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Comment by spiek | Hacker News Reader

You realize you can do all of those things and still make not very much money, right? You also realize that people in different economic situations aren't privileged to receive all of the institutional knowledge about the job market that you may have? That some people don't even think about becoming doctors or lawyers or programmers because they dont know anyone who became those things? There are a huge number of reasons why some people may not be able to make the same amount of money someone at google can make. Does that mean they shouldn't be allowed to live in SF?

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Not to mention young recently graduated lawyers and doctors make shit for money, and newly minted lawyers in particular are facing much weaker than expected demand in the market.

"Making smart choices" doesn't always pan out. I don't think one can easily accuse someone who studied hard, disciplined themselves, and made their way through law school of being shortsighted, but here they are facing unemployment or dramatic underemployment.

Ditto traditional fields of engineering. Lots of people who studied hard, planned ahead, worked hard, and then fell into the massive collapse of manufacturing in this country.

It's nice to know that the crazy "improv political theater" from that one guy has some bearing in reality, though.

As a case in point, my sister and her husband recently finished their post-doc work at NYU and are heading out to SF. Both of them PhDs, both of them work very hard at what they do, both of them in school/fellowships/postdocs since graduating high school (they are 32/33 now) and are having trouble finding jobs. Her husband recently took a job in SF doing research getting paid a mere 60k a year. That's very low anywhere for the effort put into it, insultingly low in SF, IMO. She can probably find work there in SF pretty easy, but probably not making much more.

Lazy they are not.

(seriously thinking of pushing them into joining one of those RoR or similar bootcamps and getting into Programming, they have the drive and intellect to do well, I think)

Edit: Just to be clear, their PhDs are both in the 'Hard Sciences' - biology to be specific - Virology and Genetics respectively.

I had this same discussion with an ex-colleague and he pointed out that if you managed to drive away all the lower paid workers, then who would clean your streets, stock your supermarket shelves, put our your fires and catch those criminals? He made a very good point.

In old east coast cities the low-pay workers will simply live farther away and endure shitty commutes.

In the Bay Area this isn't possible, since NIMBYs have fought against every and any transit project, and caused the neglect of existing mass transit. Housing is expensive from SF all the way south - where exactly would these people commute in from? You can't even get from downtown into the Outer Sunset in an hour during commute hours, where do you think your baristas are going to come from?

The SF Bay is one of the most thorough and complete failures of government and infrastructure I've witnessed first-hand.

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