Skip to main content

C100, Facebook, and the Valley: Bittersweet.

I had a great opportunity to participate with thec100.org over the past two days as they ran their fourth "48 hours in the Valley" program.

We had a great showing of Canadian Facebook employees on a panel this morning, and covered topics from how to best engage with Facebook, to the culture of both Facebook and the Valley.

One question from the audience was "what would it take for you to come back to Canada?"  And the answer was uniformly "I won't." The reasons had nothing to do with Canada (someone mentioned that they would not go LA or anywhere else either), but had everything to do with the unique appeal, energy, and community in the Valley for anyone in tech. 

The bittersweet part of this was: I agree.  I would love to head back to Canada - it is home.  But, I won't.  The advantages of being here in the Valley (much more obvious to me now that I am at Mozilla) are just too strong.  Sigh. 

Comments

Popular posts from this blog

The Fourth R.

Reading, wRiting, aRithmetic, and algoRithms.  My wife and I were just brainstorming about this: how coding should be the next "basic" skill.  Of course, someone was ahead of us and posted this .  It is awesome to see Mozilla Hackasaurus referenced in this article.  It is a small world. In the early days of the printing press, scholars wrote the books; the press was simply used for production (see this article ).  As time went on, "average" people became familiar with the medium, and used it for their own messages.  We are at just that point with the Web.  Software Engineers write the code, and the Web distributes it.   Software Engineers are the algoRithm scholars of today.  They won't be for long.  Soon algoRithms will be taught starting in elementary school, along with the other three R's.

Timed math tests

You have 3.2 seconds to figure out the problem below. Alan knows 90% of the concepts behind the math test, and can do those 90% very quickly.  He always gets 90% on timed math tests. Bob knows 100% of the concepts, but is a slow worker.  In the timed math test, he gets 75%, but, if given an extra 10 minutes, would get 100%. Alan graduates with an A; Bob with a C. You are building a bridge. Who would you hire? Seems like everyone from Gates to Zuckerberg has problems with how education is carried out today.  I wish I had some of their clout and could help to change the system.