Silicon Valley Tech Entrepreneurs: Behind the Stereotype
businessweek.com
businessweek.com
I feel like this is a classic problem of economic conservatism/liberalism: how should money be allocated to people. It's just really exacerbated by a lot of young people making a lot of money and pulling the divide apart.
Really the only problem we have is a housing shortage. Granted there to some extent a fixed amount of land (although Treasure Island and Foster City testify somewhat to the contrary). But we could definitely build higher.
Maybe it would change the aesthetics of the City some. But I'm more concerned about losing the character of the City of welcoming all types of people, no matter where you came from or what you like to do than I am about the way our buildings look.
Rather than protesting in front of Google buses (which would have been significantly smaller if they had limited participation to only people who've never used a Google product or service), they should be protesting in front of City Hall to allow the building of new housing. The only thing that will keep them in the city is to lower the cost of housing to a level where they can afford to live there and that can't happen if there's no new development.
You've been living in Oakland for the last 10 years. You work at a local place making $15/hr. You have built up a lot of friends and enjoy your life. Suddenly the tech boom hits. A year later your landlord decides to sell the house. You go out and try to find a new place but its twice what your last place was and over half your income. But that doesn't matter because the market is so competitive the new landlord wouldn't rent to you anyway. So now you go into a desperate struggle to save the life you've built for the last 10 years. Calling and emailing everywhere trying to find a place. You have 20 days left. 10 days left. You have an old friend in Oklahoma City. He says you can crash for a couple weeks and that there's plenty of jobs and cheap rent. You know you have to go and leave behind your life. You know that if the tech boom didn't show up none of that would have happened. Sure you're not going to die on the streets. But I would probably be pretty pissed.
> You know that if the tech boom didn't show up none of that would have happened.
The tech boom has obviously not hurt the real estate market in the Bay Area, but it's a common misconception that the tech boom is the primary driver.
There is a substantial amount of money coming into the Bay Area real estate market from overseas and a significant amount (perhaps most) of the domestic home buyers are not newly-minted tech millionaires.
The truth of the matter is that a lot of the well-paid tech workers cannot afford to buy in the Bay Area. This has impacted the rental market more than it has the home market, but the rental trend is one seen nationally.
> But that doesn't matter because the market is so competitive the new landlord wouldn't rent to you anyway.
Around the country, millions of would-be home buyers have become renters and there is not enough apartment supply. Rents are rising nationally and lots of people are struggling to cope, including in cities where there is no tech boom to blame. In short, the dearth of affordable rentals is not the result of the tech industry. It's the result of a broader supply and demand imbalance.
Recently, Seattle has experienced the greatest percentage increase in rents[1]. San Francisco and San Jose were up there, but the recent percentage increases in the Bay Area have, for instance, been on par with the increases seen in 2012-2013 in cities like Houston, Miami, San Diego and Boston[2].
It's a tough market out there for lots of people and while it's convenient to think that the Bay Area is always special because of the tech industry, this simply isn't the case.
[1] http://online.wsj.com/news/articles/SB1000142405270230488710...
[2] http://realestate.msn.com/massive-rent-increases-to-continue
soooo many charts
It's harder to empathize with US citizens who've managed to squander their enormous advantages and have to suffer the relatively mild indignity of moving to a different US city.
It's fun to think poor Americans are lazy, but when you realize that helping people in America is one of the lowest paid(often volunteer) positions, how warped the reality of the US dollar is.
To many "dignity" as you described it, is not working like a slave to enrich the evil that is destroying our country. And if you are moving here to contribute to that you are not much more than a paid mercenary.
EDIT: Look, I get it that you are possibly coming from a fucked situation wherever you might come from. And I can't blame you for it. But realize that few people in the US actually will benefit from it, and it will actually make their lives worse. It's what you have to do, but it really isn't something that many Americans would think is good. We already learned about imperialism in High School and prefer not to repeat it.
This is poor long term planning that undermines the nation for short term intrest. Unless you have pledged your allegiance, your contributions and loyalty is short term.
So obviously we are going to prioratize someone who has our back. If you have the education it is likely because you come from a privileged family. There is also strong corrupting ingrained into the system. Unless my last red envelope was given to me in error.
There are men and women in your country of greater merit who are not given the opportunity. If we were truely acting on merit they would be hear, and not you.
They would have been given the scholarship and the resources in childhood to succeed. I have met way too many entitled princelings lacking any of the virtues of a gentleman.
Also "mild indignity of moving to a different US city" - how would you feel if you lived in a city for 40 years, and suddenly find yourself priced out of your home?
This is a more complex problem.
Maybe so but the engineers there make less than the baristas in the US. Hell, an engineer in Canada makes less than a bartender in SF.
I grew up in Toronto and lived there for 17 years but the tech jobs are so bad I can't really afford to stay. Not without living with my parents or spending 65% of my net income on rent and transportation. I don't feel entitled to stay, nobody owes me anything. I can either move or figure out a way to earn more money.
It would be nice if the government or private industry could insure people against this kind of disruption, but I don't see it happening soon.
In the meantime, people are constantly affected by all sorts of circumstances out of their control.
Unless you don't believe in the free market at all, I don't see how the case of renters is any different.
The more you work, the more you get paid and the less affected you will be by this sort of thing, so I would assume this sort of risk motivated people to work harder.
When I directly answer why it wouldn't, you act as if I was supposed to be explaining addressing the ethics, and that my answer betrays me as callous and uncaring.
But you didn't make the argument that society should avoid "pulling the rug from under people" for its own sake, regardless of its affect on motivation to work. So I didn't address that point.
I did, however, explain precisely the ethics of my viewpoint in my original post, you just chose not to address this, and took the easy way out by focusing on a technical issue (the effect on people's motivation to work) and then pretending I had failed to address a moral issue that you raised.
It is a conditional system of reward. The equation is not equal for everyone.
Edit* Just found and article on the subject randomly
http://www.npr.org/blogs/ed/2014/08/07/335285098/rich-kid-po...
In order to deal with inequality, we have progressive income tax and welfare. These mechanisms are the fairest, because they don't favor people based on their individual preferences.
Now a poor person who lived their whole life in SF doesn't really have an inherent preference for living in SF. And they probably are made worse off by the tech industry. But it is still the government, if anyone, who should compensate such people for their changed circumstance, and it's also practically impossible to figure out if that person is really worse off than, say, a person with the same income who lived in Detroit their whole life.
So there is no valid principal by which people should hate people in tech, and I think most people actually understand this.
However, people dislike nerds, and they like to rationalize their beliefs. I remember people called me arrogant in school, not because I was, but because that way they could enjoy the moral indignation. I think something similar is happening here.