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The video of Dropbox employees trying to kick local kids off the soccer field is exactly how I picture most of the failed social interactions in Silicon Valley.

The video of Dropbox employees trying to kick local kids off the soccer field is exactly how I picture most of the failed social interactions in Silicon Valley. Utterly clueless, then they wonder why people say they dislike them.

tareqak 9y ago
~I didn't believe you~ (Update: the video was at the very bottom in the linked article, I'm sorry): https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=awPVY1DcupE https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=awPVY1DcupE Description below the video: UPDATE: After public uproar, SF Rec & Park removed the policy that allowed this encounter to happen. The City - without posting the availability of the park rental on their public website - had been marketing the Tuesday and Thursday slots initially only through an app so that the demographic portrayed in the video - a tech league - was taking the space from neighborhood kids twice a week.
- chasd00 9y ago
  i would blame the parks department more than the employees. My 8 year old has had this happen to him (we live in Dallas) and his friends. Poor communication about reservation availability and who has reserved what and when is always the issue, especially if a YMCA is involved heh. If the employees were being jerks about it though is another thing.
counterpoint1 9y ago
Ya, how dare some people want to use a field they had reserved ahead of time! Sometimes I wonder what bizarro world other people are living in. Every city in America has public spaces which can be reserved - playing fields, gazebos, park areas, picnic spaces, museums, art spaces. Only because it was tech workers in SF does anyone suddenly pretend like first-come first-served laissez faire is the only acceptable use of shared resources.
- sverige 9y ago
  Obviously the kids that were there had no idea that it could be reserved. See another comment here about that reservation being available only on an app, not the website. The cluelessness is in the aggressive assertion of their "rights" and their complete failure to listen to what the local kids were saying. Hell, they couldn't even be bothered to play a pickup game with them. The frightened / annoyed looks of the two Dropboxers when they realized they were on video adds to the hilarity. I was pretty sure they wanted to be cops asserting some bogus right not to be filmed in a public space at that moment.
  - red75prime 9y ago
    One party paid the money for reservation, other party is ignorant of the rules. Situation is pretty clear to me, but I'm programmer and have trouble noticing subtle unwritten social rules.
    - mcguire 9y ago
      Please don't blame your failings on your membership in a heterogeneous group of people.
    - gyom 9y ago
      Sure, the rules are simple, but if you listen to the guy who says that he grew up here, he explains that field has NEVER been reserved. It’s easy to imagine how some bureaucrat updated the rules and accidentally destroyed a nice social space by turning it into a field that people pay for, use, and leave (opposed to a more spontaneous meeting place for young people who aren’t that organized). You can’t fault the Dropbox people there for making a reservation and expecting that it would be valid. They’re a bit clueless in how they respond, though, not realizing that those rules are clashing with the unofficial social dynamics happening there. (Semi-related : That’s why we might feel that banks are assholes for foreclosing houses that belong to deployed soldiers. Legally they can do it, but it sounds like it’s the shittiest application of the law.)
  - JBlue42 9y ago
    >Hell, they couldn't even be bothered to play a pickup game with them. That would've been the emotionally intelligent thing to do.
- gerbilly 9y ago
  > ... how dare some people want to use a field they had reserved ahead of time! Even if they had the permit, maybe they should just play pickup with the neighbourhood kids. Sounds like a lot more fun than arguing for ten minutes and it would allow them to form bonds with the local community. That they overlooked this obvious solution is an example of exactly the kind of cluelessness that silicon valley tech workers are bing criticized for. As tech workers, we are good at creating little sandboxes for others to play in and we really like our rules. Tech workers are actually very conservative in a way despite the proclamations of liberating the masses. A good opportunity was lost to make friends with he local kids. Sport is a great way of bringing people together.
  - deleted 9y ago
    [deleted]
- bpyne 9y ago
  As a kid, the neighborhood basketball court had norms for use that developed over generations. If you wanted to play and a game was in progress, you’d call out, “Got next!” (If someone else on the sidelines had already called it, they’d let you know and you’d wait your turn.) When your turn came, the winning team stayed on the court and you went onto it with your team, picking up players from the sideline as needed. In this way, people from the outside still had their chance to play, but they integrated into the system. (They were probably made better players as well since they had to play against a wide-array of competition.) The system was true of any urban court I visited around the US. If our neighborhood court suddenly had to be reserved, it would be a major disruption to norms established for generations. Neighborhood kids, who knew nothing about local government and how to work with it, would have suddenly felt pushed out. Worse, assuming they observed the reservation made by the “outsiders”, they would have been left with nothing to do except wander the streets. That’s often the scenario courts were built to prevent. I understand that leagues need to schedule ahead. I also understand that local governments need supplemental income to maintain neighborhood facilities like basketball courts and soccer pitches. But, neighborhood kids need open time during after-school hours and weekends to meet with other kids and play without the formality of a reservation process. The Dropboxers in the video would have been a lot smarter if they explained to the locals about the reservation and offered to have a big game “subbing in” as needed.
  - mcguire 9y ago
    You are describing what happened on the soccer field.
    - bpyne 9y ago
      Watching the video in full, it was not clear that the two parties played together. They seemed to head that way until the guy with the permit arrived. Then it became a territorial standoff again. What would be truly interesting is how the Dropboxers handled the situation afterward. Did they get local authorities involved? Did they come back the next week, without a permit, and blend in the way the guy from the locals suggested? The answer would be a good measure of their Social IQ and value systems.
SirensOfTitan 9y ago
I don't understand, why wouldn't the Dropbox employees be entitled to a field they reserved fairly in advance? If anything the Parks and Recs department is at fault for not making rules clearer. Using money to push others out is poor behavior, but so is using the tired 'how long you've lived in SF' (like one of the people mentioned in that video). Once again 'techie' hate is misguided and most of the scorn should be focused on city hall for poor policy.
- gerbilly 9y ago
  > Using money to push others out is poor behavior, but so is using the tired 'how long you've lived in SF' IMHO $27 gives the the tech workers a lot less claim to that field than the entire lives that the kids have lived there, regardless of the piece of paper. If they didn't want to play pickup, then the right thing to do is to go and play on the dropbox campus. It's not fair or logical, but it's the right to do. I'm sure with the billions of dollars the company has it can build it's workers their own football pitch.
  - saiya-jin 9y ago
    > IMHO $27 gives the the tech workers a lot less claim to that field than the entire lives that the kids have lived there, regardless of the piece of paper. WTF? Either you have a system with rules and law (which can prioritize kids, or not), or you have some random mess where, based on current emotions stemming from some articles, rules can be bypassed, skipped and avoided because... something. Would you like to be treated unfairly when filling for taxes compared to some 'local'? I presume no. You know, treating every human being as equal and whatnot... some old school notions I see
  - quotemstr 9y ago
    Living somewhere for a while gives you no special claim to that location.
    - mcguire 9y ago
      Humanity seems to disagree, almost universally.
wolco 9y ago
In fairness they had a permit the other group didn't and the city put in place a permit system to deal with these issues. If that happened in a less high profile city the other party would be the one who was assigned blame. There are only so many soccer fields here if people started to ignore the permit system it would make it more unfair to the more disadvanged groups.
mbrameld 9y ago
How should they have handled it? Called the police? What if it had been the Dropbox folks playing pickup and a family had rented the field for a birthday party and the Dropbox folks refused to leave? My guess is you wouldn't be criticising the family even though the only difference is the identity of the players. That speaks loudly to your biases.
- gerbilly 9y ago
  Sometimes bias is justified. These people lived there their whole lives. They grew there, we flew there. Localism isn't good either, but a bit of respect and give and take for people who, let's face it, will soon be pushed out of their neibourhoods to make way for tech workers, would be nice.
- sverige 9y ago
  I think they should have played a pickup game with the kids. They could have had some glorious "team-building" experience and built up the community at the same time. Like, get to know the neighbors before they are displaced because rents are going up. And it's funny, I really was waiting for the cops to show up because one of the Dropboxers had called them. Their desire to avoid having any real interaction with these kids is so painfully obvious that it makes me embarrassed for them. As far as your hypothetical, it's just that: hypothetical, as is your perception of my hypothetical biases. It's actually hilarious, because in the hypothetical my mind conjures up, I'm sure if we met in some real-life context you would end up calling me a nazi. FWIW, when I was younger, I knew and hung around with people who are just like the Dropboxers, and was probably like them in many ways. I've gotten to know and work with a lot of different kinds of people since then, so now I would intuitively know a better way to handle this situation than these guys did. Step 1 is to recognize that they are valuable human beings and neighbors. That's where this exchange broke down, so no need to go on to subsequent steps till we get that part right.
  - quotemstr 9y ago
    These people reserved a field using correct, official channels. Why should they have to change their plans because some other people squatted on the field? Why should the Dropbox people have any moral obligation whatsoever to play a game with people they didn't choose?
guiomie 9y ago
If you read the video description, the blame should really be on the city for having an obscure system where you can rent the field that no one actually uses.

tareqak 9y ago

~I didn't believe you~ (Update: the video was at the very bottom in the linked article, I'm sorry): https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=awPVY1DcupE https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=awPVY1DcupE Description below the video: UPDATE: After public uproar, SF Rec & Park removed the policy that allowed this encounter to happen. The City - without posting the availability of the park rental on their public website - had been marketing the Tuesday and Thursday slots initially only through an app so that the demographic portrayed in the video - a tech league - was taking the space from neighborhood kids twice a week.

chasd00 9y ago
i would blame the parks department more than the employees. My 8 year old has had this happen to him (we live in Dallas) and his friends. Poor communication about reservation availability and who has reserved what and when is always the issue, especially if a YMCA is involved heh. If the employees were being jerks about it though is another thing.

counterpoint1 9y ago

Ya, how dare some people want to use a field they had reserved ahead of time! Sometimes I wonder what bizarro world other people are living in. Every city in America has public spaces which can be reserved - playing fields, gazebos, park areas, picnic spaces, museums, art spaces. Only because it was tech workers in SF does anyone suddenly pretend like first-come first-served laissez faire is the only acceptable use of shared resources.

sverige 9y ago
Obviously the kids that were there had no idea that it could be reserved. See another comment here about that reservation being available only on an app, not the website. The cluelessness is in the aggressive assertion of their "rights" and their complete failure to listen to what the local kids were saying. Hell, they couldn't even be bothered to play a pickup game with them. The frightened / annoyed looks of the two Dropboxers when they realized they were on video adds to the hilarity. I was pretty sure they wanted to be cops asserting some bogus right not to be filmed in a public space at that moment.
- red75prime 9y ago
  One party paid the money for reservation, other party is ignorant of the rules. Situation is pretty clear to me, but I'm programmer and have trouble noticing subtle unwritten social rules.
  - mcguire 9y ago
    Please don't blame your failings on your membership in a heterogeneous group of people.
  - gyom 9y ago
    Sure, the rules are simple, but if you listen to the guy who says that he grew up here, he explains that field has NEVER been reserved. It’s easy to imagine how some bureaucrat updated the rules and accidentally destroyed a nice social space by turning it into a field that people pay for, use, and leave (opposed to a more spontaneous meeting place for young people who aren’t that organized). You can’t fault the Dropbox people there for making a reservation and expecting that it would be valid. They’re a bit clueless in how they respond, though, not realizing that those rules are clashing with the unofficial social dynamics happening there. (Semi-related : That’s why we might feel that banks are assholes for foreclosing houses that belong to deployed soldiers. Legally they can do it, but it sounds like it’s the shittiest application of the law.)
- JBlue42 9y ago
  >Hell, they couldn't even be bothered to play a pickup game with them. That would've been the emotionally intelligent thing to do.
gerbilly 9y ago
> ... how dare some people want to use a field they had reserved ahead of time! Even if they had the permit, maybe they should just play pickup with the neighbourhood kids. Sounds like a lot more fun than arguing for ten minutes and it would allow them to form bonds with the local community. That they overlooked this obvious solution is an example of exactly the kind of cluelessness that silicon valley tech workers are bing criticized for. As tech workers, we are good at creating little sandboxes for others to play in and we really like our rules. Tech workers are actually very conservative in a way despite the proclamations of liberating the masses. A good opportunity was lost to make friends with he local kids. Sport is a great way of bringing people together.
- deleted 9y ago
  [deleted]
bpyne 9y ago
As a kid, the neighborhood basketball court had norms for use that developed over generations. If you wanted to play and a game was in progress, you’d call out, “Got next!” (If someone else on the sidelines had already called it, they’d let you know and you’d wait your turn.) When your turn came, the winning team stayed on the court and you went onto it with your team, picking up players from the sideline as needed. In this way, people from the outside still had their chance to play, but they integrated into the system. (They were probably made better players as well since they had to play against a wide-array of competition.) The system was true of any urban court I visited around the US. If our neighborhood court suddenly had to be reserved, it would be a major disruption to norms established for generations. Neighborhood kids, who knew nothing about local government and how to work with it, would have suddenly felt pushed out. Worse, assuming they observed the reservation made by the “outsiders”, they would have been left with nothing to do except wander the streets. That’s often the scenario courts were built to prevent. I understand that leagues need to schedule ahead. I also understand that local governments need supplemental income to maintain neighborhood facilities like basketball courts and soccer pitches. But, neighborhood kids need open time during after-school hours and weekends to meet with other kids and play without the formality of a reservation process. The Dropboxers in the video would have been a lot smarter if they explained to the locals about the reservation and offered to have a big game “subbing in” as needed.
- mcguire 9y ago
  You are describing what happened on the soccer field.
  - bpyne 9y ago
    Watching the video in full, it was not clear that the two parties played together. They seemed to head that way until the guy with the permit arrived. Then it became a territorial standoff again. What would be truly interesting is how the Dropboxers handled the situation afterward. Did they get local authorities involved? Did they come back the next week, without a permit, and blend in the way the guy from the locals suggested? The answer would be a good measure of their Social IQ and value systems.

SirensOfTitan 9y ago

I don't understand, why wouldn't the Dropbox employees be entitled to a field they reserved fairly in advance? If anything the Parks and Recs department is at fault for not making rules clearer. Using money to push others out is poor behavior, but so is using the tired 'how long you've lived in SF' (like one of the people mentioned in that video). Once again 'techie' hate is misguided and most of the scorn should be focused on city hall for poor policy.

gerbilly 9y ago
> Using money to push others out is poor behavior, but so is using the tired 'how long you've lived in SF' IMHO $27 gives the the tech workers a lot less claim to that field than the entire lives that the kids have lived there, regardless of the piece of paper. If they didn't want to play pickup, then the right thing to do is to go and play on the dropbox campus. It's not fair or logical, but it's the right to do. I'm sure with the billions of dollars the company has it can build it's workers their own football pitch.
- saiya-jin 9y ago
  > IMHO $27 gives the the tech workers a lot less claim to that field than the entire lives that the kids have lived there, regardless of the piece of paper. WTF? Either you have a system with rules and law (which can prioritize kids, or not), or you have some random mess where, based on current emotions stemming from some articles, rules can be bypassed, skipped and avoided because... something. Would you like to be treated unfairly when filling for taxes compared to some 'local'? I presume no. You know, treating every human being as equal and whatnot... some old school notions I see
- quotemstr 9y ago
  Living somewhere for a while gives you no special claim to that location.
  - mcguire 9y ago
    Humanity seems to disagree, almost universally.

wolco 9y ago

In fairness they had a permit the other group didn't and the city put in place a permit system to deal with these issues. If that happened in a less high profile city the other party would be the one who was assigned blame. There are only so many soccer fields here if people started to ignore the permit system it would make it more unfair to the more disadvanged groups.

mbrameld 9y ago

How should they have handled it? Called the police? What if it had been the Dropbox folks playing pickup and a family had rented the field for a birthday party and the Dropbox folks refused to leave? My guess is you wouldn't be criticising the family even though the only difference is the identity of the players. That speaks loudly to your biases.

gerbilly 9y ago
Sometimes bias is justified. These people lived there their whole lives. They grew there, we flew there. Localism isn't good either, but a bit of respect and give and take for people who, let's face it, will soon be pushed out of their neibourhoods to make way for tech workers, would be nice.
sverige 9y ago
I think they should have played a pickup game with the kids. They could have had some glorious "team-building" experience and built up the community at the same time. Like, get to know the neighbors before they are displaced because rents are going up. And it's funny, I really was waiting for the cops to show up because one of the Dropboxers had called them. Their desire to avoid having any real interaction with these kids is so painfully obvious that it makes me embarrassed for them. As far as your hypothetical, it's just that: hypothetical, as is your perception of my hypothetical biases. It's actually hilarious, because in the hypothetical my mind conjures up, I'm sure if we met in some real-life context you would end up calling me a nazi. FWIW, when I was younger, I knew and hung around with people who are just like the Dropboxers, and was probably like them in many ways. I've gotten to know and work with a lot of different kinds of people since then, so now I would intuitively know a better way to handle this situation than these guys did. Step 1 is to recognize that they are valuable human beings and neighbors. That's where this exchange broke down, so no need to go on to subsequent steps till we get that part right.
- quotemstr 9y ago
  These people reserved a field using correct, official channels. Why should they have to change their plans because some other people squatted on the field? Why should the Dropbox people have any moral obligation whatsoever to play a game with people they didn't choose?

guiomie 9y ago

If you read the video description, the blame should really be on the city for having an obscure system where you can rent the field that no one actually uses.