Something interesting I read on Steve Woz's site
As yet another engineer working in Silicon Valley, it seems that with
all the Internet startups and dot-com millionaires, no-one is out to create
exciting, innovative products and technologies here anymore. Instead of
"How can I change the world?", it's "How can I go IPO ASAP and get rich
quick?" I see PhD's leaving high-tech to work on yet another search engine.
I see folks reading The Wall Street Journal who used to read Byte. Do
you see this trend worsening? Can hi-tech get out of this dot-com mind-set
and back to innovation? Will there ever be anything close to a technical
revolution again?
Woz:
I do see this trend increasing. A lot of the problem is that small guys
with something attractive have a much more difficult time getting recognized.
This is largely due to the spending of large companies, ensuring that
their territory is not easily eaten into. You have a good point. Where
are the engineers and scientists these days? All we hear about are CEO's.
Typically they attended business schools and weren't inspired by science
fiction.
Defined tags for this entry: geek stuff
Comments
Consider this as a rant, but as a guy good at C/C++ with no industry experience, I can tell that canned C# and Java jobs are more easy to get and pay a shit load of money. My work on Cognitive science pays me 10$/hr, my friends working on C# get 50$/hr for some simple SQL applications.... if this trend continues, even the guy with the strongest principles will succumb.
So there is no motivation to innovate. Why should we innovate... just for fun?? Cuz for all we know, some guy in an Armani would sell our idea for a million dollars, patent it and give us a few thousands to be happy about.