[pabb]

Commenting on this incredibly late, but I knew there'd be some good fodder in this comment thread.

You have a good point, but unfortunately you're still missing the point. Not being able to effectively cure cancer isn't the issue Silicon Valley is facing. As others have said, as software engineers, we would have gone to school to do bioinformatics and study the natural sciences if that's what we wanted. The issue is that a vast number of people are working on shitty, pointless, worthless apps.

It has nothing to do with barriers to entry. What kind of problems do you learn to solve in this field? Computational ones, i.e. things involving facets of computing. So why are less companies devoting resources to working on facets of networking, optimizing computer architecture, writing more efficient compilers and operating systems? Things that software engineers should have plenty of knowledge on, and would be much more beneficial to society than the next bullshit social app. Why is this not the case?

That is what the author is addressing. Churning out photosharing app #35875 isn't helping anyone. But maybe if people started taking pride in the notion of being a hacker and a computer scientist, and actually solving shit worth solving instead of stamping those phrases on their Twitter pages for social approval, then just maybe the Valley could gain some credibility back.

[eli_gottlieb]

>So why are less companies devoting resources to working on facets of networking, optimizing computer architecture, writing more efficient compilers and operating systems?

I can think of a couple reasons:

1) Because hardware/microarchitecture companies do devote effort to architecture and compilers.

2) Because low-level software/OS companies do devote effort to networking, compilers, and operating systems.

3) Because network effects mean that only a very few mutually incompatible languages and OS's can survive on the open market, with a larger but still fairly small variety surviving on open-source volunteer efforts.

>Not being able to effectively cure cancer isn't the issue Silicon Valley is facing.

Oh really? Aren't there some computational problems we could work on that have cancer-cure-level impacts?