The New Homeless: Aspiring Web Developer Ends Up on San Francisco's Streets
dailyfinance.com
dailyfinance.com
By ascribing success to meritocracy, you also by definition ascribe failure to lack of merit or application. This is platently false. The failure here is to not recognise that merit isn't the only reason for being employed, unempolyed and underemployed. [0]
[0] "A kinder, gentler philosophy of success": http://www.ted.com/talks/alain_de_botton_a_kinder_gentler_ph...
After a decade of working as a chef, he was looking forward to finding a job as a Web developer.
Calling him a web developer is a bit of a stretch. He initiated a career change in the middle of the recession (albeit caused by the recession as well).
It's incredibly strange that you view not twittering, spending time on stackoverflow, or blogging as not doing anything.
By that standard, absolutely all of the best people I've worked with in the past decade are useless, and some of the worst people I've worked with pass your test with flying colors.
I'm not generalizing to the idea that bloggers and stackoverflow users are all useless. I'm taking the far more sane position that blogging, twittering and stockoverflowing are uncorrelated to work ethic and talent.
I really feel for him and his family, but it's not like this indicates a problem for web devs looking for work in SF, so I'm not really sure it's relevant to HN.
Firstly, it sounds like he went to WSU, not UW, which around here certainly is not a well-reputed university. So his degree doesn't earn him any brownie points at any employers.
Secondly, there are a lot of web dev (but we're talking backend code also, not just frontend dev) in the Seattle area, and we are hiring like mad. That being said, the big names around here source from all over the world, not to mention all over the USA - if you do not have a prestigious degree, and/or years of experience and a portfolio that blows people away, you will go nowhere real fast.
At the risk of being presumptuous, but having seen this particular story too many times, it sounds like he had a lot of illusions about what it would take to succeed as a web dev, and expected his education to carry him through his job search, where the reality was that experience trumps almost everything else in this field.
I imagine moving to SF made all of the above worse, not better.
I was unable to tell from the story what the individual's actual skill levels were in this field - usually where a portfolio comes in handy.
Any one of those four would be problematic. Put all four together and I'm not sure where the story is. Actually _finding_ a job with all four strikes against you would make for quite a story, actually.
I empathize with the guy though - that has to be an amazingly tough slog, coming to a new city, unable to shelter his family, and then having a family loan fall through at the last moment. The only good news is that it looks like he's found a place to live.
In general though, I don't think we can use it as an anecdote to accurately reflect the opportunities available for the hacker community in the valley. Though there may be some meta story about the importance of creating your own job.
I can't help but wonder if his background works against him in some ways. I've been in some pretty harsh meetings when we look at someone's background and if they seem a little strange in any way we don't even consider them.
Considering the hard time my company has hiring in Boston and I'd imagine the same is true in San Francisco (with no real information) I'm surprised no one has taken a chance on him yet. Wouldn't a lot of companies at least consider someone with a CS degree fresh out of school? Seems like someone worth talking to at least maybe.
Anyway, it's interesting to know that you can become homeless without being crazy. But I don't think you can draw many other conclusions from this article--e.g., about the state of the economy, or about the nature of homelessness.
I find it quite difficult to believe that a chef with 10 years of experience could not find a job in Seattle. This beggars belief.
In short, don't tempt economic fate when you have a wife and kid and live in the USA - you should not count on ANY social support in this country.
Or a job in a kitchen here in SF. We have more restaurants per capita than any other city in the world bar Paris. Even if it was just prep or even dish washing - it would have been some $.
It also seems like he didn't have any network here in SF, or try to build one. So many free tech events going on every night that you would think he would attend them to get a network going.
I genuinely feel sorry for this dude but he certainly made a lot of mistakes that don't indicate good judgment (the kind of "non-tech" smarts you look for in a good dev, as it happens)
This also made me think about different family cultures. In my immediate as well as extended family, you are almost EXPECTED to help a family member in this position. The downside to it is you have leecher families that don't work. The upside is I have to go back several generations on my family tree to find a family that is homeless and struggling.
Having grown up in the US(I was born in India) I struggle every now and then about this idea of distributed wealth. It often means fewer vacations even if you are making a killing because you always have someone in your extended family who isn't as well off and needs your help. Longterm though there is no doubt I prefer this shared wealth model. If this guy was in our family he would not be homeless. I know this because at any given time we have a family who is in his position. The larger family helps and in most cases they rebound again and no longer need help.
In my immediate family, we all agreed a while ago that any individual venture by my brothers will be equally owned by all three of us. My uncles have a similar agreement.