Trendy Tech Article Round-up

Half of my cognitive load on any given day is spent fighting the urge to read EVERY SINGLE ARTICLE on the internet. Fortunately, some make it through my productivity filter, and I allow myself to read them. Lately I've been using the very cool application Pocket to save things I want to read later.Several pieces grabbed my attention this week. Each touched on the start-up culture in which I work, but I didn't feel like the target audience - they all hinted direction at a reader on the outside of the tech world: Rolling Stone's big interview with Bill Gates, the NY Times Magazine's 'Silicon Valley's Youth Problem', and two from the Wall Street Journal - 'Success Outside the Dress Code' and 'Have Liberal Arts Degree, Will Code.'Mr. Gates' most interesting statements revealed his thoughts on morality, religion, and government, but he also answered questions about the current state of things - massive acquisitions of zero-revenue companies, and the possibility of living in a constant state of surveillance.The Times article was engrossing, chronicling the division between youth-driven startup culture and the legacy of elder-generation technologists (like Zuckerburg / Gates.) Is it just coincidence that Gates gave an interview to the youth-focused Rolling Stone at the same time as the Times publishes a manifesto on the generational disconnect?The two WSJ articles also share the 'young tech' theme  - 'Success Outside the Dress Code' investigates the results of a study on how dressing casually in formal settings can influence opinion (a practice, common among young software developers, which I am happy to rant about) - and the other, 'Have Liberal Arts Degree, Will Code' about how young graduates of all departments are abandoning the academic disciplines they studied in favor of higher-paying software industry positions (as an English major working with a Ruby on Rails development team, this one really hit home)So what catalyzed this deluge of similarly focused articles? 'Big Media' writes about technology often, but something about the tone of this writing seems different - Bill Gates waxing poetic on billion dollar acquisitions and world-saving to the pot-smoking readership of Rolling Stone, the NY Times writer (a young Silicon Valley alumn) broadcasting her concern over whether she should work for a hot young startup like Uber or a crusty old-guard firm like Cisco, and the Wall Street Journal exploring the incongruities of tech culture - how its citizens dress eccentrically and give up their educational idealism in favor of cold, hard cash.Of the articles, Yirin Lu's writing in the Times magazine stands out the most. Her personal anecdotes as an intern in Silicon Valley bind well to the concrete examples of age division she describes. She rejects the presumption that older companies are home to "subpar, less technically proficient" employees - she cites the number of patents owned by Cisco as evidence to the contrary. Yet, as the WSJ article describes, tech companies are trying to grab as many young engineers as they can - some going as far as offering signing bonuses to dissuade potential hires from finishing college. If only Mr. Gates had fielded a related question in his interview, he surely could have added a valuable argument to the debate.The Wall Street Journal pieces are brief, neither explores their territory with the critical and sharp eye that Lu focuses on her topic. But each shares the provocative attitude that a certain kind of delirium resides in Silicon Valley's money soaked culture. In Gates's interview, he states: "When you have a lot of money, it allows you to go down a lot of dead ends."It's hard to pin down exactly what statement these articles are all trying to make, if any. What I'm most curious about is how deeply these discussions will resonate with their audience, or if they are only this week's flavor of capricious media interests. Perhaps the journalists' unstated intent in their recent scrutinization of the modern technocracy is to map those "dead ends" out before too many people (without Mr. Gates' resources) get stuck moving toward them.