Silicon Valley’s Youth Problem (2014) | Hacker News Reader

Silicon Valley’s Youth Problem (2014)

nytimes.com

35 pointsstevewepay18 comments

I think the blaming is misplaced. Or at least we're inconsistent with it. Why not go ahead and blame the dropouts of whom there was a chance there was one who could have come up with the cure for some dreadful disease.

Or why not accuse artists and others who don't produce real goods of wasting their talents on creating art, some of it, in the form of hollywood movies, or extremely middle brow artists of having wasted opportunity. Or why not come down on plastic surgeons? Why not ask why they didn't become useful surgeons? Or barratry lawyers, why not ask them why they didn't all become constitutional lawyers criminal defense lawyers? Why not bemoan hack journalists for failing serious journalism and affronting the profession?

No, but tech workers must be exceptional and we must expect much more from them than the rest of the population rather than let them pursue what they want as we allow the rest to do without much repudiation.

So yes this is apparently a resubmission. But this statement struck me:

"Since the acquisition, Biswas, who is 32, has fought to retain the spirit of the vanguard, but his struggle reveals an implicit fear — that young engineers might be willing to work at Meraki but not at Cisco (because it’s too big and fusty), or that clients might be willing to buy from Cisco but not Meraki (because they don’t really trust start-ups)."

So maybe the answer is for these large companies to spin out R&D departments into their own companies with different names and corporate cultures. The primary customer at first would be the parent, but employees wouldn't have to deal with the nonsense that comes with working at a large multi-national company, or with the risk that comes from working for an unproven startup. The companies could also generate revenue from outside customers that do not compete with the parent and be publicly traded as a separate entity, which means that the value of options given to employees and the underlying stock wouldn't necessarily be tied to the prospects of the parent. Young engineers go to work for the fun R&D startup, and customers buy the products they design from the large, reputable parent.

While good in theory - Underlying corporate culture eventually leaks into the core essence of the subsidiaries, thus exposing the true substance of these little companies.

This sounds like what Cisco does with their spin-in process.

They invest $100MM in a new company in exchange for a majority ownership stake, and retain the right to purchase the remaining shares for a previously agreed-upon price based on performance targets.

More info here: http://www.businessinsider.com/why-cisco-showered-three-men-...

Interestingly, this model was advocated for in The Innovator's Dilemma, which was the book that coined the term disruptive innovation.

However the parent company is unlikely to be the first customer, since they're unlikely to want the product themselves. Cisco probably didn't want Meraki's business until Meraki proved it to be a valuable one.

If a company spins out its critical R&D functions and gives the new company its intellectual property, then yes, it will want the "product" :) . What I'm talking about is creating a new company that begins with the express purpose of doing exactly what the internal R&D department was doing before, with a long-term contract from the parent to do exactly that. The parent becomes its first built-in, guaranteed, life-long customer. You're talking about buying companies that already have IP, which is a different thing.

Not sure why this re-surfaced now but here's a link to the comments when it was posted over a year ago: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=7384818

Because karma

"In a place with one of the best gender-ratios in the country for single women, female friends I talk to complain that most of the men are, in fact, not available; they are all busy working on their start-ups, or data-crunching themselves. They have prioritized self-improvement and careers over relationships."

I'm particularly curious about what she believes the alternative option is here. Are we supposed to waste our time and self-esteem with uncertainty and self doubt in the pursuit of a relationship, or focus on something that brings immediate and tangible results, and keep building up our confidence through building and administrating tech like coding through Python and working with Linux? Personally I'll always take the the one that brings tangible results and confidence before the one that brings depression and uncertainty.

I was reading Hackers (http://www.amazon.com/Hackers-Computer-Revolution-Anniversar...) earlier this month, and that sounds pretty much like the "bachelor-mode" described therein.

It's tough... You can devote your time to a logical, rational system that provides consistent rewards to your efforts - or you can pursue sex and unpredictable human factors.

    In pursuing the latest and the coolest, young engineers ignore 
    opportunities in less-sexy areas of tech like semiconductors, data 
    storage and networking, the products that form the foundation on which 
    all of Web 2.0 rests. Without a good router to provide reliable Wi-Fi, 
    your Dropbox file-sharing application is not going to sync; without 
    Nvidia’s graphics processing unit, your BuzzFeed GIF is not going to 
    make anyone laugh. The talent — and there’s a ton of it — flowing into 
    Silicon Valley cares little about improving these infrastructural 
    elements. What they care about is coming up with more web apps.

While I agree somewhat in principle, especially with the example about GPUs, but I think the viewpoint of this article greatly discounts the value of the open-source byproducts from many of the Web 2.0 companies.

For example, scaling to the levels that Facebook has presented many novel challenges and opportunities to push productivity in traditional computing areas. The open-compute project, face recognition, apache thrift (which builds upon ideas that began with protocol buffers), etc. are all ways in which some foundational technologies were the by-product of pursuing the creation of a social software empire.

That said, I also think this journalist is blindly by his own industry. There are plenty of cool startups working on foundational technology, it's just that they aren't as sexy and stories about them don't attract as many eyeballs. Take Planet Labs for example. That's some pretty foundational area in terms of how Space has been valuable to humans and they are aiming to democratize access to have an eye in Space. Maybe the author just doesn't know how to discover tech companies that haven't already been discovered for him by the pop tech journalism media?

We've conflated "engineer" to an absurd degree in the software industry. Engineering deals in a lot of hard math problem solving - as in, that's utterly vital to it.

It's also completely orthogonal to the types of problems Web 2.0-type companies work on - there isn't a 1:1 ability to translate the people going to work in one area to another.

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=7384818

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=7452643

Some of the best responses to this article are on Quora: https://www.quora.com/What-does-Silicon-Valley-think-of-the-...

I really hope you can see past the fact there is a login requirement. There is a lot of really great content on Quora.

...and it requires you to put up with their needless shit to get it.

That Google hasn't de-listed them (and everyone else using what is nothing more than cloaking) is a real shame.

I must say I chuckled when I read the top Quora comment. Its author clearly doesn't understand the genre this piece is written in, namely cultural criticism. He says:

> Too many paragraphs seem this way: like she had a point she wanted to make and then she tossed in a few questionable observations without thinking much of the logical relationships among them, the facts behind them, whether her idea was really supported by the phenomena she's describing.

Cultural criticism isn't meant to be a definitive, empirical description of reality. It is offered as food for thought, one additional point of view that may help you look at things differently and maybe see some things in a different light. One of course can, and should, critique such a text on the basis of contradicting all evidence, but expecting complete coherence is completely misunderstanding the purpose of the text.

If you add a ?share=1 to the URL, it bypasses the login and shows the full commentary.

Clickable: https://www.quora.com/What-does-Silicon-Valley-think-of-the-...

It is against HN guidelines for me to assume that you are spamming HN to get more user from that site, but at least include the no bullshit link:

https://www.quora.com/What-does-Silicon-Valley-think-of-the-...

Reply on news.ycombinator.com