Exodus of Silicon Valley
breakingground.us
breakingground.us
I rarely see needles unless I get pho in the Tenderloin, which is the neighborhood that some people seem to think is the only one in the city. SF is the most beautiful city I’ve lived in by a mile.
My SO works at Twitter and was shocked to see journalists say they were permanently WFH. What Dorsey actually said was that if managers approve certain roles can stay remote, but most managers plan to bring teams back to the office, with 2-3 day WFH being the most popular option.
Rents went down downtown, because everything is closed. It’s a huge leap to assume that will stick and rents are still astronomical given everything is closed.
I can’t tell you the reason, but people are just obsessed with this “end of San Francisco” narrative despite a ton of hard evidence to the contrary. I studied CS after the dotcom and people were convinced all programming jobs were going abroad since programming can be done anywhere, instead Bay Area engineering comp quadrupled. Now instead of going to Mumbai it’s going to Denver or Montana, doubtful.
People saw companies like Reddit, Yahoo, and Twitter lay off all their remote workers. They saw Googlers in MTV get the most promotions. There is understands skepticism “this time is different.”
It’s funny how there are so many articles about how Silicon Valley is leaving the Bay Area but not a single one about how Wall Street is leaving New York. People just get hung up on “code monkey work can be done anywhere “ and ride the media wave. There’s been a tech bubble waiting to pop and an exodus from Bay Area for 10 years now, in the minds of journalists and the blogosphere. In the real world, not so much.
I think this depends on your personal definition of San Francisco. Toward the end of the last wave of tech (2017-2019 I estimate), a lot of the folks moving here to work were more interested in the income and prestige of working in a "cool SV company", along with the social-status effect of working in a "hip city" rather than actually doing interesting/hard work with interesting people. These folks can still brag about their prestigious employers and their fat salaries if they work remotely. These are the folks for whom the "end of San Francisco" is welcome, as they weren't particularly interested in the location anyway, and with a pandemic going on, there's no social status to be gained by living in a "hip city". For folks that are here for the weather and the intellectual, cultural, and racial diversity and prowess, I doubt the Valley and SF will be overshadowed any time soon. I don't really hard hard numbers for this though, so I could just be full of sh--.
A colleague moved to an office in boulder. Everyone there is senior, and not leaving. No space to get promoted. All the big stuff that could get them promoted is already taken up.
A different friend moved from a satellite office, and has now been promoted twice.
As for San Francisco, some would argue that the "end of San Francisco" already occurred because of the tech industry. People are obsessed with the idea that tech will leave town because they preferred the way it was before.
The Freeway revolts, yes. They are exoterically held up today as an example of early environmentalism and even anti-racism, but when I started learning about the history, the groups responsible, and the demographic changes that were happening at the time a very different esoteric picture emerged.
Check out the cover story of the 1954 edition of "The Negro Traveler's Green Book" (pages 11–18, inclusive) about how San Francisco is "fast becoming the focal point of the Negros' future" despite "being squeezed into two areas of San Francisco today":
https://digitalcollections.nypl.org/items/3c85ba30-9374-0132...
Then realize that one of those two areas (Western Addition / Fillmore area) was connected to the Central Freeway by the former Turk / Golden Gate ramps and that that's when the fervor against the Western Freeway started in earnest.
And now so much for that formerly-bright future: https://www.forbes.com/sites/priceonomics/2016/05/11/the-afr...
I'm sure it's totally coincidental that the conversion of the north-of-Market segment of the Central Freeway into Octavia Blvd kept the Oak/Fell connection but blocked the Turk/GGate connection entirely.
Just imagine what today's SF could be like if every new piece of architecture wasn't "hostile architecture". The pre-1956 appearance of Civic Center Plaza might be an indication: https://i.redd.it/u30i14rbd3e51.jpg
edit: I forgot to mention that Lincoln High is in a neighborhood that explicitly banned sale to non-whites via redlining and racial deed covenants:
https://default.sfplanning.org/Preservation/sunset_survey/Ad...
"In San Francisco, many of the largest private builders of the 1920s to 1950s—such as Baldwin & Howell Henry Doelger, Standard Building Company, and Metropolitan Life Insurance Company (Parkmerced)—included racial covenants or discriminatory practices prohibiting non-Caucasians from purchasing and/or renting properties, particularly in the western and southwestern area of San Francisco. It is interesting to note, however, that Sunset District builders typically did not adopt racially restrictive deeds until the late 1930s."
The Western Freeway, of course, would have connected these neighborhoods quickly up to all the others. As to why the Sunset District didn't adopt racial covenants until the 1930s, I wager it might have something to do with most of it not existing yet :)
This is what the Sunset Ave area looked like in 1938, for example: http://www.davidrumsey.com/luna/servlet/s/e0zozf
A black swan pandemic highlighting the inadequacy and fragility of our public health systems will do that.
Like the Web 1.0 era, the Web 2.0 era has seen some pretty durable successes. Transactions over the medium are here to stay, they aren't "weird" any more. Your portal to technological offerings is not a "PC" any more, it is an increasingly obviously mislabeled "phone." Margins on communication "services" have been commoditized away and seem unlikely to ever return.
I'm looking forward to the next thing, what ever it happens to be. The most fun is always the first third of a wave. The swell, the hint of powerful forces just under the surface waiting to be tapped, the anticipation of successfully getting enough ahead to start the adrenaline fueled ride.
Never a dull moment in a place like this.
Lots of great minds have been focused purely on software but perhaps the shift back to hardware / physical things is starting.
A lot of advances in SV in the last decade, many of which were derided until recently, have helped us survive the pandemic - video communication (Zoom/Skype/Meet), entertainment (Netflix/HBOMax/Prime), grocery and food delivery (Instacart/PrimeNow/DoorDash/GrubHub), online shopping, Cloud and remote work tools (Office365/AWS/G-Suite and tons of Cloud/SaaS startups) etc.
I am thankful for that innovation!
PG's thesis was building a new Silicon Valley requires a critical mass of nerds and investors in one physical location.
Even with the rise of remote work, I think this still holds true.
Everyone can move to random places around the US, but ultimately, I think they will feel lonely because they're not surrounded by other like-minded nerds.
No magnitude of Zoom meetings can simulate the feeling of being physically surrounded by others like yourself.
With no clear alternative for physical location, I think everyone will come back after shutdowns end.
The internet has now reached a stage where location matters less than ever. It is no longer necessary to amass engineers in one physical location. I think a lot of us would be more creative(albeit less focused and productive) if we were living on a piece of land with the time and extra money needed to play with the things we are good at.
(*) The valley, not SF. The line is blurry but they are not the same.
Nowhere has that.
I have spent a ton of time in Asia and feel I have a better then average understanding culturally than most Americans (at least that is what what my friends from their tell me, but who knows!) Failure in Asia a source of great shame. Here if you fail the VC ask you "So did you learn anything...good, here is some more money for your next thing." I think that a key difference is the view that failure is a lesson that helps you do better for the next time and not a reason to be ashamed.
This was June, a couple of months into the Covid19 lockdown.
For 3/4 of the rent I was paying in Mountain View, we bought an big, beautiful home a few miles outside of Olympia, Washington on five acres of woods, where we enjoy stable, high speed Internet, privacy but also effectively more proximity to most things than we had in the bay area, where driving to Costco could take 30 minutes. Now we can get to anything we want in down time Olympia in 11 minutes, even though it's further away.
Yes, I took a pretty steep pay cut, but it's been largely offset by no state income taxes, lower monthly living payments, cheaper food, cheaper electricity, etc etc. Oh, and I'm finally actually building equity in a property that would easily go more than $20M in the bay area.
In the end, it was an easy decision.
To contrast that, I have been wanting to move to San Francisco since a little kid and can't and most likely won't make that possibility. I am greatly excited for people like you, who clearly don't care where they live and care about crap like family values and property, to leave so this place so it can become liveable again.
I also hit the tech lotto, have a nice house, etc. and am planing to leave. I worked my ass off for 20 years (with the last 10 being 50+ hour weeks, 150K+ miles per year travel, 2 weeks a month not with my family) to have the opportunity to play in that lotto. Does that make me someone to hate?
But please do tell me rich person that I should smile and be happy.
I'm probably not smarter than you. I probably didn't work harder than you. I probably didn't make better decisions than you.
I fully admit to and embrace the fact that most of my blessed life has come as a matter of fortune and good luck.
It appears people just don't pay attention and need it showed to them which is pointless on my end because you are just going to downvote it
I am not telling you to smile and be happy. I was just trying to understand your thoughts in your comment. At one point in my life my wife and I had our cars repossessed and were a month from being on the street. I had a job for 9 months where I drove 300 miles a day to get to because we lived so far away (with family) and it was the job I could get that paid the bills for my family. We all do what we have to do. The world is not fair.
Those people aren't in my life anymore because of that. These people succeeded in life without trying and is unacceptable for companies to hire in a world with an abundance of skill.
Forget about passion. That has never mattered when people with not understanding of how software works gets a position in a software company. Plenty of people are passionate about tech, but also want to work in operations.
I feel lot of hate and frustration in your comments. If people got nice jobs, celebrate.be happy for them. No time to be a hater, love is the answer!
> Those people aren't in my life anymore because of that.
You ended your friendship because they got good jobs? Am I reading this correctly?
1) Look into transitional housing facilities or permanent supportive housing programs near you, so you can stop worrying about rent for a period of 6-12 months.
2) Find a reliable source of food that is free or very cheap
3) Dedicate 2 days a week to learning and further development of your front-end dev skills
4) Dedicate the remaining days of the week to finding and completing contract work on Upwork.com. Start out by offering your services for a very small fee. The objective at the beginning is to just get good reviews (if you do a good job, people will come back and give you more work, but that's just a bonus). Once you have a few solid reviews under your belt, winning larger contracts will get easier.
5) Stop trying to flip things or doing anything else that doesn't reliably pay above $15/hr.
Sure, it did.
> ... don't care where they live ...
We loved the bay area when we arrived in 2009, and we still do. I spent the first 23 years of my life in Southern California, and while I'm not personally a fan of socal, I think the state of California is one of the most amazing, remarkable places in the world.
> don't ... care about crap like family values and property ...
I'm not sure what you mean? When you say 'family values', can you be more specific?
GP very clearly does care about where they live; it's just that that location, the result of 'crap like family values and property', is different to where you want to live.
That's OK!
We each care about where we live, and we each have different preferences: that's OK.
>San Francisco had four times as many deaths from overdose this year as it did from the COVID-19 virus
San Francisco also has one of the lowest death rates and counts of COVID in the entire US for big cities. I’d say comments like these are also disingenuous to paint a picture of crazy peril. Overdoses are bad but the fearmongering is ridiculous.
And never could have gone back. After getting off the land-price escalator, there was soon nothing I could hope to buy at anything like what I sold for.
Anyway I never wanted to. I raised a family here on 80 acres of land in a new 2300 sq ft house I built in a cornfield, 15 minutes from a university town. Boys grew up hiking, biking, doing projects in the shop. Taking lessons from PhDs and doctors. Metalworking classes from Amish blacksmiths. Music lessons from well known performers and teachers.
There's a whole world of interesting places and landscapes out there. Plenty of towns large enough to support whatever interests and entertainments you want. And all at a fraction of the cost, fiscal and emotional.
Most people move to SV/SF in search of fortune. Sometimes they stay even after they found it.
[1] I just checked again, it's now $3,000-$7,000
>San Francisco had four times as many deaths from overdose this year as it did from the COVID-19 virus.
While the quote you cited sounds impactful, I don't understand the point of comparing those two numbers nor what inferences I should draw from it or how it makes this narrative more true than another. In the end, the piece just feels vacuous. It feels like a cheap imitation of some of PG's writings.
My hypothesis is that many markets eventually return to normal, but SF strikes me as one that may never be what it once was. The veneer of the place was already cracking for those that lived there or visited, and now it’s cracked for employers. Why stay and limit yourself to SF when you can source talent from everywhere, knowing that a partially or entirely distributed model can work? I can’t imagine real estate values ever return to their prior state in SF. It’s going to be painful for those that own there, but could be some strange sort of renaissance for the city.
The history of SF is literally that it never reverts exactly to any of its previous incarnations. After the gold rush, it didn't return to being a sleepy fishing village, or whatever it was, after the 1906 earthquake, it didn't rebuild exactly as before, nor did it after the 1989 earthquake (where the rebuild only ended a few years ago).
When you say "what it once was", are you referring to the Haight/Ashbury scene of the Summer of Love? The Church of Satan at its Heyday? The gay scene before the arrival of AIDS? SF before Web 1.0? SF before Web 2.0? SF DURING Web 2.0?
I don't doubt that SF will be different a few years from now. It's not a given to me that it will be worse. And in fact, maybe letting some of the excess money evaporate and have some of the more opportunistic fortune hunters move on will create breathing space that will help SF hit its next groove.
Wow.
(My friend works in addictions here in BC, Canada)
Horrible numbers eithier way, but there has NOT 4x the number of deaths from drug overdose in the US compared to COVID-19.
Switzerland, for instance, is on track for 3000+ COVID-19 deaths and is unlikely to exceed 150 overdose deaths.
I've lived here since 1996. I've seen the ebbs and flows of traffic/vacancy rates. There was an exodus in 2001 and another one in 2008. But the people always come back.
In other words, every decade the same article, over and over. Yawn.
(Definitely there was a change in the late 90s when people came for the money rather than the sheer technical fun, but as that same impetus had produced SF in the first place (god rush of '49) it was hard to complain, even if it did change the culture for the worse. Sadly those people didn't all flee with the dot com crash nor the 2008 crisis. Well, we can't have everything.)
I wonder if the author intends to lead the charge, or if they might be staying? :)
In an alternative reality…
Really happy with my new place!
The first place I found, what a nightmare. I almost committed to buying that house until I remembered to check the high-speed internet situation. Since Skylink is not available yet and the previous owner did not have high-speed Internet, I called the local cable company. All they could tell me is that possibly there might be? There never has been service there, and they can’t guarantee that there will be.
Phone company had 10 Mbps ADSL.
Not to worry, I backed out in time. Working from home only works when you can work from home.
Something now told me to rent instead. The house I found had 250 Mbps cable. This I confirmed with the previous renter. I’m going to put it to good use.
We are in a pandemic and now I’ll be having to entertain myself. It’s winter, I’m new (again) in town, and the pandemic is keeping my from being more social. I guess there’s always Scruff from a safe social (digital) distance.
I also consider the extra physical distance. This is not San Francisco. I love the idea of my more distant, comfortable life outside of California, but living in denser cities is much better for the environment. My greenhouse gas emissions footprint has grown significantly; especially around travel.
I still drive an EV, that helps with my conscience. Maybe all logistics and shipping providers servicing my new home will do so too? Lots of new delivery truck EVs available now. Of course none are good as walking.
I’m now a bit more dependent upon UPS/FedEx/Amazon for shopping online. The new address doesn’t have Amazon Fresh or Instacart available; and Prime Now is only available one zip code over. Every shipment takes two days.... I can make it work - but to do so, I had to get reacquainted with retail shopping.
Trader Joe’s has one location 15 miles away, must go plug in now for tomorrow. I’ve got 100 miles of range; but it’s 30 degrees outside this week for the high (and we just got through a wicked snowstorm.) My cars’ range may take a hit.
It is frustrating whenever I can’t get businesses to free up chargers blocked by cars. But what about snow?
Last week the charger was blocked by a snow bank 8’ tall on the side of the parking lot with the charger. Seriously, I can’t be the only one in this town who needs to use the EVSE!
I moved to SF happy I’d never have to drive 30 miles to get errands done again. In San Francisco, I could just walk; or otherwise it’d be less than 6 miles round trip.
I shop at night after dinner. This town is not taking COVID-19 seriously. Lackluster mask usage, no social distancing. I am hoping that it won’t be as busy. I’ve got one comorbidity that I don’t want to test the limits of. I heard the regional hospital is out of ICU beds; but the bars are pretty full by the University.
It’s like science doesn’t exist. People here have a common distrust of government. It makes sense that in a low tax state, the local government public health department is regarded with the same esteem as the other underfunded and underperforming city departments.
On second thought, I think San Francisco doesn’t seem so bad after all. Eh who needs money, we can’t take it with us when we go.
To each their own.
Why don't we just occupy all the cafes in Chamonix, or take over Puerto Cabezas, or the seediest neighborhood in Montevideo? And then we can change it up every few years.