I'm a programmer who tends to agree. When I see jobs at companies who say crap like "we're revolutionizing the taco space by making it social!", I roll my eyes.

Yes, what the world needs now is more data streams about individuals' taco-eating habits, produced by people who are distracted from their tacos by their smartphones.

We're all someone's "social taco space".

I don't know what you do exactly, but you work in programming and I'm sure there are people out there who would dismiss what you do as being pointless and say:

"Yes, what the world needs right now, as every day people are starving, cancer is killing thousands and children are forced to fight in wars, what we need is more virtual ones and zeros that make the upper middle class richer".

If there are people out there who like taking pictures of tacos, and that it brings them joy and delight in any way, then how is it more stupid than anything else in the entertainment business?

Being condescending is easy, but not very constructive.

+1. My comment was really about my personal feeling of what is useful and interesting.

I would dismiss the "social tacos" job, but would happily write code to control toy robots. :)

Here is an example pulled from today's 'Who is Hiring', which makes fun of this exact issue then proceeds to spout something that sounds exactly the same to me:

  > Subscription based social hyperlocal mobile gamified
  > dating discovery engine with loyalty coupons. For the 
  > enterprise.
  > 
  > Just kidding.
  >
  > We're a stealthy team of product generalists, ML 
  > engineers, and even a neuroscientist filling a hole in 
  > the universe by building software that enriches the 
  > human experience.

http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=4727245

I love talking to my 76 year old grandma about tech - i once explained my semiconductors energy harvesting phd topic to her and she sort of got it. She does the crossword, she uses the phone book but she also plays scrabble online a few times a week with people all over the world (apparently the Chinese are very good in her opinion). It's a nice balance for her to have a appreciation of the current technology and the older stuff (although she thinks facebook is evil and twitter pointless)

Good article; learn from our pre-internet-age elders while we can; google spoiled us.

(I had to hide the left edge of the browser window, the animated sliding social buttons were very distracting as I scrolled. Perhaps I'm getting elderly.)

It was the fact that they jump that bothered me. If they were just fixed in place it wouldn't have been so distracting.

The ticker here really is that most of us can't speak layman terms. If we practice our pitch and our grandparents roll their eyes, it only means that most probably wouldn't understand our product or service we are trying to sell. They would appreciate it when we are able to tell them what to appreciate, in pure English form minus all the technical jargon.