Its hard not to feel angry at people like this. "Rich Kids" really? These "Kids" spent years developing their engineering skills to get to the point where they are now. Are engineers paid a lot? Of course. But we're certainly not in the same category as those who inherit wealth. Most engineers that I know come from incredibly humble backgrounds.
Some people make excuses that he's only rallying against the stereotypical brogrammer, but I don't think that's true. He's really against anyone being in his neighborhood he didn't personally approve of. He's the same as the neighborhood watch keeping the 'undesirables' out of the cul-de-sac.
an engineer confronts him in a Q&A session about his bias towards engineers. John just blows up. He accuses techies of being quiet &boring, while at the same time accusing them of being the people who are bashing trans people. He's very inconsistent and is just good at being loud.
Oh, and he's also a transplant from NYC, so if we're supposed to buy into his transplant-hate, we should hate him too.
This guy is nuts. Tech is the single most friendly industry for trans people; there's a reason why working in tech is a transfeminine stereotype.
I love going dancing in Capitol Hill (Swing, Salsa, Ballroom) but I don't find the neighborhood as welcoming and I was told it would be. University District seems like the place to go if you're young.
For every buyer, there is a seller and if he doesn't want the neighborhood to change, he should be speaking with the sellers rather than the buyers.
The mechanics terraformed capitol hill, the current community colonized it, and now the next wave is buying it.
No one here is dictating culture - they are asserting their preference to a community that was built over decades over another that is superseding it, and which they find distasteful.
The only thing constant is change.
=(
If the marginalized had other tools to fight for themselves, I might very well agree with you that it's unfair. As-is, I'm pretty okay with the notion that the rules of the road change when you have all of the money and all of the power and saying not-nice things about you because you are economically destroying them is simply one's tragic burden to bear.
The HN guidelines don't have an exemption for being right. On the contrary, it's when you're right and the other person is wrong that they apply most.
If he was, would that make him "one of them"? Making good money suddenly bars you from being a valued member of the community?
> only to find it in the process of being colonized by moneyed interests and neighborhood tourists
Can you explain what you mean by this?
No, it's not OK "when we do it."
That and the construction of cheaply made housing that rents for well above what the neighborhood has ever paid. It's the same story in many other places, of course.
I think John's a treasure, and I love his posters. They express very succinctly what many of us here feel - though there are less every year of course. Not much we can do about it, but a parting "fuck you" seems pretty appropriate to me.
http://www.capitolhillseattle.com/2014/11/the-woo-girl/
This is kind of childish, but still made me laugh: https://instagram.com/p/1OKvvFwzOi/?taken-by=aaronbrethorst
NSFW, assuming your workplace is opposed to drawings of male genitalia: http://slog.thestranger.com/slog/archives/2014/04/10/legenda...
Whole Foods is shit - it's literally just a CostCo with fancier packaging that charges more - and that movie theater sounds like pretentious pap. This all sounds like overpriced crap even though I'm the target demographic.
Are you sure there's a magical market force whereby tech workers volunteer to be surrounded by overpriced crap?
It says "New to the city? Work in tech? You're a plague and locals FUCKING HATE YOU. LEAVE."
* Parents who pushed you to focus on your schoolwork.
* Parents who owned a computer, or bought a computer specifically for their kids' education.
* Parents who lived in a house with consistent water, electricity and internet service.
* Parents who made sure you got glasses if you needed them, so you could see the board in class.
* Parents who understood the importance of a college education, and who helped you apply to colleges (real colleges, not for-profit scam schools), took you on college visits, filled out financial aid paperwork, contributed to your tuition.
* A relatively high IQ and/or an analytic mindset.
I'm sure you've worked hard, but don't discount the advantages you were born with, and don't fall victim to the Just World Fallacy. This planet is full of people who worked twice as hard as you and got nowhere.
bool is_other_person_is_humble()
{
return do_they_make_less_money_than_me();
}Spent a decade educating yourself and endless nights practicing your craft? Its all "privillege" and "luck", now give me some of that money.
Did you misread when the person said specifically "I'm sure you've worked hard"?
Person is probably not saying "hey nothing you did was on you" but is more likely wanting to say "hey consider the greater context of your existence".
With a sense of compassion and a diminished sense of smug self-satisfaction, I might hope.
On the other hand, we have my wife. She is smarter than me, but went 7 different schools as her family moved from place to place before she finally dropped out, worked retail as she essentially raised one of her sisters as she scraped by. In a more stable environment, she'd have almost certainly ended up in law or business school.
She now really tries to provide some sort of stability, and encourage focusing on schoolwork with her nieces and nephews, who are in danger of repeating the history of poverty.
Seeing that makes me realize how very lucky I was to be born into the family I was, and everything I took for granted really isn't just what "normal" is.
Tech is a very middle class profession. Much more middle class than most high paying professions like Medicine, Law, Executives, Consultants, Banking, etc.
And most people who would call someone a rich kid were born just as middle class (or even better).
Who is getting this great benefit that is so ridiculous?
I only got to go to college on a scholarship, and I spent the first five years of my career making under $50k.
I'm disappointed that some people think working in tech means that you're made of money.
I'm not saying that the assumption that all tech workers are rich is correct, but you might want to rethinking how much money $50k after 5 years really is.
[1] http://www.seattletimes.com/seattle-news/education/pay-varie...
[2] http://www.wsj.com/articles/SB100014240529702036875045766553...
Many people spend their entire lives making less than $50k. Try and have a little bit of empathy.
What makes you think that yuppies and engineers are disjoint sets?
That's totally the way the world works right?
Ahhh... it's the old, I'm not rich! The rich are people that make more than me!
By that definition, almost nobody is rich.
Pretty sure the backlash is against the "kids" part of rich kids - as the phrase "rich kids" insinuates second-gen wealth, a mass of money without having the responsibility or maturity to have earned it.
Very different story than for many of us self-made engineers, coming from the lower end of the economic bracket and taking advantage of scholarships and financial aid to get the skills that have now landed us well-paying jobs as adults, which we've worked 8-12-hour days to earn and keep.
We may be "rich" but we're not spoiled "rich kids", that make more sense?
The backlash is not against "kids", but unreasonable defensiveness about the word "rich," because "oh, I'm not rich, I'm just getting by even though I have a stupid-good 401k and benefits and make enough money to never look at a bank statement." When you have to own up to just not really working all that hard and just not really having a struggle in your life that you didn't create, lots of people feel real bad. (And the ones that are hurting people with real problems should feel bad. "But economics" does not clean one's hands of one's contributions to even faceless evil.)
I guess the reason I assume the backlash is against 'kids' and not 'rich' is, to use my own anecdote, most everyone I know in this industry who might be incorrectly classified as "rich kids" came from much humbler circumstance, and they also try to keep perspective on their extreme good fortune as you do.
Perhaps it's the circles we run in, but most of the people I know personally who would be caught in the crossfire of "rich kids" are aware and grateful daily of their massive advantage because of the stark contrast to their childhood economic experience - and it makes them work twice as hard to make sure they maintain it, as well as pay greater attention to those evils.
I feel like the truer crime called out by "rich kids" is reveling in privilege, oblivious at its cost to others - that total lack of societal awareness I tend to associate with children, which I guess is why 'kids' seemed more backlash appropriate.
I don't think the tech industry or the people of it want to coexist with other people, and I very strongly feel like the mean streak of turbocapitalist libertarianism shooting through tech encourages a culture of not feeling a need to coexist.
And now I'm bummed again. Grumble.