Ashamed to work in Silicon Valley: how techies became the new bankers
theguardian.com
theguardian.com
I’m not so sure the industry is “perceived” like this, it’s more like old media outlets (especially The Guardian and NYT) relentlessly push this message and this piece is no different.
I get that technology has destroyed their ability to gatekeep messaging, their business model and their prestige but at some point old media attacks become too transparent and probably have the opposite effect as intended. I think technologists have reached that point. I don’t know if the general audience has yet but I’ve never heard anyone complain about “tech bros” in real life (probably because they don’t really exist).
If there's no problem with Brilliant Assholes in technology then why are there such a clear pattern of them?
Paul Graham has got a no-asshole rule for a reason- and it's not because he finds it difficult to find assholes to fund.
People with enormous power and wealth are frequently terrible across all industries. I'm still fairly convinced Kalanick has more in common with Weinstein and Miki Agrawal than your average trenches-level programmer, simply because power corrupts. (If tech has a singular problem, it's that startup culture means some people are in power for their whole careers.)
And at the trenches level: yeah, brilliant assholes are a thing in software. And classical music, and physics, and law, and... They're all specialized fields with noninterchangeable work, power-law payouts, and room to minimize human interaction in daily work.
I don't disagree with you that this happens in the field, and I definitely appreciate hearing from people in the field who might agree with this article. But it still feels like there's a pattern of comparing Silicon Valley to Wallstreet, while ignoring the myriad other fields with similar dynamics. That, not the existence of assholes, is the part that feels agenda-driven to me.
1. The median household income in the US is something like 1/3 to 1/2 of what I understand the starting salaries are in SV. For most outside the tech bubble, economically, there is little visible difference between "techies" and "billionaire CEOs".
2. Much of Kalanick's behavior is mirrored by lesser techies, albeit on a smaller scale.
3. Anyone have any hard numbers on the size of the "techies and billionaire CEOs" class versus the total professional classical musicians and physicists in the world? Certainly, the former seems to have more actual impact.
4. Do you really want to live on the pointy end of lawyer and wall street banker jokes?
("What's the difference between a lawyer and a catfish?" "One is a bottom feeding scum-sucker; the other is a fish.")
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1633171
"pg 2632 days ago [-]
"Incidentally, we don't call it a "no asshole rule." I think what I originally said to Robert was that we try not to accept jerks, and since he'd heard the phrase "no asshole rule" he used that to describe it.
"Our criteria aren't the ones listed in this article, either. We're not trying to avoid people who make other people feel bad so much as those who are bogus, or dishonest. That's what we mean by a jerk: someone you can't trust."
I’m not saying that these characterizations are fair. But if there is anything that people are, it’s tribal, and the tribal lines are being drawn.
Well, it used to be. I would argue that hasn't been the case for a few years now. People today who strongly associate libertarian thought with SV are living in a memory.
Libertarians want both economic freedom (which includes many things Trump policies against like free trade and lax immigration restrictions) and social freedom (keeping government out of debates like bathroom use and abortion), which I would argue is more than half incompatible with Trump's aphilosophical racially charged nationalism.
I would guess less than 10% of tech workers are actually libertarian, and that there are more conservatives in tech than libertarians. Most are probably Democrats (for many varied and diverse reasons). But having them be the same as a lot of other people makes it harder to de-humanize them, so when that's the agenda on the table, they frequently all get pidgeonholed into being "libertarians" anyways because it's an excellent straw man.
::cough::
Serfdom is the status of many peasants under feudalism, specifically relating to manorialism. It was a condition of bondage, which developed primarily during the High Middle Ages in Europe and lasted in some countries until the mid-19th century. Serfs who occupied a plot of land were required to work for the lord of the manor who owned that land.
OTOH, Libertarianism is explicitly based on the idea of self-ownership and rejects the idea of that style of bondage (although certainly allowing for debt, and any kind of contractual obligation one wants to voluntarily enter into), and also supports property rights for everyone, not just "lords" and "vassals" and so forth. [2]
Individuals own their bodies and have rights over them that other individuals, groups, and governments may not violate. Individuals have the freedom and responsibility to decide what they knowingly and voluntarily consume, and what risks they accept to their own health, finances, safety, or life.
As respect for property rights is fundamental to maintaining a free and prosperous society, it follows that the freedom to contract to obtain, retain, profit from, manage, or dispose of one’s property must also be upheld. Libertarians would free property owners from government restrictions on their rights to control and enjoy their property, as long as their choices do not harm or infringe on the rights of others. Eminent domain, civil asset forfeiture, governmental limits on profits, governmental production mandates, and governmental controls on prices of goods and services (including wages, rents, and interest) are abridgements of such fundamental rights. For voluntary dealings among private entities, parties should be free to choose with whom they trade and set whatever trade terms are mutually agreeable.
This fascination with property rights is why libertarians are so often dismissed. Liberty should mean a lot more than base selfish "get your hands off my property." It's also not workable in a vastly unequal society. With a lot of the world's wealth having been accumulated by birth, status, or cultural capital, all diametrically opposite of any notion of having earned that wealth, it's a non-starter to suggest that the rest of us "have-nots" dare not place any limits on what the haves can do with the property they magically acquired.
You want absolute property rights? I'd be fine with that if the inheritance tax was 100% and everyone started off on equal footing, with an equal chance to succeed based purely on their own hard work. That'll never happen, and that's exactly why we need to place serious controls on excessive wealth accumulation.
The whole philosophy is self-contradictory nonsense. They claim to be against all forms of violent coercion, but then enshrine the largest and most widespread system of violent coercion ever to exist as a sacred right.
Bill Gates (I know, not SV, but still tech) is another who is still despised by a good number of ordinary people here, though he has done a good job of aligning himself with Warren Buffett in their minds. For some reason, a lot of people around here admire Buffett. Gates' Q rating has risen accordingly, I'm sure.
The midwest charged forward a large share of human innovation and large tech basically says: do not bother applying.
UIUC, Wisconsin, Michigan are all awesome CS programs, with tons of alums in big tech companies.
People in small midwestern towns don't know tech bros. They do know Facebook, Google, Apple, and Amazon. Uber is probably a mixed bag.
Really? Uber isn't a thing? All the scandals about terrible sexually charged behavior and aggressive "bro" behavior aren't real?
They really exist.
Instead, “tech bro” is supposed to mean some mythical programmer-douchey guy. I’m sure there are people like that but not at the scale where it matters or implicates all developers as an occupation.
I know developers at Uber. They’re just regular (smart) people trying to live their lives. Unfortunately they’re regularly attacked by the media but I think most let it roll off their backs at this point.
Are you blaming the messenger, or do you have an independent source of knowledge from outside the tech bubble?
Tech companies still have exceptionally high public favorability compared to other major businesses. They don't even show up on most-hated lists, but get much higher-profile media negativity than loathed companies like Time Warner.
A particularly interesting metric from that article is watching how favorability tracks media coverage. United and Volkswagen abruptly lost significant favorability during their recent scandals, but Facebook's favorability is completely stable. That looks to me like a sign of the media pushing a view that isn't resonating publicly.
For a while i felt like i was on crazy pills
Except that the "fuck you" goes less to people who laughed at nerds years ago and more to the local community, regulators and software users.
Like, they've both got the stereotypical awkward Indian engineer who can't talk to women, but SV took a novel approach by not hating him. SV's weird-by-engineering-standards characters are weird for reasons outside of their nerdiness (e.g. Jared's German-language night terrors), BBT just turned Sheldon's nerdiness up to 11. (And created a really nasty autism stereotype in the process.) And so on.
(Can anyone imaging BBT finding a stereotype as obscure as Gilfoyle's occultist thing? Because that's definitely a 'thing', but it's some serious inside baseball.)
If anything, you might argue that the transition from Big Bang to Silicon Valley is a display of the changing position of nerds. More realistically, though, I think they're just aiming at different demographics.
It's usually a disaster when writers try to create characters smarter than themselves. You get word soup based on how the writer imagines smart people communicate, filled with weakly used jargon and unnecessarily long words.
My coworkers still accuse me of using complex language even though I have worked to simplify and clarify my communication.
Although, strategically, we should be supporting the "nerd black face" image.
Of course you are.
The jokes are validated by David Saltzberg, a Professor of Physics and Astronomy at UCLA.
I think if the jokes were superficial and lazy, I would perceive that as mean-spirited. But they seem to get the details correct.
The Heisenberg uncertainty joke was pretty good. https://youtu.be/F6LIo-FfpKs?t=11s
The characterizations, meanwhile... well, Howard and Sheldon both struck me as pointlessly mean-spirited portrayals, while Rajesh was just a really overwrought stereotype. It felt like the technical side of things ended at input on specific jokes, and in response everything else was hammed up to ensure it would maintain mass appeal.
Of course, that's a pretty common pattern - could-be-good works getting diluted to ensure they won't drive away any viewers. I wouldn't be surprised if it boils down to a good idea plus executive meddling. The later seasons also seem to have a really bad case of Flanderization, where writing novel jokes got hard so "hah, nerdy talk!" came to the fore.
When I was younger, I tended to have roughly equal sympathies for everyone, regardless of wealth, race, career, etc. As I get older, I think I've become a bit more hardened and "preferential". I'm definitely a lot less sympathetic to people who I perceive as prejudiced - and I tend to see a lot of prejudice against tech folks - not related to the current sentiments, but the more common antisocial behavior towards "geeks", "nerds" and the like that's always existed.
To me, it's the same as one who is overtly racist. Why would I want to help a jerk like that? Except when it comes to prejudice amongst "geeks" and "nerds", it is much more prevalent than overt racism.
Of course, it's not as black and white as I put it, but I can understand if others in the tech industry are leaning that way. I've seen first hand wealthy tech people do a lot of good for people around them, but they're still treated poorly by them because "nerds" and "geeks".
In fact, I think it's had a much bigger impact on me observing this over and over again than it has on the people involved.
While the status quo may not be good, I prefer it to the world before the Internet giants. At least people have alternatives to joining a law firm or the finance industry.
(Written by someone who does not live in SV, does not work for any of these SW giants, and does not make a lot of money).
The econ major banker/consultants are now CS majors and PMs.
Those with integrity behave with integrity. This is the biggest betrayal of the people by those who spent the first 10-20 years incessantly posturing about freedom and liberty, at least the bankers are not hypocrites.
Last I checked FSF and some very powerful nerds who aren't assholes still exist.
I believe you have the order reversed. It's not that people behave like this when they get power, but that behavior like this increases the likelihood of gaining power, causing those with these behaviors rise to power disproportionately.
Examples: Trump, SV Bros
I'm not sure I understand. The whole article is just describing literally anyone in any industry.
What people can't seem to grasp is that tech in SF/SV simply created a massive insular culture that doesn't contribute to the culture that was previously there. It just took over ruthlessly. All previous artistic beauty that was in SF is just gone now and replaced with tech kids that get paid a ton and would rather spend it on cryptocurrencies and music festivals than participating in the city's artistic scene.
Its no wonder at all why people don't like tech people. Its not because they get paid a ton. Its just because they get paid a ton and have no care for anything that was previously there.
But I mean, its a tiny city and the city's building regulations don't do much in the way in helping with gentrification at all. Not sure what else could have possibly happened.
Teachers. Surgeons. Physiotherapists. Soldiers. Artists. Grocers. Cleaners. Miners. Forestry. Farmers. Elder care. The people who drive your shuttle bus.
Most industries require contact with other humans, and implicate you in their happiness. In techland, we are already a step removed from our customers (because we create autonomous artifacts.) But beyond that, now we’re powered by overwhelming amounts of capital. And the whole point of that capital is to create vast power imbalances between you and the people you’re allegedly serving.
In a previous decade, computer programmers could have counted themselves as citizens. Connecting and empowering people. Maybe a lot us still are. But lately, a lot of what we’re doing is finding new ways to yank Jenga pieces out of society, in hopes that all the pieces will fall into our bosses’ laps.
I agree with the statement, but I'm not sure it squares with your list? Tech and banking aren't unique in offering the chance to sit alone in an office and turn early advantages into ludicrous excess.
Broadly, we're talking about jobs that have power-law payouts among their practitioners, require highly skilled (and hard to interchange) labor, and don't intrinsically punish jerks (meaning limited interaction with coworkers or customers). Not all of them make billions, but they get something exponential that encourages them to compete - fame or professional power or job security.
That's a lot of careers. Orchestral musicians fit, lawyers fit, surgeons fit in spades, artists and mathematicians and philosophers all fit.
Obviously tech and banking are not equivalent to those things - heart surgeons have never destroyed the economy. But I think it's a catastrophic mistake to try and understand why tech and banking cause these problems by acting like the professional demeanor is unique. That is at best a starting point, a way of acknowledging that if yanking pieces out of society is easy and rewarding it will happen. The question from there is "how do we stop that from happening?"
(I'm not sure how much we honestly disagree, I just think the distinction is important. That Jenga metaphor is fantastic.)
> Orchestral musicians fit
My friend who was in the Boston Pops disagrees - the pay was crap (he had to provide music lessons on the side to maintain a reasonable income), the pressure was humongous, and their off-hours practice to keep at the top of their game puts our own hobby programming efforts to shame. Like video games, all musicians want to perform in the big orchestras, creating a highly competitive supply glut.
I'm also fairly certain that most mathematicians and philosophers come nowhere near to our power distribution curve.
That leaves us in the company of bankers, lawyers, and surgeons. Not the highest prestige group of people to exist alongside. Especially since, while well off, we're making nowhere near their "Fuck You" levels of money.
I don't just mean "the pay distribution is exponential". I mean any system where the rewards of the work (as judged by the people doing it) accrue primarily to a small fraction of the workers. This isn't about the size of the payout, it's about a system where competition and potentially ruthlessness within the labor force have substantial benefits. (Contrasted with careers like factory labor where getting 'ahead' of coworkers doesn't have much to offer.)
So for orchestras, "all musicians want to perform in the big orchestras, creating a highly competitive supply glut" aligns nicely with what I mean, even if that supply keeps salaries down. Most talented musicians don't make it into a career, most career musicians teach in schools or play weddings or otherwise don't make it to the Pops. Video game design is another power-law return - most people don't get to lead teams, most team leads don't make hit games. The same for mathematicians - the payouts are largely status, tenure, and prestigious institutions, but they're still exponentially distributed.
A decent definition would be any profession where the stereotypical example and the prototypical example are completely out of sync. The prototypical truck driver is basically what we imagine them to be. The prototypical software engineer works on an inventory system for a non-tech company someplace outside the Valley, and has nothing much in common with the 'techie' stereotype.
The (completely unintended) effect of this is that the existing community gets poorer, not richer, when rich people move in.
Although surgeons aren’t really in the power-law game; at best they can do a handful of surgeries a week. But yes I chose that example specifically because many of them are tempermentally detached from people, get paid a lot, and are often workaholics. But we don’t see people revolting against surgeons.
So power-law for surgeons would be doing the hardest surgeries in the highest-stakes fields, heading up a clinic, ending up rich and famous. A great brain surgeon doesn't save vastly more lives than an average one, but people like Ben Carson and Sanjay Gupta get exponentially more fame and status.
I think we agree though - it's a great example of a field with similar social dynamics to programming, and a very different societal role.
Most do, but many don't. Including some that were considered prestigious jobs (Wall Street, law firms, etc). A number of these jobs involved really boring grunt work with minimal contact with others.
The fact that you think that really underscores how much of a bubble you must live in. No, that's not any industry. Indeed, the only people who live like that in my mid-sized town are college students. College is cool, but it's kind of a half-way house for real-life, not something to be extended indefinitely like the tech firms do.
And isolating yourself from your fellow citizens in this way is a particularly bad idea when you're creating products that have outsized influence on our free time, relationships, health, and elections.
If you travel to cities which are known for specific things, you'll often find these culture pits. SF is just a really special case. Its just the size of the city that exacerbates it so much there. Its tiny. Theres no room for growth. Anyone not in tech got pushed out. And now you have a culture silo.
I specifically moved away from San Francisco to Toronto to avoid this very problem. I'm still in tech. Theres no shame about it here at all. Hell, I get excited if I meet someone also in tech now. The city is so big and has so much space to sprawl and have startups anywhere that tech simply doesn't define anything here at all.
It doesn't have to do with the industry entirely. The tiny city is the problem IMO.
What "artist beauty" are you talking about?
Some of the areas that "tech kids" took over were basically slums (like around the Tenderloin), or (much more frequently) industrial eyesores in SOMA. None of these had the least "artistic beauty" about them that I could discern.
Now opposite the rows of shuttered businesses around the Tenderloin and warehouses of SOMA there are some nice, new, open businesses, with employees that spend money on other local businesses, helping to revitalize the area.
Speaking of "artistc beauty", have you looked in to the lobbies of some of the office buildings on Market St around the Civic Center BART? Some of those have truly impressive, beautiful, and creative art displays inside. Some artists were hired to create those. Money that would not have been spent and artists who would not have been hired had the "tech kids" not come around.
Sometimes I wonder what bizarro world other people are living in. Every city in America has public spaces which can be reserved - playing fields, gazebos, park areas, picnic spaces, museums, art spaces. Only because it was tech workers in SF does anyone suddenly pretend like first-come first-served laissez faire is the only acceptable use of shared resources.
The cluelessness is in the aggressive assertion of their "rights" and their complete failure to listen to what the local kids were saying. Hell, they couldn't even be bothered to play a pickup game with them.
The frightened / annoyed looks of the two Dropboxers when they realized they were on video adds to the hilarity. I was pretty sure they wanted to be cops asserting some bogus right not to be filmed in a public space at that moment.
That would've been the emotionally intelligent thing to do.
You can’t fault the Dropbox people there for making a reservation and expecting that it would be valid. They’re a bit clueless in how they respond, though, not realizing that those rules are clashing with the unofficial social dynamics happening there.
(Semi-related : That’s why we might feel that banks are assholes for foreclosing houses that belong to deployed soldiers. Legally they can do it, but it sounds like it’s the shittiest application of the law.)
If our neighborhood court suddenly had to be reserved, it would be a major disruption to norms established for generations. Neighborhood kids, who knew nothing about local government and how to work with it, would have suddenly felt pushed out. Worse, assuming they observed the reservation made by the “outsiders”, they would have been left with nothing to do except wander the streets. That’s often the scenario courts were built to prevent.
I understand that leagues need to schedule ahead. I also understand that local governments need supplemental income to maintain neighborhood facilities like basketball courts and soccer pitches. But, neighborhood kids need open time during after-school hours and weekends to meet with other kids and play without the formality of a reservation process. The Dropboxers in the video would have been a lot smarter if they explained to the locals about the reservation and offered to have a big game “subbing in” as needed.
What would be truly interesting is how the Dropboxers handled the situation afterward. Did they get local authorities involved? Did they come back the next week, without a permit, and blend in the way the guy from the locals suggested? The answer would be a good measure of their Social IQ and value systems.
"As a kid, the neighborhood basketball court had norms for use that developed over generations. If you wanted to play and a game was in progress, you’d call out, “Got next!” (If someone else on the sidelines had already called it, they’d let you know and you’d wait your turn.) When your turn came, the winning team stayed on the court and you went onto it with your team, picking up players from the sideline as needed. In this way, people from the outside still had their chance to play, but they integrated into the system. (They were probably made better players as well since they had to play against a wide-array of competition.) The system was true of any urban court I visited around the US."
describes the situation on the field when the Dropboxers arrived.
"If our neighborhood court suddenly had to be reserved, it would be a major disruption to norms established for generations. Neighborhood kids, who knew nothing about local government and how to work with it, would have suddenly felt pushed out. Worse, assuming they observed the reservation made by the “outsiders”, they would have been left with nothing to do except wander the streets. That’s often the scenario courts were built to prevent."
And that was the community's reported response.
Even if they had the permit, maybe they should just play pickup with the neighbourhood kids.
Sounds like a lot more fun than arguing for ten minutes and it would allow them to form bonds with the local community.
That they overlooked this obvious solution is an example of exactly the kind of cluelessness that silicon valley tech workers are bing criticized for.
As tech workers, we are good at creating little sandboxes for others to play in and we really like our rules. Tech workers are actually very conservative in a way despite the proclamations of liberating the masses.
A good opportunity was lost to make friends with he local kids. Sport is a great way of bringing people together.
Description below the video:
UPDATE: After public uproar, SF Rec & Park removed the policy that allowed this encounter to happen. The City - without posting the availability of the park rental on their public website - had been marketing the Tuesday and Thursday slots initially only through an app so that the demographic portrayed in the video - a tech league - was taking the space from neighborhood kids twice a week.
Using money to push others out is poor behavior, but so is using the tired 'how long you've lived in SF' (like one of the people mentioned in that video). Once again 'techie' hate is misguided and most of the scorn should be focused on city hall for poor policy.
IMHO $27 gives the the tech workers a lot less claim to that field than the entire lives that the kids have lived there, regardless of the piece of paper.
If they didn't want to play pickup, then the right thing to do is to go and play on the dropbox campus. It's not fair or logical, but it's the right to do.
I'm sure with the billions of dollars the company has it can build it's workers their own football pitch.
If they didn't want to play pickup, then the right
thing to do is to go and play on the dropbox campus.
I agree, so it seems to bring things back full circle: just play pickup with the local kids, have a good time and make friends.
It's not fair, but it's right?
At this stage, what do those words even mean? It very much seems you have your desired outcome firmly in your mind, and are merely playing verbal gymnastics.
Why are we advocating for something that we are agreeing is unfair?
Just imagine the phrase being used for all manner of unfair acts that society at the time deemed to be "right".
It's unfair for the dropbox guys to lose $27 on the permit.
But it's also unfair to have your neighbourhood change too quickly for you to be able to adapt and continue living there.
What I'm saying is that there are moral categories to strive for beyond fairness.
IMHO, humans are too caught up on fairness. In a way nothing is 'fair'. Morality has to be situational, and trying to impose a top down moral framework is only a necessary evil.
We should strive to do the right thing in the moment.
If you want moral certainty, then you'll never get it. No one can give you that.
That's both a circular statement, and an ambiguous one. Both sides were doing the right thing at the moment.
The only party that was clearly in the wrong were the people who were renting out the space. The reason this whole thread exists is that there is not a consensus on what the "right" behavior should have been. Pretending there was one right way to go is adding to the disconnect and gap between the two parties.
Perhaps you're hung up on my using the 'right thing' in my earlier post. Hey, I'm speaking colloquially here as most of us are. I could have rewritten that using formal logic symbols perhaps, but the no one would read it.
The crux of my argument is that there was an opportunity to look beyond who had the 'right' to play on that field at that time.
And it's funny, I really was waiting for the cops to show up because one of the Dropboxers had called them. Their desire to avoid having any real interaction with these kids is so painfully obvious that it makes me embarrassed for them.
As far as your hypothetical, it's just that: hypothetical, as is your perception of my hypothetical biases. It's actually hilarious, because in the hypothetical my mind conjures up, I'm sure if we met in some real-life context you would end up calling me a nazi.
FWIW, when I was younger, I knew and hung around with people who are just like the Dropboxers, and was probably like them in many ways. I've gotten to know and work with a lot of different kinds of people since then, so now I would intuitively know a better way to handle this situation than these guys did. Step 1 is to recognize that they are valuable human beings and neighbors. That's where this exchange broke down, so no need to go on to subsequent steps till we get that part right.
They grew there, we flew there.
Localism isn't good either, but a bit of respect and give and take for people who, let's face it, will soon be pushed out of their neibourhoods to make way for tech workers, would be nice.
If that happened in a less high profile city the other party would be the one who was assigned blame. There are only so many soccer fields here if people started to ignore the permit system it would make it more unfair to the more disadvanged groups.
Also, the fact that we still often have to use "open source" as a euphemism for "free software" in these type of situations illustrates the point even further. Freedom or liberty does not matter to these companies. It's not even about money or greed to them as they often give away their software/services without charging. All they care about is establishing complete control and dominance of the market.
Not using "open source" doesn't mean what you are implying. There are a lot of considerations companies go through on selecting to work on OSS or not.
That said, the quoted example is confusing at best. Companies are made of people and people have biases. You never know what kind of bias or consideration the hiring manager had in mind. Normally, for me if someone makes a statement which I don't agree with - I do make an effort to ask "Why?". I don't simply walk off because someone has a different opinion. But maybe, that is my idea of getting hired - understanding what and why of things I might end up doing.
I've noticed that hammering "why" only seems to work at mid-sized companies -- in the case of a fortune 500, then the whys are usually significantly disconnected from what most employees are doing, unless you're talking to the board or senior management, in which case you are probably being paid to determine the why. In the case of a startup, everyone seems to be running around like chickens with their heads cut off frantically trying to determine the "why" but no one is really sure of what it is.
Apple is well known for not giving its users freedom. And their products are preferred by the majority.
But yah, Silicon Valley is becoming the next Wall Street, I can't count the number of MBA's at work anymore. I doubt things will get better with tech and cypto potentially getting bigger.
I see it not as a loss, but more like a change.
Also no-fault evicting is not a terrible travesty. It sucks, but usually there's compensation to help with moving expenses. If the land owners don't have the ability to do this, renters can hold them by the balls (preventing a sale) and it would drive rent prices through the roof to compensate for this.
While I agree that the execs are paid way too much, this isn't exclusive to tech. And if they're talking about your run of the mill software engineer (like me) then I disagree completely. There are multiple logical reasons why tech salaries are "high" (though really they're not that much higher than many other engineering disciplines' salaries). Another way to see it is that all other salaries are too low, but that's beside the point. As someone with tech skills, I can leave tomorrow and start my own business. If the salaries weren't high enough, I would either do that or work in a completely different career. Why would I do software if I could work an easier, less-stressful job for the same amount of money? And finally, let's face it, most people cannot write software and will never be able to write software no matter how many coding camps or classes they attend. Writing software isn't like making coffee, a process anyone can learn. So people who have never written software, and probably don't have the capacity to do so if they wanted to, complaining that run of the mill tech engineers like me are making too much money have no idea what they're talking about. I challenge them to learn tech, get into the industry, do real-world work, and then do that for 1/2 or 1/3 of your typical salary, if that's what they think the jobs are worth. Either that or shut up and stop being jealous, judgmental children.
Why are techies being shamed because they’ve worked hard and spent it on something they like?
This is why tech has a diversity problem. It’s not the inner culture. It’s the outer culture and the shame attached to it.
EDIT
I don’t own one of those skateboards/scooters but I do appreciate working in a culture where people similar to me finally feel comfortable to be themselves without judgement.
I feel that the people quoted in this article are a bit too manipulated by other’s opinions.
In the end you have to ask yourself: are you happy doing the work here? If not, then change. But if you yourself are happy and you leave because of the media’s opinion then you’re setting yourself up for a miserable life.
Cause the powers that used to be (newspapers, the established parties) are scared. More and more power is in the hands of the tech industry and it is reasonably popular (last numbers I read was that google had 88% approval, whereas the approval of congress compared disfavourably with AIDS). Tech was the wunderkind and underdog in the 90ies, mostly harmless and a producer of shiny toys.
Tech now has some amount of power, but because we are still outsiders we get stupid articles like that. My hope is that google figures out how to run an AI newspaper (so the articles can be made free) and use it to remove the rest of the power from the incumbents because they do too much damage to us.
I'm sure Google's working hard on it though!
Most poor people I know are only poor because of finance--title loans, student loans, rent-a-center, medical debt, credit cards, etc., and it's a race to the bottom for everyone since the banking system diminishes the value of cash faster than most people can accumulate it.
At least Google is providing some kind of benefit to mankind alongside their fuckery.
Think about what has changed instead of just dismissing an argument outright without addressing any of its points.
San Francisco’s poverty and squalor is already a concrete example of where this Wall St 2.0 mentality leads. Let’s work on escaping this path.
Far less people in SF would be homeless if the tech economy wasn’t so focused on pushing all its gains to the wealthy (and less so to an engineer class that enables them).