That’s a funny quote, but I’m not sure what the relevance is. Did I make a generalization, or did the author of the article make one?
There’s probably on the order of 10 million scientists, a sizeable chunk of whom could be said to work in biology (including adjacent fields like microbiology, biochem…). The article contains only references to a handful of non-representative outliers… That’s more than a generalization, it’s a total miss.
You’re doing it again: complaining about one person’s generalization from a few examples, then making your own, far grander and more absolute generalization, on an even flimsier, vibesier idea, contained only in your head and personal experiences, that you feel is too cumbersome to share, making it subject to none of the scrutiny you are making.
Software engineering is well on the way to normalizing, IMO. The job market has not been great for the past two years. The margins in finance are getting squeezed too by tech. If you’ve been investing for a decade or two, you know how much lower fees are now.
Software will continue to eat the world. There's a massive push to cut costs right now and hence the software job market is under considerable pressure, but companies are burying themselves in tech debt and low quality solutions. This will catch up to them very soon.
We're already there. It's one of the causes of why all our physical infrastructure is failing. When we outsourced our manufacturing in the 90s-2010s, we lost all that talent.
25 years ago, it seemed obvious China was going to be to the 21st century what the USA was to the 20th. But also 25 years ago, AI translation in a video call that not only dubs you in your own voice but also modifies your mouth to sync lips with the synthesised voice, was wild speculative SciFi on par with a warp drive.
China's population peaked in 2022, 8 years ahead of schedule. It's a massive challenge and no country in history ever managed to reverse a trend in births of this sort.
PRCs aggregate births from 2000-22 is like ~350m, around a US worth with 60% and rising tertiary enrollment, disproportionate going STEM + technical. They're going to be drowning in talent (hence youth unemployment problem), multiple times than US can match with domestic+immigration. This is more than enough talent (and cheap due to supply/demand) to compete/dominate in strategic industries until 2060s+, especially with emphasis on driving brains into hard sciences vs finance or excess software. Yeah there's going to be challenges dealing with the pyramid but not with domains driven by skilled talent. All the catchup PRC has done in past 20 years was fueled by fraction of skilled workforce relative to what they'll generate in next 20-30.
The high youth unemployment is an indicator that their industries haven't caught up with providing jobs - there's no way for those people to utilise that talent.
All that when China's fertility rate has been below replacement since at least the early 90s. This is the generation of "little emperors", who were heavily invested in.
Japan went that route, complete with a real estate bubble which is also present in China. Didn't go well for them.
OECD combined STEM talent generation = high more indicator of surplus / overcapacity in generation = cheaper talent. It's about not having SHORTAGE of talent while catching up, even if some excess ends up driving cabs. Eitherway, youth emplloyment high, but not crippling high and overall unemployment is like 5% which means youths finds jobs eventually, just not right away.
The goal of family planning / investing in 1-2 kids is explicitly so resrouces can be pooled to throw them into tertiary - little educated emperors - so they can compete in advanced sectors instead of having 10 kids make widgets.
Japan is basically a US Satrap whose economy can be easily coerced via US influence (i.e. US killing JP semi / forcing it to appreciate FX to kill competitiveness). PRC insulated from that / doesn't have to comply. Also JP's talent is why it's still competitive DESPITE having such shit TFR, same with SKR. The issue witht those are relatively small countries is that they've already maxed out their human capital (80% skilled work force). They're running to stand still from bad demographic trends. PRC is still transitioning from 20% skilled to 80% skilled, they still have so much substantial room to accomodate 100s of millions of new skilled workforce and milk productivity gains current driven down by massive pool of under productive / undereducated labour will slowly be replaced (really die, since that cohort leans old). That's the problem comparing JP with PRC demographics... their skilled demographic/workforce composition not remotely comparable.
Almost. They’re already fantastic at manufacturing and to a certain extent improving on technologies but we haven’t seen a lot of new breakthrough come from China yet. I don’t doubt it will start happening, it’s just a matter of when.
That would probably be ‘perultimate’ (see https://en.wiktionary.org/wiki/per-#Latin ). Mind you, since ‘ultimate’ means ‘last’ it’s not clear what this word would actually mean.
This post doesn't address the elephant in the room -- wages in biology seem to be supressed due to an oversupply of life sciences scientists willing to do tasks in various corporate and academic labs.
Since life science wages (rewards) seem to be so low compared to other careers in relation to the density of advanced degree holders, the ambitions need to be that much bigger to make it worth it to found uncertain and risky startups. Only big ideas would be worth funding. Ecosystem tooling startups might be founded once more capital for that category trickles in.
>>And I have no doubt that Patrick Collinson — the CEO of Stripe [...]
Patrick's last name is Collison, not Collinson, as per the wikipedia link that the blog post references.
I understand what you're trying to say here, but I disagree.
What someone finds interesting or boring is of course subjective, but you'd be surpised at how many people find finance endlessly interesting - and especially the overlap between finance and software ("fintech").
On the surface, it might be bewildering that some people are more interested in internet payment processing than say, stem cell research, but that's just how peoples interests work!
The company I work for runs a wrap platform [1]. Not one developer in the company has ever mentioned that they find the area intrinsically exciting to work on.
There is a sense of collective responsibility that we are the custodian for the retirement savings of hundreds of thousands of people, so you do not want to screw that up. There is also satisfaction in that our efforts as developers mean that our platform is consistently rated the best on the market.
But nobody, least of all management, is kidding themselves that people are working for the company because of the problem domain - they’re working for the company because of the pay, conditions, and company culture. And there’s absolutely nothing wrong with that.
Some people get satisfaction out of solving problems and learning, regardless of what the problem is or what they’re learning.
Building a company is a constant exercise of problem solving and learning, especially at the early stages.
I grew a SaaS to millions of ARR but the thing that keeps me interested isn’t really the industry we’re in, it’s all of the tangential things that are required to build and grow (learning how to hire well, learning how to build company culture, pitching to investors, M&A, figuring out how to be a good leader, etc)
Sometimes I feel guilty that I’m not as directly passionate about the product itself as I should be, and am more passionate about the people and company and the journey it’s on.
>Sometimes I feel guilty that I’m not as directly passionate about the product itself as I should be, and am more passionate about the people and company and the journey it’s on.
That's because you are a human, that built a company. You are not that company, even if you must embody it - literally and figuratively.
High level topics aren’t what people are doing day to day though. There’s definitely parts of any business that are interesting but that only goes so far. Science also involves a great deal to tedious work.
Comparatively high fintech pay suggests it needs those wages to attract people.
I hate it when someone tries to take it in a subjective direction without accounting for fundamental human biases.
Like any human can understand why space x catching a freaking rocket is less boring than stripe payment processing. I mean come on!
Do you really expect me to believe you fundamentally think payment processing is so much more cooler than catching a freaking rocket? If anyone believes that I’d point to them having more of an axe to grind with Elon then any depiction of what they really feel.
I subjectively think I am god. That’s just my subjective opinion and it’s valid because everything on the face of the earth is subjective.
First, Software is saturated. Every idea is being attacked such that the boring things are the only niche available. That’s why you see more boring startups in software.
Second the innovation in software largely raw garbage. Humanity moving forward is developing a light speed drive but software innovation is mainly something along the lines of: instead of looking through the phone book for a plumber there’s an app for that now.
And if you look even deeper at the technology of software itself it’s mostly horizontal development of endlessly making new abstraction after abstraction without ever really knowing if things are improving. Case in point we went from server side rendering to single page apps and now we’re heading back without ever really knowing if things have improved or gotten more complex.
I don’t want biology to model software. Software is a bunch of illusions and no progress anywhere.
Ironically I think AI is the one part of software that isn’t an illusion as this is real progress in creating an entity that can’t be differentiated from a human. The thing is most people think AI is an illusion because it “hallucinates” and I’m just thinking the whole time that the fact that we created something that can lie, deceive and hallucinate is a marker of progress bigger than all the bullshit progress you see in the rest of software and the software startup world.
So I disagree with op. Good on biology to not do boring bs.
I'd rather formulate it the other way around. There are not enough smart people in computing working on the really important things. Instead they are working on what pays the most.
That may have an effect, but I don't think the root cause is the number of developers.
The root issue is that people and groups are disorganized and have inconsistencies between them. Changing habits and convincing other humans and making political coalitions is very hard, so instead people are willing to spend surprisingly large amounts of money in various ways that somehow take the edge off.
Creating or adopting software to "organize" is just one way that can occur. It could also be something like a doomed initiative that someone with clout wants, or even just paying the salary of a useless person hoping they'll leave on their own because firing them is too hard.
I for one would be happy if the everyday software I use wasn't complete rubbish. It won't make the world meaningfully better, but it certainly won't make it worse. It's a start.
Why isn't there a browser which you can just install to have a good Internet experience? It would have to update itself every day with a new definition of "good" due to the arms race with advertisers.
It would have to block all ads and trackers and other bad JavaScript; automatically redirect YouTube to Invidious and so on, while seamlessly keeping all YouTube features; automatically open the chronological tab instead of the recommended tab on most social media; be blatantly illegal to possess; and update itself through Tor so nobody can do anything about it.
I agree. I detest that the world I live in, there's an inordinate amount of human effort that goes into diverting my attention to make me behave against my own best interests by buying something, or even just offered the opportunity to notice something buyable, that in both cases enriches someone else.
If all of that effort was focused on something meaningful, rather than something 'profitable', I wouldn't despise myself or the rest of humanity.
There's a massive difference between making the world a better place versus making the world a better place for a select few. Late stage capitalism has a massively heavy emphasis on the latter.
And now the USA has effectively reverted to monarchism. [1]
do what I do. every time grammarly interrupts my YouTube viewing, I say out loud clearly to myself "fuck off grammarly", and then I use YouTube-download to get the video without the ads.
every time Facebook shows me an advert for solar panels, I close Facebook (I only go for the pictures and stories of cats getting in awkward situations).
I've amassed a ton of books for my old age - some day I'm going to go offline and never go back online.
I actually pay for YouTube to not show me advertising, but I'm also a fan of UBlock Origin and yt-dlp [1], and also physical media, but I do appreciate ebooks a lot.
Imagine you had a team of 10 average (not bad, but also not great) software engineers for a year. Choose between:
* Get them to implement the kubernetes ssd/disk attachment plugin for the Adobe cloud offering.
* Get them to implement the remote access, scheduling and status control of a biochemistry centrifugue.
Both missions are boring, and neither will change much how whe world runs.
Well, I lied. Because of incentives, it is actually choosing between 15 decent engineers for the Adobe cloud or 1-2 cheap & bad engineers for the centrifugue (I have worked in embedded, I know software is an afterthought in that industry).
And now let's make it more personal: would you rather work for Adobe cloud for 135k per year, or for Centrifugues R Us for 85k per year? Would your spouse agree with your decision, especially after your 3 year old decided to grab and throw the TV to the floor?
That makes it sound like "boring" and "important" are opposites, but they aren't.
There may be some very boring database shuffling import/export problems, but if they aren't done by somebody, a bunch of people won't get paychecks and won't make rent. Or the boring task of reviewing code that needs to be right or else someone dies.
Important things pay the most. Or they aren’t important. If they aren’t valuable, they aren’t important. The market determines important. If there is something that someone thinks is important but aren’t willing to spend their own money on it, then it clearly isn’t that important.
The people that maintain the Cobol that runs all the banks make less money than people writing a web page that half works.
I have a family member who works for Wells Fargo and discovered this while talking to him and a programmer friend of his. They work on the systems that move money around between accounts, and I work on a shitty half-thought-out web app. I'm paid like 2x what they are.
This assumes people’s preferences are optimally aligned to their best interests in a micro and macro sense and that, more or less, classical economics is precisely accurate. None of this is actually true.
There are plenty of things that are important that the “market” doesn’t allocate a ton of money towards and tons of stuff that are really not important but the “market” rewards. The market in the end is a collection of decisions by individuals in aggregation, and decisions by humans are rooted more in their psychology than in some uber rational god mind of optimality. It is very possible to shape behavior, decision making, and capital allocation in ways that are demonstrably pessimal. Indeed with the advent of mass consumption of social media and algorithmic manipulation of psychology you can shape market behavior directly in ways that are detrimental to the participants in the market while rewarding the manipulators. This can be even done as a method of warfare, in which you shape psychology, behavior, and market preferences against a societies best interests.
This is why we have non market systems that prioritize objectively important work that’s inefficient by the market’s perspective. This is essentially the outcome of 248 years of economic research after the wealth of nations.
exactly, that's why nurses are treated like shit and football players are paid so much. we truly live in idiocracy. most recent example being the man who can't string a full sentence together getting elected a second time.
I've started calling this stance "free market fundamentalism".
No, "the market" isn't all knowing and infallible. It's wrong very often. And the way it allocates capital is often not optimal in any way.
People like you argue that scamming old people is an important activity because it allows capital to be better employed. I mean, "the market" wouldn't reward the scammer with a living otherwise!
> most decent or ambitious companies in this field are run by exactly one type of person. They are often deeply curious, hard working to the point of near pathology, and will almost always end up pursuing some sort of crazy pie-in-the-sky mission. Like curing aging or making de-novo proteins in a zero-shot manner or trying to usher in entirely new dogmas in biology. In other words, something where immense intellectual output leads to outsized market payoff.
I have a friend who works for Nvidia. I can’t remember the founder of Nvidia’s name, but the above paragraph reminded me of the description my friend gives of him. Frankly, my friend is a fanboy of this guy for the reasons given in the article about biology company founders.
Someone said to me, if you look at all activities that have the potential to make you vast amounts of money, what you'll find is that the people doing them are people who are very motivated by money. It's not that the good guys at stripe selflessly accept devoting their lives making society better even tho it's boring, they're doing it for the money. I don't see how "smart" or "boring" enters here at all.
Biology is just too vast of the Gap (difficulty) for our own exellence/smart people to be incentived to jump.
Every "discovery" is merely reduced to a classification, which can reduce one's accomplishments - when every question's answer just is a name of a new branch of questions.
Biology is life, life is just an arbitrary nested magnitude of complexity.
It's very likely that Stripe initially pitched very cutting-edge, ambitious ideas to VCs. So, comparing seemingly "boring" mature company to new startups may be misleading.
