It’s more nuanced than that. Americans on the west coast can express dissent; the means, however, are indirect and easily missed by managers who lack cross cultural competence. There’s also less motivation for a worker at a large successful American firm to express dissent in the first place. Employees at smaller firms speak up earlier.
I think the problem lies with the American polity, values, and business environment, and not industry leadership per se. Smart new grads generally go where the money is, and for the last 20 years that has meant either finance or big data firms that may have no interest in real technical progress.
> Smart new grads generally go where the money is, and for the last 20 years that has meant either finance or big data firms
Software TC has outpaced high finance for almost 15 years now, especially for the kinds of candidates who had the option between the two.
I went to one of those universities where CS grads had the option between being a Quant at Citadel, an APM at Google, or an SWE working on an ML research team. Most CS students chose 2 and 3 because the hours worked were shorter than 1 and the hourly wage and TC was largely comparable.
> may have no interest in real technical progress.
Hard to make technical progress as (eg.) a cybersecurity company when most CS programs do not teach OS development beyond a cursory introduction to systems program, and in a lot of cases don't introduce computer architecture beyond basic MIPS.
The talent pipeline for a lot of subdisciplines of CS and CE has been shot domestically for the past 10-15 years when curricula were increasingly watered down.
> I went to one of those universities where CS grads had the option between being a Quant at Citadel, an APM at Google, or an SWE working on an ML research team
I find it interesting that you are trying to find fault in my position while describing the same phenomenon in even greater detail than I could have myself. All of the roles you list are broadly aligned with the finance or adtech industries, which simply do not employ people with the skills you desire in sufficient numbers. The talent you seek is following the money, just like your peers did.
The talent pipeline was shut down because adtech sucked most of the oxygen out of the room, and consolidation by hyperscalers finished off what was left. Big data firms simply don’t need the same headcounts to maintain their infrastructure - it is arguably the whole point of their business.
I have spent over a decade asking myself when the systemic cost of this would be realized. Better now than in another 10 years - all of the cohort that predates this will have aged out of the workforce by then.
> The talent pipeline was shut down because adtech sucked most of the oxygen out of the room, and consolidation by hyperscalers finished off what was left
I've been in this space as an IC, a Manager, and a VC and trust me when I say the education standards have been watered down in CS for 10 years now, that I no longer have a pipeline to train detection engineers, exploit developers, eBPF developers, and others out of college in the US.
Just take a look at the curriculum changes for the CSE major (course 6-3) at MIT in the 2025 [0] versus 2017-22 [1] versus pre-2017 [2] - there is a steady decrease in the amount of EE/CE content and an increased amount in math. Nothing wrong with increasing the math content, but reducing the ECE content in a CSE major is bad given how tightly coupled software is with hardware. We are now at a point where an entire generation of CSE majors in America do not know what a series or parallel circuit is.
And this trend has been happening at every program in the US over the past 10 years.
The United States Constitution is a relic that predates national political parties as a concept. Political parties effectively neutralize many of its structural checks, including federalism.
The framers recognized this failure in their own lifetimes and held to gentleman’s agreements to limit the power of parties while openly anticipating that the system they created would be replaced. The erosion of their informal understanding has taken far longer than expected, but it has certainly occurred. Today, the political consensus that could allow for the creation of a viable replacement no longer exists. History shows whatever follows from this is often very unpleasant.
Proprietary software has not been a business moat for decades. The moats are their complements: hardware, networks and protocols (including humans), data and formats.
The party with control of the federal legislature and executive has vigorously opposed shifting energy demand away from fossil fuels for decades. The opposition has spent that time doing the opposite. The economic viability of added generation capacity is utterly irrelevant here.
Rural voters are not most of the country unless you believe geographic area is more important than people. There are better ways to address the concerns of rural interests than enshrining gerrymandering along state lines.
Today, open source drivers are written mainly for new entrants that are trying to undercut dominant players or incumbents in stable market niches that have largely ceased developing new products. If the current trends continue, it will take some time for any surviving components of Intel’s business to settle into the latter position.
I use open-source OpenBSD is because the entire source tree is small enough for me to understand and manipulate. I guess I expect that it is all human-generated. This unwieldy, proprietary chunk makes me want to ditch graphics support in order to keep my source tree significantly smaller.
The size of the MMIO addressable register space on many modern VLSI devices is shocking the first time you see it. However, OS device drivers often do not need to access more than a small subset of the registers. In addition, the register layout for functional units within a larger device is often identical after accounting for unremarkable changes to unit base addresses or iterative, generational addition of new registers.
The problem is the language and toolchain for OS device drivers cannot consume the manifests RTL designers use to enumerate registers, and and RTL designers rarely share the manifests and toolchains they use to generate source files for the OS developers. Instead, it is common to generate and share sources for the entire MMIO space of every supported chip revision.
To eliminate the source bloat this produces, OS driver developers would need to work with RTL design teams to release IP sanitized register manifests and tooling that can generate saner outputs for their own consumption. This is fairly specialized work and there is not a strong business incentive for most large firms to support it.
What about just committing the symbols that are actually referenced in the code? I be most almost all of those registers are never mentioned elsewhere and and could be culled with an appropriate dead-code elimination step (per release).
I feel then people would then complain that they're shipping "incomplete" or "obfuscated" code.
These headers are likely generated from their internal RTL, and somewhat part of the documentation to allow other OSS users to understand the interface. Even if most aren't used by most client drivers, and "just" some internal detail of their firmware/GPU command processing, or even optional and completely unused in current drivers, they may be useful to the community if the host can see and modify them.
Sure, you could argue that should be "split out" from the headers and documented separately, but at this point I'm generally happy for the hardware companies to give the community as much as possible and let them decide what's relevant.
I’m not aware of any widely available tools that can identify unreferenced C preprocessor macros and newer language constructs that are amenable to analysis are still fairly new.
Removing unreferenced definitions from open source patches would also underscore the fact that driver code is already largely inaccessible to contributors that don’t have access to hardware specifications. The few that persist without it probably appreciate that the full listings are still published somewhere.
The few academics that actually tried to characterize incel reprobates found astonishing rates of autism. This observation was broadly dismissed because their study designs (necessarily) relied on self reporting and any proposed solutions split along various ideological lines. I am not surprised to hear a broader population may be reporting similar problems 5 years after a global pandemic cancelled socially normative adolescent experiences and economic opportunities for an entire cohort.
The structural problems that contributed to the current situation are not improving. I am approaching the conclusion that they will not be addressed until the position of one or more broad socioeconomic brackets becomes entirely intolerable.
>and any proposed solutions split along various ideological lines
To massively oversimplify for the sake of brevity, the actual solution is create an economic and social environment that's conducive to the greatest number of people being able and encouraged to engage socially and in-person, instead of the endless scrolling on Instagram or having their social activity consist almost entirely of talking over Discord that became mandated during COVID. That shouldn't be controversial unless you presuppose that those who are struggling are all maladjusted incels who deserve what they got, and not generally normal people in a soulsucking environment. It's why I find comments like the one I initially responded to so gross. The reality of this situation is so obvious and so dangerous that I have to assume that those participating in the mudslinging are writing off an entire demographic for the sake of not having to back down on participating in a moralizing political trend that is losing steam.
Sadly, presupposing that everyone who struggles socially somehow deserves it has been common for all of recorded history. People who struggle for extended periods axiomatically cease to be considered “normal” at some point.
It is better to understand than let frustration give way to despair.
