alt Hacker NewsThe man is hailed as a brilliant nerd in our circles. I didn't realize he's a great public speaker. He really read the room.
The "McKenzie"-style lady and Schmidt from Google (who really seemed to resent the pushback and chided graduates), can go to hell. I'm happy that someone is telling the young people who are likely to suffer because of this tech that they matter. I can't imagine how much angst much exist after taking on debt to get an education and then this is the job market.
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I saw him give a graduation speech over twenty years ago, and to be honest, he was not a great public speaker then--he rambled and lost the plot. But twenty years is a long time, so he may be amazing now! I love the quote.
I also saw video of some school president being booed so badly that he never actually gave the speech, while some other admin had to come hold his hand and yell at the tuition paying students.
Ah, here it is. It was CalArts: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=C0vTVWyY47s
It's not that hard to "read the room" when you're a humanist, and not a sociopathic tech CEO... you just speak your mind, and you realize that your fellow humans are onboard with you
Would you prefer the harsh unpopular truth of Erich Schmidt, or a sweet (unintentional)lie of Wozniak?
Because a lot of resentment people have later in life for career choices and failures in their adulthood are based on advice from their youth given from out of touch councilors and boomers who told them them sweet lies like "you can be anything you want to be if you just work hard and apply yourselves, the world is your oyster, etc", which turned out to be BS once their rubber hits the brutal road of the present day competitive jobs market, and the way the government backed system rewards asset ownership over labor, meaning a wrong choice here makes the difference between a homeowner or not.
The housing and tech jobs market today isn't the one Woz had in the 1970s in the bay area. There's a big chance his way of thinking that got him to be the cofounder and CTO of Apple back then would get him chewed out and spit out in the jobs market of today, just like how famous FOSS devs of tools that Google use internally couldn't even get past the resume screen at Google to get an interview. Same how I love my parents and they love me, but their out of touch career and life advice did more harm than good to me, even if that's not what they intended. Just like Woz, they're not malicious, but the world is much harsher today and moves faster than what older people who had it easier in their day can comprehend, so you have to take their advice with a generous portion of salt.
Ultimately just like councilors and boomers, it costs Woz nothing to BS young people with speeches filled with idealistic hopes and dreams that sound good and get cheers, since his set for life financially, only doing computing today as a hobby for fun, but he's not gonna be the one sending resumes looking for jobs based on his own advice, dealing with 7 stage interviews, and then wondering why he's getting rejections and how he's gonna afford rent.
As a Embedded programmer and HW tinkerer, I hate Schmidt and I like Woz, as people I mean, but I'd rather base my important life choices that affect my ability to get a job and pay rent on harsh truths from successful business sharks that I hate, rather than nice sounding but broken fallacies from people I respect. I'm old enough to have lived through this once, and if I were to have the chance to go back and try again, I definitely would pick the other side this time simply based on the fact that the people who did pick the ugly pragmatic side rather than the idealistic side, pulled out ahead, and they always will because that's what the world rewards.
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Where's a link to the actual speech? There's no link in the article. Surely you saw the speech to comment how strong of a public speaker he is, and it wasn't based off this one line right?
I'm sorry but that one-liner is reddit level cringe. I want to see the actual speech and more of what he said rather than one line.
A bit off topic, but about commencement speeches...
Marvin Minsky spoke at my graduation. It was around the time when it seemed like genetic therapies might solve all kinds of problems, and there was a big debate, moral objections, etc.
Most of the talk was a rambling rant against religion holding us back from scientific improvements to life. It did not go over in the mostly christian crowd. I loved it.