The Tech Industry vs. San Francisco
newyorker.com
newyorker.com
At this point I attribute most of it to basic human envy, or perhaps even just not liking the "nerds" getting ahead.
Most of us here work in tech. We know our co-workers. We know where we came from. For many of us, years growing up spent reading, tinkering, being maybe a little anti-social. A lot of us probably found a computer at a young age, and just felt a compulsion to learn how it worked. Now we're getting paid for it.
I guess I just don't see this greedy group of evil doers out to ruin a city when I look at the people I've encountered in the industry. I see people who got a bit lucky that their passion became profitable.
I mean, bashing Google busses? Yes, Google created a perk, but they created it because a lot of their workers wanted to live in the city, and it beat having them all bring cars into SF and clog the 101. But I guess if you're a tech nerd, you're not supposed to live in the city, because that's for OTHER people, not you.
Do doctors, lawyers, and people in finance get harangued constantly in other cities? (substitute anyone with a well paying job) Do they have to take surveys about their donation habits to charities, and if they didn't, answer why not?
Why do we collectively put up with this? It really all seems to boil down to a class of people deciding that "techies" aren't worthy of living in THEIR city, and that's that.
Well, yes. Go around New York saying you're an investment banker and see what people think of you.
> Why do we collectively put up with this?
Why indeed?
Demand for living in a certain area grows, prices get higher, people who used be able to afford living in that area can’t afford to live there any more.
I’d be angry and envious too with the people moving in. Even if they might not have evil intentions, they are indirectly responsible for driving me out—just by wanting to live there and being willing to pay a premium.
Personally, I feel like new money coming to an area or a city is not just a threat but also an opportunity: but it takes an extremely clever and compassionate city council to make sure that, instead of going from cheap to expensive, areas evolve to provide housing opportunities both cheap and expensive, allowing the new money to reinvigorate the neighbourhood while leaving place for the old inhabitants.
Let me just kill you right now, because there was some bullshit article in the New York Times saying ‘the good of gentrification.
Here’s the thing: I grew up here in Fort Greene. I grew up here in New York. It’s changed. And why does it take an influx of white New Yorkers in the south Bronx, in Harlem, in Bed Stuy, in Crown Heights for the facilities to get better? The garbage wasn’t picked up every motherfuckin’ day when I was living in 165 Washington Park. P.S. 20 was not good. P.S. 11. Rothschild 294. The police weren’t around. When you see white mothers pushing their babies in strollers, three o’clock in the morning on 125th Street, that must tell you something.
Then comes the motherfuckin’ Christopher Columbus Syndrome. You can’t discover this! We been here. You just can’t come and bogart. There were brothers playing motherfuckin’ African drums in Mount Morris Park for 40 years and now they can’t do it anymore because the new inhabitants said the drums are loud. My father’s a great jazz musician. He bought a house in nineteen-motherfuckin’-sixty-eight, and the motherfuckin’ people moved in last year and called the cops on my father. He’s not — he doesn’t even play electric bass! It’s acoustic! We bought the motherfuckin’ house in nineteen-sixty-motherfuckin’-eight and now you call the cops? In 2013? Get the fuck outta here!
Nah. You can’t do that. You can’t just come in the neighborhood and start bogarting and say, like you’re motherfuckin’ Columbus and kill off the Native Americans. Or what they do in Brazil, what they did to the indigenous people. You have to come with respect. There’s a code. There’s people.
Read the rest of the transcript here: http://nymag.com/daily/intelligencer/2014/02/spike-lee-amazi...
And from experience in the uk its recent immigrants which use these shuttles far more than native born employees I suspect there is some racism at play as well all those bus protesters where young whites didn't see any latino or African Americans.
This symbolizes exactly what the problem is: zero sense of social responsibility, and when it starts pissing people off you pull the victim card.
You really don't understand what the problem is when the tech-elite creates it's own public transport system, pissing on all the people that make up the city you live in, from the people that collect your garbage to the barista that makes your espresso?
Here's some news for you: these people aren't pissed off at "techies". They're pissed off at people like you.
>You really don't understand what the problem is when the tech-elite creates it's own public transport system
Jesus. It's a company bus. My uncles 30 years ago were shuttled (under communism no less) to their work, by their work. It makes a lot of sense.
I try not to be dissmisive. You feel what you feel but come on. Get a grip. What exactly is the problem? And what is the solution?
This is just the anti science and tech elements in western society acting to keep us technical proles in our place how dare these oily engineers think they are as good as my PPE from Oxbridge and shock horror some of them make as much as my lawyer or doctor.
You're part of a gentrification. You are implanting something which destroys what those before you loved and hated about "their" city.
You've brought different values and habits that they have no place in. They can't live near where they used to, eat where they used to, etc. You shouldn't blanket statement it as envy. You're at the epicenter of destroying what people think their lives are or should be - and you don't care. That's just reality and odd social and economic dynamics at play.
Also, are you sure that you're a nerd? With SF growingly becoming the Mecca for kids that used to pay homage to finance, etc. it's more likely you are the fruits of the cohort raised with computers and video games. Not nerds... just normal people with a good hand for the current economy.
> are you sure that you're a nerd?
C'mon now.
I guess I just don't see this greedy group of evil doers out to ruin a city when I look at the people I've encountered in the industry. I see people who got a bit lucky that their passion became profitable.
You don't know the real power players. You're right. The average, middle-class tech workers (you, me, and the people you know) are not the enemy. We're upper proletariat, essentially on the same side (if a different tax bracket) as the "true" proletariat that is actually poor. I feel like this controversy is being cooked up to pit the middle class (us) and the working class against each other, in order to distract both us and them from what's really going on.
In technology's upper ranks, you see malevolence and MBA culture. You see Ellis Act landlords and multiple liquidation preferences and all sorts of scumbaggery. You see closed allocation and funding based on family connections and frat boys and Clinkles and Snapchats and Tinders. The press outlet that has the best depiction of what's really leading tech right now is (sad to say it) Valleywag.
However, the upper-working class, $140,000 per year, mid-career software engineer is just as worried, as the poor are, about his childrens' future and the health of the city and just trying to stay competitive in an industry that (a) does not give a fuck about him, and (b) will probably replace him with a clueless 22-year-old in ten years. The fact that he's merely adequately compensated for his skills, education and continuing effort, while the rest of the working class is even more exploited and abused, is hardly his fault.
Yes, the bad guys sit atop the tech industry. They're not the lifelong engineers who top out at $140,000 or even $225,000 per year. They're the VP/NTWTFK (Non-Technical Who-The-Fuck-Knows) para-dropped into companies by their corrupt VC buddies from MBA school. They're the moneymongers who think multiple liquidation preferences and participating preferred (technical jargon for "I've got the connections, so lick my taint, prole") are morally acceptable. Those are the bad guys. Not us.
If we're guilty of something, it's that we enjoy our work (perhaps not our paid jobs, but the ongoing process of learning and building cool technology, even as a hobby) so much that we tend to disengage from political fights: both ours (open vs. closed allocation) and the bigger ones of the world (Ellis Act). The bad guys have become quite adept at exploiting this property of us. When we realize that something's wrong, we focus on minutiae. We focus on the douchebag 27-year-old middle manager who told us everything has to be in Java, and it becomes a complaint about Java, the language, instead of the bigger issue (the investor-level corruption that put the idiot in charge).
That head-in-the-sand behavior of possibly the smartest working class that's ever existed really hurts San Francisco, but it also hurts us. Going forward, we're going to need to fight the "head in the sand" impulse and fucking annihilate MBA culture. Not only San Francisco, but our own jobs (after age 40) depend on it.
We have to fight. So much is at stake. We have a power that humanity will require in order to (a) move away from fossil fuels for energy, (b) cure cancer, and (c) deliver safe, cheap, environmentally sound transportation at the world scale. Humanity's survival (or, at least, the survival of civilization) literally depends on us because the current state is completely unsustainable. Unfortunately, instead of using that power for progressive R&D, we get stuck helping MBA-culture scumbags unemploy people.
I'm not an engineer. I don't do hands-on technical work (e.g. coding, syadmin, etc.). I have an MBA.
Are you saying that I'm one of the bad guys?
Probably not, but you may be working in a closer profession to them.
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michaelochurch: If we're guilty of something, it's that we enjoy our work (perhaps not our paid jobs, but the ongoing process of learning and building cool technology, even as a hobby) so much that we tend to disengage from political fights: both ours (open vs. closed allocation) and the bigger ones of the world (Ellis Act). The bad guys have become quite adept at exploiting this property of us. When we realize that something's wrong, we focus on minutiae. We focus on the douchebag 27-year-old middle manager who told us everything has to be in Java, and it becomes a complaint about Java, the language, instead of the bigger issue (the investor-level corruption that put the idiot in charge).
That head-in-the-sand behavior of possibly the smartest working class that's ever existed really hurts San Francisco, but it also hurts us.
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Peter Ludlow on "The Banality of Systemic Evil":
http://opinionator.blogs.nytimes.com/2013/09/15/the-banality...):
The mid-level managers that he spoke with were not “evil” people in their everyday lives, but in the context of their jobs, they had a separate moral code altogether, what Jackall calls the “fundamental rules of corporate life”:
"(1) You never go around your boss. (2) You tell your boss what he wants to hear, even when your boss claims that he wants dissenting views. (3) If your boss wants something dropped, you drop it. (4) You are sensitive to your boss’s wishes so that you anticipate what he wants; you don’t force him, in other words, to act as a boss. (5) Your job is not to report something that your boss does not want reported, but rather to cover it up. You do your job and you keep your mouth shut."
Jackall went through case after case in which managers violated this code and were drummed out of a business (for example, for reporting wrongdoing in the cleanup at the Three Mile Island nuclear power plant).
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In my view, the perfect example of Silicon Valley's systemically banal evil is how nearly every internet business gets it's revenue from advertising and a lot of good people jump through hoops to convince themselves that they have not made a deal with the devil. So much so that my mere suggestion of this as evil rains downvotes (as I expect for this comment).
When I talk to anyone who's livelihood doesn't rely on advertising or marketing, there is near unanimous agreement that advertising is fundamentally manipulative and dishonest.
"It is difficult to get a man to understand something when his salary depends upon his not understanding it." -- Upton Sinclair
Besides the social cost of Advertising, there many other costs (https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=7767811). The idea that advertising gives us free web content and services is utter bullshit.
“The best minds of my generation are thinking about how to make people click ads. That sucks.” -- Jeff Hammerbacher, fmr. Manager of Facebook Data Team, founder of Cloudera
It's important to realize that Hammerbacher isn't just talking about engineers working directly on ad systems, but anyone working on any product that relies on ad revenue and thus invariably makes design and functionality choices that prioritizes ad views and advertiser value (e.g. collecting data about you) over end-user interests.
The get rich quick ethos of Silicon Valley tech firms using whatever means necessary, such as showing ads, collecting user data for advertisers, coming up with viral schemes (When did the virus become our role model?), and then using those riches to take over the space (pricing everyone out) as well as the culture (money, materialism, socially vapid products, getting rich quick is destroying the counter culture, much of what makes the Bay Area special).
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And now, as if to prove my point, Hacker News has killed this article.
Example: Elon Musk. There wouldn't be a Tesla or SpaceX without the PayPal money.
Most of us who work on ads are not going to be funding (or working for) those research institutions (which are, alas, shrinking and dying). The successful ones are going to become executives at larger companies, or venture capitalists (few of whom will rise enough to make any calls regarding direction).
The problem isn't that there's anything wrong with working on ads. There isn't. It's where the money is, and it's no worse than what most people do in their jobs. It's that anti-intellectualism, from below, and rapacious upper-class parasitism, from above, have deprived society of the research opportunities into which smart people should be able to direct their time. For the most part, the jobs just don't exist (look at academia).
If you want to own it, own it. Just take an attitude of "We're richer and pushing you out of the city, deal with it." Stop trying to rationalize it as something else, you'll just wind up in a state of cognitive dissonance where you make up assumptions about what the interplay between classes are and surprise surprise, it turns out the interpretation you made up because you're disconnected to the people outside your class doesn't sound that bad to you.
We know where we came from. For many of us, years growing up spent reading, tinkering, being maybe a little anti-social. A lot of us probably found a computer at a young age, and just felt a compulsion to learn how it worked. Now we're getting paid for it.
This comment is on a article that starts with the crunchies, I'll just repost what John Oliver said at the crunchies. It didn't connect then, I doubt it will work now:
"You already have all the money in the world. Why do you need awards after that? It is absolutely ridiculous. You’re no longer the underdogs, it’s very important that you realize that. You’re not the scrappy people that people get behind. It used to be that people who worked in the tech industry were emotional shut-ins who you could root for. Now those days are gone. You’re pissing off an entire city."
Yes, this is aimed at the people at the top of the tech companies, not you, the rank and file worker. But you're defending the guys at the top, aren't you? Your bank account may be smaller, but how are you externally different?
I just don't get the narrative here...
1. Young techie gentrifier to be graduates from college, applies to Google and Twitter.
2. Gets job offer. Accepts. Let's say Twitter. She's really stoked to work on high throughput Scala servers or something.
3. Needs a place to live in SF.
4. Moves in to start new job, is now a "problem" in someone's eyes.
So what is this theoretical person supposed to do to avoid being part of the problem?
Is the answer: Welcome to your new job/life in SF! I see you're a techie. Please be aware that you should base your housing spend on a local barista salary, not your own, so if you can't find a place, consider Daly City. Also, the locals have decided on a "tithing" figure for you at 8% of your salary. Pick local charities of your choice. You still should work at a local homeless shelter once a month. Additionally, please do not go to any bars in the Mission, Haight, etc...your kind is not wanted there. Thanks!
Alternatively, if you don't think there's anything natural about such a system and one's place in it, you can see an economic system as a socially created malleable artifact underpinning conflict and competition between people's competing interests, and your interests currently directly conflict with and deny other people their interests and desires.
Its not that you're a nerd. Its not even solely that the nerds are making money. If you were all making money building condos off in some unpopulated desert somewhere, i don't think anyone in San Fran would give two hoots.
Its that money is being used to elicit social power and change against people who have disparate interests, but who don't have as much money and thus have very little option in our current system to have their desires recognised or valued.
People with money are doing things that are against the interests of a group of people without as much money who feel they have a historical connection to the area.
I'm not saying either side is right, but its pretty easy to understand where they're coming from and I think it requires some pretty shocking naivette along the lines of "why won't these damn plebs just be happy to get out of our way and thank us for our presence and money" to think they don't have a point and genuine grievances. (and one isn't doing much to gain much sympathy for nerds by not seeing that).
The people who already live in those areas?
I do. Keep in mind, not everyone shares the same idea of nirvana.
http://www.amazon.com/The-Rent-Too-Damn-High-ebook/dp/B0078X...
Less regulation would likely lead to diverse kinds of housing being available, and I'm sure there would still be plenty of suburbs.
Another way to think about it is that tech buses compete with public transportation. If you want to reduce traffic and help non-employee citizens, invest in the existing public system.
So try to fix that. The distance is hardly unbridgeable with public transport and express point-to-point public services are hardly a novel idea.
> And the constituent counties have historically often resisted cooperating with each other to expand public transit agencies.
So try to fix that.
Ah but that's more difficult than putting a private system on public assets.
No. But currently they're hardly solving any problems, creating more, and wondering why they're not popular.
They got a bunch of people off the roads by providing a bus. That's good for the environment, traffic, and their workers, who don't have to deal with a stressful drive. Seems like a pretty good solution to me, even if it's not perfect.
To me it looks like people just want excuses to hate on successful companies in the tech industry.
I can't make it 36 pt unfortunately...
Because people who don't agree with you are "haters that whine"? It's not exactly hard to find out what they want and that it's not primarily about the buses.
There's also plenty of reasons why the buses aren't good for people in the tech industry. Especially for entrepreneurs that want to compete with these companies.
http://techcrunch.com/2014/04/14/sf-housing/
Yeah, there are plenty of people with legitimate gripes, but having grown up in a place with its fair share of them.... it seems there is a category of people who are just out there looking for something to get riled up about. And it seems quite wrong to target the people and companies when they're just doing what they do and happening to make money at it. If there's a housing problem, address that, no? They might as well shake their fists at the internet itself, because that is what's helping the companies make the money, with which they pay the people, who drive up the prices.
Tech workers needed to get from their houses to their office, but there was no existing convenient way of doing this. So they bought a bus. Then more. Others followed. Now there are some questions arising and society (read: government) needs to get involved. How many busses are allowed? Can they use bus stops? Should we charge them? A little for usage or a lot for subsidizing other's transport? Should Muni buy new comfy buses with wifi and run new routes to mountain view? Can they do that or does the other transit authority have rules against that? Would people ride this, or would it be a waste of money?
Perfectly reasonable questions, which should be debated and negotiated. But not from day one.
But let's be honest: it's not about the busses. It's about inequality.
You're doing more than Google :)
This is a nonsensical way of looking at it. If the city opened up new bus lines going straight to and from Google and Facebook all the same people would be complaining about tax dollars being misappropriated by the rich. And they would be right. Why should everyone else pay for a bus straight to Google when only Googlers benefit?