San Francisco Spent a Decade Being Rich, Important, and Hating Itself
buzzfeednews.com
buzzfeednews.com
What do I mean by fucked up? I mean that the cost of living and housing has become so high that the broad cross section of people you need to produce a vibrant city (e.g. bankers, politicians, techies, policemen, teachers, fireman, waiters, paramedics, artists, etc.) can no longer all afford to live there, and this is a real, serious problem. Cities have always had rich areas and poor areas, but as inequality has grown over the past few decades, with wealth flowing out of rural areas and into urban ones (especially "supercities" like SF, NYC, Seattle, etc.), it means that these cities are having less and less room for anyone but the rich.
SF is just the most acute example because (a) the concentrated tech boom here has created enormous amounts of wealth and (b) the geography here more tightly constrains sprawl compared to most other cities. However, the same exact thing is happening in lots of other places. E.g. there used to be "good parts" and "bad parts" (Hell's Kitchen, Alphabet City) of Manhattan, but there are almost no cheap places in Manhattan anymore. Similarly, Austin TX was a "slacker's paradise" 30 years ago, now pretty much all central housing is looking at $300-400k or more just for lot value of a single family home.
I'm not sure what the answer is, but I think it's worth talking about how something feels broken in our cities, and what viable solutions would be, instead of just focusing on the "anti-anti-tech-bro" angle.
Can you explain why you thought this comment required a throwaway? I have seen many people express similar sentiments without anonymity, and can't think you anything in it that would get someone not hired, for example.
The irony is that these people don't have a strong technical role -- they are mostly founders and executives. It's the people working under them with less influence who are doing all the hands-on tech work.
Like it or not, male technologists are privileged beneficiaries of SF's broken social order. They might not be individually responsible for what's broken, but if there is "really such a tragedy" in the city, it is certainly not the fact that some guys are being stereotyped and mocked on Twitter.
San Francisco is bounded on all sides from expanding, so it's partially at the mercy of its suburbs when it comes to things like housing. Has there ever been a movement to consolidate the Bay Area like how Nashville consolidated 14(?) counties with the city itself?
What was the fucking point of that? Were the culture and values of Sunnyvale really that antithetical to those of Cupertino?
It would be really nice if one of these parking lot hamlets actually did act differently and zone themselves to be super dense but when I left councilors were still mostly arguing about public WiFi and paying millions to water those plants in the road dividers all summer long.
...on the border of Cupertino and Sunnyvale. The sales tax was different depending on which side of Homestead
San Mateo county also has a few cities with their own sales tax: https://www.salestaxhandbook.com/california/rates/san-mateo-...
1. proximity to other tech companies (good for employees switching jobs) 2. proximity to venture capital (good for entrepreneurs) 3. general culture of tech work 4. general culture, food, weather?
4 seems to pale in comparison to the cost and quality of life issues I have read about (super expensive, dirty, bad transport).
2 seems plausible. But are in-person meetings so necessary and hard to set up outside the area (also, how many people there just want to be employees somewhere and don’t care about VCs?).
3 is pretty nebulous. And again I wouldn’t expect this to be a big factor for people who mostly just want to work somewhere and not build their own thing.
I’m left with 1. Is that it?
It just seems weird that company location appears optimized for founders (we should go where the action and investment money and talent is!) and not the enormous mass of people who would just be clocking into their jobs and making those companies run. I have no data on this, but it looks like those masses of lower-level employees might prefer to live somewhere more “sensible”.
It looks like such an...inefficiency.
The Bay Area is expensive. But, if you have a tech job, the pay balances out easily. Sometimes excessively.
There is tons of interesting tech work in the Bay. Not just pay the bills and go home work. But, work that is fascinating in itself. If you can’t find fascinating work here, maybe your interest in tech is limited to the paycheck. That’s totally respectable. But, you’d probably be happier some place more family friendly, or with mountains, or with a culture less focused on work -even if your bank account won’t grow as fast.
The arts culture has fallen off recently as rents have risen and the drug/homeless epidemic has really picked up in the past two years. But, it’s SF is still a beautiful city full of wonderful things. And, a lot of (mostly dog) poop.
Have you heard about that sinking luxury condo skyscraper in S.F.? The terrain is formable in San Francisco, the geographic location treacherous. San Francisco's urban plan does not work well enough to fit nearly a million people. NYC has less than half the square mile footage, yet double the population. NYC works primarily better mainly because of location and geography. "...It turns out that Manhattan has a bedrock unusually suited to the construction of very tall buildings, in many cases just a few meters below the surface."
https://observer.com/2012/01/uncanny-valley-the-real-reason-...
This is so spot-on it literally pains me
In SF, I used to think the answer was to build more housing, lots more. But, after hearing from sooooo many NIMBYs and so much extreme angst against any kind of growth, I've come to realize that SF doesn't deserve tech companies or any companies for that matter. It's time to accept what the locals want and start acting like it. Remove the incentives for companies in SF and start applying disentives.
Tech needs a new home, a new city, perhaps one that hasn't been built yet. Perhaps one where innovation will be welcomed instead of stifled. One, where inclusiveness is all encompassing (and applies to housing) and not just a catchphrase used to be politically correct. One that isn't covered in poop. A city where enough housing supply can be built for everyone.
Do you mean the tax break for companies in the mid-market area, aka the Twitter tax break? There's definitely some tech around there, but I think SoMa has a lot more. The big ones, Google, Facebook, and Salesforce, aren't there.
I vote Denver, Seattle, or Pittsburgh.
This article nicely represents the narccisistic hubris of the ivory tower leftist viewpoint, and in-group social behavior at large. Tech Bros are the nerds that were (and still are, despite shallow appropriations of nerd culture in the mainstream) cast off from "normal" society. This has been the norm in the U.S. for decades. It's not cool to be smart and have geeky interests.
Now tech is hot and the in-group is having trouble competing with people for whom this wasn't just a job or a class, or even a hobby, it was an escape. So they go after their characters to justify quotas and the now deliberate social stigma they were previously oblivious to enforcing. Tech Bros is a dirty class stereotype which totally ignores the passion and skill of the people who are revolutionizing society, for better or worse. And at the end of the day it's just the weird nerd kids being bullied as always.
There's an obscure blog by a guy who talks about the three or so stages of popular subcultures, and how one of the three groups eventualy ruin everything, linked in the comments below which is related.
I'd say, in the early days, programmers were more geeky because computers were newer, rarer, and much harder to use. Most kids didn't grow up with computers in their homes. If they did, the computer was a big, ugly, unfriendly beige box, not a sleek sliver of glass and aluminum. When you booted it up, you were greeted by a blinking monochromatic command prompt, not an welcoming graphical interface. You had to learn cryptic, non-intuitive commands to operate it. Only a certain type of person would have the interest, focus, and abundance of free time to master it.
Nowadays, kids are raised on computers. Software engineering is widely seen as a viable career path. The act of programming hasn't changed much, but we've removed some of the barriers to entry and made the career path accessible to a broader group of people.
Now computers are literally everywhere, and literally always before people's eyes. Also, there's the internet that connects them across the globe. Now anyone with a good idea and good business execution can start a billion-dollar business from home or garage, and reach global audience with little technical effort.
On top of it, there are oodles of money looking for return, and high-risk, high-return investment looks better than no investment to many. This has radically changed the balance. As an engineer, you can build a very valuable, far-reaching company. Even if it's not turning profit yet, you have relatively much easier time to have millions invested in it.
That's funny, because as member of the tech community myself, I can unequivocally state that if there is one group that can be defined by the narcissistic hubris of its most prominent and influential members, it's techies.
I mean, we're talking about people whose idea of "disruption" is bending and breaking all kinds of rules and laws. AirBnB, Uber, Theranos, Facebook, Google, you name it... they're all led by people who think they are better than others, know more than others.
THAT is the real reason there's a backlash against us.
Most of us in tech don't have any say in the direction of the industry. Many of the rank and file workers would actually prefer to live someplace cheaper like Seattle, but it's the leadership of the tech industry (VCs, execs, etc) that have been slow to geographically diversify the industry.
There's too much blaming of all techies for the actions of the people at the top of the tech hierarchy.
We would have a say in it if we, you know, unionized.
But last time I checked, most techies viewed unions with disdain.
Also, what technology do you think is enabling clean tech? We simulate everything on the back of a subset of the tech industry.
It's not cherry-picking at all. Look around you. The most powerful and influential actors in our industry are also the worst.
>> This ignores all of the dedication poured into open source
Please don't strawman. I am very clearly not saying that the entire industry is bad.
I think unlike you I know the past. I can see both it and the future. I don't like this future. All I see is you guys are building machines to exploit people.
To me the evictions dwarf every other concern. It's a result that's straightforwardly inhumane, and I don't think any reasonable person would disagree.
Personally, I'm inclined to blame NIMBY San Francisco homeowners for this, but of course they would blame me and other "tech bros" for moving here. In the meantime, those hardest hit, low-income renters, are a member of neither bickering party.
Policies which artificially constrain supply for no good reason? I’ll agree that’s inhumane.
It is. It is inhumane.
I agree with you that policies which artificially constrain the supply bear much of the blame, but an outcome can be inhumane in and of itself, even if it emerges from "supply and demand".
People getting thrown out of their homes because the value of their labor no longer covers the cost of their dwelling is bad.
If we want housing to be an investment, we have to acknowledge it's going to rise in value faster than inflation (otherwise it's a crap investment), which means it won't be affordable.
Conversely, if we want housing to be affordable, it cannot rise in value faster than inflation, which means it can't be a good investment.
As Charles Marohn says, it's not even a "problem", in that problems have solutions. It's a predicament.
That seems to be the problem at its core.
Also housing can't rise faster in value than inflation long term. It can for a while but eventually it'll reach a point where even with a 30 year loan you can't purchase it with any job in the area where the house is located.
So if housing is fundamentally unsuited for gaining wealth in the long term for anyone but the wealthy and if it's core function is to house people, then I don't see a need for housing cost to appreciate above inflation.
Sure demanding people to leave the place they are used to live in isn't the nicest thing to do. But it can be done in a reasonable way, e.g. with a plenty of warning ahead of time.
(Disclaimer: I was asked to leave a rented apartment twice, not in SF; both times I was told so just a month ahead of time.)
That isn't an argument.
Someone having to rent a smaller apartment in a less desirable neighborhood is not inhumane.
SF has far more housing demand than it has housing supply. The pie is a fixed size. Policy can pick and choose the winners this way or that way. Either way you have the same number of winners and same number of losers. All you're doing is arguing over who you think should win and who you think should lose. The net amount of "inhumanity" is the same.
Maybe in your preferred policy the people who were there first get to be the winners. Good for them, I guess. You picked one winner. But there's 5 losers who are denied access to economic opportunity because they didn't rent someone else's home 15 years ago. That's inhumane if you ask me.
SF is one of the most desirable places to live in the entire world. Not everyone gets to live there. There's no universe in which everyone gets to live there. If we lived in a fantasy Star Trek future with no money then even still not everyone who wants to live in SF would get to. The fact that not everyone can live in a highly desirable location is not inhumane. Someone living there and then later having to live somewhere else is not inhumane.
Remember that every current resident who isn't evicted means one person who wants to move in to the city isn't able to.
Of course if you don't like bustling city life, you may see it differently. I would recommended moving to suburbia it the countryside then.
Good. Maybe the US will have a third city then.
These are sons of the elite who used to mainline to investment banking on Wall Street, or maybe a MBB shop — they follow the money.
There are plenty of nerds coming here, and they make a bit more money if they snag a FAANG job, but VCs and bros make sure they don’t get too big a slice of the startup pie.
There's a million companies making millions or selling for hundreds of millions (or even 10s) who never make the headlines. They do weird obscure niche stuff that would take 20min to explain to an outsider.
And 99% of them are all run by normal hardworking nerds-from-high school type people who aren't pretentious or failed to grow out of University stereotypes of educated males, and yes males do a lot of dumb ignorant stuff in their late teens and early adulthood.
But the average entrepreneur isn't the 20 something prodigy the news fawns over, it's usually a 40+ guy whose been in the industry for a long time and found niches problem sets which they can specialize in and make a lot of money automates/dramatically improving how businesses are run in those markets.
Then there are the super nerds who work at Google and Tesla and Twitter, but mostly they are mid-teir nerds just happy making a living being able to work with other really-smart people. There isn't anything toxic about any of this. It's just highly curious people working on problems that interest them. And occasionally that involves pushing uncomfortable hard-changing solutions society isn't quite ready for - or nerds who weren't quite ready for society.
It's a learning process and SV will get better at interacting with the wider world. I hope too that the world starts treating SV (and the tech hubs around the world) with more respect.
Apple 25x'd over the last 10 years and is at all time highs. Microsoft is at all time highs. Tesla is at all time highs. Amazon, Netflix, Salesforce, Google, FB are close.
Is this what you’re referring too? “Geeks, MOPs, and Sociopaths”?
https://meaningness.com/geeks-mops-sociopaths
By this formulation, it’s hard to argue that “tech” as a subculture hasn’t been overrun by sociopaths. Just compare the tech heroes of yesteryear (thinking the 70s/80s) with those of today.
To some degree you may be correct, but tech is unique. It primarily falls into this category, however in recent times, probably as during the tech boom, the culture is also rightly seen as a strong career path. And the people who spend their lives coding out of pure passion make these things look extremely easy to outsiders - you can't deny that someone who spends 4-8 hours a day coding in their spare time since teenagehood isn't likely to outperform someone who just does this for a living. So there will be a particularly strong pressure to coopt the subculture - but my point is that tech is different, because it isn't a subculture, it's a passion that cannot be simply emulated because in the end code either works or it doesn't.
This. So much. I've been a nerd since middle school and have experienced a fair amount of bullying while growing up.
But the fact is, nothing has really changed between then and now. It has always been 'safe' to bully the nerds. No other group of people receives this level of public venomous screed. We shrug and accept it because we are used to it.
We as a group need to get better about advocating for our rights to live and work as humans just like everyone else and be more deliberate about pointing out the completely bizarre policy environment of California in general and San Francisco in particular that has led to this explosion of issues.
It’s because nerds are too busy following our interests to bother attacking back. Defending oneself in general doesn’t work: attacking back does. The maxim “Never defend, always attack” is a maxim for a reason.
The only real “solution” here is to attack back and bully the people who bullied you in the first place. And is that really a solution?
If as nerds, we defend ourselves, then we stay in the frame of the bully. If we attack back, we become bullying nerds.
Society needs scapegoats. For decades and decades, nerds have been safe to pick on. It’s not until you get an extremely aggressive nerd like Bill Gates that a member of the “nerd class” even begins to defend themselves. And aggressive nerds are rare and generally self-interested. Rather than attacking back for the “nerd class” as a whole, they attack companies competing with theirs.
What is the solution to this quandary? Everyone who’s read Girard knows we need scapegoats. If not nerds — oh wait, I mean “tech Bros” — then who else can we scapegoat as a society? The answer should obviously be Wall Street IMO, but that moment seems to have passed when the Occupy movement got culturally supplanted by in-group identity politics.
IMO in order to stop the bullying, we must become bullies ourselves which poses two questions:
* do we really wanna do that?
* and would it even work since Occupy failed so dramatically?
Furthermore, being scolded in Buzzfeed News now and then does not constitute bullying and is not actual persecution. The closest thing to actual violence against “nerds” (wrt the actual subject of TFA) were rocks thrown at tech company shuttle buses a few years ago in the Bay Area, which doesn’t seem to happen anymore. And those actions can be framed as relating to real issues such as tension between different economic classes and how localities change with economic development.
It’s ludicrous to claim that there’s such a thing as a “nerd class” and hold Bill Gates as an exemplar of one, when his time at Microsoft can be likewise framed as nerd exploitation- see everything about Microsoft’s monopolistic actions in the ‘90s impacting other “nerds”.
Unlike classes based upon religion, race, nationality, gender, or socioeconomic status, “nerds” are a tribe that don’t actually exist beyond the schoolyard. At least, it’s far more fuzzy, even compared to other identities such as “hacker”, the latter which is at least tied to specific technical professions and activities that exist in the real world.
Finally, if people are going to codify nerd identity, then we’re going to end up relitigating the tiresome “nerd culture is being appropriated” pop culture battles over comic book and sci-fi/fantasy movies and video games becoming mainstream, and that’s a very tedious can of worms.
Also, without codifying nerd identity how do you expect the bullying to end?
This is my junior year picture that is in the yearbook. https://i.imgur.com/qDmYOJV.png
High school wasn't great for me. But by 29 I knew people had it worse and I realized nobody wants to hang out with a perpetual victim. Do you think you shouldn't have to work to get laid?
Again, really curious how you are are being bullied. Are people pushing you into lockers? Or do you just equate bulling with not getting the respect you think you deserve?
I can't fathom what you tried to accomplish by looking up his age. No matter what number you find, you'd dismiss him with either "you're only N years old, too young to realize that..." or "by N I was old enough to understand that..."
[Emphasis added] Well, this is certainly true. It's worth thinking for a moment about why "tech bro" has become a pejorative phase. Perhaps it has something to do with the "tech", which, for the most part, is really just online-ad-tech, UI/UX optimization, and a couple other things. Non-technical people don't really understand what most of this stuff is that "tech bros" work on, even though it really does affect them. And so it seems reasonable that they are a little confused as to how the "tech bros" got so rich working on "tech", which, again, is allegedly going to make us all better off. At least that's what we were all told growing up.
To be frank I think the hubris comes more for the other side of this equation that you do, and I don't think it's a uniquely leftist viewpoint to be skeptical of all of this (as I am not a leftist). When I visit SF (which is probably a dozen times a year) I'll see plenty of new billboards and ads for new startups working on the "hottest new stuff". I'm a technical person and can actually grasp what they're working on. Some of it is great. But working people who can't afford to live there now don't get what any of this is, and they're right to be skeptical about it. Who cares how passionate you are about revolutionizing an algorithm to better serve adds on social media. Long term, that's probably going to hurt society. Not help it. And if criticism of this is now "bullying" then, well, I'm Biff Tannen.
Most of Silicon Valley isn't working on ad-tech (although a large chunk of it is). To dismiss everyone working in SV as working in optimizing ads doesn't make much sense.
There are other sectors of the economy completely wrecking the Environment (Energy, Global Warming), Global Economy (Finance, 2008 crisis) etc. While those sectors get their fair amount of attention, it seems like its cool to pick on those in tech now.
/shrug
Should we have a movie made about ad tech and social media and their deleterious effects on society? Just to make it even.
Most of Silicon Valley isn’t working on ad tech, yeah, I get it. But for crying out loud what the hell are they working on? Thats my point. How this is interpreted outside of tech circles is that “tech” is just a thing to make “tech” people more rich.
Edit: I’d actually like to know what percentage of SV is working on ad tech, which I consider useless for American society at best and dangerous at worst.
If you are being left behind, if you're smart enough to know that, certainly it's not going to make you feel any better to know more about what people are doing that you can't do.
I wonder if anyone has written about the strangeness of the world being taken over by social media, specifically juxtaposed with the general belief that the people who develop tech lack social skills. That seems like a deeper challenge to what people believe than just nerds getting rich.
Even if you're employee #10 the amount of equity you receive is, if you're lucky, maybe .20%, and drops exponentially from there.
Employees working at the big cos likely made much more depending on how long they held on to their RSUs than your average startup employee.
That's just one company.
Only one I can think of is Uber where there could’ve been that many employees with significant equity, but that is really a generational company. Thinking of the ones that reach peak value in the low billions.
AFAIK engineers were getting around 12K RSUs pre IPO, maybe 20K for senior ones, which at today’s valuation is not even close to a million.
Okay, so that requires the company to be sold for at least $1B, the employees collectively own 100% of the company, and the stock is evenly distributed. Given the investor's share and uneven distribution among employees, for there to be 1000 millionaires, the company would have to sell for at the very least $5B (probably much more). There are only a handful of companies that have sold at that level, certainly not common.
That would be roughly 100 a year. Y Combinator definitely funds more than a 100 startups a year, and it funds a small minority of all startups. Given that there were over 250 yet to IPO unicorns as of 2018 and Google alone made over 100 millionaires when it IPOed I think you’re off.
> Employees working at the big cos likely made much more depending on how long they held on to their RSUs than your average startup employee.
Most employee stock options are more akin to joining Stripe now than to joining a company that just left YC.
Again if you’re granted .2% as a very early employee you will make low millions if it does IPO for over $1B. The 100th employee at that company is not making anything close to that, especially the non-technical ones.
Working at a unicorn and receiving equity does not automatically mean your grant is anything close to 1M. It completely depends on when you joined, job title, seniority, and whether it’s a technical role or not.
I'd counter with something more radical for HN: that "Tech Bros" are the beneficiaries of a colossal intergenerational wealth transfer, constructed (consciously or unconsciously) to ensure that the vast majority of that wealth stays within the hands of relatively highly-educated, middle class white people. The myth-making that this "revenge of the nerds" fantasy is a subset of is in service of countering the obvious observations that would make such a wealth transfer untenable politically (in this case, hiding the fact that Tech Bros tend to come from privileged backgrounds). Another example is tech's dogmatic obsession with the notion of meritocracy, disguising the gatekept (and, otherwise, often arbitrary) nature of its job market and feeder pipelines in education and networking. With the general public's perception of the tech community cemented in this way, its members are free to wield influence and exoform their political, social, and cultural environment as they see fit.
This doesn't have to be a conspiracy to work; instead, what often happens is that investment entities headed and funded by elite, wealthy, often white Boomers look independently at pitches for companies that make widgets, if anything at all; that sell advertising and the profiles of the advertised-to; and that will never turn a profit, and ultimately determine, "I like these guys, they could turn this thing unicorn." They never will, of course - hopefully FAANG will buy you out for the technology you built to better sell ads - but in the meantime, dozens, hundreds, thousands of people will have access to incredible salaries and opportunities. Just as long as it's the "right" people.
I say this from the perspective of someone on the outside looking in, locked out of tech prosperity by circumstance, not lack of desire or aptitude: Tech Bro-dom bullies, ignores, and eventually leaves in the dust, professionally and economically, the people who are really on the margins.
It's not the soft-on-crime District Attorney who cleared out the prisons by releasing criminals back onto the street.
Not the soft-on-crime SFPD, who barely enforces the law because what's the point? The DA won't prosecute anyway.
Not the fact that the hippies grew up and moved to Marin, and marijuana and mushrooms have been replaced with fentanyl and methamphetamine.
It's certainly not the bustling drug market that operates in 24 hours a day without police interference in the Tenderloin around Hyde and Golden Gate, making the city a go-to destination for drug addicts from across the region.
It's not the hundreds of millions of dollars the city hands out each year to homelessness advocacy groups that have no accountability and deliver no results.
It's not the entrenched NIMBYs who fight housing development tooth and nail.
It's the tech bros.
It's easier to just move to a more conservative state or a more welcoming city with less taxes and less restrictions.
I appreciate those that choose to stay and fight, but sometimes it's better just to move on.
San Francisco has been getting worse.
From my first visit there in ~'93 to my last in ~'99 SF felt like it was going downhill quickly. I would not have gone back voluntarily after the first visit if not for job requirements.
I had an uncle who lived in Hayward who complained about both areas a lot.
After reading the news about needles, mental patients, shitting in the street etc... I dunno how it could get worse.
“And depending on which camp you found yourself in, there was one of two essays you’d brandish at dinner parties, yell about on Twitter, and pretend to have read that explained what the protests symbolized.
One was by the prolific writer Rebecca Solnit ...
It took until the following year for those inclined to the second point of view to find their voice, which came under the guise of a long post at TechCrunch by journalist Kim-Mai Cutler ... Point being: This decade has been such that, were you inclined to agree with Cutler or with Solnit, you could find plenty of evidence to support your point of view...
As the decade comes to a close, in many ways we’re no closer to a synthesis than when we started. Tech’s villains continue to be awful, both individually and collectively. And our housing production remains anemic.
And yet there are signs of hope.“
In fact the heroes of this story, if there are any, are the “tech bros,” big tech companies, and YIMBY’s who are making attempts to build more housing and be neighborly.