One of the sad things that happened while I was away on the cruise ship was the Google Heretic fading from the news. His spirit lives on, however, in the September/October 2017 issue of MIT Technology Review, our alumni magazine. The cover story is “35 innovators under 35 who are shaping the future of technology” with the additional tag of “Meet Tech’s Rising Stars.” (Certainly it would be a painful waste of time to read about anyone older than 35, unless perhaps the topic were technology for nursing homes.)
Depicted on the cover as the “first among equals” of the 35 is “Software engineer Tracy Chou,” whose LinkedIn page reveals that she no longer does technical work, having left her coding job at Pinterest to join Ellen Pao in “Project Include.” Page 43 of the issue explains that this is “an organization designed to help CEOs implement diversity and inclusion strategies at their companies.”
Chou is being celebrated by the editors of Technology Review for gathering some data on the gender IDs of people who work in various Silicon Valley enterprises (but in a world where gender is fluid, how can we rely on data more than one day old?). In other words, her specific technical achievement is kind of similar to the first-week-of-September work of a high school student in AP Statistics.
[You might ask… What are the most interesting-sounding technical projects described in this issue? My personal theory is that better solar cells and batteries are the most critical items, so I pick the following out of the 35:
- “Michael Saliba a researcher at the Swiss Federal Institute of Technology in Lausanne, set out to investigate a new type of solar cell based on a family of materials known as perovskites” (efficiency now up to 21 percent)
- Gene Berdichevsky, a battery nerd from Tesla who has co-founded a battery startup
- “[Lorenz] Meier, now a postdoc at the Swiss Federal Institute of Technology in Zurich, built his own system instead: PX4, an open-source autopilot for autonomous drone control.” (nowhere near the potential impact of solar/batteries, but interesting to me!)
]
Anyway, I thought it was interesting that the U.S. has reached the point that the most notable people in technology are no longer technologists.
Hopefully it is just Technology Review reached the point of irreversable irrelevancy. Hard to imagine that these 35 are the cream of crop and none of their engineers work for Boeing, GM, Honday, Toyota, Monsanto, Boston start-ups, Silicon Valley start-ups, etc… How many solar panles Swiss export? Not in my Lowes or Home Depot. Great that Russians started with nano-tech, but why work on old Li batteries?
Were Google, Facebook people etc.. ever in MIT TR inovators? Or whoever developed hotbot, started social media, etc? Other promenet technologists? Not sure, just asking. I browsed TR twenty years back and do not recall anyone in TR back than making headlines today.
Maybe everyone takes this excellent course https://ocw.mit.edu/courses/materials-science-and-engineering/3-091sc-introduction-to-solid-state-chemistry-fall-2010/ and figures battery storage is almost a solved problem. Seriously, I listened to the entire course on iTunes U and loved it. It make me both wish I had and glad I didn’t go to MIT. (The learning! The competition!)
You are showing your teacher background instead of reality in modern US corporations. No one who works for any of the Big Corps you mention can talk about the stuff they are working on. Those ideas are secret and proprietary to the company. So no one publishes anything. Sorry but that is reality.
So things that makes it to MIT-TR are old or some splinter work that has no commercial aspects for now.
Technology describes everything nowadays, even as it becomes less inclusive of old timers. Soon, nursing homes will be only applicable to people under 35.
Well, arguably the future of “technology” is squabbling about how to split the take. So maybe the editors of TR are right in putting one of the hungry eaters on the cover.
btw – speaking of the Google Heretic, James Damore did an interview with Joe Rogan.
It’s a bit long, but interesting nonetheless – good to listen to while on a long car ride:
I believe it is only a matter of time before the world realizes that American engineers are mediocre (especially newer ones) and that immigrants and H1Bs are the only ones keeping engineering alive in the US. Once that happens, you will probably see further outsourcing and relocation of engineering and design centers out of the United States. Why pay more for worse engineers?
I am an American engineer and compared to my peers who were educated outside the US, I do feel like I lack a lot of engineering skills that they have.
Whatever technical work that Chou did at Pinterest was of no interest to the Technology Review (or anyone else) to begin with. What was she doing, writing code for tagging photos? So having her leave Pinterest to be a full time “activist” is no great loss to the technical world.
What is really shameful is that the Review chose her as one of the 35 to begin with for her cutting edge work in “bringing tech’s dismal diversity numbers out into the open”. Emtech is supposed to give attendees the “opportunity to discover future trends and to understand the technologies that will drive the new global economy.” Chou’s work has ZERO to do with that. The only direction that Chou’s work will drive the American economy is into the ground, as “diversity” replaces merit as the criterion for hiring.
@Anon , from talking to people who work everyday with H1Bs … they are not the best and brightest anymore, either.