San Francisco Bubble
blog.larrold.com
blog.larrold.com
1. Everything too expensive? Good, don't live here, eventually enough people will leave to drive all of the costs back to other market norms.
2. Dumb startups? Good, they will fail, people won't be able to afford to live here and they'll leave.
3. People are spoiled? Uber is cheaper and more convenient in some cases than taking the local transportation. When people stop taking public transportation because it's fundamentally broken (ps - it's awful in SF) then it will force government organizations to re-think their planning.
4. Bad engineers? Yup, I've met some of them. They'll eventually leave too when the system weeds them out.
I too think it's weird here, but since I do enjoy my life in the Bay area enough, I'm happy to wait for the market to correct to normalcy. The people who are here just to chase the "me too's" will soon be forgotten.
EDIT: I should probably clarify my overall sentiment. People who come to SF and complain that this situation is less than ideal have the freedom to simply choose not to play. The cost of living is driven by the simple laws of supply and demand. Speak with your wallets, not with your mouths.
Very few things require genuinely novel pieces of code to work. Yes, lots of value can be captured using code, but you could totally start something like airbnb with a lot of manual labor clicking in a GUI.
Djikstra said "Beware premature optimization" and that's quite true. I think automation should be used when things hurt to bad to do manually anymore. For some people, that's any task which must be performed twice and then you write a script. For others it might be years manually updating excel for bookkeeping every night. One can go real far manually updating excel...
For the few startups that do experience significant growth, it's much easier to find talent (engineering and otherwise).
This is why a product I was working on almost got killed. The senior engineer working on it wanted perfection before delivery. The project was already one year overdue. He suddenly came in one day and rushed me to finish up something and he wrapped up a couple things and we launched at the end of the week.
Found out that the project was going to be axed if we didn't deliver very soon.
I agree, but this is mostly true because there's so much low-hanging fruit out there. If you look at the current successful startups like Uber and Airbnb, they're really trivial applications. That doesn't mean they can't create huge amounts of value by "trivially" repackaging services and connecting people.
Once the low-hanging fruit is developed during the next 10 years or so we can finally start focusing on actual high-tech engineering startups.
(Soylent doesn't even make the stuff. That's outsourced to Jasper Products in Joplin, MO.[1])
By saying things like "Good, they will fail, people won't be able to afford to live here and they'll leave" you're completely overlooking the human costs and implications.
Things don't just change overnight. It's an slow, painful, eventual decline. Things shouldn't need to be pushed to a breaking point for us to make necessary changes to alleviate these problems.
"Everyone rides an Uber" is great for the Uber drivers. "People spend too much on organic produce" is great for the farmers. "Even bad engineers are in high demand" is great for the mediocre engineers.
Housing is a problem, but this post didn't mention it.
So before we start making changes, what are the problems in your opinion?
And, then, what changes are you proposing?
Even mentioning Uber, organics, bad engineers and mediocre engineers ignores places like the south side of Chicago and any gradient between. It's not as pretty outside as you think it is.
rant.
Maybe I'm a bit naively bitter on the subject, particularly after spending some time at Chicago's opengov hack nights. Something about it got very, very turned me completely away from modern civics and its problems solving. Much of it seems to stem from the same vain as high school grads building unmaintainable schools in "primitive" cultures many miles away.
My problem isn't that Uber, SF etc exist. Individually, "fuck yeah!". As a whole, though, they take the focus away from the nuance of actual problems and create comfort for those who can afford it. The poor, the mentally sick and the fringe simply aren't accounted for to the level that they can be. Especially after walking through SF streets earlier this year. It was infuriating to see so much homelessness and prosperity of achievement condensed in the same place. Chicago and NY have nothing on how sharp that difference was (although, I admit it might be selection bias).
Many techie-type folk my age tend to complain about the large economic/social problems. Very few of them ever take action - yet they complain about inaction! If that feeling is as pervasive as it seems, then maybe the problem just might be within some nuance that's not being addressed. When skill's diverted from that nuance towards Bay-like areas and their functions, then YES, they are part of the problem. Just maybe not directly or in an intuitive way.
I also forgot to apologize for mentioning Uber, organics, and engineering. You're right, but acknowledging the existence of those concepts I'm totally ignoring the South Side of Chicago.
But by bringing up Chicago, you're completely ignoring sub-Saharan Africa and Bangladesh. It's not so pretty there, either. Are you going to apologize for that?
Let's just remember that we should always mention regions of extreme poverty whenever we discuss something.
It's a complicated problem with many, many components. Nuance is more relevant than you think it is. Think of fractals and weather patterns.
An effect of SF: http://www.chicagotribune.com/news/globalcity/ct-global-city... Why it happens: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Human_capital_flight
It's not that the free market solution is great. It's that all other possible solutions are even worse.
I feel like I should just make this my email/social media signature since I say it so often:
A perfect requires these things:
- Perfect market information
- No participant with market power to set prices
- Non intervention by governments
- No barriers to entry or exit
- Equal access to factors of production
- Profit maximization
- No externalities
The less you have those, the less efficient your market is. "Free markets" aren't these magical things that arise on their own in nature. They are carefully crafted and maintained artificial environments and most are far from efficient.
Market forces are not a silver bullet that will solve all problems if we just sit around and wait long enough for the invisible hand to do everything.
Companies don't have to be told to improve, either, not when their competitors are improving and eating market space. At least, that's how it works in theory. A lot of industries have turned into demilitarized zones, both sides opposed but neither making a move. Telecom is the best example of how bad this gets.
And yet even telecoms have invested huge swaths of capital to get us to 3G then LTE.
https://www.techdirt.com/articles/20131012/02124724852/decad...
This lack of competition leads to a sort of mini-monopoly, meaning that they basically have no reason to not jack up prices.
That is, until Google comes along and kicks them out, as another comment points out.
The telcos have stalled residential broadband for decades, leaving most of the US stuck with early 2000s-level cable modems or DSL. None of them will make a move.
So what happened? https://fiber.google.com/about/
except to define property rights and enforce them, which is kind of significant 'intervention'.
The non-market solutions would be something like these:
1 - Price controls
2 - Government approval of business ideas
3 - Rationing non-essentials
4 - Licensing engineers
That's a rather nonchalant way of saying something that will likely be a very sharp, painful transition. And when a boom-town the size of San Francisco implodes it can have a huge impact on the entire country.
I don't disagree with the points you made. But there is nothing free market about the housing market in San Francisco.
How so? There is a supply (although limited), and there is a demand. The landlords are interested to maximize their profits, but can not ask more than the market can bear.
But even if the owner would like to sell the land, and buyer would like to pay a lot of money, this is usually not allowed, for political reasons.
If let to operate more freely, free market economy would be efficient in increasing the density of homes in high-demand areas. This is very much not happening in San Francisco.
If people are willing to pay Manhattan-prices (and even more), the free market response would be to build at Manhattan-density.
I'm glad we could stand by free-market narratives while we waste untold amounts of capital on nothing.
But it seems there is such an unquestioning faith in "the invisible hand" that the mere suggestion that misrembered high school economics may be an oversimplification, let alone in error, is viewed as unspeakable blasphemy.
Particularly ludicrous is:
>4. Bad engineers? Yup, I've met some of them. They'll eventually leave too when the system weeds them out.
But I'd ask the prophet of the invisible hand these questions:
Isn't the current state necessarily exactly correct given the panglossian invisble hand?
How is it other's using the same hand waving also claim the bay area economy is a permanent feature? Heretics I presume?
If the invisible hand is going to correct the situation, when will it happen? Next week? A hundred years? Or "soon, my son, soon"
> then it will force government organizations to re-think their planning.
Made me lol. As if any Government has ever changed it's offerings based on the market. They'll just keep paying public workers absurd wages to continue to suck because status quo is way more important than customer satisfaction when it comes to public entities.
http://www.twincities.com/2015/12/31/mark-dayton-wants-100-m...
A Government entity has no competition, or if they do (like the USPS for example) they can rely on subsidies from the Government and run at a total loss if they need to. I'm not saying this is a good or bad thing, but if you have a worker who knows their performance is tied to their ability to deliver a product and another worker who knows they're pay is coming whether the customers are happy or not, one of those is going to be motivated to make sure customers are happy and the other one is not, and they will act accordingly.
So your argument is that this is really bad at the moment, but over an unspecified amount of time, 'the market' will sort it out. No worries. No need to think about things. No need to consider things. Just the market. Isn't the market great.
The opposite, I think. I recently started taking public transportation MORE often, because traffic on the freeways has gotten so bad.
Too many engineers today, perhaps like sports players, take a big salary, project it across 30 years and then say "Wow I've got millions headed my way, do I really need to bag my lunch?"
I've watched as they became both broke and depressed as the wave that was supporting those salaries and the technology that was supporting their employment have broken (as they always do) and they are suddenly "too old and too out of date."
Like the guy who was making $200K/year as a SOAP architect for some package that managed really expensive enterprise server and storage gear. When the wave passed and people moved to cheap white box servers in abundance using things like Docker or Chef to run and manage them, this guy walked into a world at 45 years of age with zero applicable experience to your distributed server cluster based company. And he is slowly burning what savings he had because the only entry level programmer job he could get is paying him $85K and his take home pay doesn't completely cover his burn rate (he optimistically expects to be promoted to a high paying job as soon as they see what he can do.)
If you are living the high life as an in demand engineer please don't be that guy. Start planning to provide funds for your kids education, or if you're not having kids ever then a fund to pay someone else's kids to take care of you when you're too old to work. Cut out recurring expenses in your life where ever you can and put excess money into savings or investment vehicles so that it can start working for you by earning more money. Understand that life is change until you die. Anticipate change to avoid having change drive your decisions.
I was stoked to move to cheaper area and work remote for these reasons, but it put a serious brake on career/income growth. And all it takes is some old-school mgmt to come in and then you are treated like some pariah.
The property tax rate is 1.1826% of assessed value in SF (1% state + a small % local). And your initial assessed value is based on your purchase price.
I think it's more realistic to say you'd be spending close to 4500/month net assuming you didn't live in a place with an HOA. If you live in a condo with an HOA, you could easily be spending 5000 to 5500/month.
On the plus side, at least you get to deduct all that mortgage interest and property tax on your federal taxes. When you are paying 3k/month+ in interest and taxes, that's a really nice tax advantage over renting a similar property.
The "lifestyle inflation is evil" mantra never made sense to me. The definition I usually find is "living better than a college student once you are a working professional," so apologies if you mean something different.
I was raised to save 15% for retirement, to never carry a credit card balance, to build a 6 month emergency fund, etc. All of these priorities come first. But, after they are funded:
I am in software in part because because I like it, but also because it enables the life I want: a decent apartment to myself, a decent car, some international travel, not having to agonize over small day-to-day purchases. I want these things much more than I want early retirement (which is not particularly useful if all I can do with it is sit in a low-cost-of-living-city home and eat Ramen). If you told me I'd be a broke college student forever, I'd probably go into theater.
Why should we compromise parts of our life for more money, and then carry that money in our savings accounts perpetually? It really seems like you should either use the money in a way that's important to you, or optimize for free time instead.
Silicon Valley as we imagine it might die, and I'm set to absorb a few months. I can't imagine the world will stop wanting code. And if it does, I can change careers like my parents both did in their 40s.
I think he's referring to how most people do it - carrying debt, little or no savings, paycheck to paycheck no mater how they make. And when they do get a raise, instead of putting the extra money towards getting on track financially, they just bump up their lifestyle so that they're always living right on the edge of what they can manage.
there's always some penny pinching proselytizer trying to tell other people how to live.
i find it better to focus on making more money.
They say "$2k for an apartment? That's way too much! Why don't you move to [place]?"
Honestly if you haven't rented an apartment in the last few years, you have no idea. You also have no idea how lucky you are to get that rent control subsidy.
You can go manager or freelancer, of course.
I remember moving to SF and making ~$110k, and renting a ~$2500 studio in a mediocre part of town with no car (I got a motorcycle eventually) and it was difficult to save any money, even if I wasn't bankrupting myself.
Not only do you need to try and save as much as possible (which is really hard if you are not single and able to live with roommates), you need to be constantly learning.
If you're attracted to the boom, but don't have the wherewithal to get rich, by definition you're not the type of person who plans well.
Intractability issues of Nash equilibria aside, if that's your take on an article ostensibly about sustained market disequilibria, then I don't think you fully understand what a 'free market' is supposed to entail.
Love the quote :)
Why does it take so long for the market to correct and why does the market allow such huge variance from normal?
I think the answer is obvious, people get acclimated to their environment very quickly and lose the ability to see systemic problems.
Therefore it seems the market will tend towards local minimum. Similar to how evolution works. It doesn't handle gross changes without a lot of pain.
> When people stop taking public transportation because it's fundamentally broken (ps - it's awful in SF) then it will force government organizations to re-think their planning.
I think what is much more likely is that the government will simply raise taxes to cover the shortfall and let the public transit die.
That kind of happened in other parts of the world (in the former socialist block). You know what happened afterwards? The significant demand for mass transportation encouraged private parties to step in. They weren't as good or as convenient compared to the former government-subsidized public one, but they solved the problem for a while.
I think it's fun to be flippant, but there still certain demographics that are being displaced and negatively impacted by the bubble.
People would rather argue in ivory towers about abstract problems that don't exist in the real world (sexism in video games, Internet feminism, etc), rather than work on unpleasant and unsexy problems that can easily be solved.
What's abstract or unreal about them? What's "Internet" feminism, for that matter? I'd say sexism in videogames is real... and the level of aggression in online discussions about that topic is almost asphyxiating, enough that I consider it a serious problem. Would you similarly argue that it's "unreal" to argue about sexism (or racism, or whatever -ism) in movies?
It's a shame you said this, because I'm in agreement with the rest of your post.
Disclosure. I tried living in SF. The cost of living was too high. I left. Problem solved. Ta da, no bitching required
Based on your experience you described, you weren't displaced.
I was amazed by the people who felt entitled to a lower cost of living - all while blaming IT workers for gentrifying their beautiful oasis. I would have thought they lived in SF their whole life to feel that level of angst. More like a couple years. Intermittently. While their parents pay for their art degree.
A sense of entitlement is an English idiom for "having too high of expectations", and typically associated with narcissism. Expecting to not be displaced from your home after 20 years is not a sense of entitlement or narcissistic.
I'm trying to look at it in more brighter light, so I'll say that they can sell high their place (which is wonderful thing from a market player's prospective), then offer themselves as a gift to enrich some other lucky place (which is good for many under multiple reasons). It's a win-win!
You are speaking of a free market that is highly theoretical, because there is no such "free market" in today's economy, no matter where you live. However, free market theory suggests that a situation such as SF is not possible under a free market.
San Francisco has a great deal of political might, which explains a lot of the founding contexts allowing it to survive in the way it does. Add the fact that employees cannot be held to an non-compete agreement, and you have a bunch of engineers stepping over one another to chase the next six month gig as the number of ridiculous startup options balloons to a totally unsustainable size.
1) Want to build a skyscrapper? Having the same housing density as Tokyo or Manhattan? No .. sorry .. think of the traffic or view or ... whatever.
2) The place you live in has become very valuable. Pay the appropriate property tax. Umm .. no .. sorry. We don't want to make live unaffordable for seniors or umm whatever.
The reality is just wealth distribution. Away from people who are young and new to the area and towards those who were here before.
Considering people seem to have planned their lives around the implicit expectation of the current tax structure, it isn't ridiculous for seniors on "fixed incomes" to be nervous.
But let's remember that seniors are the wealthiest age demographic, and those among them who are actually financially needy can be easily cared for while still not stifling all the hopes of young entrepreneurs.
What do free markets and San Francisco NIMBYism have to do with each-other?
Careful. Money=speech is a touchy subject. It implies that those with less money are somehow less important. That may be true from a libertarian absolute free market standpoint, but cities are not liberated markets. They are nests of overlapping interests and entrenched power brokers. Not everyone is free to move at the drop of a hat, nor should we expect them to bounce around chasing their market niche. We should respect that people want to live in community year after year without being forced out, or in, due to market fluctuations. There is value in establishing roots in a community beyond the financial.
1. Some people can have more freedom than other people.
2. In a free market, rich people have more freedom than everyone else.
A free market is not truly free. Although this concept is frighteningly obvious it is incredibly hard to articulate. You are essentially telling people to get the fuck out of San Francisco because they're not rich enough.
"AppNexus helps brands connect with consumers, empowering agencies and advertisers with a uniquely powerful approach to programmatic online advertising."
Thanks for working on Ad Tech, the very thing that powers this bubble by trading attention as a commodity. Other people work on silly startups, but this shit is akin to HFT.
So he's doing a real thing that provides real value to the web. And it's actually a sustainable business, to boot.
Lastly, there's absolutely no need to get so personal -- if his article offended you, discuss the article.
I usually keep that opinion to myself because it's not a popular one, but in this particular subthread we are not discussing the article, we are discussing the author who volunteered his "I am very hypocritical" comment.
Elsewhere in this comment thread I discuss the article.
1) In a thread where the author shows up and says "I am very hypocritical", standard rules like "discuss the article, not the author" do not apply. The author is fair game for discussion.
2) I don't usually crap on other peoples' industries, but not in this case, because (1).
That's ok. The internet would be better off without most junk websites, and the ones I like, I'm willing to pay for.
We're in enough of a media bubble already - there's so much media and so few trusted sources that its impossible to filter content anymore. Ads inject themselves after people's ability to filter burn out like a virus. Its not good for society.
Too many fall into the "Field of Dreams" fallacy thinking that if you build it, they will come. Most of the time it doesn't work like that.
If you're an engineer with a family here in SV, you cannot take a sabbatical. In most cases you need to get a job in a week or the rent will drive you to bankruptcy.
I don't get people who are so smart and yet simultaneously so stupid that they think spending $100,000 a year is normal.
Wake up, you're rich, you're just too stupid to realize you could be living at a much cheaper level.
I'm not defending this at all, as I think it's stupid, but they are not "rich". They are frankly just less screwed than other middle class folks.
You seriously think having double or probably triple from just one salary isn't rich?
And where exactly are all your caterers and cleaners and gardeners and nannies and baristas and tavern workers and shop people living and buying their food with their minimum wage in the bay area? Obviously they aren't remote working.
Perspective is a bitch.
First of all, cost of living varies widely from locality to locality. Making 90k a year in middle of nowhere Idaho or some other piece of flyover country is totally different than making 150k in an urban area like NYC or SF.
Saying: "welp, it's your fault your cost of living is so high, you should move 2 hours away to Sacramento, stupid" is not only incredibly naive, but borders on a level of ignorance that I haven't seen in quite some time.
...Especially when talking about perspective.
Just a friendly reminder:
1. There is another human being on the other side of the conversation.
2. Practice compassion when responding.
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[1] http://paulgraham.com/disagree.html
[2] https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Graham's_Hierarchy_o...
There is nothing hypocritical about acknowledging one's self is spoiled.
The one thing I really agree with though is the funny thing that happens here with the word "engineer". If you can make a website you somehow qualify for the title software engineer. By Bay Area standards, I myself am director level engineering talent—and I get offers for such all the time—and yet I don't even remotely consider myself an engineer. Because I can make a website? Because I know a little python, ruby and node? Come on. I've never written anything that lives in a real production environment and you want to hire me as your director of engineering? Are you mad?
I phone screened somebody not so long ago who asked me if it was the "kind of job where you have to write a lot of code", because they "weren't that sort of software engineer". Didn't quite know what to make of that.
I don't love it. Maybe the person you screened should be doing my job.
The reason is because they learned out of innate curiosity and true passion. You always go farther with those.
However, you go even farther with curiosity, passion and a degree.
Can you elaborate on why you think it's "blatantly obvious" though? I can't make any of these types of guesses with high confidence.
The only thing that might change this is something like the opening of the final frontier-- space. But in that case I'm not sure if it would... distances between say Earth and Mars are so vast that any Martian economy would effectively be a separate entity. It might experience rapid growth but I'm not sure if that would translate over here. The Homeworld might still be like Japan-- a zero-bound no-growth economy.
I suppose an AI explosion that wasn't destructive might change things too by creating a lot of new non-corporeal economic entities, but we're well off into sci-fi land here.
Edit: I don't necessarily mean that all forms of "growth" are over. We could still have tremendous growth in knowledge, technological capability, standard of living, and some amount of economic growth. But heavily leveraged inflationary credit economics requires crazy exponential growth in an absolute sense. Without crazy growth it breaks, and the only way to keep it nominally running is to pump money into it to prevent cascading default.
In a sense I think the "pop Austrians" are right that the present system is broken, but they've historically had the failure mode exactly wrong. The failure mode is not hyperinflation-- it's hyperdeflation that's permanently held at bay by money printing ("Japan"). That's because pop Austrians don't get the money multiplier. Almost all money in circulation is credit/debt, not M1. You'd have to print absurd amounts of money and make sure it's distributed more widely than banks to cause a non-localized hyperinflation in a credit economy. (Localized hyperinflation is possible due to bubbles but these usually collapse.)
Of course another way of keeping the illusion alive is to pump up localized credit bubbles repeatedly. These give the illusion to certain sectors or regions that the economy is still growing the way it should... for a while. But then they pop and you need another round of money printing to prevent hyperdeflation. Rinse and repeat. Meanwhile these bubbles distort the price structure of the economy, such as by making housing ridiculous or driving certain commodities crazy.
Agreed nominal interest rates will likely drop down again to zero to restimulate the economy, but I doubt that will stick for the next decade, as inflation should creep back in forcing the Fed's hand. However, if you believe that "real interest rates" (ie subtracting inflation) will be zero for a long time, I can concur -- currently they are negative.
Earth is now Japan. Perhaps Mars is the next America.
The banks are a serious drain on the system. They get to extract percentages from the economy year over year, while contributing nothing (except interest obligations).
Then, perhaps, we try to figure out how to engineer solutions that will guarantee certain certain conditions will be met (e.g. Enough food for every person in an area will make it to that area for everyone there to live satisfactorily).
As the dependencies are mapped out and tracked, it will become obvious which tasks are necessary to fulfill the current economic objectives. Then, it's simply a matter of performing the tasks.
Have you ever fired anyone? "Nope"
Have you ever shipped a product and supported it for more than a year? "Nope"
Do you have any quality engineers that would come with you? "Nope"
Have you ever managed a manager? "Nope"
I noped his ass out the door.
Fear not, this craziness will pass.
At my last company, my boss was the first technical hire. His title was Director of Software Engineering. He got that title and the responsibilities that came with it solely because he was the first technical hire.
He had no management experience at all. He was a great engineer, but he couldn't manage his way out of a paper bag. He had the double whammy of both not knowing a thing about process and not understanding people. He didn't think having a process was necessary because his own code was amazing, he wrote the initial versions of our software all by himself in what actually is a solid example of a well-engineered project, and he couldn't fathom how anyone's code could be less than amazing. He also couldn't handle stress, and he had a habit of screaming at his subordinates and treating us like children whenever he got stressed.
His management was the biggest reason I quit.
I think engineers/developers/hackers tend to undervalue the skills necessary to manage a project well. Basically considering the work a lot easier than writing code or building something and thinking that anyone can do it (including themselves in your example).
I think the reason for this is because a lot of people can do a shitty job managing a team and it's not as obvious as when people do a shitty job programming (or at least there are more people that can be a bad manager undetected than can be a bad programmer).
It's harder to bullshit technical skills, but a bad manager could have good enough social/political skills to get power and it's probably also more likely to attract people looking for power. Engineering seems to provide a filter to avoid some of this naturally.
That said being a really effective PM, Manager, VP is a skill different from programming and with a similar depth that shouldn't be dismissed easily. This is more obvious to HN probably because startup founders often have to get better at it in order to build a company. Since it tends to rely a decent amount on empathy and social skills in addition to being able to understand the technical pieces/prioritization it's also harder to know how good you'll be at it when starting.
It is something you can get better at though, just takes investment/learning like anything else.
Reminds me of Tom West from Soul of a New Machine.
In my experience, once you are in management it takes a hell of a lot more fuck-ups before you are ousted.
Because they got the job.
You've never maintained a production app and you're getting offers as director of engineering?
I completely agree that you may not want your best engineers in this role because interfacing with and leading people is a completely separate skill, but I would still think any competent exec with a technical title will have some technical experience.
What's worse, the people interviewing me know even less than I do. The patchwork of bullshit runs deep in San Francisco.
Even if you're a bona fide engineer, but not enrolled in the order, calling yourself one opens the floodgates of hell where spaghetti coders do the same and get hired by retarded HR departments to take the lead on some mission-critical software.
I like this. I am a self-learned developer. When my peers call themselves engineers, I spit my coffee.
It seems as though the US prioritizes shit-developers/wannabe-engineers over experienced Canadian developers. Which kind of makes sense, in that you feed your own before feeding your neighbour.
So I really doubt that H1B flooding is a thing. Open to debate though.
http://www.nytimes.com/2015/11/11/us/large-companies-game-h-...
"Many of the visas are given out through a lottery, and a small number of giant global outsourcing companies had flooded the system with applications, significantly increasing their chances of success. While he had one application in last year’s lottery and lost, one of the outsourcing companies applied for at least 14,000."
A quick fix would be to award H1B based on salary instead of lottery.
We do it because it works...
Ehhhh. If you try to stamp and sign structural engineering documents as an engineer, and then a bridge collapses, you're open to litigation. I don't think anyone has been (successfully?) sued for declaring themeselves as Software Engineers in Canada. There are no damages.
Interestingly, you can call yourself an "SE," and its fine (according the professional engineering associations), but companies in YVR actively recruit "software engineers" (e.g. Electronic Arts)
I do cringe, though, at the extreme overuse of the term in software; I have two parents who are legit PEs in the US and drilled the distinction in with me.
At the very least, it should be reserved for someone with a broad theoretical and practical background who solves more complicated problems ... but you know how title inflation goes.
I take issue with this one. It's entirely possible to live frugally while living IN San Francisco. I moved here about 7 months ago and expected it to be incredibly expensive but it hasn't been the case (beyond rent).
The author mentions $15 crappy local IPAs but I've actually never found a beer for this price. There is no shortage of $7 craft beers you can buy at a brewery or bar, no shortage of Trader Joe's with the same prices as, say, Charlottesville VA.
I've found that other than rent, the prices are comparable to other places. If you get a salad delivered on postmates or uber eats or something then that's what you're paying for. That isn't SF.
I think a lot of people are living a lifestyle where they have no problem paying for stuff like a delivered salad when they can walk next door, or uber instead of taking the bus, but lots of people are walking and grocery shopping and not paying those prices.
Prices in SF are definitely 2x-3x what I have paid anywhere else.
In fact, every time i visit, say, chicago, or atlanta, i'm strongly reminded of this fact.
Can you find quality places in SF where that's not true? I'm sure. But on average, it's definitely the case that it's significantly more expensive here.
You can compare the CPI as well: http://www.numbeo.com/cost-of-living/compare_cities.jsp?coun...
http://www.numbeo.com/cost-of-living/compare_cities.jsp?coun...
Groceries should not be 40% more expensive in SF :)
(and we do have $7-12 beers, they're just known to be extra fancy or aged)
Overall Portland is still relatively cheap. The only thing getting out of control is rent and house purchasing (because of the serious lack of inventory), but the entire nation is seeing this so it's not specific to Portland.
So I think as others have mentioned, rent and house prices are the things climbing sharply. I know someone paying $900 for a room in a 3 person house, in a really great part of town (Division, for locals). I've heard studios go for well over $1000, and fill up fast. But really, you don't have to look very hard to find something cheap(er). Surrounding areas (with new access to light rail that goes down town) are reasonable.
I don't think it's really as bad as some people make it out to be, but it definitely is getting more expensive in town. I mean, that's the nature of the housing market recovery :)
You can buy 6 packs of good craft beer for $7/$8 at any grocery store.
wat? it's 1.5$ actually
I'm visiting from Australia and its maybe 10% to 30% more expensive, and alcohol is cheaper. Nothing like what we paid for stuff in new york.
All i'm saying is you should look at other markets that have been propped up by speculation... and see what happens when the market corrects. Most of the time they over-correct before finding a new better more stable price.
You have to understand risk in order to understand that you were not overpaid.
In fact, while they might be able to purchase a home still, it often times will be quite a bit smaller, more run down, and in a worse neighborhood due to the sheer cost of buying one. And often times they are only buying out of desperation because they don't want to be forced out of the area entirely due to rents beyond their control.
I have yet to hear a convincing argument why this is a bad thing.
It isn't sustainable and its not a productive use of capital.
This lifestyle is going to implode when the economy stumbles.
JM Keynes said eons ago that with increases in efficiency we will eventually be able to get to a 15-hour work week. So, a particular industry in a particular area was able to get to an approximation of that, and the counter-argument is that this is not a productive use of capital?
Besides, TFA complains that all these people are working on silly startups, which is presumably not a productive use of capital either. You can't have it both ways.
On the backs of whom? How much are those Uber drivers, grocery deliverers, and artisanal salad chefs making?
It is good that one group of people is moving forward, we just have to be careful that we aren't doing it at the expense of other groups. The impression I get is that in the US today, it's not just that some people are getting richer, many others are getting poorer.
I don't believe there is such a law of economics.
The employee certainly improves their value in terms of skills acquired during a sabbatical. The employee also gains significantly in terms of value of life experiences when they take time to travel, support kids, etc.
Certainly there are unproductive poor team players who dissapear whenever trouble happens but we shouldn't set our policies based on this minority.
Most of the blame is cast on the big companies (Twitter, Facebook etc) but the reality is that there are hundreds of smaller companies choosing SF and the valley in general.
And again I say, until companies allow people to work from wherever this will be fueled more.
Finding talent is getting ever more difficult already, if you expand your search area to the entire country/world there's a better chance you'd find people no?
This is a feature not a bug. The whole VC model the Bay Area thrives on is based on the premise of hitting on only a small percentage of successful startups and you never know what's going to be a hit. Many successful startups have pivoted out of "stupid" ideas. I'm sure at one point "Blogging 140 characters at a time" was considered a stupid idea.
I struggle with this all the time
I try to put myself in the shoes of VCs hearing AirBNB, Uber, Twitter and other pitches. I'm pretty sure I wouldn't give them money. (and then, I would post on HN saying "How I missed AirBNB. Including email threads with the founders and beating myself up).
This is indeed the premise of VCs but even with that in mind, some startups being funded are just ridiculous.
No, let's just make yet another app which brings insignificant incremental deveopment to calendar viewing apps.
Be serious.
> Everything is too expensive.
Just normal supply and demand economics. This happens all the time all over the world when lots of high earning people suddenly move to an area.
> There are thousands of dumb startups.
Yup. And most of them will die. And some of them will become AirBnB. The problem is, it's extremely difficult to predict which is which. That's just the nature of searching for "the next big thing". I'd rather live in a world where there are lots of dumb companies so that the few exceptional ones have a chance to get started.
> People are spoiled.
No, people in SF value their time, as it's the only resource you can't get more of. I absolutely understand why someone with the money would have groceries deliver for them. It's more efficient. The locally sourced and organic thing does feel a bit silly though, although I would say that's a fad you see everywhere.
> There cannot be these many quality engineers.
I'm sure there are some bad engineers there. But SF has a massive pool for exceptional talent, and while I'm sure not every engineer is extremely high quality, I have no doubt that a substantial amount of top tier programmers are in SF. If the majority of programmers weren't making meaningful contributions to their companies, I don't think you would see them being compensated the way they are.
There is s difference between lazy, spoiled and pretentious. Rich people have existed for a very long time. Few have ever had groceries delivered. The hire personal shoppers, housekeepers, chefs, maids to buy their food. This getting groceries delivered is a passing fad, an affectation for people looking to cultivate an image of themselves. Having more money than time is nothing new.
Everything is too expensive
Things are expensive, yes, but more so in neighborhoods with high concentrations of new residents, namely SOMA and most of the Mission. You can get an IPA at nearly any of the bars in my neighborhood for $4, and coffee for $2.
There are thousands of dumb startups
I agree 100%. I've had the (figurative) banana hammock recruiter call me, too, and it's shocking to me how many people are repeating the mistakes of the 90's boom.
People are spoiled
Don't confuse a small yet vocal minority with the City as a whole. There are still plenty of starving artists, passionate musicians and dedicated activists; they just live in different neighborhoods than they did 5 or 10 years ago.
There cannot be these many quality engineers
Again, I agree 100%. During the 90's dotcom boom I worked with a web developer who literally didn't know how to write HTML; all his code was copied from other parts of the project. It's not surprising that it's happening again this time around, but as mbesto wrote, they'll eventually leave too when the system weeds them out.
All in all, most of these are things long-time San Franciscans dislike about our city, too. What's left to be seen is whether or not enough of the people who made San Francisco a desirable place to live can afford to live here once the tech market cools off.
I've seen grads come out of boot camps that are better programmers than people who have been programming for years. They might lack the knowledge, but they've got good sense and hustle, and at the end of the day, I'd take that over a stubborn engineer who looks like they're gonna age into a Dilbert comic.
If the app is for 10 users or for the other 75% of employees, may be less important...
The only thing that's really hard to avoid spending way too much money on is housing.
Live in a van down by the river, or a cargo truck in a Google parking lot.
Next billion dollar startup
And people shouldn't discount that.
Here in suburban Dallas, I'm paying $1220 (soon to go up to $1270) per month for a 1513 sq. ft. townhouse that I have entirely to myself. And my commute isn't bad because most of the tech companies here are also in the suburbs (the Telecom Corridor in Richardson).
Good luck finding anything like that in SF.
I'm a very private person, and I like having a lot of space to myself. The idea of having a roommate or living in a small apartment (especially in an urban environment) makes me physically ill. I'd never be able to live there.
What the author describe is a lavish (according to him) standard of living, judged startups to be dumb by their name/description (but they got investor money). He concludes that we are in a bubble.
Here are the metrics that matter:
* Are current startups generating enough money to pay salaries.
* Are current startups raising enough funds to make ends meet.
* Are there new startups funded.
* Is the number of exits/IPOs higher to create new millionaires.
* Is the number of failed startups higher to create new unemployed engineers and free capacity.
If someone is interested to know these numbers, maybe finance me for a couple months of research and get the right facts.
* Are the startups that are hiring taking up enough of the talent compared to large established companies with billions in the bank such that if there were a bubble, and it were to pop, it would actually make an impact on the hiring environment.
I'd love to see some hard data on the % of people employed by the "startup ecosystem" vs. large established giants like Google, FB, Apple, Adobe, MS, Amazon, etc. These companies have MASSIVE hiring needs and will likely continue to for some time. Should interest rates cause lots of startups to die, I have a hard time believing it would result in a similar situation to the last dotcom bust. Salaries might be depressed for a while, but these giants would still be fighting each other to swoop up the talent.
I'd seriously love to see some hard data on how much of an economic impact it would have in the Bay Area housing market and the public markets in general if all of the funded startups were to go poof overnight. My current bet is "not much in the scope of things."
A good indicator of a bubble in SF/SV startups is measuring the IT job market using local Craiglist and Dice job postings since startups heavily use them.
I used both websites on & off since the late 90s to find contract & permanent full-time jobs. Back then at the height of the dot-coms, the Dice home page showed 120,000+ jobs, right after the crash (2001-2003) that number fell to around 20,000-30,000. Now it's around 80,000.
On Craigslist, at the dot com height, the Software section for the Bay Area (https://sfbay.craigslist.org/search/sof) had so many job postings per day that the list of postings for that day would spill over to the next page (there are 100 listings per page). A year & a half ago (late 2014) there was a good amount of postings and I got a frenzy of replies when I contacted them. Now, there's only a handful of postings per day.
The latter has such massive hiring needs in comparison that even if funding dried up (which they do not need since they have lots of profit and are already oftentimes publicly traded), I don't think it would slow down the market THAT much.
When these tech giants have layoffs - usually in the 100s or 1000s - it's a big hit to the job market. May not be reflected on Craigslist or Dice, but there'll be a lot more job-seekers. Instead of getting 50 resumes per job posting, hiring managers would be getting hundreds.
"To big too fail" isn't a thing.
Bottom line is - hiring (or lack of) is a leading indicator of a company's financial health. A company that doesn't have any open jobs for a sustained length of time (3-6 months to a year) is in belt tightening mode - which comes right before layoffs or worse, closing shop.
Btw - Yahoo is already doing layoffs or 'downsizing'. If Yahoo wasn't hiring during the past 3-6 months, that definitely was an indicator of this.
Yahoo Downsizes In Latin America, Closes Mexico And Argentina Operations http://techcrunch.com/2016/01/28/yahoo-downsizes-in-latin-am...
Here are some news sites that track layoffs. I recommend keeping a close eye on things.
http://techcrunch.com/tag/layoffs/
https://twitter.com/search?q=layoff%20OR%20layoffs%20OR%20%2...
Or better yet, keep an eye on the Dice jobs number which is prominently displayed on the Dice.com home page.
As of today, January 29, 2016 that number is 84,201. My take is that if this number goes below 60,000 then the bubble is bursting.
That being said, the number of startups in San Francisco is fine as long as there is corrective balance. At the least, startups which are failing will die faster due to rent alone.
What are folks flocking to? A unique combination of deep VC pockets and gullibility that can only be found in the SF geological record?
No, this looks more like a regular ol bubble to me... The flywheel is spinning up, driven by run of the mill irrational exuberance and a belief that everyone in the bay area is just smarter than everyone else. Anyone on wall street in 2007 should find that eerily familiar...
That's what makes gold rush economics similar to bubble economics: Everyone decides to chase after a nebulous source of value.
San Francisco has always been the Gold Rush City.
Which means it is best to sell the shovels so startup X can more easily/faster "disrupt the banana hammock ordering process"
SF is pretty ridiculous in a lot of ways. But I would take an SF as ridiculous as if everything he said were exactly true over one where there weren't any truth to it. Through all that froth does come actual creativity and innovation. The banana hammock delivery disrupters will fizzle in due time. The people who got inspired by all the energy and potential and decided to build a VR product that revolutionizes medicine will survive. I'd rather see a lot of false positives than risk a couple of false negatives. And besides, it makes for an endless supply of entertaining stories for people aren't from here.
The place sounds like a magnet for talent, no doubt. But the flip side of that is, everyone going to SF leaves other locations talent-starved and willing to be very accommodating.
However, how is taking Uber to work every day 'spoiled'? I bet the guys owns a car where he is from and spends significantly more on monthly transportation than I do. For $4 more than a bus, I get point to point pick up and drop off, and save about 40 minutes of my time (which I can use to go work out in the mornings).
And some others have figured out that it makes sense to spend $20 on grocery delivery rather than spending 90 minutes doing it yourself if you're working 60-80 hours per week and make more than $20/hour. To be sure, a lot of people work long and hard. They make certain sacrifices but just because they are not the same sacrifices that the author would make it doesn't mean they're bad.
Depending on where you live, Uber/Lyft can be a lot more expensive than a bus.
In Dallas, a monthly public transport pass costs $80. This comes with unlimited uses of the buses and trains for an entire month. Let's say you work twenty days (four weeks) a month, with a trip each way. That amortizes to $2 a trip, less if you also use your pass for personal trips on weekends.
Lyft costs me about $11 on average to get me between home and work. If I were to take Lyft to and from work every day for a month, again assuming twenty working days a month, I'd be paying about $440 a month. That's not $4 more; it's $9 more. That's 5.5 times how much I'd be paying for public transport. Again, that's not counting using it for personal trips on weekends (here, the minimum is $5.70, including the trust & safety fee).
If Uber/Lyft is only $4 more than a bus in SF, then buses are way expensive there.
The general idea, as I understand it, is that if someone invests and makes a ton of money, then other investors come in trying to do something similar to make a lot of money too, only what they are investing in is no good. But all the money creates a temporary illusion of an economic boom, which is what has been happening in the S.F. Bay area for some time now.
I'm old enough to remember the .com bust quite well. At the time the "irrational exuberance" (as Greenspan/Shiller dubbed it) made perfect sense, and the ideas were fundamentally sound, the problem was that investors did not understand that it would take another 10-15 years to get to ubiquitous Internet, and the impatient ones got burned when the bubble burst.
FWIW I live in New York and prefer it massively to SV, but I mean....
https://www.beermenus.com/places/1609-rosamunde-sausage-gril...
This is pretty much the only place i know of where people are okay with paying $30+ total for a salad and think it's normal
"Do you make your startup people eat more ramen, or do you provide more funding?"
As costs keep going up, people STILL think they have to move to SF to get funding or find talent. Yet there is plenty of talent or ideas in other places but the money doesn't move, the dumb part is the VC dollar will go farther in other places.
So who's job is it to prompt the move? The idea makers or the money providers?
I used to be active in the Python/Django community earlier and am getting involved in the JS-React-Redux community. Not only do most people live outside SF, they live in a remote place that you wouldn't have heard about.
Software, good software is creative and creativity needs serendipity. The pressure to meet the next funding round criteria or to get an Uber through the traffic hearing my next track not making eye contact with my uber-pooler isn't the best frame of mind conducive to creativity.
I'm sure a lot of top CEOs and the top guys in select areas have a great social circle - smartest people who they eat/hangout with, which is very good. But there are also a lot of me-toos, for whom just living in SF is the thing they are achieving that feed their egos.
> Currently a principal engineer at AppNexus on sabbatical, I am trying to have a new post every day.
There are a lot of ideas you may find silly but others find interesting enough to spend their working hours to make a success. If you only focus on finances, tons of them will fail. If you look at the experience they'll have doing it, I'm sure some of them will find it was a success.
I've worked at a couple startups and I've worked at some big corporations. There are bad coders everywhere. There are bad ideas everywhere. There are also a lot of jealous people who apparently get bent out of shape because people who are not the best engineer ever are making more money than them and getting to take time off arbitrarily.
Instead of focusing on how much you think their startup is stupid, or how they shouldn't get time off because they're not as good as you (based on who knows what), why not just focus on what you have, what you do, and what you like? Stop living against them and live for yourself.
i certainly have never taken ubers everyday to work even though i could probably(?) afford to do so. seems like an expensive daily habit though.
i actually live in the city where it's not some huge loft in fidi/downtown. good for anyone who can get their groceries sent up to their room but i'm not sure how close to the norm that is. tech workers are all across the board in terms of how they live, how much they get paid and how willing they are to fetch their own groceries.
i live on the first floor of a older apartment complex, but i have to walk down a hill to fetch my groceries. i do sometimes use one of the gazillion food delivery services to eat dinner though.
anyways i would say this is similar to someone who goes to ny, visits the financial district in manhattan for 3 days and then proclaims, "everyone in ny is rich! of course they can afford all that housing! they're so stuck up! why are the cabbies so rude? why are new yorkers so rude?"
I'd like to ask you all about what you've experienced & seen on Craiglist and Dice that would give you an idea on how good or bad the IT job market in San Francisco (and the Bay Area in general) is or was. I hear conflicting stories of qualified people not able to find jobs after a year of searching (like the SOAP architect below) and on the flip side, of companies not able to find people (the so-called 'IT talent shortage').
I used both websites on & off since the late 90s to find contract & permanent full-time jobs. Back then at the height of the dot-coms, the Dice home page showed 120,000+ jobs, right after the crash (2001-2003) that number fell to around 20,000-30,000. Now it's around 80,000.
On Craigslist, at the dot com height, the Software section for the Bay Area (https://sfbay.craigslist.org/search/sof) had so many job postings per day that the list of postings for that day would spill over to the next page (there are 100 listings per page). A year & a half ago (late 2014) there was a good amount of postings and I got a frenzy of replies when I contacted them. Now, there's only a handful of postings per day.
I think it'd be good to get an idea of SF/SV IT job market's fluctuation over the years by compiling these data points. I did a Google search for charts with these data points but couldn't find any. If any of you used these two sites anytime from the late 90s to today and remember the # of postings for that specific date or time period, please post. Ideally, month to month data with high interest on data points from 1999-2003 (dot-com bubble) and 2006 to today (credit bubble).
If you're mature and hardworking, I have no problem with you taking PTO whenever you need it or not committing to hard deadlines. But those are earned privileges based on trust and a history of delivering.
It is so hard to hire software engineers and there are tons of them. Bootcamps are not the answer. It is not a quantity problem, it is a quality problem.
That people are paid here well is a result of the huge imbalance of wealth in the world is another discussion topic.
Hard to take any of this seriously. Lots of people regularly taxi to work in large cities and I cannot imagine how it's indicative of a bubble. Author seems too emotional about such an assertion.
SV has been overpriced for decades and it is only the importation of CHEAP h1b labor that has allowed the growth to continue.
You know something is a miss when you build ever and ever more future slums being 4+ story apartment buildings resulting in h1bs stuffed 12+ into an apartment paying $3K+ or even more for a 1BR apartment.
Americans won't live like that. Or so I hope.
If you didn't have h1bs then the jobs most likely would have gone to cheaper parts of the country as the wage costs would have started to rise to levels such that the products couldn't be developed here.
Works for me.
We have (or had) a choice of allowing IT to be offshored "like everything else" or wreck Silicon Valley making it into a (future) slum.
We made the wrong choice.
Eastern europe has a lot of talented engineers, but lacks capital and know-how on building an international business, places are cheap to live in and so on.
Without the shitty startups acting as free training wheels, the unicorns would have a much harder time finding quality talent.
Who cares if people are spending money to get shit done for them that they don't want to personally do (laundry, groceries). As long as they can pay for it and are utilizing hours to what they actually want to do in life I don't see the harm.
And expensive food exists in most major cities.
There might be some truth to the title, but the article lacked the data to support any of it. I'm flabbergasted that it got upvoted on the frontpage of HN.
> This reminds me of the first dot com bubble where people with degrees from devry were joining companies and making big salaries
Why do you care about where people got their degrees from? What does that have to do with commanding a high salary or not? If the people seem to be overpaid for what they do, fine. But that has nothing to do with their degrees. Or even their abilities.
Seriously though, this movie does touch many aspects related to gentrification and what happens when supply stays the same but demands spikes sharply ... chuckles all around.
Companies evolve, and some don't stay dumb forever.
Change that is categorically meaningful involves things like a cure for cancer, a new source of energy, etc..etc.. If we are to judge whether this startup trend has changed peoples lives in a meaningful way, we should look for changes that are categorically meaningful.
You don't have to move here, so chill out, people.
I've been to many startup competitions in the last couple of years and most of the winners have no business model.
For instance, last year, the winner was a startup that was "Twitter with 255 character limit". It think it was awarded $20,000
one of the best engineers I've ever worked with has a degree from DeVry. I know many great engineers who don't have CS or engineering degrees. And I know plenty of dummies with lots of letters after their name.
I recall when I was in SF in 1999, limo after limo pulling up to what was a pretty ordinary club. I didn't really care how people pissed their money away, but it seemed so bizarre and so detached from reality. I was glad to get out of there.
Is this actually a real company and if so can someone post a link?
Perhaps it's my unadventurous lifestyle, but I have never found myself in a situation where I so urgently needed a posing pouch that 'Uberising' the industry would have helped me out.
I had no idea what it was either, so I thought I was saving you a search.....
Ummm... that's the point?
I'll extend that statement to any of us living the western lifestyle!
Imagine you have a 2x2 matrix where the x-axis is positive value added to the world and the y-axis magnitude of impact. You want your job to be in the top right corner, high impact, high value added to the world but there's two ways to get there. You could do something that has high value but low impact like working at a non-profit in DC helping with excel spreadsheets or whatever, you're delivering value to the world but making a very small impact. The other approach is that you could learn how to build a large scalable system for delivering a solution to millions of people first. Maybe you're making the 100th best photo sharing app and it will never add large value to the world, but you're learning how to deliver impactful solutions you just need to figure out how to deliver real value. I'm not sure why there's a bias against the second approach. I lived in DC for five years and most of my friends are doing less interesting things than my friends in SF. Someone who gets experience at a startup that builds interesting technology but never takes off could be the next CTO of a political campaign for all you know.
Also, it's a complete myth that San Francisco is expensive to live in. You can leave cheap or expensive in any city. SF has a culture where being poor is totally cool. Everyone gets it, you're in tech you're an entrepreneur etc... There's no pressure to go to nice restaurants for social status like there is in New York. I spend much less money in SF than I did living in DC just because of the lifestyle I'm living. Buying a house in SF is impossible due to the insane prices, but it's really not that bad living in an apartment here.
I don't think people are spoiled here, I think your perceptions are off. First, programming takes place entirely inside a persons head. Mental state is really important, and the 9-5 office job with a commute to and from the office every day doesn't work very well for engineering. I like to break up my day into two halves. The first half of the day and the second half of the day, this gives me two discrete time periods where I can do work and I like to take a bike ride in between because I can think about the problems, and then not have to go to the gym later in the day. When I was working for a company in DC there was no way I could have left at 2:00 to take an hour bike ride, even if that's how I work best. I think it's ridiculous to say that people working in their optimal workflows makes them spoiled.
And again, it takes probably 3 years to become a high-quality engineer. So I'm not sure what you would want coding bootcamp graduates to do after 3 months, get together and talk about how hopeless life is? I'm glad that people are getting into the industry, the only way you're going to get better is by getting real world experience. So what someone with 8-months experience isn't a great engineer yet? By continuing to get better over the next couple years he will become a better engineer and then be able to add significant value to the world, I'm not sure why you would want to discourage developers from perfecting their craft. This would be like heckling a Med School student for not being a great doctor yet.
Cool. Can you point me to where I can get an apartment in SF for less that $1k/month?
Maybe not a single apartment to yourself, but definitely a room in a shared apartment.
There are a lot of cities btw where you can't get a single one-bedroom apartment for < $1,000
What did I like? Seeing a few famous landmarks, a couple of the restaurants, and my rental apartment had free NetFlix.
I've done the whole norovirus dance once too. It really does knock you out for a week or two. (I started feeling sick when walking around outside one morning, decided to take the subway back home, the first sickness struck while waiting for the train—I just had to throw up on the subway tracks. Pretty awful. Some nice bystanders gave me an unopened bottle of water they had with them which was nice.)
In some ways it seems all the "regular" people get absorbed into other levels of success/purpose outside of technology here, so technology is left with a larger weirdo population than SF since there are many more non-techonlogy things to make regular people happy around here.
"Well, yeah. So?"
Is that actually true?
I've actually never seen a beer over $12 before. $5-7 is the norm.
If you move to the bay area in your 20s, by the time you're in your 40s you will have a specific knowledge of a fad language that is 20 years old. But even if you somehow keep up with new tech in your spare time, you will look 40 something and thus be nearly unemployable solely on those grounds.
And you simply will be unable to save any reasonable amount of money no mater how many beers you don't drink. Like anyone else in the states, your sole savings would be home equity which you won't have because you won't be able to buy any kind of home in the few years your age makes you employable.
If in doubt, for those still in SF, determine the savings of your co workers in their 20s and 30s (who are now near then end of their employability), and whether they rent or own (good luck finding a 50 something coworker to ask). Be aware that you do not leave the bay area rich, you leave it because you can't afford it. And be aware there are few middle aged and effectively no old people there. And beware that 45 is only half way to retirement age.
What I find lacking in such comments, though, is some explanation on why and the suggested alternatives. Would you mind sharing why? Java/C# were the hot things of 10-15 years ago and people still make a living out of it. It sounds like an argument for classic Red Queen problem where the only winning move is not to play.
I live in Southern California (LA/OC). It's not cheap by any measure but it's within the bounds of economic sanity compared to SF/SV. There are tons of very interesting tech jobs in cutting edge areas like computer vision, AI/ML, the latest web and DevOps tech, and a lot of hardware/EE stuff. There are many other places like this. Canada probably has a few too. Even NYC, which is more expensive than LA, is still "sane" compared to SF when you consider what you get. In NYC car ownership is very optional, which mitigates the high rents, while in SF you must own a car if you ever want to leave the peninsula.
I've turned down numerous offers in SF/SV because it just seems economically insane. The housing prices are clearly unsustainable and the OP's comment about it being a "serious life mistake" rings true. The craziness has also priced out much of the interesting culture that made SF compelling in the first place.
Edit: I keep hearing about the relentless ageism in SF/SV tech. I don't see so much of it elsewhere. Is it really that bad? If so it seems like a SF/SV thing and not necessarily true everywhere. In that case it might make some sense for young people to spend some time in SF/SV getting into the latest stuff and learning and then bail before 30.
But I too would dearly like someone to show me that I am wrong. To disprove my observation that the vast bulk of people who move to the bay area do not stay there happily and prosperously the rest of their lives but eventually move out, maybe with a wistful blog post.
Well that's just total bullshit. There are tons of middle aged and elderly people in SF, most of whom moved to the city in the 60s or 70s and bought property before it became ridiculously expensive. There is a huge population of aging hippies still in SF. Now if you mean "there are few middle aged people working in the startup world", you might be correct, but I'd guess that's the same for startups anywhere.
Not everything in San Francisco is the tech world, and the city does not just consist of the Mission and SOMA. Most of the city is non-tech families and less exciting residential neighborhoods. People who dont live in SF usually dont see that side of it.