I wish Tesla made hipster apps with mediocre photo filters too, so they could have some additional money easily to do their awesome stuff xD
I've often wondered why Things Needing Money (cities with budget deficits, states with budget deficits, caltrain, etc) don't develop startup-like things they can sell.
From one point of view, the answer is obvious: nobody wants to make someone else rich when they can make themselves rich [1]. But, from the other point of view: people do that all day every day. The majority of people don't understand (and don't want to understand) the complexities of corporate ownership, acquisitions, and payouts. They just want enough to pay for housing, food, support their family, and buy some toys a few times a year.
Could those Things Needing Money work it out by advancing internal EIR positions with enough funding to hire subordinates as necessary?
[1]: The valley does provide a way around "constantly working to make someone else rich." At large places (Cisco in the old days, Google now, probably Facebook too) you see people work the system. They can leave their company, start a startup of basically what they were working on at Big Corp, then have Big Corp aciqhire them back for a few million dollars. Or, they make a startup, get acquired by a Big Corp, vest their buyout, then immediately leave and re-create their original startup they sold, but better (maybe more sustainable or more IPO-like the second time around, but it's the exact same thing as the first time around).
If it is even legal for a government organization to make something to turn a profit, in many cases it isn't, the chances that an organization run like that would produce even the stupidest of successful money making apps is unlikely. On the off chance that they did succeed the cry from private industry would be so incredulous it wouldn't last long.
It'd be a good place to get a job if you wanted to cool your heels for a bit, but long-term I think I'd get really cynical and depressed. The thing that really hurts is that people who do go above and beyond don't get more than a token reward, and usually don't end up making more than the paycheck-suckers. Like you said it's all seniority. You'll see one or a handful of people busting their butts and doing really good work, and dozens or hundreds of people coasting, and the former are not given raises.
"Pure" meritocracy is a pipe dream. It's an idea that sounds good in rhetoric but is near-impossible to even define, let alone achieve, in reality. In the real world attempts at pure meritocracy often devolve into stress-inducing 80s Wall St. films. But absolutely flat anti-meritocracy sucks worse. The optimum is probably somewhere... hmm... maybe 2/3 of the way to an attempt at pure meritocracy? Enough incentive and accountability to motivate and reward, but enough flex and forgiveness to not burn people out.
Without even considering the impact of luck, there can be no doubt that building "startup-like things" takes enormous effort and dedication - and those can only rarely exist as secondary concerns in another organisation.
Meta: I like your style of writing! Do you have a blog that I can follow?
Thanks!
I think this is the quote of our generation, at least. It manages to summarize a huge part of what's wrong with the economy, politics, and the human condition.
Reminds me of a short, succinct, techie version of this:
http://sprayberry.tripod.com/poems/howl.txt
I think we should take it as a call to arms.
I wouldn't pretend to know all the best minds of my generation, but I believe that I know a statistically meaningful sample. A few of them are working in finance, which does make me sad, but the vast majority of them are working on really cool stuff, both in academia and in industry. Only one of them is trying to get people to click ads.
This isn't to say that there aren't some great minds working on getting people to click on ads, just that they represent a tiny fraction of the "best minds of our generation".
Even if they were all working on "getting people to click on ads", I think that's still an improvement on "building the atomic bomb", which we could have said about a previous generation at one point in time. (And just like the bomb gave rise to some wonderful physics, I have no doubt that getting people to click on ads will lead to some wonderful insights into cognition, psychology and economics).
Actually, come to think of it, I think you probably are correct. But a more accurate quote would be "the most well paid best minds of my generation are busy getting people to click on ads." I do know of people doing incredibly cool stuff in industry and academia, and none of them are making what the ad-analytics and finance people are making. In many cases they are making a graduate stipend (read: vow of poverty) and have poor employment prospects post-graduation (if they actually want to use their degree).
It is better for example to create some social mobile games, and then get valuated in a crazy bubble.
For example the company Gungho, they got 273 million invested on them at march for about 60% of the company (do not remember the exact number), then released a single game named Puzzles and Dragons, and now they are valued on the Tokyo Stock Exchange for about 15.1 billion USD yay!
And yes, that is more than Nintendo, for a single game. Perfect example of investor rationality.