The Stanford Daily Magazine Vol. III Issue 3 (02.19.19)

The Stanford Daily MAGAZINE

VOLUME III

•

ISSUE 3: TECH EDITION

CS

MARRIAGE PACT p. 4

LIGHTROOM p. 14

•

FEBRUARY 15, 2019

in

Crisis

p. 16

COMPLACENT VALLEY p.= 28 println(“pg 1”);

WEAR YOUR PASSION THE EDITION 1

HAIL STANFORD - The Edition 1 Swiss Made timepiece strikes a balance between the nuanced art of Swiss watchmaking, the rich traditions of Stanford University, and the uncompromising passion of a lifelong Cardinal. Visit hailbrand.com or the Stanford Bookstore. Only 50 pieces made. GO CARDINAL!

HAILBRAND.COM/STANFORD XX println(“pg =

2”);

Contents STAFF

04 MARRIAGE PACT A never before seen look at the data behind the popular campus survey

06 STARTUP CULTURE Is Stanford responsible for startups’ recent public unraveling?

14 LIGHTROOM Nature scenes from our photo team

16 CRISIS IN CS Will the CS Department respond to rapid growing pains?

24 GRANDMA’S NEW IPHONE How tech companies market their products towards senior citizens (or not)

28 COMPLACENT VALLEY Questioning conformity in Silicon Valley’s tech scene

31 CARTOONS

EDITOR-IN-CHIEF Courtney C. Douglas EXECUTIVE EDITOR JH Wagner MAGAZINE EDITOR Claire Wang MANAGING EDITORS Amir Abou-Jaoude, Gillian Brassil, Michael Espinosa, Holden Foreman, Dylan Grosz, Julia Ingram, Miso Kim, Khuyen Le, AnnaSofia Lesiv, Erin Perrine, Olivia Popp, Bobby Pragada, Ashwin Ramaswami, Emily Schmidt, Nik Wesson, Erin Woo LAYOUT Shirley Cai, Hee Jung Choi, Harry Cole, Maya Harris, Yifei He, Maika Jones, Miso Kim, Sarah Kim, Miranda Le, Anna Manafova, Christina Shen, Josh Wagner, Daniel Wu. Cathy Yang BUSINESS MANAGER Regan Pecjak

Staff cartoonist Julia Gong takes a look at tech puns.

AD SALES MANAGER Evan Gonzales

32 CROSSWORD

DIRECTOR OF ALUMNI DEVELOPMENT Arianna Lombard

Puzzle master Grant Coalmer’s latest tech-inspired creation

On the cover: Computer Science classes often face steadily increasing enrollment with a dwindling teaching staff. | CATHY YANG/The Stanford Daily println(“pg = 3”);

Inside the Stanford Marriage Pact

by Kit Ramgopal

W

hat the fuck did we just do?”

Sophia Sterling-Angus ’19 remembered thinking to herself, staring at the numbers on her laptop screen last fall.

13 hours prior, she and Liam McGregor ’20 sent a survey called the “Stanford Marriage Pact” to around 10 Stanford email lists and group chats. Questions poked shamelessly at students’ intimate values, ranging from “How kinky do you like your sex?” to “Are you comfortable with your child being gay?”

The goal was lofty: finding each participant a future spouse. Ultimately, an algorithm for stable marriages would filter through the profiles and find each student their most compatible long-term partner — a “backup plan” in case both people end up single later in life.

Like many entrepreneurial fairy tales, the idea began with a white board — inspired by an economics homework question referencing the Nobel Prize-winning stable marriage algorithm, coupled with observations of Stanford’s dating scene.

“We [the Marriage Pact] have this joking voice where we are like, ‘When you look up in 10 years, there will be no good people left for you.’” McGregor said. “...Students are focused on academics and finding a job, but they’re also in the best place they’ll ever be to find someone to marry. And they may not find someone.”

The best-case scenario would have been to have a hundred participants, Sterling-Angus recalled thinking at the time. After all, “take my survey” pleas constantly clog student email inboxes, earning them a brand of disdain reserved for things like fruit flies and annoying slang. Most go straight to the Trash folder.

Yet, half a day later, in mid-November 2017, Sterling-Angus opened the Stanford Marriage Pact form to find over a thousand responses.

Within five days, they had hit over 4,000 responses — over half the undergraduate

println(“pg =

4”);

population. Sterling-Angus and McGregor found themselves in possession of a highly personal dataset on students’ relationship views, substance use values and political, sexual and religious preferences, all identifiable by name and without any privacy agreement.

The algorithm’s 2017 matches sparked thousands of awkward Facebook messages, hundreds of dates and even a handful of lasting relationships, according to feedback results from last year’s experiment. By 2018, the Marriage Pact had quickly escalated from a mysterious Typeform link to a near universally-recognized term on campus.

This year’s Marriage Pact 2.0 was even bigger and better-researched, with a pool of 4,465 students largely representative of Stanford’s undergraduate demographics.

Data privacy debates now extend from Hewlett-Packard to the Hill — a tech industry tailspin fueled by incidents like Facebook’s Cambridge Analytica scandal and Google’s Gmail data sharing controversy. This year, McGregor and Sterling-Angus also made upgrades to the Marriage Pact’s data policy.

Namely, they created one in the first place.

“The truth is that there is some relatively sensitive data involved in here,” McGregor said.

Policies include a promise not to sell data, conceal individually identifiable data and offer contact information only to your match.

For each participant, the Marriage Pact obtains four types of data: demographics, contact information, values and the relative importance of your values. “[Popular dating app] Tinder does a really good job with pictures and two sentences, which optimizes one-night stands,” SterlingAngus said. “But when you go from five days to five months to five weeks to five decades, we thought we needed something else…. a common set of values. A common approach to life.”

The resultant data pool — obtained and visualized in anonymized form by The Daily’s

investigative team — provides unique insight into the Stanford psyche. For example, men were more likely to view themselves as smarter than most people at Stanford, while women reported themselves as average or below the average. Forty-eight percent of students expect their children to attend Ivy League colleges, while 83 percent of students think abortion should “always be legal.” Demographics analysis showed that the majority of people who identify as homosexual are men, whereas bisexuality is dominated by women.

Despite the Marriage Pact’s implied fictionality, Sterling-Angus and McGregor see algorithmic matching based on this type of data as a future reality.

“It takes such hubris to say, ‘Just by my own searching, I found the best person to marry,’” McGregor said. “...It’s very hard to search through a relevant number of people and judge them on their qualities. This is the chance to officially search thousands of people.”

“How many couples do you know met on Bumble or met on Tinder?” Sterling-Angus added. “I think it’s not a bad thing to increase your optionality and meet people who you otherwise wouldn’t have.... Before, we were really limited to people that you naturally come across — and technology allows you to expand that circle.”

The Marriage Pact feedback form includes success stories of Memorial Church makeouts, relationship sparks and budding crushes.

Stanford alumni and San Francisco residents have even reached out to the Marriage Pact administration email asking for a marriage pact for their respective pools — perhaps one with a less joking tone.

“One marriage,” Sterling-Angus said with a mischievous shrug. “I want one marriage.”

Contact Kit Ramgopal at kramgopa@stanford. edu.

by the numbers...

data-driven demographics 2+ races

White

Asian (East)

Asian (Other)

Other Black

Asian (South)

Independent

Democrat

Female

Spiritual (not religious) Jewish Christian (other) Hindu

Buddhist Muslim Mormon Other

Abortion should always be legal.

Non-Binary

Agnostic Atheist Catholic Protestant

50%

Male

SEXUALITY

Middle Eastern Latinx

POLITICS

Republican

RELIGION

ETHNICITY

Communist Other Libertarian Socialist

Hetero sexual

Homo sexual

Bi sexual

Pan sexual

AGREE

Emotional vulnerability is an imporant part of my friendships.

I’m comfortable with my child being gay.

Both parents should work.

I like to be thought of as spontaneous.

My intellectual curiosity is the most important thing about me.

I expect my children to attend Ivy League-tier colleges.

Social activism is important to me.

It’s okay that my partner does softer drugs.

I like fast food.

It’s important that I make more money than my peers.

It’s important that my kids be raised religious.

Gender roles exist for a good reason.

It’s okay that my partner smokes cigarettes.

DISAGREE

println(“pg = 5”);

The smartest kids

in the room

by Carolyn Chun

A closer look at Silicon Valley’s public unravelling and Stanford’s role in the process

L

ast April, Facebook

Chief Executive Officer Mark Zuckerberg sat, sweating before a Congressional panel. Under scrutiny was how a British political consulting firm had gained access to the private data of more than 50 million Facebook users while Russian operatives leveraged the platform as a tool to interfere in the election of a U.S. president.

In September, healthcare technology corporation Theranos Inc. notified its shareholders that the company would dissolve.

It was the last act in a three-year drama that revealed founder Elizabeth Holmes to be at the center of what prosecutors now describe as an elaborate, multimillion dollar plot to defraud investors, doctors and patients, based on the false claim that her technology could test for hundreds of diseases with a pinprick of blood.

In November, e-cigarette company JUUL decided to pull its fruit-flavored products from distribution. The decision came after pressure from the U.S. Food and Drug Administration for its role in what the agency called an epidemic of youth nicotine addiction, which saw an estimated 75 percent increase in println(“pg =

6”);

e-cigarette use among high schoolers in 2018 (vexed administrators have taken to installing vape detectors in bathrooms).

Such scandals have brought a heightened focus on how enterprises manage both company culture and the broader impact of their products and services. It seems that a more tempered view of the Californian wunderkinder is in order.

For Stanford, the discussion strikes close to home. The first outside-investment in Facebook came from venture capitalist Peter Thiel, who received his B.A. from Stanford in 1989 and his J.D. in 1992. Holmes started the company that would become Theranos in 2003 as a sophomore at Stanford, dropping out later that year on the advice of Channing Robertson: then Vice Provost and Dean of Research in the School of Engineering.

Robertson later joined Theranos’ board. The founders of JUUL, Adam Bowen M.S. ’05 and James Monsees M.F.A. ’06, were graduate students in product design.

The list goes on. Brian Action ’94 cofounded WhatsApp: a cross-platform messaging app that has been recently criticized

for the way its viral message forwarding mechanisms and end-to-end encryption have enabled the propagation of fake news during the 2018 Brazilian election and fomented mob violence in India. Jawed Karim M.S. ’07 co-founded YouTube, which has been in the news for surfacing extremist videos in its recommendations. Former Stanford Ph.D. students Larry Page M.S. ’98 and Sergey Brin M.S. ’95 founded Google, which acquired YouTube in 2006 and is now facing employee walkouts over a proposed Chinese search engine that human rights advocates say would facilitate further government surveillance and the repression of dissident voices.

Stanford has earned a reputation for being at the forefront of innovation. According to current and former Stanford engineering professors Charles Eesley and William Miller’s 2018 book “Impact: Stanford University’s Economic Impact via Innovation and Entrepreneurship,” an estimated 39,000 active companies can be traced back to the University between 1930 and 2011, including names like Hewlett-Packard, Gap, Nike, Netflix and Instagram. If Stanford-linked companies were

to form an independent nation, Eesley and Miller wrote, it would boast the 10th largest economy in the world.

Now, the same resume has left the University with ties to a field in crisis. What follows is an account of Stanford’s relationship with entrepreneurship, as well as an examination of how the University intends to move forward.

After all, Stanford now faces a pressing question: In light of such scandal, how should it respond?

A moral education

crass, profanity-laden jokes about sex, alcohol and sorority members. That was followed in 2018 by accusations from a former Snap Inc. employee that the company had permitted the growth of a sexist and toxic workplace environment.

The long-range vision for Stanford announced by University President Marc Tessier-Lavigne in the spring of 2018 lists ethics as the first item under values. Recent events are now testing how, and to what extent, this value will be enforced in education and in practice.

Stanford was founded in 1885 with high-minded notions of education as the fashioning of bettered individuals and citizens. Yet, headlines in recent years have called into question the extent to which this mission has been realized.

Theranos defrauded investors. JUUL fostered addiction for profit. Google declined to send either CEO Sundar Pichai or Alphabet CEO Larry Page to congressional hearings on Russian electoral meddling Facebook chief executive Mark Zuckerberg, who faced this past fall, a decision ten hours of Congressional hearings on privacy and some saw as skirting difficult Russian electoral interference early last year. conversations about its global impact. Pichai testified before the House Courtesy of Wikimedia Commons for the first time in December.

There have been other ugly incidents as well. In 2014, the undergraduate emails of Snapchat founder and Kappa Sigma fraternity member “Ethics is about how we ought to treat each Evan Spiegel ’18 — who took other as human beings,” said political science a break from Stanford lecturer Brian Coyne Ph.D. ’14, whose work in 2012 to focus on the centers on frameworks of justice. “It definitely app — went viral for their is an everyday consideration, or it ought to be for individuals.”

Insofar as any institution has the capacity to influence the moral development of an individual, Coyne suggested that universities like Stanford have a unique opportunity — and responsibility.

“We inherit an ethical system from our parents and our families and the social milieu we grow up in,” he said. “But as we become adults, especially as we come to universities, we can start to interrogate the ethical beliefs that we have picked up before. And then we can either assent to them in a conscious way or change and revise them, if we choose.”

The university an individual attends can help to determine how that process unfolds, or whether it unfolds at all, Coyne explained. It is a perspective echoed by Geoff Sayre-McCord, who teaches philosophy and lectures on entrepreneurship at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill.

Sayre-McCord explained that the time to foster discussions on ethics is in the early years of college, which he described as a point when people are still making decisions about who they will be as individuals.

“Making clear to people that they’re not able to lead an ethically neutral life, that they’re not in a moral free zone, I think is really important,” he added.

The administration expressed a cautious view of its role, with University spokesperson E.J. Miranda noting that Stanford would hesitate to make public comment on the ethics of actions taken by individuals who are no longer direct institutional affiliates.

“Typically, the University only takes public positions on issues or actions that directly affect Stanford’s mission or operations,” Miranda wrote in an email to The Daily. “In general, the University does not speak against initiatives, businesses or projects.”

Nonetheless, Coyne sees the University as having a distinct ethical burden that it must and does recognize.

“It’s not hyperbolic when we talk about educating the future leaders of the next generation,” he said. “Stanford has a kind of special obligation by virtue of its prestige and power.”

There is also reason to believe that now, more than ever, the University occupies a place of particular importance for those who go on to become entrepreneurs, said Randy Komisar, who has been an entrepreneur and investor in Silicon Valley since the ’80s and has worked at the venture capital firm Kleiner Perkins since 2005. He recalled the early stages of the Valley as being markedly different from today.

“Success came to people later in their lives,” Komisar said. “They had more life experience when they took on the responsibilities of leadership.”

Now, he explained, the rapid growth of a startup often upends that timeline, placing young founders at the helm of companies with tens of millions of dollars of invested capital and the concerns of a much larger enterprise.

Just over a year after its launch from a Harvard dorm room in 2004, Facebook reached a println(“pg = 7”);

The demand for accountability goes to whoever has the power, in my view. And it is an empirical fact that these companies have the power.”

–– Brian Coyne, political scientist whopping 5.5 million users. the Business Association of Stanford “They are so young, with so little expertise,” Entrepreneurial Students, added that ethics is he said of such cases. becoming a growing part of the discussion.

Komisar’s observation does not hold true “On the student level at least, it does tend across the board, with data from Eesley and to permeate the conversations that I have with Miller’s book indicating that, among people,” he said.

Stanford alumni, the average age At the same time, Stanford’s culture is of founding is in the midwhat drove Komisar — who lectured 30s. Still, there are enough at Stanford in the early 2000s — notable cases of dropouts away from the University in and recent graduates in 2008. executive positions for “I was weary of the Komisar to make his pre-professional attitude point. Both Holmes that students at Stanford and Zuckerberg were taking towards were 19 when they entrepreneurship,” founded their he said. “They were respective ventures. beginning to think Spiegel was 22. about the course as Amplifying a means for them to the effect is what create a startup and get Komisar sees as an rich. And that was never age schism in tech the goal.” startups.

“They don’t surround themselves with experienced people of other generations as Elizabeth Holmes (above), CEO of the healthcare technology company Theranos, has they did in the past,” he said Instead, the goal was to teach been accused of fostering a complex net of lies to maintain the appearance of success. of successful entrepreneurs, entrepreneurship as a philosophy, referencing an age bias in Silicon Komisar explained. There is a vast Courtesy of Wikimedia Commons Valley hiring practices as one factor in set of resources at Stanford for those this phenomenon. interested in entrepreneurship, which has He added that, unlike more conventional helped support the success of alumniFaculty business structures, companies like Facebook founded ventures. Of alumni who went on and student sources did not suggest and Google have seen control remain in to found their own enterprise, 40 percent that Stanford students or the school’s the hands of the entrepreneur, rather than took some form of entrepreneurship course at entrepreneurship culture should be of special the board of directors, further pinning the concern — and the leaders of the two major decisions of the company to the priorities of a student entrepreneurship organizations single individual. on campus went so far as to offer positive “Boards of directors are neutralized by their perspectives. inability to effect any change in leadership,” he “As with every community, there are people explained. “Shareholders can hold or sell, but who are there for the right reasons and people not change management.” who are there for the wrong reasons,” said Coyne and Sayre-McCord both said Maurice Chiang ’19, co-president of student that process of ethical development at the entrepreneurship group ASES. But Chiang University level is focused on the kinds of maintained his belief that most students with values that students adopt and carry with which he had engaged were committed to and them into postgraduate ventures, an approach passionate about solving real need. that anchors the conversation to the level of Andrew Blum ’20, co-president of individual morals.

Teaching innovation

println(“pg =

8”);

“We are seeing apologies substitue for accountability in innovation” –– Geoff Sayre-McCord, philosopher Stanford, Eesley and Miller found. With course offerings in small business and entrepreneurship first available in the 1940s, Stanford has since developed into a bastion of entrepreneurship education, maintaining field courses in the subject at all seven of its schools.

Tom Byers, a professor in the department of management science and engineering, has had much to do with that. It was alongside Byers that Komisar lectured when he was at Stanford.

“In the mid-1990s, when Tom Byers came to Stanford, there was no pedagogical framework for teaching entrepreneurship in Silicon Valley — and the Silicon Valley style of entrepreneurship had no framework,” Komisar said. “There were some courses on entrepreneurship being taught at some business schools, but they were largely around family businesses. They weren’t designed around high-aspiration, innovative technology startups.”

Komisar described Byers’ impact as redefining the academic treatment of the field.

“Tom Byers basically created the entire curriculum for teaching entrepreneurship that is now accepted globally,” Komisar said.

Byers acknowledged his role in the development of entrepreneurship education, which he described as part of the larger project of the Stanford Technology Ventures Program (STVP), the engineering school’s entrepreneurship hub where Byers is the faculty director.

“It was nothing very scholarly,” he said of entrepreneurship education in the early days.

“I mean, it was just stories,” he continued, referring to a lack of structure in the pursuit of what made ventures successful. Moreover, he said, courses were limited to business school students.

Now, any student can take a course with STVP. Byers encourages this, rejecting the notion that entrepreneurship fits within the boundaries of a single discipline. Rather than a subset of business, he sees entrepreneurship as a superset consisting of a toolbox of skills, including strategic thinking, creativity and the capacity to make rapid decisions with limited information.

“It can be taught,” Byers continued. “There

is a case to be made that it should be learned by everybody.”

This ethos is shared by the Hasso Plattner Institute of Design, better known as the d.school, which welcomes students of all backgrounds to its coursework on design thinking.

“We are one of the few places on campus where students from all seven schools actually come together to take classes,” said Sarah Stein Greenberg, executive director at the d.school.

Just as Byers believes entrepreneurship extends beyond business, Stein Greenberg sees design thinking as a mindset outside of product design.

“We teach a set of tools and approaches that are about looking at problems in a really creative way and coming up with solutions,” she said, adding that the first characteristic of design thinking is skepticism. “We don’t take the problem statement as given. We really look first at whether we’re solving the right problem.”

The second characteristic is learning through failure. Each time an iteration misses the mark, Stein Greenberg explained, it should educate and refine the next attempt.

“And it’s through this process of iteration, it’s through that cycle that you actually get to something that’s worthwhile,” she continued.

Inherent in such approaches, as both Stein Greenberg and Byers recognized, is disruption and action — a sense of “go-for-it,” as Byers put it.

Komisar agreed: “[Entrepreneurship] is about doing things that don’t work,” he said.

“It is a laboratory for rapid innovation and experimentation.”

But, he warned, that scope has changed the calculus in Silicon Valley.

“The thing is, if that is done at scale, the ramifications of being wrong are gigantic,” Komisar said.

‘Move fast and break things’ Akshay Kothari M.S. ’10, who created the news aggregator Pulse in the d.school incubator class Launchpad as a graduate

student in electrical engineering, has felt the benefits that come with a bias toward action.

When the first version of Pulse was ready, he recalled telling his professors that the app would launch in a few weeks, so as to leave time to test and refine it. His professors told him to reconsider, urging him to go ahead and put it out into the wild.

He did, and the app reached the top of the App Store in the news category within a matter of days.

“If we hadn’t done that, if we had been even two months late, it would have been a different story,” Kothari said, explaining that a flood of similar news apps hit the market shortly after Pulse. In 2013, Pulse was acquired by LinkedIn for $90 million.

Komisar nonetheless tied a version of these same principles to many of the issues faced by startups in recent years.

“We are seeing the results of a hyperdynamic, innovative environment,” he said. “We are seeing apologies substitute for accountability in innovation.”

Komisar’s words are reminiscent of a remark that Mark Zuckerberg made in the early days of Facebook.

“A lot of times, people are too careful,” Zuckerberg said, addressing a lecture hall in a clip from a recent PBS documentary titled “The Facebook Dilemma.” “I think it’s more useful to, like, make things happen and then apologize later than it is to make sure you dot all your i’s now and not get stuff done.”

This message evolved into one of Facebook’s early mottos: “Move fast and break things,” a mantra that came to permeate the approach of Silicon Valley on the whole and reflected the boldness of a set of innovators out to make change.

Now, it has evolved to mean something quite different and more serious. Counted among the things that Silicon Valley startups may have broken are federal securities laws, civil rights laws against workplace discrimination and labor and transport laws.

Stein Greenberg was quick to note that with action must come an active practice of reflection: “I think that it’s about that balance,” she said, explaining that innovators must recognize the appropriate time and place for

println(“pg = 9”);

disruption and the unexpected, as well as the an empirical fact that these companies have potential long-term consequences. the power.”

“That is part and parcel of any kind Coyne referenced the way that of innovation, right, is really being social media now determines the able to think about, ‘What are de facto rules of free speech. the implications of what I’m But there are other ways designing?’” she said. that companies shape It is also part of being an the world in which we effective designer, Stein live: producing jobs, Greenberg continued. affecting economic “Your responsibility growth and is to be thinking determining how about that broader and where we make ecosystem, as well as purchases. Netflix the broader problem co-founder Reed you’re trying to Hastings M.S. ’88, solve — as well as for instance, has whose business or changed not only way of working you the medium, but might be disrupting,” also the manner in she said. “You are which we consume going to miss big pieces television. of insight if you don’t Then there are cases actually test across that like Thiel’s secretive data broader spectrum.” collection and analysis firm She further pointed out that Palantir, which was founded A course at the Graduate School of Business helped inspire DoorDash, a design thinking is, at its core, about in 2004 to meet security needs popular food-delivery service. user satisfaction. No designer should for the global War on Terror and start from the question of whether has since become a fixture of federal someone would pay for their and local governance. First contracted by the product, she said.

Pentagon and the Central Intelligence Agency “We’re trying to understand, to work in Afghanistan and Iraq, Palantir’s at a deeper level, what people services are now used to detect Medicare really value, so that we can design something that actually matters to them,” Stein Greenberg fraud for the U.S. Department of Health and said. Then, she explained, come considerations Human Services, pursue criminal probes for the Federal Bureau of Investigation. and of viability and feasibility. screen airport travelers for the Department However, Komisar’s comment still strikes of Homeland Security. It has also been used at a key aspect of this discussion over action, in Chicago, Los Angeles, New York and New speed and consequence: the recognition that Orleans to help police keep tabs on criminals businesses have the power to exert massive influence over the societies in which they exist. — as well as the network of interactions that those felons have with other Coyne explained that much of political people, with or without criminal records. theory assumes that only government has the A number of factors have contributed to the power to set the terms by which we live our present ethical issues and challenges, including lives. the most basic notion of what a startup is.

“That is, to a greater and greater extent, “There was a presumption that, unlike other no longer an accurate assumption,” he said. aspects of business, technology innovation had “The demand for accountability goes to a sense of amorality to it,” Komisar said. “The whoever has the power, in my view. And it is

“Your responsibility is to be thinking about that broader ecosystem, as well as the broader problem you’re trying to solve — as well as whose business or way of working you might be disrupting” –– Sarah Greenberg, d.school director println(“pg =

10”);

creation itself had value — and you put it out into the world and let people create with it.”

One might look to how Zuckerberg reacted in the wake of the 2016 presidential election, insisting that Facebook was not a media company — an assertion that no longer holds water with the public.

There are also some who suggest there might be certain moral hazards to which entrepreneurs are more prone by nature.

This notion occurred to Sayre-McCord while speaking to friends and acquaintances involved in the entrepreneurship sphere. When he asked them what the particular moral hazard of their profession might be, he found a shocking level of consensus in their answer: lies.

“Entrepreneurs, you know, have a very, very low likelihood of success for any particular venture,” Sayre-McCord said. “But to throw yourself into an entrepreneurial effort, you almost surely have to convince yourself that yours will succeed.”

This process, he said, involves a good bit of self-deception — and it lends itself to further truth-bending.

“As has been explained to me, dealing with professional funders, they start shifting how they speak of things,” he said of entrepreneurs seeking to pitch their ideas.

According to Sayre-McCord, there were two common narratives among the experiences of his acquaintances. First, there were those who, in order to secure the money they needed, first made promises about what their product would do based on thin evidence — if there was any at all, he said. Then, there were those who, upon reaching success, assigned too much of the credit to themselves. He cited Theranos as one example of the former.

“It looks as if what happened is somebody thought they had a great idea and then became convinced that, to protect the idea, they had to keep lying about it,” he said. “The lying just kept going and going.”

Sayre-McCord is the first to say that his grounding is anecdotal at best, but he thinks that the existence of a particular moral liability faced by entrepreneurs is a concept worth engaging with, especially when it comes to

identifying the particular ethical challenges for which they should be prepared.

“The real thing to focus on is when people are far enough along that they realize that they need to get more money or everything will collapse on them,” Sayre-McCord said, explaining the pressure that can push an entrepreneur to deception. “That’s the predictable structural incentive that you don’t face in so many other businesses.”

Institutional efforts Back at Stanford, there are those looking to make change happen at the educational level.

A leader in defining entrepreneurship education, Byers is now at the fore of those working to study its interaction with ethics and develop improved ways to bring this conversation to the classroom. He is in the midst of a research project seeking to pinpoint the relationship between ethics and entrepreneurship. He also hopes to convene a conference in Minnesota in the next year to dialogue with other universities, which he says are excited to see Stanford take the lead.

Meanwhile, Jack Fuchs, a lecturer in management science and engineering, has inaugurated an STVP course this winter on principled entrepreneurial decisions.

Each class will feature speakers from a different company, spanning industries such as investment, software development and healthcare, who will discuss with students a “difficult situation” from that company’s history.

Fuchs seems optimistic about the progress that could be made by the simple act of starting the conversation. In his view, a lack of clarity in ethical principles is often at the root of the issue when it comes to business malpractice. Such a lack of set boundaries puts individuals at risk of losing their way in moral grey areas — of taking those first few, easierto-rationalize steps that can evolve into more serious transgressions, he said.

Stein Greenberg reported that the d.school is exploring how best to incorporate ethics

into its curriculum as well. The school already works to ensure that students are given a space to consider moral hazards by building frequent user feedback, debriefs and reflection into the timeline of course projects.

In the course ME 206A: “Design for Extreme Affordability,” this also involves class activities that ask students to research conflicting perspectives on development work and bring them to class for debate, she explained. She described how past students had used the experience to interrogate the proper role of those with wealth in developing povertycentered solutions.

“Our real goal is to equip our students with the ability to navigate through these difficult ethical questions over time,” Stein Greenberg said. “They are going to face those question in an ongoing way.”

At the GSB, Zenios runs Startup Garage, which, unlike the d.school and STVP, is a program more directly designed to foster and create businesses. Both for-profit and nonprofit pitches are welcome.

Zenios and the rest of the teaching team incorporate a series of activities at the front end of the program to help teams determine their values and how they will guide the venture. He said profit alone is not a motivation that the teaching team finds acceptable.

“We are pushing our students to find their deeper driver for starting a venture,” he explained.

To illustrate his point, he talked about DoorDash, a popular food delivery service that came out of Startup Garage in 2013. One of its founders, Tony Xu M.B.A. ’13, grew up helping out his mother at the Chinese restaurant she ran, which drove his desire to help small businesses. When he spoke with the owner of a macaroon shop in the first few weeks of the course, he discovered potential room for a service that would let small restaurants deliver without needing to maintain their own drivers.

Zenios tells his students that one of the best ways to create what they believe to be positive change is through a business model that works — one that can support itself.

“The real thing to focus on is when people are far enough along that they realize that they need to get more money or everything will collapse on them”

–– Geoff Sayre-McCord, philosopher println(“pg = 11”);

“A financially viable model makes it possible to institute change,” he said. At the same time, he says, it is a mistake to become short-sighted, mistaking a balance sheet for all there is to a company.

Outside of Startup Garage, Zenios does research on the unintended consequences of business decisions and is working to integrate a dedicated discussion of such consequences into the Startup Garage curriculum. He also noted that every GSB student is required to take an ethics course.

“It’s something that we are actively thinking about,” Zenios said of ethics at the business school. “There is no doubt that we can be doing more, and we can integrate things into our curriculum.”

The effort has been mirrored at the administrative level, with Tessier-Lavigne announcing as part of the long-range vision for Stanford an initiative “to infuse our role in the technology revolution with ethics and societal considerations.”

“Our president gets it,” Byers said. “In my conversations with him, he really wants this [situation] to not turn out like tobacco. Duke got started with tobacco money. A hundred years from now, do we want to be known as tobacco, now that we know that tobacco is deadly?”

It is a fraught question, given the marks that already stain Stanford’s past — including the underpaid, dangerous work of Chinese laborers from which Leland Stanford made his fortune and the Native American land on which it was built (the Stanford Indian was the school mascot from 1930 to 1972).

Coyne echoed the optimism of Byers: “Stanford’s leaders are folks who endorse the ethical mission of the University,” he said.

He named Debra Satz, this year’s new dean of Stanford’s School of Humanities and Sciences, who is herself a philosopher. println(“pg =

12”);

“At a personal level, I think the commitment is there,” Coyne said.

That is not to say that Stanford is the best model of ethical entrepreneurship. It is not even to say that the beliefs and practices discussed in this article are being executed in the way some might hope. Both Zenios and Stein Greenberg spoke of ensuring ethical exchanges in the user interactions they ask of their students and emphasized empathy as the foundational first step.

However, one undergraduate who took the course ME 115A: “Introduction to Human Values in Design” — taught by d.school founder David Kelley M.S. ’77 — said that her experience with design thinking as a problemsolving approach felt arrogant and extractive.

She found herself facing one course project, involving the redesign of vendor marketing strategies at a local farmers’ market, with discomfort and guilt.

“You’re going to be going in as a Stanford student — someone with an elite education — to this environment that you know nothing about, after taking one week of an introductory course, and you’re going to be doing something for these people that they couldn’t have thought of,” she said of what she took to be the premise of the project.

“It’s disappointing to hear that even one student walked away with this perception; it seems they missed that the point of the class is about being human centered,” wrote d.school spokesperson Debbe Stern in an email response on behalf of the ME 115A teaching team.

“We draw on content from a range of sources in our field, including a year-long project regarding ethics in design research by a former d.school fellow and resources published by many design firms that confront these issues regularly,” Stern continued.

Further, Byers has already identified at

least one potential pitfall in his own teaching.

Most entrepreneurship courses like to talk about action, but ethics require talking about constraints, he explained. He says he must reconcile with the fact that bringing in ethics can seem to conflict with the atmosphere he wants to build.

“Because it really is fun: You’re creating new stuff,” Byers explained. That energy transfers to the classroom, he said.

“We’re up, we’re drawing, it’s all about expanding the mind, expanding the realm of possibility,” Byers continued.

But he has to remember when to reel it back. Talking about ethics in the context of entrepreneurship is still difficult, he said: “It’s not in the language.”

His point resonates. For all that Stein Greenberg emphasized reflection as a counterbalance to action, the Launchpad class from which Kothari saw Pulse emerge still describes itself online in terms that would not seem out of line with the charismatic, reckless spirit of Zuckerberg when he told his employees that it was okay to “move fast and break things.”

“Over the course of only 10 weeks, Stanford students take an idea for a product or service and start an actual company,” reads the Launchpad class website. “Maybe one of the reasons it works is because we put our emphasis on the entrepreneurs, not the idea.

Or maybe it’s because we focus on doing, not planning, or maybe it’s because we don’t believe in failure, only evolution.”

Stern wrote via email on behalf of Stein Greenberg that the reference to “planning” describes business aspects, which ought to be approached after the initial idea has been iterated enough times with tight feedback loops. Each instance of feedback demands reflection on how to move forward, she wrote.

“No matter the pace at which you work —

and independent of the methods you use to get your work done — personal integrity and acting ethically is essential,” Stern noted.

A murky future Even with Stanford faculty members’ best efforts to address the issue, it remains an uncomfortable truth that ethics are not clearcut, and there are questions that will remain difficult to answer.

Stein Greenberg talked about responsible innovation as considerate of the potential consequences, a notion echoed by others.

But when asked about the extent to which businesses could be held responsible for externalities, as well as how much foresight could be expected of them, no source gave a definite answer.

Take DoorDash, the successful Startup Garage venture with a well-intentioned foundation story and no major scandals. It facilitates the consumption of takeout food, which some studies have suggested leads to less healthful diets: Does it have a responsibility to consider the impacts it is having on American health? Is this consideration mitigated by the fact that the company has partnered with Feeding America to take leftover food from restaurants to the hungry?

Zenios seemed surprised by the health question. He laughed, saying, “I don’t think they’ve looked into that. I think that their perspective was that people were eating out and they were going to make eating out easier.”

There is also research that indicates that, despite Tony Xu’s good-hearted mission, DoorDash and food delivery services like it are actually undercutting the profits of small businesses around the country. This raises the question of if, in Zenios’ value-centric view, DoorDash has attained real success.

“The term ‘success’ is a complicated term,” Zenios said. “It could be a success in one dimension and may have completely failed in a different dimension.”

He also saw the question as part of a larger one of economic constraints, which determine the extent to which companies can manage or anticipate the effects they have.

“Marketplaces are ruthless,” Zenios said.

“Entrepreneurship always creates winners and losers.”

Yet, he continued, “Entrepreneurship means progress.” This is the premise of business, Zenios pointed out — that if a product adds enough value and is financially viable, it will create a net positive effect.

There are other questions. Stein Greenberg, who described a need to think about the end user within a broader system, paused when asked how one might reconcile conflicting priorities between different members of a community.

“It is very situational and this is exactly the kind of thing that we are trying to help our students develop,” she said. “This is not an environment where I, as the instructor, can tell you the right answer because you, as the designer, are doing the work to really understand that ecosystem.”

Meanwhile, when it comes to Stanford, time will tell how far the administration goes to demonstrate its commitment to ethics. If it holds its matriculated students to a certain standard, ought it hold its alumni to the same?

Citing again the founding goal of Leland and Jane Stanford to promote the public welfare, University spokesperson E.J. Miranda wrote, “The University cannot speak to the actions of individuals once they leave the University, but we encourage them to work toward the goals envisioned by the founders.”

Stein Greenberg said that, while they have not addressed JUUL in coursework, she has had students raise questions about the

company to her on a one-on-one basis. Even then, she hesitates to condemn it outright.

“When I have had students ask me about the company or the product, that, for me, has been an opportunity to say, ‘Well, what do you think?’” she said. “And to have a conversation about, ‘What would you do if you designed something that started to have some harmful consequences?’”

Such an approach underscores another limitation, which is that Stanford faculty can do no more than encourage students to scrutinize their own values. They do not control the actions of those they teach. As Komisar described it, the goal is to empower individuals to take an ethical, holistic view — but that is no guarantee that they will.

Business schools have been teaching ethics for a long time, he noted, but those schools still graduated the people who built the 2008 real estate crisis as well as those who started the energy company Enron, which filed for bankruptcy in 2001 after hiding billions of dollars of debt from shareholders and regulators.

All the same, the conversation is alive at Stanford. And there is cautious but real optimism about the possibility for change.

Asked if this is a turning point in how Stanford approaches ethics, Byers’ response was quick and firm: “Well, if we have anything to do about it.”

He says he looks forward to seeing the changes come to industry as well.

“Can’t get much worse than the past couple years,” he said. “I think everyone has woken up.”

This is the moment to act, Byers said: “A crisis is a terrible thing to waste.”

Contact Carolyn Chun at cgchun@stanford.edu.

println(“pg println(“x = 13”);

Lightroom I took inspiration from the river in the middle of the photo to evoke a classic two-sided conflict narrative. The manipulation consists of putting a gradient of red and green on a transparent layer in Photoshop, and then using different blend modes to get the effect I want.

–– Khuyen Le

For this series, I was using inspiration from a magazine ad where a dancing couple had been cut from the scene on the left panel and pasted to a blank white page on the right panel. However, after realizing that my pictures were lacking some of my personality, I doodled on the blank, white space using Photoshop.

This photo was taken by my mother, of me. The photo of the physical collage can serve to remind us what technology cannot always create, like texture and shadows.

–– Malia Mendez println(“pg==14 println(“x 14”);”);

In this photo, I initially made the lighting more dramatic in Lightroom. I then imported the photo into Photoshop, where I liquefied the image to make it as abstract as possible, while keeping the subject (a horse) somewhat recognizable. –– Jules Wyman

For this edit, I started with one of my favorite shots from this past summer (a giraffe and oxpecker bird at sunset) and initially just made some subtle changes to exposure and whites/blacks between different parts of the image in order to emphasize the contrast between the silhouetted figures and the sunset backdrop.

I then used a smattering of artificially created dark dots to introduce a degree of chaos into an otherwise picturesque scene, with the goal of creating a somewhat unsettling final product. All editing was done in Lightroom. –– Jules Wyman

println(“pg = 15”);

CS in Crisis

by Jasmine Liu

Is Stanford doing enough to respond to capacity and inclusion challenges?

by Jasmine Liu

CATHY YANG/The Stanford Daily

println(“pg =

16”);

“S

TANFORD THREATENS LIMITS ON NUMBER OF CS MAJORS,” the sensationalist all-campus email newsletter The Fountain Hopper (better known as The FoHo) alerted readers in fall 2016, during my freshman year. There wasn’t a lot of substantiating evidence beyond the fear mongering title, and the information was later revealed to be false. Nevertheless, a panic ensued in my freshman dorm, although most of my friends were a ways away from even thinking about declaring.

Undergraduate enrollment in the computer science (CS) department at Stanford has quintupled in the past 10 years. As former CS department chair Alex Aiken once put it in a newsletter, expansion “has varied only between ‘rapid growth’ and ‘very rapid growth.’” This trend is paralleled nationwide. Between 2009 and 2015, the Computing Research Association found that CS degrees awarded at Ph.D.granting universities increased by almost 300 percent.

Despite tremendous interest in computer science at universities across the country, degree conferral continues to trail labor demand. Data from the Bureau of Labor Statistics indicates that from 1975 to 2015, employment in computing increased twice as fast as the production of degrees in computing and information science. Even if enrollments hit a plateau at Stanford sometime in the next few years, the longterm continued growth of the department is virtually guaranteed.

At Stanford, the dramatic growth of the undergraduate major has generated tensions within a department that preaches inclusion yet faces formidable strain on its limited resources. Today, the CS department is home to just four percent

of total University faculty and staff but claims 20 percent of all undergraduate majors. An investigation conducted last year by a visiting committee of nonUniversity computer science professors and industry professionals describes the growth of Stanford’s CS department as “unsustainable” — a word repeated three times throughout the report. Moreover, it highlights that CS faculty are leaving at a historically unprecedented rate: Twice as many faculty have left the CS department in the past decade than in the previous 40 years combined.

With little reason to believe that the number of undergraduates declaring CS will slow in the near future, is Stanford doing enough to ensure that its CS education will continue to be first-rate?

‘Pump, not a filter’ At this project’s inception, I was primarily interested in how Stanford’s CS department has achieved diversity within its undergraduates that is by and large unheard of at other universities. In 2015, Reuters reported that CS had become the top major for women at Stanford, and currently, almost 35 percent of declared CS majors at the University are female. In comparison, only 18 percent of bachelor’s degrees awarded in computer science go to women nationwide.

Instructors and faculty within the department readily admit that socioeconomic and racial diversity still needs a great deal of work. But I remained curious about the conditions that made it possible for CS to be more welcoming to women at Stanford than at other institutions. I quickly realized that the best person to direct my line of historical

inquiry at was the person who started it all: Eric Roberts.

Upon graduating from Harvard University in 1980 with a Ph.D. in applied mathematics, Roberts set about his job hunt in an unconventional manner.

Instead of sending applications to schools with open positions, he wrote directly to the presidents of women’s colleges without established CS departments, determined to bring the field to one of these schools.

In 1980, Roberts became the first fulltime CS faculty member and department chair at Wellesley College, a first step in a storied career of increasing diversity in the field through approaching undergraduate education with intentionality. In 1985, Roberts left Wellesley when the department began imposing undergraduate enrollment limitations. He later wrote in a memo that the restrictions made “the relationship between faculty and students adversarial, causing students to become more competitive and, in many cases, angry. Teaching became considerably less enjoyable.”

In 1990, Roberts joined Stanford faculty as the first full-time member responsible for CS undergraduate education.

Today, he is widely recognized as the founding figure of the undergraduate CS curriculum at Stanford. As associate chair and director of undergraduate studies in the CS department, Roberts became the principal architect of the highly popular introductory computer science series that draws thousands of students every year from across all seven schools.

In that role, Roberts authored seven textbooks now used at high schools and universities worldwide, and he designed a programming sequence that represents a paradigm for CS departments globally

today.

At the core of Roberts’ philosophy is a commitment to increasing enrollment numbers through making computer science accessible. Such an approach favors prioritizing the number of women and underrepresented minorities enrolled rather than the percentage. His rationale for establishing a principle of inclusivity rather than selectivity remains as relevant today as it was in the 90s, when Roberts embarked on the task of developing a program from the ground up.

Building numbers indiscriminately inevitably diversifies the pool of potential mentors and peers, increasing the likelihood that members of an underrepresented minority group form a “critical mass” and build a supportive peer community. And given the dire American labor shortage in computing fields, restricting the supply of CS degrees conferred may seem unjustifiable.

To increase recruitment, enrollment and retention, the department has targeted each component of undergraduate education.

While many other departments in the country treat their introductory sequence as a series of “weeder” courses, Stanford CS has taken the attitude that its elementary courses should be “feeders for the major.”

“As a staff, our commitment is to make the bar high and do everything we can to get students over the bar,” said Cynthia Lee, a lecturer for two core CS classes.

To address swelling class sizes and provide mentors, the department installs what it describes as “stepping-stone role models” — undergraduates, graduate students, lecturers and faculty who offer guidance to students at various points in their University careers.

Adjunct classes that provide additional

println(“pg =

18”);

problem-solving practice like CS 107A: “Problem-solving Lab” for CS107 are offered to give students extra help. And bridge programs like the Stanford Summer Engineering Academy introduce computer science and engineering to incoming freshmen to help promote retention in classes and the major.

Building on the ethic of improving accessibility, in 2008, the CS department commenced a redesign of the curriculum to allow students to personalize their education according to their interests. Instead of the former “one size fits all” approach that required students to adhere to a rigid set of courses, an array of tracks was rolled out to allow students to specialize in a diverse set of subfields, including artificial intelligence, biocomputation, graphics and more. Today, students can choose from any of nine tracks, with the additional possibility of individually designing their own track, as opposed to the more restrictive one-track option that existed previously.

Mehran Sahami, the associate chair for education in the CS department, attributed the curriculum revision process to increases in both enrollment and diversity, as well as a rise in the percentage of women in the major.

Sahami said that “there’s actually a pretty strong correlation” between the revamped curriculum and the changes in undergraduate diversity in the department.

The principle of inclusion is ingrained in the ethos of Stanford’s computer science department. Instructors and professors religiously repeat the mantra that each course should be a “pump, not a filter.”

“Every method we’ve seen … of constraining the size of the major will harm diversity,” said Philip Levis, associate professor

with a joint appointment in computer science and electrical engineering. “Given things like job prospects and the financial lucrativeness of computer science, that’s essentially a form of economic oppression.”

It is not merely coincidental that all faculty members are on the same page about inspiring student interest rather than restricting access.

Sahami referenced a CS faculty retreat six to seven years ago, at which participants unanimously voted against a quota for student enrollment in the major.

Since then, Sahami said the department frequently revisits that undivided agreement to double down on its commitment to undergraduate education. Being at Stanford has numbed me to the remarkable nature of Stanford CS’ “big tent” philosophy — at other universities, aggressive weeder courses and even outright rejection from CS programs are common. For comparison, at UC Berkeley, the Electrical Engineering and Computer Sciences (EECS) major is restricted to those who are admitted directly to the program, and students interested in the computer science major must apply and maintain a minimum 3.3 GPA. At Carnegie Mellon, students must either be accepted into the School of Computer Science or transfer in. These schools exercise total control over the size of their undergraduate CS population, with the obvious disadvantage of limiting access and diversity.

I pressed Roberts to explain how Stanford’s CS department has been uniquely able to coalesce around a central organizing principle of accessibility when so many other departments and schools have capitulated to enrollment caps.

He cheekily responded, “I was chairing the department for a long time, and the people I hired had that view!”

The department has stayed true to its commitment to accommodate any student with an interest in the subject, and the size of both undergraduate enrollment and majors is growing. About 95 percent of Stanford undergraduates take some CS course during their time at Stanford; therefore, an overwhelming majority of students graduate with some exposure to the discipline.

Today, CS majors represent approximately 20 percent of the graduating class, and each year, this proportion continues to expand.

Gender diversity within the major has followed suit.

“I think relative to places just like Stanford — the Harvards, the Princetons — Stanford is doing much better,” Roberts says.

Given this context, it’s clear why Alex Aiken, then department chair, and Sahami were so amused by the FoHo’s notion that Stanford would cap its CS program. In a follow-up email to the FoHo, they hypothesized that the rumors were spread as part of a clever tactic

Courtesy of Eric Roberts Emeritus professor Eric Roberts is considered by many to be the founding father of computer science education at Stanford.

intended “to get students planning to major in CS to actually declare before the last quarter of their senior year.”

Anyone who knew a thing at all about Stanford CS would know that, as Aiken and Sahami put in their follow-up message, “there is zero chance the department will move to limit the number of CS majors. As in zilch.”

The department is rightfully proud of its steadfast dedication to and success in serving interested students. But in my research, I also heard concerns that if it proceeded without dramatic changes, the CS department would soon collapse under its own weight.

‘They don’t know what they don’t know’ “What do you think —” She was clearly exasperated. She paused, collected herself and let out a laugh. “What do you think the student to teacher ratio is for computer science?” Monica Lam, who has been a professor in the CS department since 1988, implored me to do a calculation and to let the numbers speak for themselves.

This past fall, the average CS class contained approximately 120 enrolled students. But even this number is generous because it includes smaller introductory seminars and graduate level courses, many of which require the instructor’s consent or an application to join. The student-to-faculty ratio within the department is approximately 12 to one.

Excluding emeritus, courtesy, adjunct and visiting faculty, the ratio is closer to 20 to one.

By contrast, the University advertises a fourto-one ratio school-wide.

What is unusual in CS is that class sizes for higher-level courses do not dwindle in size for upperclassmen who have completed the core.

For example, this past fall, 1,040 students were enrolled on the first day of class for CS 229: “Machine Learning,” a course with a roster of more Teaching Assistants (TAs) than most humanities seminars have students.

Recorded lectures, long lines at office hours and automated grading have become staples of the undergraduate computer science experience. Dixee Kimball ’18, a senior majoring in CS, said that he “mostly [doesn’t] go to lecture” and instead learns from online slides and recorded lectures — a fairly common practice among students, he added.

Office hours are frequently crowded, especially in the days before problem sets are due and prior to major exams.

“I’ve seen people show up at office hours and wait for two hours to get the answer to one question,” said Amy Liu ’17, who majored in CS and was a TA for a core CS class. “That’s kind of crazy to me.”

“It’s clear that they grade assignments in a very scaled fashion,” Kimball said, referencing the widely used online grading platform Gradescope, which allows students to submit assignments online and receive digital feedback from instructors on their work.

He acknowledged that the staff has done a “reasonable job” given the quantity of grading they must do but expressed that “for the sake of learning, it could have been better to have more personalized feedback.”

Beyond the classroom, even the undergraduate advising program — deliberately put in place to foster personal relationships between CS faculty and declared students — has become ineffective given the sheer number of students it must accommodate.

“I don’t actually know the name of my

advisor,” Kimball responded when I asked whether he had ever made use of faculty advising in the department. “Certainly quite a few of my friends either don’t meet with their advisors or have met their advisor [just once],” he added.

From a faculty perspective, lecturer Cynthia Lee echoed Kimball’s insights. “Advising is the one thing where the scaling issue is just much more difficult to tackle,” she said.

Lee indicated that she currently has around 50 advisees and said that it would be impossible for her to serve as “a one-on-one tour guide for life and for the major and career for that many people.”

The uniformly large class sizes in computer science suggest that students may complete the major without ever engaging with instructors and professors in a smaller, more intimate setting — an essential component of the individualized learning experience that Stanford prides itself on. When I talked to Sahami about large class sizes, he expressed the difficulty in balancing the desire for individualized attention with accessibility to the major.

At the beginning of the 2017-18 academic year, enrollment in CS courses surged by an additional 10 percent. The very fact that students enthusiastically pour into CS classes each year despite decreasing individual attention from faculty indicates that the department, at least to some extent, has found innovative ways to scale up.

The section leading program — in which undergraduate instructors are paid to host small seminars for introductory CS classes 106A and 106B — was established by Roberts before the recent upswing in enrollment and has evolved into an important tool for managing swelling class sizes in the introductory series.

Julia Daniel ’17, formerly the head TA of CS 106A and currently a TA for CS 103, identified the culture of students sharing knowledge with peers as a key advantage of how the CS department has responded to large classes. “[The undergraduate section leader model] is super scalable because you’ll generally have a pretty solid proportion of students who want to take on that role, relative to students who want to take the class,” she explained. “That can scale to any particular size you want. That works even in classes with over a thousand students.”

These scaling strategies are inventive and have alleviated resource concerns. But they do not compensate for the lost benefit of directly interacting with experts in the field. As Roberts puts it, “One of the things that you like to do in a university is give students the chance to interact with the people who are … really changing the field.”

When I asked Lam about what she saw as println(“pg = 19”);

tainable’ “It uses the word ‘unsus rybody wants to Eve re. three times in the bably weather this think, ‘Well, we can pro hate is bad storm.’ What universities -do attitude, can a news, so everybody has makes it it t which is fine, except tha point where a ch much harder if things rea ent, because there has to be retrenchm it didn’t work then people realize that collapse of as we had hoped.’ And the s.” iou ser morale is much more - Eric Roberts

VEDI CHAUDHRI/The Stanford Daily

VEDI CHAUDHRI/The Stanford Daily

consequences of the growth in enrollment and large class sizes, she told me, “You should ask the students. I think that sometimes they don’t know what they don’t know.”

She hesitated, conceding that she had just contradicted herself. “There are people who think that, ‘Oh, it’s fine — I can handle these large classes,’” Lam continued, “but they have not seen what it means if the classes are smaller.”

She added, “Especially in computer science, there are a lot of projects … a lot of creativity.

We can help, but not when the sizes are so big.”

Her final assessment? The department “needs drastic changes.”

‘Collapse in morale’ The second time I met with Eric Roberts, he sat down and rummaged around in his backpack for half a minute before fishing out a thick stack of paper. Each department is visited once every 10 years by outside consultants — typically, professors from other schools and experts in the field — who evaluate the state of affairs and circulate a report internally.

“I can’t let you have this,” he warned me.

I imagined that he brought it along to martial physical evidence to lend weight to his words.

“It uses the word ‘unsustainable’ three times in there,” he said, deftly pointing to various lines in the report. “Everybody wants to think, ‘Well, we can probably weather this storm.’ What universities hate is bad news, so everybody has a can-do attitude, which is fine, except that it makes it much harder if things reach a point where there has to be println(“pg =

20”);

retrenchment, because then people realize that” — Roberts mimicked a gasp — “‘It didn’t work as we had hoped.’ And the collapse of morale is much more serious.”

What collapse in morale? I asked.

“It’s within the faculty,” he clarified, before comparing the phenomenon at length with the well-documented occurrence of doctor burnout.

Many CS departments at peer institutions are battling similar problems. While bachelor’s degrees in computer science have quadrupled since 2006 nationwide, the number of tenureline faculty has flatlined. The premium of working in industry poses a persistent threat to the supply of candidates for academic positions. While more than seven percent of undergraduates eventually pursue a Ph.D. degree in every other STEM discipline, only one to two percent of undergraduates who major in computer science pursue a Ph.D. From this vanishingly small slice of students, only about 30 percent accept positions in academia.

Judgment day is just around the corner for the CS department, Roberts warned. While the shortage of faculty is acute for CS departments across the country, Stanford’s retention rate is especially bad. The 2017 Visiting Committee report that Roberts came equipped with found that twice as many CS faculty have left Stanford in the past decade than in the previous 40 years.

There are several reasonable hypotheses for why faculty are leaving that have little to do with soaring enrollments. The affordability crisis in the Valley may be pushing faculty to areas of the country where the cost of living

is less exorbitant. And for those who stay, the lure of industry — the opportunity to do cutting-edge research while depositing paychecks that are double or triple a university salary — is proximate and seductive.

Additionally, according to CS professor Philip Levis, “the School of Engineering actually has some pretty strict rules” about taking leave and maintaining industry ties, making it difficult for faculty to balance one foot in nearby tech companies and the other in teaching.

Finally, Levis explained that the CS department at Stanford is relatively more egalitarian with its pay, with at most a “factor of two difference” in salary between its faculty members. “If you look at a place like UC Berkeley, you can see factors of three or four difference,” he said. While maintaining comparatively even pay may foster a healthy work environment, it also may make Stanford less competitive than peer institutions.

Roberts refused to ascribe a singular cause to why faculty have steadily trickled out of the department in the last 10 years but stressed that the statistic alone should raise red flags about how Stanford is faring in the competition for top-notch faculty. He told me that although he cannot speak for others, overload — “too many students for too few faculty” — was the reason he went into “retirement.” He currently lectures at Reed College in Portland, Oregon, where he teaches an introductory CS course to approximately 50 students.

Lam concurred with Roberts. “We are so overworked,” she said. “We tried everything we could. I think that you will find our department to be extremely reasonable in terms of what we are doing. Everybody is working so hard to try to keep this up.”

John Mitchell, a CS professor and the newly appointed department chair, acknowledged that faculty are overworked but highlighted that most are overjoyed with the flood of student interest.

“Everybody who teaches in computer science really just feels deluged and is working extremely long hours trying to keep up with the student interest,” Mitchell said. “People suffer from lack of sleep, but they feel they’re doing something worthwhile by teaching students.”

Despite this effort from the faculty, Lam believes that students are still underserved and that the only solution is to dramatically increase faculty hiring.

Roberts underlined that Stanford’s CS department fares particularly poorly in the search for tenure candidates. He mentioned that “a lot of Turing Award winners used to be at Stanford but weren’t when they got the Turing Award… A few of those were people who had not gotten tenure at Stanford.”

“There is a sense in which we’re seeing harbingers of a decline,” Roberts said.

However, there are those within the department who do not see eye-to-eye with this assessment. When I asked Levis, who has served on the hiring committee, how the department has endeavored to match increasing student enrollment with new hires, he thwarted the assumption in my question.

“There’s this question of should faculty appointments scale with enrollments?” Levis claimed that from the University’s broader perspective. “If your majors increase four-fold, you don’t get a four-fold increase in faculty.”

Instead, Levis argued that decisions about how many faculty should be hired should instead come from “a deep intellectual and disciplinary standpoint” — an analysis of the ways in which a field of knowledge is evolving from a theoretical and practical vantage point, he said. He labeled the call for increased faculty based primarily upon enrollment numbers a “mythical man-month,” referencing a collection of essays from the nineties that highlighted the paradox that larger teams can sometimes be less effective than small ones in software project management.

Beyond differential faculty perspectives on the issue, national organizations have also taken stances in the debate over whether a method of gradual change is sufficient to address enrollment surges. In 2017, the National Academy of Sciences released a report titled, “Assessing and Responding to the Growth of Computer Science Undergraduate Enrollments” that issued a less equivocal verdict. According to the report, academic institutions should be “proactive” in response to increased CS enrollment.

“Taking incremental actions to get through the next year or semester are unlikely to produce the best outcomes for the institution and have in the past been associated with negative outcomes such as decreased participation of women undergraduates in computing,” the report reads.

In line with these so-called “incremental actions,” Jennifer Widom, the current dean of the School of Engineering, said that “there has been some net growth [in CS faculty hiring] but it is slow,” attributing the sluggish growth to “the extremely high standards of faculty hiring in the CS department.”

“Over the past five years the overall size of the CS faculty has grown to 40 full-timeequivalent (FTE) tenure-line faculty to 48 FTE,” Widom wrote in a follow-up email to The Daily. “Several lecturers have also been hired.”

But this approach is consistent with a philosophy of slow-moving improvement on the status quo, which has done little to mitigate the chronic departmental bloat.

Despite the ostensible disparity in outlook

between professors who side with the status quo and others who decry it as untenable, the report highlights common ground that is so plainly visible it almost feels redundant to point it out: Computing will play an “overwhelmingly important role … in the future of society and the University.”

In our conversations, faculty returned to the motif that they were passionate about teaching students and doing cutting-edge research.

However, as Roberts alluded to, Stanford cannot sit back and assume that it is the only institution capable of providing this type of job satisfaction. The findings of the Visiting Committee report are as unambiguous as they come: Short of serious reorganization and reform, Stanford CS will fall down the ladder of top-ranking CS programs.

But concerns within the department may not alone be reason enough for enacting permanent, structural change — after all, Stanford maintains it is a liberal arts university. If Levis is right to advise against rash decisions on faculty expansion without due consideration of where CS sits in the University and how this position has transformed in the past decade, then this is precisely the conversation that we must now have.

College of Computing?

“I think we need to do something big,” Roberts said.

In October, MIT announced a $1 billion commitment to found the Stephen A. Schwarzman College of Computing, which will open in September 2019, to foster interdisciplinary opportunities and to accommodate escalating enrollments.

Currently, each of MIT’s academic departments belongs to one of five schools.

The College will operate at a distinct administrative level from the schools as an

“institute-wide entity.”

Most notably, the College will add 50 new faculty positions — increasing, by fiat, the size of MIT’s total faculty by five percent — and will initiate the construction of a new building.

MIT’s recent announcement revives an ongoing discussion in Stanford’s department over whether establishing a new administrative structure, like the College of Computing, might be the answer to its growing pains.

There is significant room for improvising the implementation of such a plan at Stanford. The central feature unifying various “College of Computing” plans is that CS would be elevated from the departmental level. But there is considerable latitude in executing this prototype at Stanford: This new administrative structure could entrust leadership of the “College” to a dean, putting CS on equal footing as Engineering, Humanities & Sciences and Medicine; or it could establish a “College” operating at a level separate from both departments and schools, similar to the College of Computing model unveiled at MIT. Most likely, these changes would be accompanied by numerous faculty appointments and the construction of a stateof-the-art building.

Roberts tells me that he has been pushing the department to consider some variation of a “College of Computing” proposal for the past 15 years. He claims that there is “overwhelming support” within the department for founding a “College of Computing,” recalling a straw poll at a faculty retreat around six years ago that showed that two thirds of faculty expressed support for the formation of a school.

Yet Roberts delivers this information with a tone of defeat, resigned to the reality that this kind of transformational change is a long shot. “Because a small group in the leadership is philosophically opposed to it — dead-set against it — it hasn’t happened,” he explains.

Like many computer sciences classes at Stanford, CS 106A: Programming Methodology — arguably the most popular undergraduate course offered at the University — boasts a roster of more Teaching Assistants than some humanities classes have students.

EVAN PENG/The Stanford Daily println(“pg = 21”);

“I think there’s been a failure in the competence of the leadership of the department,” Roberts continues, in reference to faculty retention and strategic planning.

In 2015, Jennifer Widom, the outgoing CS department chair, was succeeded by her husband, CS professor Alex Aiken, when she was promoted to the post of Dean of the School of Engineering. Aiken served as department chair from 2015 to 2018.

“They’re both opposed to [a College of Computing], and that’s enough,” Roberts says.

“I’m 100 percent convinced it’s the right thing to do, and I’m 100 percent convinced that Stanford will never do it.”

When I reached out to Widom for comment, she replied, “MIT’s ‘[College]’ is very different from what was being discussed here within CS but not so different from some [long-range planning] initiatives.”

Although Roberts claims Widom and Aiken both opposed the “College of Computing” idea during the straw poll from several years ago, Widom denied involvement in “any group discussions about a [College] of CS at Stanford.”

“I haven’t been to a CS faculty retreat in many years, and I’ve not been involved in any group discussions about a School of CS at Stanford,” Widom wrote to Roberts in a heated back-and-forth email chain, which included me. “You must be mixing me up with someone else!”

Roberts aptly refuted these claims, stating that although he had never discussed the idea of a Stanford School of CS with Widom individually, Widom has “been part of the discussion at several faculty retreats over the years.”

“It would be wonderful for Stanford if your position has changed on this issue,

println(“pg =

22”);

because Stanford is, unfortunately, standing remarkably still while other universities are zooming ahead,” he continued, adding his belief that MIT’s proposed College of Computing “dwarfs anything at Stanford.”

Aiken did not respond to The Daily’s request for comment on this matter.

“The Schwarzman College of Computing: if you talk to anyone at MIT, they’ll tell you they don’t know what it is yet,” Widom told me when I asked her whether Stanford intended to make any similar moves. “We’re taking the approach where we are going to figure out what our structure is going to be, and then we’ll go ahead and announce. The scale of what we will announce is probably relatively similar to the Schwarzman in the long run.”

But when I followed up to ask if she meant that Stanford intended to follow MIT’s lead, she curtly replied, “No, I didn’t say that.”

In particular, Widom directed me to research Human-Centered Artificial Intelligence (HAI), which was soft-launched this past October by Fei-Fei Li and John Etchemendy. Its announcement brims with optimism about the prospect of convening the finest AI researchers in one place, and its website claims an impressive interdisciplinary army of 66 academics as its “team.”

In an email to The Daily, Li wrote that there would be both “top down” undergraduate involvement in the HAI initiative — classes, research and “intellectual events led by faculty” — as well as “bottom up” student-initiated activities. Etchemendy added that “HAI is very different from other efforts, both in the breadth of its focus (including both technical and humanistic concerns), and in the scale of

its ambitions.”

HAI, which was also given a nod by President Marc Tessier-Lavigne in his address to the Academic Council on the long-range planning process, represents an effort to keep Stanford relevant in a fast-changing field. But the HAI announcement at Stanford makes vague and sweeping statements about “guiding the future of [artificial intelligence]” with no actionable claims, in stark contrast with the bold and straightforward “College of Computing” announcement made at MIT. Few details are publicly available about how much funding has been allocated for this initiative and what kinds of projects will be supported by it. And at least overtly, it does not appear to address the capacity crisis in the department.

The speculative, optimistic take is that Widom’s remarks and the HAI announcement are nebulous, for the time being, in the run-up to the disclosure of more concrete plans. Or they may simply represent attempts to defer on providing a detailed blueprint for the future.

Roberts argued that in particular, Stanford is falling behind in the zero-sum game of faculty hiring. “All these places that are building schools … are going to be extraordinarily attractive to the people who are already at institutions like Stanford,” Roberts said.

He was clearly frustrated that others in the department do not take the threat that institutions like MIT pose to Stanford’s CS department seriously. In describing the attitude of some within the department, he said, “It’s this hubris that won’t quit.”

He imitated an exaggerated version of their posture — “It’s Stanford! Everybody comes to Stanford! Nobody would turn Stanford down!”

“Everybody who teaches in computer science really just feels deluged and is working extremely long hours trying to keep up with the student interest. People suffer from lack of sleep, but they feel they’re doing something worthwhile by teaching students.”

- John Mitchell — of course, despite the fact that faculty are leaving at record rates.

By this point in our conversation, I was convinced that the leadership in Stanford CS had turned a blind eye to the capacity crisis that has gradually reshaped the student experience and that has become painfully acute for faculty. But a new administrative structure should not merely be a half-baked instrument to temporarily address the current resource strain. From a disciplinary point of view, it should reflect a philosophical stance on how knowledge corresponds to the contemporary world.

Levis, for one, offered a more cautionary attitude towards announcing a College of Computing. What is best for one department may not be best for the University at large, he warned.

“I think you want to look at — when we look at ourselves as a University — would it make sense, given where this field sits, for it to be broken into a separate school, sitting at the table of the [executive committee] of the University, with the deans?” Levis said.

Levis highlighted that schools like MIT and Carnegie Mellon University are altogether “different beasts” as historically technologyfocused institutions and that the models they offer therefore may not be appropriate for a place like Stanford, which also emphasizes the liberal arts. In response to whether Stanford should establish a College of Computing, he paused to carefully word his answer and said, “There could be a time when that is a good idea, and that time might not even be that far off, but I don’t think that is something suitable today.”

When I asked Levis what conditions might make a College of Computing the right direction for Stanford to move in, he responded, “If the computer science department were sufficiently larger.”

Earlier in our conversation, Levis said that increases in faculty should be predicated on an evaluation of the relationship of the field of computing with the rest of the University.

If anything, all signs indicate that the time has come for the CS department to seriously reevaluate its position in the University.

Although the capacity crisis may by itself be an unsatisfactory justification for considering the College of Computing model at Stanford, it is also increasingly clear that both skyrocketing student interest and faculty brain drain are symptomatic of broader challenges Stanford faces in shaping the evolving relationship between CS and the rest of the University and industry.

Last year, in the spring issue of this magazine, Opinions writer Anna Sofia-Lesiv ’20 registered her shock at the fact that only two people in CS 181: “Computers, Ethics, and Public Policy,” a class of 150, raised their hands when asked by professor Keith Weinstein, “How many of you think you will write software that will affect people’s safety?”

But such questions are, for all intents and purposes, a shout into the void when posed in a class of 150 (or this winter, what will be a class of almost 300). “Liberal arts education” describes not a subset of academic disciplines but rather a process — an understanding that is missing among those who are smugly content with a model of undergraduate education that does not provide a forum for students to meaningfully consider intent, application and hybridity in their chosen discipline.

Several people I spoke with expressed sympathy with anxiety from administrators and those outside the CS department that establishing a “College” or “School” would further accelerate current enrollment trends, sucking the life out of every other discipline in the University. But such a view subtly

fortifies the ever-heightening wall protecting a center of “liberal arts” intellectualism and thought from encroaching technologism, as if these two cannot be fused in productive ways.

Students have, for years, imposed, joked about and struggled with the “fuzzy-techie” divide.

Now it is the administration’s turn to grapple with how to respond to the growth of the CS department in a way that breaks, traverses and transcends the belabored dichotomy.

Commonly held beliefs among students, faculty and administration alike that CS education is inherently less demanding on individual attention reinforces the loathed opposition between STEM and the liberal arts — that the former consists of rote problemsolving, while the latter asks profound questions of the world. I don’t claim to know what an alternative to the current divide might look like. But universities that are engaged daily in the classification, categorization and structuring of human knowledge have the right tools at their disposal to ignite these conversations.

The historically unprecedented loss of faculty — at a time when the field is gaining import with each passing day — only exacerbates existing pressure on limited resources in the department. It presents two possibilities: It can either trigger needed internal introspection, or reflection can altogether be sidestepped, making long-term strategic planning about the CS department’s coordinates and course increasingly impossible.

When I interviewed John Mitchell, he was just a week shy of stepping into his new role as department chair. He underscored that the department is a “collaborative, consensusbased organization,” as if to advise me that his provisional opinions are not royal decree.

I asked him for his thoughts on MIT’s College of Computing.

He sung its praises. “I think the MIT structure is really very creative,” Mitchell said, “and it’s visionary, it’s forward-looking, and the way they’ve thought about this is a tremendous example for everyone.”

Mitchell lauded MIT for acknowledging that computing is increasingly embedded in all fields. He continued, “What we should do here is acknowledge the same global trends and academic and intellectual trends, and then try to figure out how to respond to that in a way that reflects the nature of Stanford.” He ended his response on the remark that “we would be poor academics if we didn’t ask deep, hard questions about what’s going on in the world.”

Contact Jasmine Liu at jliu98@stanford.edu.

println(“pg = 23”); println(“x = 23”);

Senior Citizens and

Technology_

A hopeless or hopeful future?

Melina Walling/THE STANFORD DAILY The centrality of Apple technologies in the Bay Area makes it more convenient for senior citizens to seek help with devices.

println(“pg==24 println(“x 24”);”);

By Emily Schmidt_

“I

Google!” my 80-year-old grandmother once told my dad over the phone. “I turned on my computer, and it was gone. I don’t know where it went.”

Like many of my older relatives, my Grandma Evelyn was far from a tech guru when she was alive. Her skills ranged from sending e-cards from 123Greetings for every holiday (even the days you didn’t know were actual holidays) to playing Zuma (a tilematching puzzle computer game) for six hours without getting up from her worn-in, oversized leather chair. She owned an ancient e-reader (circa 2006) but couldn’t download a single book on her own. The only things she did download were nasty computer viruses, especially the kind that makes infinite ads pop up when you’re trying to browse the web.

Most of the time, Grandma Evelyn laughed at her technological amateurism. She knew my dad could fix anything she “broke” and find anything she “lost” (including the Google search bar she accidentally switched out for Yahoo). And she wasn’t alone. According to a 2015 study by the Pew Internet Research Center, only 26 percent of internet users 65 years and older claimed to have confidence in utilizing computers, smartphones or other electronic devices to go online. In another study, researchers found that 77 percent of older users need someone else to help them set up a new electronic device.

I know I’ve given my share of tutorials, even though I’m not the most technologically savvy millennial. When my mom received an iPad for Christmas a few years ago, I sat down with her to make sure she knew the following: how to turn it on and off, how to control the volume, how to open and close an app and how to take a photo. It’s all pretty basic, right?

It took her some time to master all the bells lost the

and whistles that come with an Apple product, but she eventually figured out enough to download apps and take selfies all by herself.

I’m a very proud teacher.

If I tried to teach Grandma Evelyn the basics of an iPad or iPhone, I imagine I wouldn’t be very successful. Of course, not every senior citizen has difficulty understanding the latest technological advances. Just Google the Turing Award (the most prestigious prize in the field of computer science), and you’ll see how many men (and how few women) have received it, their ages ranging from 40s to 70s. There are senior citizen-aged people who dedicate their retirement to researching and advancing technology. But I think we can all agree that the majority of senior citizens aren’t coding apps. Instead, they’re commenting in all caps on their grandkids’ updated Facebook profile pictures because they can’t figure out how to turn the caps lock off. Don’t deny it; you’ve seen it and laughed.

When I moved to the Bay Area from Philadelphia a couple years ago, I was shocked by a lot of things — the number of surprisingly good sushi joints, the prevalence of electric cars, the actual casualness of business casual clothing on the West Coast.

I knew I’d be living in the heart of Silicon Valley, the holy birthplace of tech giants like Google, Apple and Facebook. The startup culture didn’t shock me in the least because as a millennial myself, I’m used to the gogetter, doesn’t-take-no-for-an-answer venture capitalist who creates apps as a side hustle. I had gone to high school with kids who already owned three businesses before they had taken the SATs (although my peers definitely paled in comparison to those who went to high school in Silicon Valley).

The aspect that startled me most was the popularity of Apple products among senior

citizens. Should I have been surprised, though?

Apple Park is only a 15-minute drive from Stanford University. There are two Apple stores in Palo Alto within two miles of each other.

At home, I have to travel at least 16 miles or 30 minutes if I need to see an Apple-certified technician in person. It’s pretty out of the way if you don’t live right next to the Quaker Bridge Mall in Lawrence Township, New Jersey, especially for those who hate driving (or more like swerving around potholes) on I-295.

When I’m at school, I can easily bike or take the University bus for free to the Apple store.

Since there are two(!) Apple stores located in the company’s birthplace, I wondered if more senior citizens use the products out of ease, or enjoyment, or some other reason entirely. My friends and I have had our fair share of troubles with Apple devices. When I was visiting my friend in early September, we stopped by both Apple stores multiple times because her laptop screen broke and my phone screen broke on the same day. We were lucky to be so close, as are the incredible number of older folks who own the very products we do.

And so, I decided to hang out inside the Apple store on University Avenue a few weeks ago. I wanted to talk to older people who were interested in buying Apple products or had come to the store with a problem. I was genuinely curious about whether living in Silicon Valley had compelled them to buy into the monopoly that Apple has over the majority of smartphones, tablets and laptops. Although my first smartphone was an iPhone 6S, I was raised on computers with Windows operating systems, so I’ve never owned (and will probably never own) a MacBook. But when I strolled around the Apple store, surveying the chaotic scene of flustered college students and children throwing tantrums, I realized that the few senior citizens in the store were perfectly

println(“pg println(“x = 25”);

calm — almost serene.

Some of them seemed to be waiting for a technician’s assistance, but others were merely browsing the excessive selection of overpriced devices (you can’t argue that a $1,000 phone isn’t ridiculous). None was in conversation with anyone else, so I decided to approach several men and women to get my questions answered. However, not a single person wanted to be interviewed — not until William McHugh, a 75-year-old retired accountant and New York native, sauntered into the store and gave me a friendly smile as I desperately looked around for my next potential interviewee. I watched him check in for an appointment, then he sat down on a nearby bench. Hoping he would be willing to answer even one question, I walked up and gave my spiel. We proceeded to chat for almost half an hour.

McHugh started the conversation with a very clear statement: “I’m not a senior citizen by choice but by society’s expectations. I might not be the most physically fit or have the most open mind. I’m apparently a senior citizen by those qualities. But I’m not a senior citizen by my understanding of technology.”

He had come to the Apple store to get his iPhone XS fixed — the screen started glitching after he dropped it, even though the actual screen hadn’t cracked. Bringing it in for repair was his last resort. He had checked out YouTube videos (which he said “isn’t that modern for an old guy”) and asked his grandchildren to try and figure out the problem. When they couldn’t, he reluctantly booked an appointment and showed up, hoping it wouldn’t be too expensive. He’s retired, after all.

“I moved here with my wife about 10 years ago after I retired,” McHugh said. “She’s from Sunnyvale and missed the area, so we moved back per her request. I guess I didn’t mind not having to shovel snow anymore.

When we got here, I think the first or second iPhone had just come out. I didn’t want any piece of it. I was happy with my flip phone.”

As Apple came out with a greater variety of more advanced products, the craze started

println(“pg==26 println(“x 26”);”);

among the younger generations, including McHugh’s children and grandchildren. They showed him how to take the best “duck face” selfie and record the perfect Vine, but he still wasn’t convinced that paying an absurd amount of money for an iPhone would be worth it. He wasn’t against the technology itself but the price of the technology, and many of his friends were (and still are) of the

“There are many of us who are stuck in the past, and there are many of us looking toward the future.

Please help us prepare.”

— William McHugh

same mindset.

“When you’re retired in an area as expensive as Silicon Valley, you have to be smart about spending your money,” McHugh said. “It’s great there’s a store to take your devices to fix, but very few times do you come out without spending at least several hundred dollars. The products aren’t cheap, and neither are the fixes.”

But the high prices still didn’t completely keep him from investing — as he called it — in the latest Apple releases. He gave into the

pressure out of curiosity and determination to stay young, just as many of his friends have as well.

“When you’re on the East Coast, people don’t expect you to have the latest technology,” he elaborated. “At least, people over the age of 60 don’t. Young people are a whole different story. They’re all about having the newest gadgets. But for those my age, Apple doesn’t have as much influence over your life unless you’re living right in under its nose. Here, people look at you funny if you don’t upgrade or even have a matching iPhone and MacBook.”

After hearing that, I thought back to the time my grandfather wanted to trade his iPhone 4 back in for his old flip phone. While he never went through with it, I can’t imagine anyone would blink an eye in the Philadelphia suburb where he lives. My parents held onto their flip phones until a few years ago and sometimes had a hard time defending the decision not to upgrade to something with a screen wider than a few inches. Society seems to have decided that people over 65 generally don’t want to be and can’t be educated in technology, especially on the East Coast.

The fast-moving, technology-driven culture of Silicon Valley complicates this assumption, and McHugh hopes that this perception will soon disappear.

“Older people weren’t born literate in this new technology like millennials, but that doesn’t mean we can’t or don’t want to learn,” he said. “You just assume we can’t or don’t, and so we never learn. There are many of us who are stuck in the past, and there are many of us looking toward the future. Please help us prepare.”

Contact Emily Schmidt at egs1997@stanford. edu.

GigWorkers

by Michael Cai

“O

KAY, I DON’T THINK I’M going to find parking so you’re going to have to do this one yourself.” Sharon, my partner in crime, drops me in front of Whole Foods with a list and our Postmates debit card and drives off into the night. I sprint through the store to fill the customer’s order — 12 colorful frozen mochi — then slog through a suburban-mom-filled checkout line before meeting Sharon back at the door. We fight rush hour traffic to meet our maker: a Stanford grad student who looks to be in his mid-twenties. The whole ordeal eats up about 40 minutes. The compensation for our efforts? $6.12 and no tip.

For those who don’t know, Postmates is an on-demand food delivery service that allows customers to order everything from one-time takeout meals to weekly groceries directly from their phone or computer. It, and its competitors in the space — UberEats, DoorDash, GrubHub and dozens more — are quickly soaking up market share and turning the tables on the restaurant industry as local diners and corporate chain magnates alike ramp up delivery services to reach as many customers as possible.

Together, these food delivery apps comprise just one arm of the on-demand “gig” economy, a rapidly growing sector of short-term independent contractors that will drive you to work, deliver takeout meals to your doorstep when you come home and walk your dog while you eat. Big names like Uber, Lyft, Airbnb and Etsy dominate the space, which currently employs over onethird of U.S.

workers to some extent — a number that is expected to reach one-half by 2020.

Sharon, Qiqi (our other partner) and I filled 15 Postmates orders over the course of two smoky weeks this November, surveying each of our customers as we went. Our goal was to gauge perceptions of working in the gig economy among real Postmates customers as part of a group project for the course CS 181: Computers, Ethics, and Public Policy. Each customer was asked the questions, “How much money do you think Postmates drivers make?” and “What percentage of drivers do you think use Postmates as their primary source of income?”

According to Indeed.com, a Bay Area Postmates driver should make around $19.96 per hour. Our respondents, on average, believed drivers make less — around $13 per hour, or just above the Bay Area’s $11 minimum wage. However, this is still more than the $8.17 per hour we made after subtracting the cost of gas.

We found that Postmates relies heavily on customer tips to pay its drivers. Of the 15 orders we received, only seven customers tipped. Our average tip per order was just $1.20. Interestingly enough, the average tip from people who responded with a wage under $15 per hour was just $0.49.

We also found that there are a multitude of hidden costs associated with delivery driving.

In addition to gas, insurance and the risk of traffic tickets, Postmates would send us to restaurants after they had closed, to remote locations like Portola Valley, or to restaurants even after the customer had cancelled their order. All these problems, despite being no fault of the driver, would cause us to waste time and lose potential earnings while also leaving customers dissatisfied, resulting in lower pay and no tips.

Meanwhile, the general perception among customers was that driving for Postmates is a part-time gig, with respondents believing

— on average — that only 31.5 percent of Postmates drivers rely on Postmates as their primary source of income. The actual number for gig workers is a much higher 44 percent.

After starting this project, it became immediately clear for us that Postmates is pushing its drivers to work as much as possible. For example, an in-app promotion promised us a bonus if we could fill 45 orders in a week. Assuming each order takes an average of around 45 minutes to complete, it would take 34 hours of driving to obtain the bonus. For reference, according to the IRS, a full-time job has employees working at least 30 hours a week. So, contrary to people’s perceptions or what companies like Postmates may claim, gig workers are being incentivized to work their on-demand jobs as if it were their full-time job. This disconnect between perception and reality allows companies to get away with refusing to provide benefits like health insurance to their workers because it’s only “part-time work,” despite it not being treated as such.

Overall, our project has shown that the customers who use Postmates — in other words, the people with the most power to convince Postmates and other companies to change their behavior — are ignorant of the hardships faced by on-demand workers. In our experience, we learned that Postmates drivers are often penalized for factors out of their control and struggle from costs unseen to an average customer.

On-demand services such as Postmates are expected to employ half of the U.S. workforce by 2020. Our hope is that, by sharing our experience and our survey results, we can encourage others to more strongly advocate for fair treatment for those millions of workers. If the gig economy is truly the “future of work,” then there is a lot more work to be done.

Contact Michael Cai at mcai88@stanford.edu.

println(“pg = 27”);

T

Stanford education is supposed to look like, I remember thinking. It was only my third week at the university when my entire freshman dorm had marched off to the annual Fall Career Fair held in White Plaza. I wandered through its rows aimlessly, unsure of what I, without a single grade on my transcript, was meant to offer the nicely dressed recruiters, who were eagerly waiting for me behind their welldecorated booths. The thought of my summer internship or first job had barely crossed my mind; for me, school had just barely begun.

Not so for my cohort, many of whom had dutifully printed out their resumés, changed into formal attire, shined shoes and spent their day waiting in hour-long lines for a few moments’ chance to wax pre-professional with a potential employer.

Somehow, in the ensuing comparisons of perks and presents that my freshman friends had scavenged off of WikiHow or Surveymonkey, it felt as if a bucket of cold water had been poured over whatever idealistic vision I had of Stanford being a sunny paradise of mini-geniuses conspiring to change the world. It was no doubt the same day that many of those who’d bothered to shine their shoes began seriously considering the consequences of pouring a his is not what a

println(“pg =

28”);

MIRANDA LE/The Stanford Daily

bucket of cold water over their prior ambitions in favor of the more practical and comfortable career pursuits offered by representatives of Insert-Tech-Company-Name-Here.

Much more so than New Student Orientation, which encourages communitybuilding conversations about identity and background, the Fall Career Fair offers a head-first plunge into the corporate realities that often dominate the Stanford college experience. It quickly becomes apparent that Stanford is as much a bastion of academic thought as it is a pipeline, designed to channel a wide array of talented students into a few select and established career paths.

Just as East Coast schools feed students into the pipeline of management consulting, Stanford has cultivated a similarly attractive and stable path for its students in the field of software engineering. With the right summer internships and the right degree upon graduation, nearly one out of every five students at Stanford awaits a six-figure starting salary, with a small yet chic rental apartment next to their Disneyland-themed workplace where they will spend their 9-to-5 getting the shading just right on Instagram’s photo filters.

Though this rather quaint end to a sunny four years at Camp Stanford may seem like a fairytale ending to some, it is actually at the heart of an increasingly corrosive trend — the rise of complacency at Stanford.

Despite all the

ambition, demonstrated talent and vision it requires to be admitted to a school like ours, once beyond its gates, most students will find themselves dreaming of a time when they will finally be employed at the Silicon Valley company of their choice, drinking beer and swinging in a hammock while working — hardly the best use of the talent demanded of them upon entry.

The lukewarm career ambitions of students at Stanford merely reflect the slowing ambitions of companies in the Bay Area, many of whom have reached a decisive plateau in their growth and level of innovation. Those entering Stanford now are not entering a campus surrounded by companies making breakthrough discoveries or revolutionizing our lives with the use of technology. By and large, the disruption is in the rearview mirror, as local titans like Google, Facebook and Apple concentrate their efforts merely on maintaining their hold over respective markets.

For all the surplus funds these Big Three hold, little in the way of profound innovation is being achieved. Of Google’s many off-shoot enterprises, those like Google Music have surrendered their place to more successful endeavors like Spotify. Though Facebook announced intentions of servicing the world’s Internet needs through its project Internet. org, the company has increasingly scaled down these ambitions, and suffered rumors that the entire operation has halted. Lastly, we might look to Apple, whose long reign as Silicon Valley’s most valuable company has seemingly prevented it from continuing to create groundbreaking products, instead, relegating itself to releasing remakes of past successes.

The squandering of abilities in this lessthan-admirable fashion is, in many ways, an analogy for the predicament of the average Stanford student today. It is increasingly these qualities of stability and comfort that our proximity to Silicon Valley bestows on us, rather than a desire to innovate or change the world.

A quick look at Stanford’s Computer Forum betrays a similar trend. The organization was established in the 1960s to help industry specialists stay abreast of academic research through an

annual meeting, and perhaps even incorporate findings into their own products, all for the modest cost of a yearly membership fee. Today, however, Computer Forum members are more interested in the department’s students than they are its academic findings. The research insights are a side benefit to the main opportunity the Forum now offers — a chance to present a booth at the Computer Science department’s Career Fair.

On one hand, Stanford’s tight connection to software firms in Silicon Valley is a great accomplishment.

As a result, most Stanford students graduate with an offer of employment, particularly those finishing with a degree in computer science. For students from low-income backgrounds, this is a blessing; it can provide socioeconomic mobility for the student’s entire family. It’s no joke that the healthcare coverage, 401(k) packages and parental leave policies at the Big Three go above and beyond the offerings at most other employers.

Indeed, for the individual grad who struggles with a staggering college debt and Bay Area living costs, accepting any job that pays well and has decent benefits is certainly a step up from the alternative. It is, on the other hand, when these individually beneficial choices aggregate, that something crucial is damaged in the intellectual foundation of this university.

Presently, there is at Stanford a noticeably growing flirtation with materialism. It takes no more than a quick stroll through the Engineering Quad to pick out the corporate tech workers, with their Google backpacks and Facebook-embroidered Patagonia sweaters, twin Apple AirPods tucked smartly into their ears. Without employers that espouse clear principles and offer a concrete direction in the impact they want to have, students fall

to revering the mere status of the companies themselves — along with the corporate perks like free business travel to exotic locales, on-site laundry and free gourmet cafeterias — that they offer. With destructive consequences for intellectualism, young professionals prioritize wealth for its own sake.

Second, and perhaps as pertains uniquely to Silicon Valley, there is a decline in the perceived free speech students exercise.

Students prioritize their summer internship placements more heavily than they do their campus involvement. Most will hesitate before putting their name on something that can be read as critical of well-known technology companies, for fear that this might decrease their chances at working there. However, it is not just critical takes that are silenced — the level of engagement with campus publications has suffered due to the risks that an intellectually adventurous piece might have on employability.

Lastly, the easy availability of safe jobs at large established technology companies, has the adverse effect of creating a brain drain on other occupations that could benefit from an influx of young talent. How many future neurosurgeons, constitutional lawyers and journalists will we lose to software engineering positions that focus on targeted advertising at Google or Facebook?

This is not to say that all jobs at large tech corporations are bad. There are plenty of opportunities at companies like Alphabet’s X, which is attempting to better the world with endeavors like Project Loon, aiming to bring remote communities online through an aerial wireless network of high-altitude balloons.

Software engineers are pushing the bounds of the possible at companies like SpaceX and Tesla, companies attempting to redefine humanity’s sense of distance and energy usage,

respectively.

It is entirely within the power of Stanford students to be more selective and critical when it comes to crafting their career ambitions.

After all, it’s one thing to hold off on ambitions while you get your foot in the door, but quite another to stay there making Kim Kardashian face filters for your entire working career.

The excitement over immediate employment and material benefits masks the incipient conformism that tempts students to abandon the struggle to achieve something difficult and great, and instead opt for a path of least resistance, leading to a lucrative career that offers little in the way of innovation or impact.

It is an impossible ask to expect all students to change the world, and this is certainly not the complaint presented here. Rather, at the present time, the rewards of conformism are so great, that there is little incentive for bright students to ask for more.

It is a near certainty that software engineers and computer scientists will be the individuals taking humanity’s most important steps forward, but something tells me this type of work will not be done from the comfort of a hammock, beer in hand. Silicon Valley has built itself a bed of complacency, and Stanford students are chief among those lying in it. It’s time to harken back to the culture of innovation that characterized the early days in the Valley, when today’s major tech giants were mere clusters of basement and dorm-room engineers with a singular choice to make for their companies: innovate, or die.

Contact Anna-Sofia Lesiv at alesiv @stanford.edu.

COMPLACENT VALLEY

by Anna-Sofia Lesiv println(“pg = 29”);

Once Apun a Time: Techie Edition Contact Julia Gong at jxgong ‘at’ stanford.edu

println(“pg =

30”);

println(“pg = 31”);

Crossword

by Grant Coalmer

6 8

10

Need help?

Solutions online at stanforddaily.com 7

9

1

2

3 4

11

12

5

Clues Across:

Down:

1. Virtual imitation (10) 2. Posh way to make fries, not withered (7) 3. Feel amazement (6) 4. New member or supporter (7) 5. There’s nothing new in such books (7) 6. Makes chips (7) 7. Dazzling in exotic color patterns (11)

8. Close union (8) 9. Anagram of irately (7) 10. Application of electrical science (10) 11. Keeps away medical practitioners (5) 12. Precious, alternative to smoking (5)

println(“pg =

32”);