So, if your teenager turns out to be a tech savant who builds an app that ranks in the top ten on iTunes, are you going to let him drop out of school to become an entrepreneur?
About fifteen years ago, when my eldest was just starting Kindergarten, I sat with my friend the political operative and made some predictions about education in the U.S. We figured by the time my son was college age, we’d be in a crisis — namely that college would be so expensive that even the well-to-do would be hard pressed to pay for it, that the market would not support student loan repayments, and that young people would begin to recognize how many of the most successful and interesting people in America were college dropouts. Most of this has come to pass, and is personified rather neatly in the kid who at least thinks he’s on the road to success with the next great app.
This NY Times article by Matt Richtel profiles kids between the ages of about 12 and 17 who have already worked in one way or another in the technology industry, usually in the area of app development. Despite the fact that the field is crowded — there are over one million apps in the iTunes store — app-building is enticing to the young, tech-savvy entrepreneur. The programming has been made easier thanks to a variety of open-source and pre-fab assets; the app space is cool and fun; and a truly successful app really can make a ton of money. If a kid has the skills and a decent idea, ordinary school can no more compete for his attention than it can for a kid who’s a sports prodigy or a child TV star. Add to this the fact that primary education is in a state of disorder and higher education can no longer promise the employability it once did, and of course teenagers are heading to SXSW Interactive to schmooze with their kindred spirits and just maybe meet the VC who will make their dreams come true.
The second Times article, written by computer scientist Yiren Lu offers a view both wide and deep of a social, cultural, and even practical role of age in Silicon Valley. One point I found particularly interesting is a general divide whereby older engineers tend to be the ones working in more established companies on some very important technologies you’ve never heard of (i.e. faster, better servers) while younger engineers are found in start-ups working on the latest app. That may seem obvious; we would expect the younger crowd to be less risk-averse and to gravitate toward the “rockstar” part of the business, but Lu points out that the app bubble isn’t necessarily producing great and meaningful technology. “Why do these smart, quantitatively trained engineers, who could help cure cancer or fix healthcare.gov, want to work for a sexting app?” Lu asks.
Reading these articles together, it’s not hard to think immediately of analogous stories of young athletes, lured away from an education toward fame and wealth only to have that immediate success undermined by some monkey wrench in the works. This narrative usually involves a cathartic moment when the protagonist says, “There I was at 24 without an education and certainly not enough money to live on the rest of my life.” And it’s hard to know whether or not the app bubble will spill out similar stories when it bursts. I think it is fair to say, though, that floating in that bubble has some of the same potential drawbacks as other tempting careers that produce a tiny number of stars and a large number of hopefuls and dropouts. When focus becomes narrow, all-consuming, and all about money, one can easily imagine a young person with mad coding skills and little life experience developing something utterly hip and utterly useless at the same time. It’s interesting that in Lu’s article, he mentions the draw to work on a sexting app by way of example and further down in the piece he makes this observation: “In a place with one of the best gender-ratios in the country for single women, female friends I talk to complain that most of the men are, in fact, not available; they are all busy working on their start-ups, or data-crunching themselves. They have prioritized self-improvement and careers over relationships.”
Lu doesn’t explicitly paint this contradictory image of a loner building a relationship or hook-up app, but he seems generally to believe there is some relevance to what that image implies. In fact, it reminds me of the last scene in The Social Network in which Mark Zuckerberg, left alone, sends a friend request to his ex-girlfriend and then refreshes the screen several times seeking her acceptance. Accurate or not, it’s a good piece of dramatic writing by Aaron Sorkin in that he shows us a man who cannot connect with anyone but who has built something revolutionary that connects everyone. Odds are, of course, many of these kids jumping into the app shoot will discover — as even Zuckerberg I believe is still discovering — that one needs to learn and experience many things in life in order to build technologies that actually serve people.
