The San Francisco Safety Net | Hacker News Reader

The San Francisco Safety Net

futurealoof.com

84 pointsRauchg58 comments

Anyone who lived through 2002-2005 might beg to differ. It's a great town, tons of opportunity, but downturns do happen, and the folks at big companies did much better than the startup surfers. There's (honestly) a lot that's different this time. For one thing, many more companies are making actual money, and the non-coder costs (hardware, marketing blitzes) are much lower. But that doesn't mean winter won't come again.

Fortunately, when it does, you can probably get a rent decrease.

Do people even remember 1999-2001? Remember "NASDAQ at OVER FIVE THOUSAAAND!"

http://news.cnet.com/8301-10784_3-10466637-7.html

Real conversation at at an over-the-top office party:

Me: "This party feels like 1999 all over again." Partygoer: "Yeah, well, I was 10 then, so I wouldn't know."

It is adorable that the poster feels like unemployed developers line the streets of New York, Boston and other non-sf tech hubs. That's really what I love most about being in NYC - it's so easy to hire developers.

Come on. We get that SF is rightly proud of its startup culture. It was the first and still the biggest. But really. There are other places too with their own very distinct advantages over SF for whole swathes of startups. Lets finally get past this SF is the best mentality and just remember that it is hard enough running a startup - let's help each other succeed wherever we are.

Have you considered that it might be easy to hire developers because there are more unemployed developers there? Contrast that to SF, where it's really hard to hire developers.

I think he meant that sarcastically.

There's a lot less circle jerk in NYC et al.

I enjoyed this article, but it's worth pointing out that this safety net exists in any tech-heavy city. In fact, that safety net is one of the biggest advantages of cities to begin with (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Economies_of_agglomeration). Anyone who knows one of the web development stacks that are currently in vogue could have a job in Austin tomorrow (if tomorrow weren't Sunday). Has the author lived in any of the other cities he mentioned or asked people if the same phenomenon exists there?

I think that safety net exists for anyone who has a sufficient network. A lot of that can be dictated by geography - sure, but with so much work happening remotely, geography is more of a convenient determiner of job/career security rather than a absolute one.

Indeed,... I could probably have a job in Austin today (I suppose it is Sunday now) even though I live 90-m outside of town... but only because there are a bunch of folks who I have worked with and who'd be happy to hear I'm willing to work with them. It's almost all network, though it does help that I'm local-ish.

Exactly. Everyone I meet in SF seems convinced that: 1) San Francisco is an amazing, modern, international city that is a fantastic place to live; and 2) anyone would be foolish to not live in SF if they want to work in technology.

They are of course wrong on both accounts. San Francisco is a shitty big city, and it is basically the most expensive place to live in the country. I never thought I would say this, but New York is cheap compared to the rent prices in SF. And for what? Shitty un-walkable neighborhoods? Urine everywhere? And everyone has to drive a fucking car if you really want to be able to get around feasibly all the time.

Tech jobs are plentiful in any large city. However, there are plenty of large cities with working public transit systems, decently-well run city governments and non-homogenous cultures that aren't overrun with white/asian males with bad social skills. San Francisco is not one of them.

Quick question: Do you live here (SF)?

I of course completely agree with your disdain for people who subscribe to #2. And I'll be the first to admit that SF is hardly a "modern" city. But the rest is just bullshit.

SF is a fantastic place to live? Why? Because I live here and I love it. And that's really the only opinion in that regard that matters. I'm not claiming it's perfect. I doubt any place is.

It's expensive, sure, but NYC is certainly not cheap by comparison (have you looked at NYC rents in desirable neighborhoods? really, have you?). Regardless, my tech-startup salary more than makes up for the cost: >50% of my take-home pay goes right to my savings account, untouched. Even with eating out for pretty much every meal, and going out to bars and the like 4-5 days a week. I do have friends who work more conventional jobs at larger companies, not in tech, and while some of them don't have the cushion I have, they're able to pay the bills, have fun, and still save some amount of money.

I walk all over the place (today I walked a little over 6 miles). Anyone who believes that SF can't be walkable is lazy, unhealthily out of shape, or both. If you live out in the Sunset or Richmond, sure, you're going to need to take the bus to places on the other side of the city. When I'm feeling lazy, I take the bus. If I'm in a hurry, I take a taxi. You do realize that there are tons of taxis in NYC, right? Far more than in SF, right? And traffic is much worse there. The public transportation in NYC is far better than in SF, but cars still have their place in both cities.

I even own a car, but I find I drive it rarely more often than once a week, and sometimes I will go 3 weeks without taking it out of the garage. The majority of my SF-dwelling friends (over 75%) do not own cars. And no, not all (or even the majority) of my friends are programmers. (Logically, I should get rid of my car, but emotionally, I can't bring myself to do it.)

Honestly, I'm surprised and disappointed that you're being so negative here; the comments in your history seem pretty reasonable and educated (if a bit overly snarky at times). Sounds like you have some kind of axe to grind. SF is a much nicer, more livable city than you make it out to be. It may not be your cup of tea, but that's for you to decide for yourself, not for you to declare to others.

Regarding the article, I think it was pretty bad. It reads as pompous and entitled, and exhibits a lack of awareness of the outside world or any acknowledgement of perspective. But it's not reflective of SF (or its inhabitants) as a whole.

> It's expensive,

Even if we like it or not, the rent is ridiculously expensive.

(someone new to SF that will probably never get used to the peeing in the streets)

"someone new to SF that will probably never get used to the peeing in the streets"

just learn to relax, and forget that all those people are watching you. You'll get used to it.

I assume you live in SF/bay area because you seem unaware of what rent prices are in other large cities. Just take a look at two searches on craigslist:

Apartments in SF: http://sfbay.craigslist.org/sfc/apa/

Apartments in NYC: http://newyork.craigslist.org/aap/

Rent is clearly much higher in San Francisco. And for much, much les desirable neighborhoods. There are numerous neighborhoods in New York (the village, LES, Upper East or West Sides, Brooklyn Heights, Astoria, Green Point, LI City, Gramercy, a thousand more) where one could feasibly find a small but cheap studio or 1br for around 2k/month. This is close to 1k cheaper than the nicest neighborhoods in SF.

And all of this analysis ignores the fact that the nicest neighborhoods in NY are vastly better than SF. Better grocery stores. Nobody owns a car; you'd be a fool to spend money on one. Cleaner neighborhoods where people don't urinate in the street. A much larger selection of restaurants and shops.

I suspect San Francisco's residents are either aware of the many shortcomings, or have just never lived in a big city and thus assume that all big cities are expensive and lacking, when it's clearly not the case.

(I compare to NYC because I know that city best, but I'm confident Seattle, Boston, Austin, Denver, and many others are probably fine places to live as well, and at less than half the cost of SF.)

Written by someone who should really get out in the world more before drawing conclusions.

There are many, many more places outside SF with a high(er) standard of living and about zero risk of being unemployed as a developer. Most of theses places outside the US also have decent social security, public healthcare and other facilities in case you should fall through the cracks at some point. (No amount of ninja rockstar tech skills will protect you against getting burned out or other misfortunes.)

This ignorant exceptionalism is something I really hate about these SF/SV types. I guess it illustrates why so many stick around: not because it's so great, but out of uninformed fear.

A couple of places, please.

New York, London, Berlin, to name a few immediately.

Common pattern there is that they are all metropolises with industries requiring tech skills and that additionally have an emerging startup ecosystem.

What places outside the US pay salaries comparable to SF/SV salaries? I'm most familiar with London, where the average developer pay seems to be substantially below the average here.

This was about being gainfully employed and not risking unemployment, not about earning as much as possible.

You can make a well above average living as a developer in most places in the world, including London. It's ridiculous to claim that developer pay in London is "below average".

I didn't say it was "below average", I said it was "below the average [in SF/SV]". http://www.prospects.ac.uk/applications_developer_salary.htm claims the average salary for a senior developer is £50,000. I'm going to assume that that's the average across the U.K., so lets allow 33% more for being located in London (33% is what I see commonly thrown around for SF/SV vs. other large US city). If we assume a generous currency conversion rate of 1.6, that works out to ~107k USD. That's extremely low for a senior software developer in the Bay Area. And London isn't any cheaper than SF ...

Really? The developers I know in London earn 500 to 650 pounds per day, which after corporate tax and say 3 weeks of vacation is still at least $140K per year.

The majority of developers in London, and indeed in the rest of the UK, make far far far far less. On the plus side, 3 weeks of vacation? 5 is more common and 6 isn't unheard of.

I don't agree with any of the points - that you'll necessarily work on interesting stuff at a startup, that a big company means you'll not work on interesting stuff, or that startups form a safety net. Glass, Kinect, AWS and iOS devices are pretty interesting, and they all occurred inside of a large company.

In contrast, I remember a lot of dealing with server crashes, browser incompatibilities and other painful and boring stuff when I worked at startups. It also seems like many of my startup co-workers who were older than about age 35 seem to have disappeared off the face of the earth.

"Glass, Kinect, AWS and iOS are pretty interesting, and they all occurred inside of a large company."

If you are lucky enough to be working on those sorts of projects when they are still small, secret teams - you'd be an exception. 99% of people working at BigCorp are not on such projects.

If you've never read the epic Steve Yegge rant on Amazon, the true story of Amazon as a Platform is quite fascinating.

"That's what Bezos was up to with his edict, of course. He didn't (and doesn't) care even a tiny bit about the well-being of the teams, nor about what technologies they use, nor in fact any detail whatsoever about how they go about their business unless they happen to be screwing up. But Bezos realized long before the vast majority of Amazonians that Amazon needs to be a platform."

https://plus.google.com/112678702228711889851/posts/eVeouesv...

Kind of tired of this emo bullshit.

If you can learn something new, you can work in many growing sectors in many cities. New York and LA have many more opportunities to grow in many more fields than SF.

And if you're really adventurous, move to the mid-east or northern africa, where you can be very successful doing an arbitrage play between successful business models in first world countries and third world developing countries.

If you're bitching about SF and Austin, you're a bozo and are not anywhere close to being a true risk taker.

Clearly not written by a semiconductor process engineer in 1986 or a web designer in 2000 but the basic truth is that when the system is engaged its pretty effective at consuming available resources and putting them to work.

Aside from the article: I really liked the layout here. First time seeing a blog laid out more like an actual newspaper. Not sure if this is a trend or not, but I like it.

I... did not like it. On a 1024x600 screen, with no mouse, it took me quite a while to figure out how to scroll single-column by single-column.

I never did, so I resorted to reducing the text size so it would stop scrolling to where I could see the left half of the third column to where I could see the right half of the third column.

I disabled the stylesheet. Ahh, pure text.

Horizontal scrolling is always being experimented with and never actually works. CSS is just too feeble to make it useful without a metric ton of JavaScript in there do to the flow.

Works fine for me. Make it narrow enough and you get normal vertical scrolling, but I find this vastly preferable to the usual thing of wasting 1/2 my screen with whitespace.

I liked it too, but I don't think you really get a sense of the effect if 90% of the article is on the first page with only a few sentences on the second.

Depends on your resolution / window size. It was two full pages for me.

I just realized this. It fit perfectly on my screen (no scrolling/paging). I resized my window and realized how quickly that could get very, very annoying if you had a smaller resolution screen.

Didn't work too well for me on iPad. If I clicked an arrow, it would slide across but hide the left 100 pixels of content until I manually moved it in to view.

This was extremely painful for me to read at the default font size. This is the first time ever that I found the text so ridiculously small that I actually went to the css to look at the formatting.

  #entries p {font-size: 13px; ...

It didn't render at all for me until I turned off the stumbleupon toolbar.

I completely agree with the gist of this article - taking a risk right now as an engineer is in no way dangerous. Not saying it won't be 12 months or even 6 months from now and taking a risky job can set you up for a bad time later.

That being said, for those of us who are hiring engineers, this should be a great opportunity to bring in some of the folks who are more risk adverse because it is safer.

Also, I'm not sure what the author is talking about with regards to murder rates. Unless I am missing something this map [1] seems to suggest there have been 7 homicides in SF total this year, which is a pittance for a major city.

[1] http://www.crimemapping.com/map.aspx?ll=-13628867.85079543,4...

Yes strictly looking at the murders SF has seven, for comparison, my hometown (150k pop.) in the middle of nowhere has six murders. Chicago has five times more people than SF and I know without checking sources there's been more murders in Chicago, probably in January alone, than in San Francisco yet this year.

People who say San Francisco is unsafe are out of touch. It's no Pepperidge Farm, and it's not out of control. When was the last time, in San Francisco, someone saw a gang of sixteen year olds with loaded guns walking the streets a block away from school? That's daily life for some in Chicago.

1. San Francisco is a tech boom town. That means as a half-decent developer you're practically guaranteed a job. Until you're not. A lot of people learned this the hard way in the late 90s.

2. It's ironic that the author recognizes most startups fail, and suggests that startups in San Francisco have been particularly blessed with the ability to spend millions on "crazy" ideas more likely to fail, yet he doesn't at all question the sustainability of this. His assumption: investors will continue to pour money into startups indefinitely regardless of the returns, and the "talent" will continue to be a primary recipient of this investment regardless of the value it creates.

3. Personal savings is the only true safety net most people can rely on. Ironically, the author is "bad at saving money" which explains why he confuses a "currently hot job market" for a "safety net."

Personal savings is the only true safety net most people can rely on. Ironically, the author is "bad at saving money" which explains why he confuses a "currently hot job market" for a "safety net."

Indeed. The only way it'd be a true safety net is if one could guarantee that the job market here would remain hot in perpetuity. As much as I enjoy working in tech in SF, I'm fully prepared (emotionally and financially) for the possibility that that could change without much notice.

But I think the -- perhaps accidental -- message is that, as a software developer, it's a great and fairly safe time to take risks. That could change quickly, but in the meantime, that sentiment is almost certainly true.

I think it depends on what "take risks" means. Not all risk is equal, and you can't fully assess risk without looking at an individual's personal situation. The bad news is that measuring risk accurately can be difficult. People overestimate potential returns, and underestimate potential losses. They also often ignore opportunity cost, and fail to use realistic time frames. So I think it's hard to make a blanket statement that it's a "safe" time for a whole group of people to take on risk.

The author of this post is the perfect example of this. He thinks he's mitigating the risk of joining startups that are likely to fail by living in San Francisco, where there's a solid job market. Yet he's living in an area with a very high cost of living and apparently not saving any money, so the risk he's taking on is almost certainly a lot higher than the risk he perceives.

I agree it is trivially easy to jump ship to another startup every month in SF if you we're so inclined. For entrepreneurs, this culture makes it a challenge to build a lasting company though... the focus employees have in SF & the Valley seems much more short term IMHO.

Besides, the safety net alluded to exists in any big city these days. I'm in Dallas and a good developer or designer showing up here today would have several job offers in a few days.

Summary: San Francisco is terrible but, hey, you can get paid a lot without trying very hard! Of course, you aren't likely to save any money.

It's amusing to me that this person's idea of a "safety net" is something that enables him to continue what he knows and acknowledges is irresponsible behavior. Don't want to put in the time to learn to handle yourself in a traditional environment? Don't feel like figuring out how to actually manage your finances like an adult? Come to Silicon Valley!

There are many reasons to move to such a tech hub, and many of them have at least some basis in real, positive factors. This post doesn't showcase any of them. All it displays is the author's haughty attitude and an inability to address his own shortcomings.

It is really sad that most of the comments here on HN would rather attack the author (or I guess SF in this case) than make better arguments against the author's comments. Not saying I agree with all of it, and honestly not even sure if the author is shining SF in that great of a light. But I guess the tone or topic of the article struck a deep chord in a lot of people.

Because it is such utter myopic bullshit.

The author might as well have written "SF is better because our water is wet here".

I stopped reading at "smell of urine" :-)

I think I speak for both San Franciscans and Silicon Valley denizens when I say that it's time to stop conflating both regions as if they were the same thing.

Complete horseshit. Worked at a great startup till January. Company had to pivot, extend runway, I was laid off. Damn I miss working with those guys. The team was super helpful, gave me a decent severance and have been trying to help place me with other companies. I've been unemployed since then. There is no safety net in this city, nor any other.

Typical YC type post. Full of BS...

> Once you spend a month in one company you can, if you like, send a few emails and be making more money in a matter of days.

Why wouldn't I like this? Who am I supposed to be emailing?

Because after only a month it's a dick move. And it might give you a bad name. Right now I happen to be in a position to do that, and I choose to stick with my current commitment.

As it happens, I've been working for longer than a month, and yet somehow even this additional time hasn't led me to the fall-into-a-higher-paying-job-elsewhere position described. I wasn't asking for reasons not to try to improve my position, I was pointing out that the ease attributed to doing it is, so far as I can tell, entirely specious.

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