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What does Silicon Valley think of the NY Times article "Silicon Valley's Youth Problem"?

  • See NY Times article here: http://www.nytimes.com/2014/03/16/magazine/silicon-valleys-youth-problem.html?_r=0Noticed that the NY Times quoted the Quora question: The author is female.

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    I live and work out here in the tech industry; I have strongly critical feelings about many of its characteristics, but am not blind to its qualities either. I thought the article wasn't very accurate. It often makes a very specific kind of argument, best exemplified by what I consider to be one of its stronger paragraphs: People think of all these perks, the free food, the flexible hours, as a sort of Gen Y invention, a deliberate extension of adolescence deep into the 20s [1]. But it’s not really about that. It’s not even about squeezing extra code out of employees. It’s about fulfilling some platonic vision of how work should be: a tight-knit group of friends, pushing themselves to greatness. I consider arguments like this to be literary. By that I mean that they are non-scientific, and neither aspire to nor achieve any kind of meaningful epistemological precision; there is no data or scale, no real investigative attempt at finding out what people involved think or say speculative, inventive, the product of creative ideation on the part of the author; these are solitary arguments, not made as part of a system of robust academic inquiry but as expressions of artistic thought capable of being usefully insightful or artistically true while still being provisional, semi-evidentiary To be specific: the paragraph begins with "People think of all these perks…" and we must immediately ask: "Who?" Does anyone in the know, anyone whose opinion is worth considering, think that the perks of this industry are "about" a "deliberate extension of adolescence deep into the 20s"? Of course not; the calculus behind the perks is well-known, prosaic enough, hardly the basis for a bold thesis suggesting that the various managers of all these thousands of companies are "fulfilling a platonic vision of how work should be." I pause here to note that I happen to agree with her, but as a literary matter; that is: I believe that we all obey the imperatives of the zeitgeist in our ways, and that her diagnosis in this paragraph is interesting, fascinating, worth making. Or at least: it is one layer of what's happening in all those cool canteens with the wheatgrass shots. But it is definitely something for a novel; I wouldn't try to enter this into any kind of academic record (or a newspaper of record). Bluntly: "It’s about fulfilling some platonic vision of how work should be: a tight-knit group of friends, pushing themselves to greatness" is false. Perks are for recruitment, retention, morale, and production; all of these things have dollar-values. Nevertheless: I liked her take. But whereas in that paragraph, her point is made despite the paucity of practical substance to her argument —note that she doesn't, say, ask anyone about the perks; that's not the kind of article this is; it's not investigating, it's opining; it's not truth-seeking, it's claim-generating— in other paragraphs this approach yields decreasingly accurate claims. For example, in iterating on her reductive theme of "old guard" / "uncool" vs. "new school" / "cool," she naturally mentions Apple and Microsoft: On the other hand, the continued success of companies like Apple, which are old guard yet somehow don’t seem out of date, implies that there is still another force at work. It is possible, albeit difficult, for a large, established company to stay relevant —but it requires recognition that to a software engineer in his 20s, with endless opportunities, what matters most is not salary, or stability, or job security, but cool. Cool exists at the ineffable confluence of smart people, big money and compelling product. You can buy it, but only up to a point. For example, Microsoft, while perpetually cast as an industry dinosaur, is in fact in very good financial shape. Starting salaries are competitive with those at Google and Facebook; top talent is promoted rapidly. Last year, every Microsoft intern was given a Surface tablet; in July, they were flown to Seattle for an all expenses-paid week whose activities included a concert headlined by Macklemore and deadmau5. This is a bad paragraph. She names only Apple; I don't think she has any other examples, yet writes "of companies like Apple" When a falsifying exception to her model is introduced, she adds "still another force" to the simple dichotomy presented thus far, which complicates it and makes previous assertions seem incoherent That force is "cool," which apparently comes in part from features that are common among larger companies like Google or Amazon. Again: "Cool exists at the ineffable confluence of smart people, big money and compelling product." This is a purely automatic and superfluous use of the word ineffable; the confluence is described, meaning it is not ineffable. The idea that something as banal as this confluence could be ineffable is pretty strange, too. I don't think she thinks it's ineffable; I doubt anyone does. But more importantly: what's appealing to an engineer about a place with money, compelling product, and lots of smart people isn't primarily its coolness. It's the money, product, and smart people. I guess that's "cool" in the sense that we call good things cool, but that's tautological. The imprecise, redundant term adds nothing to our understanding. She continues: Despite these efforts, Microsoft’s cool feels coerced. One reason might be its sheer size —with a market cap of $315 billion, Microsoft will never enjoy the headlong rush of a company with nothing to lose, the bite of the underdog. Apple has a larger market cap than Microsoft. Is "coolness" just about being an underdog, which in most cases means a marketplace loser? Does the author really believe that companies "enjoy…headlong rush[es]"? What could that mean? Does Apple have "nothing to lose"? Why? Is that related to coolness? How? And most oddly: is the author not aware that Microsoft is essentially an underdog now? And Apple really isn't?! (Also: to enjoy "the bite of the underdog," one must be bitten by the underdog; this means one isn't the underdog oneself). Why would Microsoft's "cool" "feel" "coerced" anyway? Well: if cool is about money, smart people, and product, the obvious answer is that Microsoft doesn't make "compelling product." What makes products compelling or cool? Often that they solve real problems for tens or hundreds of millions of people, rather than just making money. Does this support or contradict her thesis about the superficiality of Silicon Valley? She doesn't explore this. 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. The whole article has a careening quality that reflects its incoherence; it's hard to know how any given paragraph relates to any given thesis because it often doesn't, or worse: it contradicts a thesis without her seeming to acknowledge it! The Polish author Witold Gombrowicz advised writers not to intoxicate themselves with elaborate meanings and instead to "let facts create you." In my reading, this is the article of someone excited by ideas —despite the line bemoaning that "ideas" now drive "tech" instead of "technology," a sentence about which one could ask many problematizing questions— rather than someone whose view is being created by facts. The "facts" out here don't support ideas at the level of generality and literary felicity that she wants to write with; facts in reality rarely do. The truth is that you can't really say …the churn feels more problematic now, in part because it deprives the new guard as well as the old — and by extension, it deprives us all. 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… 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. without offering any data at all. What churn is depriving us all, and of what is it depriving us? How many young engineers pursue "the latest and coolest" instead of comparable opportunities in semi-conductors? Is this her clique, her school, or all engineers? How does she know what "the talent" out here "care[s] about"? I may not be super-talented, but I don't care about "more web apps" and don't know anyone who does! Even if we grant her the truth of her observations, how narrow they are! How trivial to the overall evolution of technology: there are, after all, many other countries working on software and hardware. Following this paragraph, she asks What’s cool? Who can be trusted? Why does one start-up go public, while another, which seems to do the same thing, fizzles? What logic, if any, pertains to where the money flows? These are the anxious questions that pervade Silicon Valley now, I think, more than ever — the vague sense of a frenzied bubble of app-making and an even vaguer dread that what we are making might not be that meaningful. I think this paragraph reveals the type of writing she's interested in: speculative, rhetorical, exploratory, literary, opinionated. There are reasons why one startup goes public and another fizzles! The logic around the flow of money is explicable! Silicon Valley is a region with millions of people; anxious questions do not "pervade" it, and if they did, they'd have done so more after the last bubble burst than they do now. "Vague sense[s]" are perhaps detectable to writers, but not to the rest of us; the "vaguer dread" is definitely an authorial invention. Again: I am more like her than not in my own thinking and writing, and I am partial to some of the lenses she uses. But this article is pretty haphazard, and I don't think it describes real or important dynamics out here. 1. As an aside: we take adolescence into the 30s, the 40s, the 50s here; this is California; Facebook didn't invent endless youth on the West Coast.

Mills Baker at Quora Visit the source

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As a longtime tech journalist, I found the NYT magazine article relatively pointless and completely unconvincing, for many of the reasons commentators mention here. But on the other hand there was a much more thoughtful and deeply-researched piece on a similar subject (or perhaps on the right subject) published around the same time a couple weeks ago by the New Republic which I would recommend as an antidote. It is not a pretty picture but it is much more convincing: http://www.newrepublic.com/article/117088/silicons-valleys-brutal-ageism

David Kirkpatrick

I think the article is largely misguided.  Here's why: First off, there are a ton of great companies started by founders of all ages.  Some of the most valuable companies of recent memory (LinkedIn, WorkDay, WhatsApp, etc) were not started by twenty-something-hoodie-wearing people. Second, the press, especially on the East Coast, has a bias toward covering the consumer-centric plays started by young people.  These articles attract more readers.  But the number of articles written about these companies is way disproportionate to the VALUE CREATION that actually occurs in Silicon Valley.  Case in point:  Does anyone know that Nimble Storage is way more valuable than Instagram at the time it was acquired? So ironically the people who are out of touch with Silicon Valley enough to bias their stories toward young entrepreneurs then write that there is a "youth problem", when ironically the problem is their own lack of understanding of what is really happening because their coverage is too narrow. :-) So I think that there are valuable companies created by entrepreneurs at many age bands.  The people who are complaining about "ageism" or a "youth problem" are not the same people as the folks who MATTER -- namely the folks who are too busy creating awesome breakout companies to pay attention to this nonsense.

Mike Maples

I thought that the article was valuable, but not for the reasons it was supposed to be. For me, it was a valuable articulation of how blind even the most perceptive of today's elite college graduates are--the author included--to the world around them. It's not necessarily their fault; to some extent it's a reflection of how they were raised (see http://www.amazon.com/Excellent-Sheep-Miseducation-American-Meaningful/dp/1476702713), which they can't do much about. Except that they could wake up. As far as the writing goes, I read a few comments on another web site that criticized the article for being a hodgepodge of anecdotes without a compelling unifying theme. I agree with that criticism. The fundamental issue I have with the article, however, is that the author mis-identifies the problem in Silicon Valley and starts her analysis on the premise of a false dichotomy. It's not about old people versus young people in Silicon Valley. It's about money and respect, and who has it--but mostly money. Smart people of all ages are going to go work where the money is. And right now, as has been the case for one full decade, the money is not where it should be. Right now it's in Stupid Mobile Apps. To be precise, the money trajectory has changed: it went from Social Networking in 2005 (immediately post-Facebook) to the mind-numbing Social / Local / Mobile in 2009 (Get it? They rhyme!) and now increasingly as the smiling, impeccably-attired MBA fools who inhabit venture capital firms have jointly forgotten the first two words, we're just down to Stupid Mobile Apps, e.g. Flappy Bird clones. God help us as we shift to the next bandwagon, which may have already hit us in the form of Big Data--a buzzword broad enough to cover just about everything except a 1.44MB floppy disk. But if you had a really big 1.44MB floppy disk... This is all to say that the youth problem isn't the fault of the youth at all. It's actually the fault of venture capitalists, and really only a few of them, who have idolized, deified and formed a kind of cult around certain (ahem) entrepreneurs whose rapid ascendency to unbelievable wealth was build on a foundation of their youth, arrogance, favorable economic conditions, a not-actually-true-but-well-received movie, and massive fraud. Now, if you want to get a company funded, your company better look like that guy's company, because if it doesn't, how could your company possibly become worth billions? Of course, the answer is that one shouldn't have to have a company worth billions (or become a billionaire) to be successful, even by venture capital standards--fifty or a hundred million is actually a perfectly reasonable goal so long as you invest a reasonable amount. But such talk is sacrilege in the church of money where MBAs worship, and it could get one excommunicated--where literally, no one in the Valley will talk to you. Because venture capitalists have become so insanely greedy that they no longer invest reasonable amounts. They invest $25 million in a seed round (Clinkle) and $112 million for Series B (Airbnb). The result is a huge boost in income inequality, and a sea of lost engineers wondering why they are working on nonsense for a few very rich, very lucky founders. The CEOs of these nonsense companies are too naive to understand why hiring older employees could be valuable--not to mention that the local deities have explicitly (and likely illegally) discouraged it--and so they don't. There are of course a few outliers who manage to make an impact when it comes to accounting or law or medicine--Aaron Patzer of Mint comes to mind--but they're hard to find and where are they now? Doing just about anything but running their company. Intuit bought Mint and Patzer became a vice president of somethingorother where he wouldn't pose a threat to the established order of things. Because in the new Venture Capital-Kingmaker spreadsheet model, which is the model Silicon Valley currently revolves around, contributing something positive to society doesn't pay.

Aaron Greenspan

Hmm...let's see... Successful "Unsexy" (as defined by the author) companies founded recently by young people in the billion-dollar club or on their way: Palantir SuccessFactors PracticeFusion Cloudera Box Asana Addepar CreditKarma PureStorage Dropbox MongoDB Klarna ZenPayroll Zendesk Fusion-IO Jumio Radius Lookout Security Counsyl If I can think of these in <10 minutes with no research, there are probably many more. The author is naive. The real problem is that journalism has become more sensational. Reporters are too focused on reporting on the shiny new object rather than investigating the true story behind innovation in the Valley. It's a common reaction to misunderstanding and a poor way to attract readership. As a result, the true innovators are trusting the press less and less. Silicon Valley doesn't have a "youth problem"; journalism has a quality problem.

Anonymous

This touches on some very salient issues and anxieties that the world at large is feeling about our beloved bay area. My main takeaway is an increasing unease at the scattergun approach journalism is taking to the complex ecosystem of Silicon Valley, and how it is unfortunately the vicious cycle of media hyperbole instead of the more nuanced and fundamental problems of the Valley's relationship with the world that are defining public commentary and popular thought. As an ex-professional writer (which is not as cool as being an ex-professional wrestler) I have some issues with the methodology employed developing the argument here, which is now becoming http://www.sfgate.com/living/article/What-out-of-town-writers-need-to-know-about-S-F-5307139.php. Weirdly, it's barely about what it says it is (In start-up land, the young barely talk to the old - and vice versa). It seems to want to be the everyman of "state of Silicon Valley" articles, covering the glut of young guns at startups, whether you're too old to be in the valley at 40, whether we're producing anything of value here, how the angst of being in a pool of very talented people affects us etc. etc. In doing so, though, I felt it became quite meandering (it even manages to bring in Google-buses and falls into the http://www.sfgate.com/living/article/What-out-of-town-writers-need-to-know-about-S-F-5307139.php). It's a bit of a bait-and-switch, and each of these issues needs easily a few thousand words devoted to them to scratch the surface. of the "over the hill" mentality is a good read to accompany this article. My anecdotal experiences are that as you get older in Silicon Valley you obviously don't want to do the high-risk high-stress startup thing a) because you have a family and a mortgage or b) because you're fabulously wealthy already and don't need the hassle. Every successful company here I've ever seen has benefited from the advice of much older people, either as CEOs (Eric Schmidt with Larry and Sergey at Google is case in point), on their board or as investors and advisors. It's predominately narrow-minded people within the Valley, or uninformed people outside of it, who think that all the young, successful people in Silicon Valley don't think about its heritage, or the experience of their older generation. I get the feeling that the writer of this article knows this, but just chose to ignore it to write a more punchy story. This particular line almost made me cry: "A few weeks ago, a programmer friend and I were talking about unhappiness, in particular the kind of unhappiness that arises http://media.salon.com/2014/03/diet_coke_sf_ad.jpg and lavishly educated with the world at your feet." Much angst So educate Wow

Ben Wallace

That guy on the left, that's me.

Craig Newmark

I don't live there. That said, I go to San Francisco fairly often (about once per year) and I will give Silicon Valley (really, San Francisco, as I avoid the rest of it) credit this far: it's diverse, at least in viewpoints. There are a lot of people in Northern California who are really talented, and who have their hearts in the right place and good ideas. They may not be the ones in charge now, and I'd love to see that change. There is no need for an age conflict. Young programmers want to learn from their elders (the good ones) and not push them out of the way. This age discrimination culture comes from the business douches who've colonized us. It has no place in technology. We know that it takeshttp://norvig.com/21-days.html to become any good at what we do, making age discrimination all the more perverse and cruel. The substance/cool chasm is real, though. Here's an HN post I wrote about it, copied here in full: This isn't a "youth problem". 20-year-olds and 50-year-olds aren't natural enemies, and most people don't think that way. Blaming this on one side is ridiculous. When 50-year-old chickenhawk VCs only want to fund 25-year-olds, that's not the fault of one generation or the other. (Can you blame it on the young for taking the opportunity? No. Can you blame it on the old when it's only a few making those decisions that are hurting most of them? No.) 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. I would hope that others, including a "silent majority" of true technologists in the Valley who, in my mind, just want the noise to go away, would agree with me.

Michael O. Church

I want to compliment the author for publishing an exceptionally well-written article as a 21/22-year-old. I think if she pursues journalism/writing she would make a great impact on bettering the world. But unfortunately the perspective of the article was very narrow. I am one of the "old generation" of Silicon Valley. When companies lay me off they have to give me documents showing how they were not discriminating by age. I have been in and out of at least half a dozen companies, some of them startups, some of them tech giants. I have been constantly keeping myself on top of the latest technology wave every 3-5 years, from the original web technology to web 2.0, to mobile, to cloud. Being old doesn't automatically make you a dinosaur, or less creative. And being young doesn't automatically make you innovative. There are plenty of younger engineers who are one-dimensional but happen to catch the tide at the right moment. Good for them if they make it but if some of them don't, they'd better watch out for the next tide. The older generation do tend to make more calculated risks, while the younger generation tend to take bigger risks. In a get-rich-quick scheme, VCs love to throw money at people who are more reckless because they can try more times and be richly rewarded if one of them sticks. We can't blame the young entrepreneurs for taking it on but the rule of the game certainly smells funny. We all know what comes out of such short-term mentality from what happened in the Wall Street. When some companies who mask neat features (thinking of an app that make photos disappear?) as legitimate businesses get multi-billion dollar valuations, one cannot help but say deja vu again. How many jobs do these companies create, vs how many jobs does a lowly manufacturing company create? Yes, the latter may seem uncool. But coolness really means different things to different people. It may just be that one group hogs the social media more and thus gets more attention. In my experience there are exceptional leaders from both the old generation and the young generation. They may have strengths in different things so wouldn't it be nice to have a blend of them? Silicon Valley is the most diverse place I've ever seen. It belongs as much to the older generation as to the young generation. It belongs to engineers as well as non-engineers, entrepreneurs and employees. It is extremely shorted-sighted to preclude any one group because it is convenient for some quick short-term gain. Am I intimidated by young engineers? No. But I value diversity in my work environment. I don't need a bubble around me so I only need to interact with people who are like me. The old generation cares as much about changing the world as the young. They just tend to do it more locally, starting with family and community. Diversity, is what makes Silicon Valley great.

Sheldon Shi

While I do understand that the vast majority of startups out there today are working on an app, it's also very clear that that's what gets funding and that's what's getting the big paydays.  So what's the problem?  The wheel is turning.  So what?  Technology changes and we have to change with it. Now, what will be interesting is when the necessary talent pool for continuing to progress basic infrastructure has all but retired.  Then the pendulum will need to swing the other way. I hope to still be around for that.

Tony Li

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