What if the critics win, and tech sector flees S.F.? | Hacker News Reader

What if the critics win, and tech sector flees S.F.?

sfgate.com

40 pointsjamesbritt54 comments

The way "techies" are being talked about and treated right now is straight up Xenophobia and it's fucked up.

We can't just be "nerds" that are easy targets to be scapegoated and picked on. If someone tries to blame you for the low supply of housing (instead of restrictive building codes) or for "changing the culture" of the city in a way that they don't like (who died and made them the arbiter of good taste). Call them out on it, its bullshit.

Technology has improved a lot of peoples lives and supplied this state a ton of money in tax revenue and for every one technology job 4-5 other jobs are created [1]. The companies in the bay area are the envy of the world, don't let peoples jealousy bring you down.

1. http://www.sfgate.com/news/article/Tech-hiring-creates-other...

You are replacing one scapegoat - techies - with another - restrictive building codes. You're complaining about people adopting one-sided, myopic viewpoints whilst putting forward one of your own - that the tech industry is great, and wonderful, and has no downsides whatsoever.

You talk about how tech gets vilified, but at the same time label people who object to tech as "jealous". I think we would get a lot further if people would acknowledge things like the housing situation in San Francisco are not the fault of either techies or building codes, but the result of a complex melting pot.

For the record, I work in tech, and I live in SF. I would like to think I'm able to see that tech has brought many benefits to SF, but at the same time has indirectly contributed to various pressures that any financially successful city will eventually encounter. London and New York both have equally crappy housing situations - different causes, different symptoms. I do, however, see how people living in SF could come to the conclusion that tech is causing these issues.

I think rather than simply turning their argument around ("you're jealous") it would be better to engage in rational discourse about how best to solve these problems in a way that leaves everyone better off. Sadly, people on both sides seem to be entrenched to the point where this is very difficult.

Both sides spout bullshit. Fascinating how human interactions work at scale.

Restrictive building codes are not a scapegoat. They are a public policy decision which directly explains why the price of housing is so high.

Building codes contribute to the problem. So does tech. Building codes are a scapegoat in the sense that SF would still have housing problems even without the building codes.

I work in tech. I'm a nerd. I love Star Trek, StarCraft, and *.gif.

I also love democracy, taxes, and public infrastructure.

Unfortunately for some of us there are a few very pushy leaders in the tech industry who don't like democracy, taxes, or public infrastructure and those asshats are making the rest of us look bad.

Oh no, we all get lumped in together and judged based on our appearance, I guess it feels sort of weird when it finally happens to us, right?

If you don't like it, what are you going to do about it? Resort to deciding that a bunch of perfectly good, hard working people are jealous because you have no other way to empathize with them?

The entitlement is palpable in this city.

I don't think that people in general have a problem with "techies" or "nerds". They do, however, have a problem with people who are generally referred to as "hipsters" today.

It is understandable why the dislike is there. Hipsters do tend to exhibit an attitude, behavior, fashion sense and materialism that can easily been seen as socially obnoxious.

Residents of long-established neighborhoods, especially those made of working-class individuals and families, will not be pleased when their neighborhoods are invaded by hipsters. The resulting changes to the community can be quite rapid and painful for those already there, both economically and socially. It's not about jealousy, but instead about unwanted disruption of established communities.

To some extent, the traditional "techie"/"nerd" community has been similarly co-opted by hipsters. This is especially true with Apple's resurgence over the past decade, when it comes to social media, and in SV in particular.

There was never this much strife when the tech industry was made up mostly of "techies"/"nerds", who in general behave in a way that is more socially friendly to established communities. Now that the balance has shifted toward hipsters being more and more prevalent within the industry, it's perfectly understandable why there's more hatred toward the industry as a whole. Their way of life invokes a very negative reaction out of basically everybody else.

Well, those tech critics just need to wait for the current "social web" bubble to implode, and then we'll see people showing cardboards saying stuff like:

"will do community management for food!"

http://images2.wikia.nocookie.net/__cb20070820063441/uncyclo...

and then as the shares of Facebook, Twitter and even the almighty google drops, the tech unemployment raises in the valley and SF, engineers get evicted and then prices will lower!

They just need to stop complaining, be patient for a few years and that will happen…

…until the next tech bubble gets the valley crazy again ;-)

It's like both communities have zero memory the dotcom boom era.

I guess ranting tech-n00bs can't be asked to know their own history and the locals can be forgiven for the smokey-mj haze.

But when your wait staff is having to move to Oakland, there might be a point where it can't make a come back.

It would be a net benefit for everyone if people stopped believing San Francisco was some kind of "technology/business mecca" or something.

We need budding tech sectors all over the world, and we don't need everyone trying to move to California (and a lot of us frankly don't want to move to California, to begin with).

California doesn't offer anything which can't be found elsewhere.

> California doesn't offer anything which [sic] can't be found elsewhere.

Except a self-referential belief that California is where it's happening.

Also: s/which/that/

There's absolutely nothing wrong with the quoted sentence -- this which-hunting is a ridiculous exercise in 'gotcha grammar' completely divorced from the facts about how the language is spoken.

See, for instance, http://languagelog.ldc.upenn.edu/nll/?p=5479 .

> There's absolutely nothing with the quoted sentence

Well, you're consistent, and let me adopt your style: the above sentence missing word.

This grammar policing is not necessary or helpful to the discussion.

I'm amazed by programmers who welcome the discovery of a misplaced semicolon but who object to the report of an egregious grammatical error, especially given the fact that both traits affect their employability.

which/that is not even an error, much less an egregious one.

> which/that is not even an error, much less an egregious one.

On the contrary:

http://www.writersdigest.com/online-editor/which-vs-that

I don't think that outweighs the evidence from Language Log clearly showing that "which" has been commonly used interchangeably with "that" in good English for centuries. This was linked earlier in the thread. Personally, I'm going to go with Dickens and Melville and Orwell (and statistical evidence) over a blog I've never heard of.

This is a comment thread. The language is informal, spontaneous, largely unedited, and participants come from a variety of language backgrounds. There are going to be grammar differences and mistakes.

You clearly understood the author, as did I and probably everyone else who read the comment. The objection was superfluous. When the commenter took offense and argued, the polite thing would have been to back down gracefully, since the point is entirely unrelated to the greater discussion. Picking on the missed-word typo is just a childish dig.

Edited, thanks.

There is, of course, a difference between occasional errors and the way in which millions of competent English speakers use their language, but I'm sure you're aware of the distinction.

I just think it's funny that programmers, acutely aware of the consequences of small code syntax errors, seem peculiarly indifferent to much more significant errors in their English prose.

And yes, I'm aware that many "errors" can be defended as conscious choices. But most of them are neither intentional nor contribute to effective communication.

The English prose used in comment threads like this is written natural language. Programming languages are formal languages. Different treatment should not be surprising.

For further reading:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Natural_language

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Formal_language

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Linguistic_prescription#Problem...

One of the memes of the Bay area is that people want it to remain the same as it was the day they arrived and that anybody who arrived after them is "the problem".

But seriously I find it amusing that the author thinks that Berkeley and Oakland will attract people away from SF. Berkeley is even more hostile to change than SF. Witness the nasty campaign against Measure T in 2012 where Berkeley voted to keep a cesspool over a nice new business park and kept parts of the city zoned for manufacturing that is never coming back instead of startups. Berkeley should have a thriving startup culture with the university, but everybody drives across the bridge rather than dealing with the NIMBYs.

Oakland's current and previous administration couldn't find its arse with both hands. Witness how much new development has ended up in Emeryville.

So yeah businesses setup in SF because because at the moment its the least incompetent or hostile of the Bay area cities to have to deal with. And will most likely remain so.

I've lived in Texas, Washington, and in Silicon Valley California. There is way more bigotry here than any of the other places I've lived.

As the old punks used to say "never trust a hippie"

Probably best not to trust the punks either.

Bigotry against whom? Do you mean racial, cultural, or something else?

I don't know what he means by this, but by my estimate, the residents of San Francisco are very bigoted against about half the country (where "half" is measured by the last presidential election's results).

San Francisco is, broadly speaking, permissive. It is not, however, tolerant, and there's a big difference. San Francisco goes beyond simply disagreeing with half of the nation's politics and values, and into actively promoting an understanding of that half-nation as "horrible, terrible people" (to quote from a former coworker), generally incapable of making legitimate contributions to the nation's political process.

Intolerant against red states and/or Republicans?

Seeing as the financial sector has failed to do so for decades, I wouldn't hold my breath. Whatever happens, CW Nevius will still be writing columns complaining about his neighbors as he has done for the last quarter-century or so.

I think we may well see a situation similar to what's happened in Los Angeles and the entertainment industry. The main players are still based there, but the city has become so expensive to shoot and work in that many films are now made elsewhere.

The problem is a structural one. There's more demand and no increasing supply of housing in SF:

http://www.theatlanticcities.com/housing/2013/10/san-francis...

The debate about whether ___Group X/Y/Z____ needs to flee is a false one -- just build more housing that will accommodate all types of people who want to stay.

To do that, the NIMBY laws and once-romanticized ideal in SF that prevent building up need to change.

Yes, let's do that. No vertical limit on buildings

In fact, let's concrete the SF bay to have more space for houses, it's better that way

After all, all those people 100% need to live there, there's no space left in the USA for them.

Too bad it's an all or nothing situation, it's not like they could just reduce the number of employees in the area.

If only there were some way for employees to do digital work without being in a centralized geographical location...

Pity how that telewoking nirvana the telephone companies keep plugging doesn't really work for a lot of use cases - I know a lot dont want to hear this but I am afraid its the truth teleworking is suboptimal for at minimum 80% of TMT jobs

"They will cling to the fantasy that rents will magically drop,"

Oh really? Less demand equals smaller prices. It may take some time, but, yes, it will happen.

About the issue: the USA is huge and it's sincerely stupid to keep cramming people into an ever tight space.

There's nothing about it fundamentally that makes it absolutely necessary. The big companies like Twitter, Google are big enough so they can stand by themselves and do not need the SF/SV influence.

Companies could go to Stockton, they need the money, and it's not so far away.

> The big companies like Twitter, Google are big enough so they can stand by themselves and do not need the SF/SV influence

That only works if your employees know they are going (and want) to be with you for a long time. In tech things change fast, and both companies and people want to be in a place where they have a good amount of options. This naturally creates local maxima around a few geographical locations. The only way out is widespread remote work.

As a guy who is moving to SF for geographically-relevant reasons (wife is a medical resident) and who works tech remotely, I'd be all in favor of this.

Come down to LA. I don't have enough tech entrepreneur friends down here. We'll create a young CEO's club, it'll be fun I promise.

Why should the tech sector be tied to any one place?

This, sir, is a mystery we have not yet solved. It has to do with a critical mass of talent and companies, social dynamics and financials.

Silicon Valley is not easily replicated.

As for me, a person who visits the place on vacations, I love it. I wish I could do more to solve its many problems.

It's not tied to any one place. It is tied to a few places, and Silicon Valley more strongly than most: in no small part because you can hire programmers there, because programmers live there, because they can get hired there (all circular-referency-like).

But it's also tied to places like New York, and London, and Seattle, and Boston, and Austin, heck, Shanghai and Hong Kong and Bangalore -- any place where there's enough of a critical mass of reasonably well-educated raw population that "programmers live there" because everyone lives there. Not tied as strongly, mind you -- the network effect and the venture capital in the bay area are hard to beat. But tied enough that it works.

Can't programmers work remotely? And can you not work remotely if your management isn't totally incompetent? "You can't manage what you can't measure." and all that jazz.

In short, the SFBA crisis is caused by the tech culture not drinking its own Koolaid about geography not mattering.

There is no consensus in "the tech culture" on the value of remote work. You've confused pundits and politicians with techies.

Which may well mean that the Koolaid is a fabrication by a segment of the tech industry to move units and subscriptions.

I've done some remote work, and found it to be mixed at best most of the time. I think part of the problem is that, for it to really work, the entire organization has to completely change their methods of work around it. If there's even one remote worker, the entire workforce has to commit to doing everything online, even if they're in the same space, or else the remote worker is shut out. Even if you're right next to your co-worker, all of your interaction has to be over email/chat/whatever you're using. Everyone you might want to talk to has to be as available on chat/IM as they are in their office.

The koolaid you speak of is only propogated by the few companies that actually do hire remote. GitHub and 37signals/Basecamp are two examples that immediately come to mind.

Github and Basecamp are companies I'd identify as fairly successful. If they can do it, why are Google, Facebook, Yahoo, and Amazon so bad at it?

GitHub only has 240 employees. Google has around 50,000. Bad comparison. It's like saying "Ruby on Rails works for GitHub; if they can do it, why can't Google use Ruby on Rails?"

If you read any of their articles on how they make remote work for them, they do it by and organizing the entire company around remote work, IIRC. And they still have offices.

So Google isn't broken down into departments? And departments broken down into projects?

This feels less like decision making based on results and more like hand waving by bad managers.

And projects don't talk to each other? And departments don't talk to each other? And departments don't report to inter-department leads/heads? There aren't Director or VP level managers?

If only there were some sort of text and voice based communications methods we could use to facilitate the transfer of information between disparate groups...

Agglomeration economies.

Why shouldn't it? It seems to be a huge reduction in friction of all types to have everything in the same place. Not just coders, but investors, people willing to start companies, accountants and lawyers specializing in the field, marketing, graphic design, etc. Face-to-face interactions are simple, and always work. The multitude of internet-based remote-work assistants all seem to have their own issues and limitations.

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