alt Hacker NewsWould 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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I agree Woz is a sweet lie how everyone is unique and a snowflake. But regarding "you can be anything you want to be if you just work hard and apply yourselves, the world is your oyster, etc", I think the problem is the work hard part.
Plenty of people have the wrong dreams, like being an influencer, but how many actually work hard. Like spend 60 hours a week analyzing youtube videos to find the perfect thumbnail or spend time learning every aspect of production from design, lighting, pacing and everything in between. Probably not a lot. And chances are if you do spend the time (on even a vapid dream like being an influencer), you'd do pretty well and learn a very valuable set of skills.
My experience is the bar is pretty low. It's hard enough to find someone that's competent in their field of expertise and is easy to work with. A lot of people are just missing the basics. They don't put in the work or are willing to take instruction.
The graduation speech is a spiritual ceremony.
It is meant to be a loftier take of the world around you. It is prescriptive: A call to action to make the world a different place than it is today, armed with your discipline and knowledge.
In lieu of this, Eric Schmidt walked on stage and gave an advertisement.
Truth is the wrong word for a future outcome. But…
Weren’t Schmidt’s comments on AI the harsh “truth” from the perspective of someone who directly benefits from the wealth extraction capabilities of AI?
It’s not the only possible truth. And definitely not the one I’m rooting for personally. That’s what you are hearing from the audience of graduates who are probably quite fearful of their future and also prefer another possible truth.
As much as it costs Woz nothing to be AI sceptic, Erich Schmidt has to loose much if AI investments don't deliver.
https://www.cnbc.com/2025/01/21/eric-schmidts-family-office-...
I can't upvote this enough. As has been attributed to the Roman stoic Seneca: “An enemy is a bad witness to your merits, but a good one to your defects.”
Even if Schmidt was telling the truth, and Woz was lying, there is a time and a place for everything, and Graduation speeches are a time for celebrating the graduates, not telling them their lives will suck.
Even if it is true.
The job of a speaker at an event is to meet the goals of the event, in the spirit of the event. Schmidt didn't do that.
> how famous FOSS devs of tools that Google use internally couldn't even get past the resume screen at Google to get an interview
As a former Googler, Homebrew was not ever officially supported at Google, or even particularly recommended, particularly because you were not allowed to store source code on your laptop anyway. Homebrew was definitely not used in any production-critical workflow. It's more accurate to say that some Googlers used Homebrew (I myself used Macports and never encountered any additional friction). Homebrew at that time was also unsuited to anything like Google's scale, so it's no surprise the author didn't get any brownie points for it.
Would you prefer the harsh unpopular truth of Erich Schmidt, or a sweet (unintentional)lie of Wozniak?
Not really a lie (unless you think the students are not intelligent?); regardless, usually you don't get "harsh truths" at these ceremonial, epideictic events. Though I guess funerals in the Schmidt family must be a lot of fun. "We begin with the airing of grievances. Then let's bury this piece of shit"
Eric Schmidt has no clearer a crystal ball than Woz has; to say one is telling the truth while the other is lying is not particularly objective of you.
How can you be sure Eric Schmidt is telling “the truth” and Wozniak is lying?
What’s your rationale and on the basis for such a claim?
> ... unpopular truth...
It is only a "truth" if we allow the oligarchs to make it a truth. This is capitalism run amuck. Late stage capitalism if you will.
The serious question that keeps getting kicked aside, is when the majority have no jobs (or low wage jobs at best) and can't afford your freaking "tokens" and trinkets, what then? But nobody cares because that isn't what's happening this quarter.
TBH this is also how I feel. There is no way to put the AI genie back in the bottle. There will be sweeping changes in society because of it. Fighting against it is seems like a fools errand imo.
You should step out of SV bubble for a while, check how rest of humanity fares compared to our ultra comfy extremely well paid jobs and maybe be a bit more humble, not expecting whole world to roll exactly as per your expectations, whatever they are.
To me, with my rather rich life experience, his words are generally true. There is some ceiling for each of us but its insanely higher than we ever achieve to reach. I've tested mine couple of times, and happy with the results.
And of course, if given society doesn't work for you, move to a better place. High quality of life can be achieved without massive effort if one is smart about it and a bit disciplined.
Harsh Old Geezer Take:
- You either ignored your history education, or (more likely) you are yet another victim of the systematic gutting of history education over the past half-ish century. (Which our society's "rich get richer" 0.01% are mostly responsible for, generally in the names of "replace with job skills" and serve-them-better ideologies.) Test: How many of the following huge changes do you think back-in-the-day young people were warned well in advance of, by the older folks - Crash of '29, Great Depression, WWII, Nuclear Cold War, Civil Rights Era Upheavals, Arab Oil Embargo, Inflation, ... ?
- The "you can be anything you want..." line is obviously for (1) emotional encouragement and (2) younger children. Once you know (say) that the US has >300M people, but only 50 state governors - it's kinda obvious that it can't literally be true for even the children of the 0.01%. But if you're a well-intended parent/teacher/councilor without any special knowledge of the future, the "work hard and apply yourself" is still good general advice. Statistically, there have been very few situations where being an idle layabout turned out better, long-term.
- At least in people who care about children, there is a very real cognitive bias toward keeping kids happy. Yes, that means working to making the world look better (to the kids) than what it actually seems to be. And telling them certain things about Santa Claus and such. Whether this bias is genetic, culturally transmitted, or both - natural selection seems to favor it.
- Over the long term, societies vary greatly in how equitably their wealth is distributed...but large, externally-secure societies have a very strong bias toward the rich getting richer, and everyone else getting poorer. Basically that's because the most sociopathic and greedy folks keep doing whatever it takes to move up and "satisfy" their longings, vs. decent folks aren't motivated enough to keep fighting back hard. Though as things get worse and worse for the 99%, it gets tougher to keep the poor from rising up and overthrowing in their masters. Historically, the #1 strategy of the 0.01%, to keep themselves on top and the oppressed masses in their place, has been https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Divide_and_conquer. Which, sadly, still seems to be doing a "great" job today...
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>Would you prefer the harsh unpopular truth of Erich Schmidt, or a sweet lie of Wozniak?
What Erich Schmidt is doing is not about describing hard reality. He is trying to make a particular version of the future come true by painting it as inevitable. It's literally a propaganda technique.