s), other entrepreneurs in the news today are not: Acton and Koum of WhatsApp (recently bought by Facebook for $19B) are in their late 30s/early 40s.

Google's founders, Larry and Sergey, are 40.

Twitter: Jack Dorsey is 38. Biz Stone is 40. Evan Williams? 42.

Steve Jobs' best work at Apple was when he was in his late 40s/early 50s. Arguably, the success of Apple today is due to Steve's leadership, not due to the company being saved by some young person who breathed new life into the company as this quote from the NYT article suggests: "The most innovative and effective companies are old-guard companies that have managed to reach out to the new guard, like Apple". (If you disagree with this, look at Apple between 1985-1997 and 2011-present, where plenty of young (and old) people worked at Apple)

To simplify the claim here: there are those who know how to adapt to the current situation and those that don't (or can, but don't care). Some of those who know how to adapt are "old guard" and some are "new guard" -- it's not the age that is the determining factor.

As for other items in the article, like the lack of young people "help[ing] cure cancer or fix healthcare.gov", there are plenty of old (older) people who don't want to work on those problems too.

As for the claim that startups are the bastion of youth, that's not true either. I see plenty of 40-something founders and startup employees. While young startup people can easily afford to do a startup because their financial commitments are low (e.g., no mortgage or family to support), the older folks tend to do a startup for a similar reason: they've earned and saved a chunk of money where they're no longer worried about money and they can take on more risk.

The younger generation do care about problems that lies beneath the application, but a lot of those problems deal more with software than with hardware these days.

Besides that, we've been moving to a open source infrastructure, where a larger number of companies that depends on softwares develop them in a collaborative way, we have moved from the proprietary paradigm that existed in the 90's. A simple texting app may depend on some innovative database to scale, and will contribute to it's development.

"The problem is that they may be making more reasonable steps, but they’re making fewer steps. It’s hard to compete when you’re moving slower, even if you’re moving in a consistently correct direction."

Saving just one animal from death feels more important than improving the way 100's of millions communicate. But is it really?

They all need each other.

The real issue is the cool/substance chasm, which the article describes well.

If you want substance, you can work for the government or a big corporation... your salary growth will average 5% per year, your advancement will be political, and you'll probably never be able to afford a house in the Bay Area or New York. You'll also be at the mercy of corporate actions (mergers, etc.) that might move you out of your fun R&D job and into the basement.

If you play for cool, there's a 90% chance you waste years of your life you can never get back, a 9% chance you break even on opportunity cost, a 0.9% chance that you never have to work again (after wearing yourself out over 10 years of a manic-depressive startup existence, and "retirement" being an artifact of adrenal exhaustion, moderate wealth, and apathy), and a 0.1% chance of getting so rich that it was actually worth it.

What we need is a middle path. We have the golden skill that makes us capable of 15-40% annual growth (in salary, economic value, etc.) Between criminally inefficient large organizations (which produce "substance", but inefficiently and with painful wastes of effort) and flash-seeking careerist venture capitalists ("cool")-- a path that might "average" 50%/year career returns but with so much noise that the median outcome is poor-- no one will let us. That's the problem.

Heh, nice name-dropping.

=== http://www.warplife.com/jobs/computer/