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> Hordes of newly minted and newly wealthy tech bros, flush with Silicon Valley VC cash, ruined what once had been an all-are-welcome cool, gray city of love, w

> Hordes of newly minted and newly wealthy tech bros, flush with Silicon Valley VC cash, ruined what once had been an all-are-welcome cool, gray city of love, where the funky landlady Anna This article nicely represents the narccisistic hubris of the ivory tower leftist viewpoint, and in-group social behavior at large. Tech Bros are the nerds that were (and still are, despite shallow appropriations of nerd culture in the mainstream) cast off from "normal" society. This has been the norm in the U.S. for decades. It's not cool to be smart and have geeky interests. Now tech is hot and the in-group is having trouble competing with people for whom this wasn't just a job or a class, or even a hobby, it was an escape. So they go after their characters to justify quotas and the now deliberate social stigma they were previously oblivious to enforcing. Tech Bros is a dirty class stereotype which totally ignores the passion and skill of the people who are revolutionizing society, for better or worse. And at the end of the day it's just the weird nerd kids being bullied as always. There's an obscure blog by a guy who talks about the three or so stages of popular subcultures, and how one of the three groups eventualy ruin everything, linked in the comments below which is related.

majos 7y ago
> There's an obscure blog by a guy who talks about the three or so stages of popular trends, and how three groups of people interact to eventually ruin any nice thing. If anyone knows that I'm talking about I'd appreciate a link! https://meaningness.com/geeks-mops-sociopaths https://meaningness.com/geeks-mops-sociopaths
dehrmann 7y ago
Honest question: are tech bros bros who upped their tech game or nerds who got bro game?
- mc32 7y ago
  It’s an epithet conjured up by journalists plugging in to the angst created by city policies and cast onto a ready and easy target.
  - thatsenough 7y ago
    That doesn't answer the question though. I'd say, in the early days, programmers were more geeky because computers were newer, rarer, and much harder to use. Most kids didn't grow up with computers in their homes. If they did, the computer was a big, ugly, unfriendly beige box, not a sleek sliver of glass and aluminum. When you booted it up, you were greeted by a blinking monochromatic command prompt, not an welcoming graphical interface. You had to learn cryptic, non-intuitive commands to operate it. Only a certain type of person would have the interest, focus, and abundance of free time to master it. Nowadays, kids are raised on computers. Software engineering is widely seen as a viable career path. The act of programming hasn't changed much, but we've removed some of the barriers to entry and made the career path accessible to a broader group of people.
    - nine_k 7y ago
      No, computers were not everywhere in, say, 1970s, so working with computers made you another kind of tech specialist, like working with, say, aircraft tech. Maybe cool, but your impact is limited; no way to make billions out of your job. Now computers are literally everywhere, and literally always before people's eyes. Also, there's the internet that connects them across the globe. Now anyone with a good idea and good business execution can start a billion-dollar business from home or garage, and reach global audience with little technical effort. On top of it, there are oodles of money looking for return, and high-risk, high-return investment looks better than no investment to many. This has radically changed the balance. As an engineer, you can build a very valuable, far-reaching company. Even if it's not turning profit yet, you have relatively much easier time to have millions invested in it.
enraged_camel 7y ago
>>narccisistic hubris That's funny, because as member of the tech community myself, I can unequivocally state that if there is one group that can be defined by the narcissistic hubris of its most prominent and influential members, it's techies. I mean, we're talking about people whose idea of "disruption" is bending and breaking all kinds of rules and laws. AirBnB, Uber, Theranos, Facebook, Google, you name it... they're all led by people who think they are better than others, know more than others. THAT is the real reason there's a backlash against us.
- majos 7y ago
  But “techies” mostly aren’t the CEO-types who try to do all this disruption. They’re mostly developers who like to get paid to do semi-interesting work. The messianic stuff is largely confined to a small, loud group, I think.
  - eecsninja 7y ago
    This is exactly it. There's a lot of apex fallacy going on in the discussion of tech. Most of us in tech don't have any say in the direction of the industry. Many of the rank and file workers would actually prefer to live someplace cheaper like Seattle, but it's the leadership of the tech industry (VCs, execs, etc) that have been slow to geographically diversify the industry. There's too much blaming of all techies for the actions of the people at the top of the tech hierarchy.
    - enraged_camel 7y ago
      >> Most of us in tech don't have any say in the direction of the industry. We would have a say in it if we, you know, unionized. But last time I checked, most techies viewed unions with disdain.
- mc32 7y ago
  That’s not “techies” those are VCs and some founders.
- allovernow 7y ago
doublement 7y ago
At least we're not getting evicted. To me the evictions dwarf every other concern. It's a result that's straightforwardly inhumane, and I don't think any reasonable person would disagree. Personally, I'm inclined to blame NIMBY San Francisco homeowners for this, but of course they would blame me and other "tech bros" for moving here. In the meantime, those hardest hit, low-income renters, are a member of neither bickering party.
- forrestthewoods 7y ago
  Evicting someone who doesn’t pay rent is definitely not inhumane. Prices changing alongside supply and demand is not inhumane. Policies which artificially constrain supply for no good reason? I’ll agree that’s inhumane.
  - doublement 7y ago
    > Prices changing alongside supply and demand is not inhumane. It is. It is inhumane. I agree with you that policies which artificially constrain the supply bear much of the blame, but an outcome can be inhumane in and of itself, even if it emerges from "supply and demand". People getting thrown out of their homes because the value of their labor no longer covers the cost of their dwelling is bad.
    - bandrami 7y ago
      So you're saying the value of housing stock should not appreciate? That's going to be a tough sell to its owners. If we want housing to be an investment, we have to acknowledge it's going to rise in value faster than inflation (otherwise it's a crap investment), which means it won't be affordable. Conversely, if we want housing to be affordable, it cannot rise in value faster than inflation, which means it can't be a good investment. As Charles Marohn says, it's not even a "problem", in that problems have solutions. It's a predicament.
      - Apocryphon 7y ago
        > If we want housing to be an investment That seems to be the problem at its core.
nytesky 7y ago
Tech bros are not the nerds and geeks of years past, suddenly rich. That was the dot.com boom. These are sons of the elite who used to mainline to investment banking on Wall Street, or maybe a MBB shop — they follow the money. There are plenty of nerds coming here, and they make a bit more money if they snag a FAANG job, but VCs and bros make sure they don’t get too big a slice of the startup pie.
- allovernow 7y ago
  You're arguing over the characteristics of a stereotype. Even if what you say is true, journalists wrap programmers in general up in their manufactured connotation. And that's, as they increasingly say in tech hubs, "problematic."
- throwawaybbb 7y ago
  I've been called a tech bro, late 20 something 1m in net assets. Me and my group of friends are absolutely the geeks of yore. Ffs my last pitch had a wh40k reference in it and the guy financing it spend more time talking about warhammer lore than about the actual startup.
  - dmix 7y ago
    People who only get their understanding of Silicon Valley and the wider hacker and startup cultures from the mass media. Which mean the Ubers, WeWorks, and Googles. They think this is the sum of tech and it totally ignores the average day-to-day life of working in tech. There's a million companies making millions or selling for hundreds of millions (or even 10s) who never make the headlines. They do weird obscure niche stuff that would take 20min to explain to an outsider. And 99% of them are all run by normal hardworking nerds-from-high school type people who aren't pretentious or failed to grow out of University stereotypes of educated males, and yes males do a lot of dumb ignorant stuff in their late teens and early adulthood. But the average entrepreneur isn't the 20 something prodigy the news fawns over, it's usually a 40+ guy whose been in the industry for a long time and found niches problem sets which they can specialize in and make a lot of money automates/dramatically improving how businesses are run in those markets. Then there are the super nerds who work at Google and Tesla and Twitter, but mostly they are mid-teir nerds just happy making a living being able to work with other really-smart people. There isn't anything toxic about any of this. It's just highly curious people working on problems that interest them. And occasionally that involves pushing uncomfortable hard-changing solutions society isn't quite ready for - or nerds who weren't quite ready for society. It's a learning process and SV will get better at interacting with the wider world. I hope too that the world starts treating SV (and the tech hubs around the world) with more respect.
claudeganon 7y ago
>There’s an obscure blog by a guy who talks about the three or so stages of popular trends Is this what you’re referring too? “Geeks, MOPs, and Sociopaths”? https://meaningness.com/geeks-mops-sociopaths https://meaningness.com/geeks-mops-sociopaths By this formulation, it’s hard to argue that “tech” as a subculture hasn’t been overrun by sociopaths. Just compare the tech heroes of yesteryear (thinking the 70s/80s) with those of today.
- allovernow 7y ago
  >If the scene is sufficiently geeky, it remains a strictly geek thing; a weird hobby, not a subculture. To some degree you may be correct, but tech is unique. It primarily falls into this category, however in recent times, probably as during the tech boom, the culture is also rightly seen as a strong career path. And the people who spend their lives coding out of pure passion make these things look extremely easy to outsiders - you can't deny that someone who spends 4-8 hours a day coding in their spare time since teenagehood isn't likely to outperform someone who just does this for a living. So there will be a particularly strong pressure to coopt the subculture - but my point is that tech is different, because it isn't a subculture, it's a passion that cannot be simply emulated because in the end code either works or it doesn't.
  - claudeganon 7y ago
    I think that’s a separate concern from what this post is describing though, which (in this framing) is whether tech continues to exist as a geek driven is consumed by sociopaths and made into something instrumental and without any real ethos. Geeks (your spending 4-8 hours a day coding) and sociopaths both exist a priori in this argument. It’s about which faction is the dominant one and the consequences of their being dominant.
scottrogowski 7y ago
> And at the end of the day it's just the weird nerd kids being bullied as always. This. So much. I've been a nerd since middle school and have experienced a fair amount of bullying while growing up. But the fact is, nothing has really changed between then and now. It has always been 'safe' to bully the nerds. No other group of people receives this level of public venomous screed. We shrug and accept it because we are used to it. We as a group need to get better about advocating for our rights to live and work as humans just like everyone else and be more deliberate about pointing out the completely bizarre policy environment of California in general and San Francisco in particular that has led to this explosion of issues.
- dondawest 7y ago
  > It has always been 'safe' to bully the nerds. No other group of people receives this level of public venomous screed. It’s because nerds are too busy following our interests to bother attacking back. Defending oneself in general doesn’t work: attacking back does. The maxim “Never defend, always attack” is a maxim for a reason. The only real “solution” here is to attack back and bully the people who bullied you in the first place. And is that really a solution? If as nerds, we defend ourselves, then we stay in the frame of the bully. If we attack back, we become bullying nerds. Society needs scapegoats. For decades and decades, nerds have been safe to pick on. It’s not until you get an extremely aggressive nerd like Bill Gates that a member of the “nerd class” even begins to defend themselves. And aggressive nerds are rare and generally self-interested. Rather than attacking back for the “nerd class” as a whole, they attack companies competing with theirs. What is the solution to this quandary? Everyone who’s read Girard knows we need scapegoats. If not nerds — oh wait, I mean “tech Bros” — then who else can we scapegoat as a society? The answer should obviously be Wall Street IMO, but that moment seems to have passed when the Occupy movement got culturally supplanted by in-group identity politics. IMO in order to stop the bullying, we must become bullies ourselves which poses two questions: * do we really wanna do that? * and would it even work since Occupy failed so dramatically?
  - Apocryphon 7y ago
    Nerds are at best a subculture, not a social class. And usually it's not even a subculture, but a collection of different subcultures and interests and archetypes and stereotypes, often mutually exclusive and conflicting.
remarkEon 7y ago
>Tech Bros is a dirty class stereotype which totally ignores the passion and skill of the people who are revolutionizing society, for better or worse. [Emphasis added] Well, this is certainly true. It's worth thinking for a moment about why "tech bro" has become a pejorative phase. Perhaps it has something to do with the "tech", which, for the most part, is really just online-ad-tech, UI/UX optimization, and a couple other things. Non-technical people don't really understand what most of this stuff is that "tech bros" work on, even though it really does affect them. And so it seems reasonable that they are a little confused as to how the "tech bros" got so rich working on "tech", which, again, is allegedly going to make us all better off. At least that's what we were all told growing up. To be frank I think the hubris comes more for the other side of this equation that you do, and I don't think it's a uniquely leftist viewpoint to be skeptical of all of this (as I am not a leftist). When I visit SF (which is probably a dozen times a year) I'll see plenty of new billboards and ads for new startups working on the "hottest new stuff". I'm a technical person and can actually grasp what they're working on. Some of it is great. But working people who can't afford to live there now don't get what any of this is, and they're right to be skeptical about it. Who cares how passionate you are about revolutionizing an algorithm to better serve adds on social media. Long term, that's probably going to hurt society. Not help it. And if criticism of this is now "bullying" then, well, I'm Biff Tannen.
- pm90 7y ago
  > Who cares how passionate you are about revolutionizing an algorithm to better serve adds on social media. Long term, that's probably going to hurt society. Not help it. And if criticism of this is now "bullying" then, well, I'm Biff Tannen. Most of Silicon Valley isn't working on ad-tech (although a large chunk of it is). To dismiss everyone working in SV as working in optimizing ads doesn't make much sense. There are other sectors of the economy completely wrecking the Environment (Energy, Global Warming), Global Economy (Finance, 2008 crisis) etc. While those sectors get their fair amount of attention, it seems like its cool to pick on those in tech now. /shrug
  - remarkEon 7y ago
    There have been multiple Hollywood movies depicting how big business and agribusiness are screwing up the environment. The Big Short was a great film about how Wall Street is totally corrupt and straight up caused the housing crisis. Should we have a movie made about ad tech and social media and their deleterious effects on society? Just to make it even. Most of Silicon Valley isn’t working on ad tech, yeah, I get it. But for crying out loud what the hell are they working on? Thats my point. How this is interpreted outside of tech circles is that “tech” is just a thing to make “tech” people more rich. Edit: I’d actually like to know what percentage of SV is working on ad tech, which I consider useless for American society at best and dangerous at worst.
wbl 7y ago
Where is my flying car? Clicking on ads is not revolutionizing society.
- lazylizard 7y ago
  I think it has actually. It motivated go, brotli, quic, tensorflow, kubernetes, vp9/av1, webrtc, hack, rust, hadoop, node, etcetcetc
sandoooo 7y ago
I somewhat look forward to SF's gamergate moment, where the mainstream left decides that it would rather convert the things that SF built into pure(r) SocJus, rather than just have SF as an ally: "codebros are basement-dwelling cryptonazi freaks!" "coders are dead!" "the word 'coder' is outdated and carries a baggage of racism and sexism! what's coding anyway? Aren't we all working with computers in some way? This means we're all coders!"
- barry-cotter 7y ago
  1) Social Justice isn’t mainstream left, it’s a very loud and quite powerful subculture. 2) The mainstream left is way too big to be coordinated on a mailing list or over Twitter and couldn’t agree on San Francisco if that was true. If there was never a coherent Left position on the smoldering wreckage that is Detroit why would there be on SF? 3) SF is just going to keep regulating, taxing and not building housing until there’s an event that everyone decides means SF is no longer absolutely the best place to be if you’re into startups and it’ll dissipate into the general Bay Area and the US, like Detroit and Michigan after Detroit started burning.
  - sandoooo 7y ago
    >Social Justice isn’t mainstream left, it’s a very loud and quite powerful subculture. Seems to me that it's becoming the mainstream left, considering the demographics are younger and more migrant-y than the old-mainstream of the Clinton era. The exact rate this is happening is up for debate, of course - we'll see after the primaries. As for why anyone would be more motivated to go after SF rather than Detroit: because SF has lots of money. Because after a certain unknown period, the budget deficits plus medicare plus social security etc will become bigger and bigger issues, and SF is just there, looking plump and delicious and terribly unjust.
tempsy 7y ago
I would be surprised if the number of millionaires minted from being an employee (not founder) at a private tech startup founded in SF was over 1000 over the last 10 years. Even if you're employee #10 the amount of equity you receive is, if you're lucky, maybe .20%, and drops exponentially from there. Employees working at the big cos likely made much more depending on how long they held on to their RSUs than your average startup employee.
- echelon 7y ago
  You're definitely wrong. I'm at a company that minted over a thousand millionaires, assuming they held onto their options. That's just one company.
  - tempsy 7y ago
    1000 millionaires at a private startup that went public? Only one I can think of is Uber where there could’ve been that many employees with significant equity, but that is really a generational company. Thinking of the ones that reach peak value in the low billions. AFAIK engineers were getting around 12K RSUs pre IPO, maybe 20K for senior ones, which at today’s valuation is not even close to a million.
  - speedplane 7y ago
    > I'm at a company that minted over a thousand millionaires, assuming they held onto their options. Okay, so that requires the company to be sold for at least $1B, the employees collectively own 100% of the company, and the stock is evenly distributed. Given the investor's share and uneven distribution among employees, for there to be 1000 millionaires, the company would have to sell for at the very least $5B (probably much more). There are only a handful of companies that have sold at that level, certainly not common.
- doublement 7y ago
  I would estimate that the typical software developer working over that 10-year period and putting the money into either S&P 500 or a house saw an increase of $1M in their net worth.
dmix 7y ago
This comment is 10/10. Excellent cultural critique.
Impossible 7y ago
While it's already kind of problematic to call nerds 'cast off from "normal" society' like they were an oppressed minority, I don't think the comparison is relevant. Most tech bros would have been working in finance or as lawyers or some other lucrative field. Many of them don't care about technology beyond how it can make them money, you see this attitude again and again on HN (countless posts about how the only value a programmer brings in business value). Most tech bros are not nerds that love technology for the sake of it, although there are of course people that work in tech that have this passion. The only way your comment works is if you apply "tech bro" to everyone working for a tech company...
bsanr2 7y ago
>Tech Bros are the nerds that were (and still are, despite shallow appropriations of nerd culture in the mainstream) cast off from "normal" society. I'd counter with something more radical for HN: that "Tech Bros" are the beneficiaries of a colossal intergenerational wealth transfer, constructed (consciously or unconsciously) to ensure that the vast majority of that wealth stays within the hands of relatively highly-educated, middle class white people. The myth-making that this "revenge of the nerds" fantasy is a subset of is in service of countering the obvious observations that would make such a wealth transfer untenable politically (in this case, hiding the fact that Tech Bros tend to come from privileged backgrounds). Another example is tech's dogmatic obsession with the notion of meritocracy, disguising the gatekept (and, otherwise, often arbitrary) nature of its job market and feeder pipelines in education and networking. With the general public's perception of the tech community cemented in this way, its members are free to wield influence and exoform their political, social, and cultural environment as they see fit. This doesn't have to be a conspiracy to work; instead, what often happens is that investment entities headed and funded by elite, wealthy, often white Boomers look independently at pitches for companies that make widgets, if anything at all; that sell advertising and the profiles of the advertised-to; and that will never turn a profit, and ultimately determine, "I like these guys, they could turn this thing unicorn." They never will, of course - hopefully FAANG will buy you out for the technology you built to better sell ads - but in the meantime, dozens, hundreds, thousands of people will have access to incredible salaries and opportunities. Just as long as it's the "right" people. I say this from the perspective of someone on the outside looking in, locked out of tech prosperity by circumstance, not lack of desire or aptitude: Tech Bro-dom bullies, ignores, and eventually leaves in the dust, professionally and economically, the people who are really on the margins.

majos 7y ago

> There's an obscure blog by a guy who talks about the three or so stages of popular trends, and how three groups of people interact to eventually ruin any nice thing. If anyone knows that I'm talking about I'd appreciate a link! https://meaningness.com/geeks-mops-sociopaths https://meaningness.com/geeks-mops-sociopaths

dehrmann 7y ago

Honest question: are tech bros bros who upped their tech game or nerds who got bro game?

mc32 7y ago
It’s an epithet conjured up by journalists plugging in to the angst created by city policies and cast onto a ready and easy target.
- thatsenough 7y ago
  That doesn't answer the question though. I'd say, in the early days, programmers were more geeky because computers were newer, rarer, and much harder to use. Most kids didn't grow up with computers in their homes. If they did, the computer was a big, ugly, unfriendly beige box, not a sleek sliver of glass and aluminum. When you booted it up, you were greeted by a blinking monochromatic command prompt, not an welcoming graphical interface. You had to learn cryptic, non-intuitive commands to operate it. Only a certain type of person would have the interest, focus, and abundance of free time to master it. Nowadays, kids are raised on computers. Software engineering is widely seen as a viable career path. The act of programming hasn't changed much, but we've removed some of the barriers to entry and made the career path accessible to a broader group of people.
  - nine_k 7y ago
    No, computers were not everywhere in, say, 1970s, so working with computers made you another kind of tech specialist, like working with, say, aircraft tech. Maybe cool, but your impact is limited; no way to make billions out of your job. Now computers are literally everywhere, and literally always before people's eyes. Also, there's the internet that connects them across the globe. Now anyone with a good idea and good business execution can start a billion-dollar business from home or garage, and reach global audience with little technical effort. On top of it, there are oodles of money looking for return, and high-risk, high-return investment looks better than no investment to many. This has radically changed the balance. As an engineer, you can build a very valuable, far-reaching company. Even if it's not turning profit yet, you have relatively much easier time to have millions invested in it.

enraged_camel 7y ago

>>narccisistic hubris That's funny, because as member of the tech community myself, I can unequivocally state that if there is one group that can be defined by the narcissistic hubris of its most prominent and influential members, it's techies. I mean, we're talking about people whose idea of "disruption" is bending and breaking all kinds of rules and laws. AirBnB, Uber, Theranos, Facebook, Google, you name it... they're all led by people who think they are better than others, know more than others. THAT is the real reason there's a backlash against us.

majos 7y ago
But “techies” mostly aren’t the CEO-types who try to do all this disruption. They’re mostly developers who like to get paid to do semi-interesting work. The messianic stuff is largely confined to a small, loud group, I think.
- eecsninja 7y ago
  This is exactly it. There's a lot of apex fallacy going on in the discussion of tech. Most of us in tech don't have any say in the direction of the industry. Many of the rank and file workers would actually prefer to live someplace cheaper like Seattle, but it's the leadership of the tech industry (VCs, execs, etc) that have been slow to geographically diversify the industry. There's too much blaming of all techies for the actions of the people at the top of the tech hierarchy.
  - enraged_camel 7y ago
    >> Most of us in tech don't have any say in the direction of the industry. We would have a say in it if we, you know, unionized. But last time I checked, most techies viewed unions with disdain.
mc32 7y ago
That’s not “techies” those are VCs and some founders.
allovernow 7y ago

doublement 7y ago

At least we're not getting evicted. To me the evictions dwarf every other concern. It's a result that's straightforwardly inhumane, and I don't think any reasonable person would disagree. Personally, I'm inclined to blame NIMBY San Francisco homeowners for this, but of course they would blame me and other "tech bros" for moving here. In the meantime, those hardest hit, low-income renters, are a member of neither bickering party.

forrestthewoods 7y ago
Evicting someone who doesn’t pay rent is definitely not inhumane. Prices changing alongside supply and demand is not inhumane. Policies which artificially constrain supply for no good reason? I’ll agree that’s inhumane.
- doublement 7y ago
  > Prices changing alongside supply and demand is not inhumane. It is. It is inhumane. I agree with you that policies which artificially constrain the supply bear much of the blame, but an outcome can be inhumane in and of itself, even if it emerges from "supply and demand". People getting thrown out of their homes because the value of their labor no longer covers the cost of their dwelling is bad.
  - bandrami 7y ago
    So you're saying the value of housing stock should not appreciate? That's going to be a tough sell to its owners. If we want housing to be an investment, we have to acknowledge it's going to rise in value faster than inflation (otherwise it's a crap investment), which means it won't be affordable. Conversely, if we want housing to be affordable, it cannot rise in value faster than inflation, which means it can't be a good investment. As Charles Marohn says, it's not even a "problem", in that problems have solutions. It's a predicament.
    - Apocryphon 7y ago
      > If we want housing to be an investment That seems to be the problem at its core.

nytesky 7y ago

Tech bros are not the nerds and geeks of years past, suddenly rich. That was the dot.com boom. These are sons of the elite who used to mainline to investment banking on Wall Street, or maybe a MBB shop — they follow the money. There are plenty of nerds coming here, and they make a bit more money if they snag a FAANG job, but VCs and bros make sure they don’t get too big a slice of the startup pie.

allovernow 7y ago
You're arguing over the characteristics of a stereotype. Even if what you say is true, journalists wrap programmers in general up in their manufactured connotation. And that's, as they increasingly say in tech hubs, "problematic."
throwawaybbb 7y ago
I've been called a tech bro, late 20 something 1m in net assets. Me and my group of friends are absolutely the geeks of yore. Ffs my last pitch had a wh40k reference in it and the guy financing it spend more time talking about warhammer lore than about the actual startup.
- dmix 7y ago
  People who only get their understanding of Silicon Valley and the wider hacker and startup cultures from the mass media. Which mean the Ubers, WeWorks, and Googles. They think this is the sum of tech and it totally ignores the average day-to-day life of working in tech. There's a million companies making millions or selling for hundreds of millions (or even 10s) who never make the headlines. They do weird obscure niche stuff that would take 20min to explain to an outsider. And 99% of them are all run by normal hardworking nerds-from-high school type people who aren't pretentious or failed to grow out of University stereotypes of educated males, and yes males do a lot of dumb ignorant stuff in their late teens and early adulthood. But the average entrepreneur isn't the 20 something prodigy the news fawns over, it's usually a 40+ guy whose been in the industry for a long time and found niches problem sets which they can specialize in and make a lot of money automates/dramatically improving how businesses are run in those markets. Then there are the super nerds who work at Google and Tesla and Twitter, but mostly they are mid-teir nerds just happy making a living being able to work with other really-smart people. There isn't anything toxic about any of this. It's just highly curious people working on problems that interest them. And occasionally that involves pushing uncomfortable hard-changing solutions society isn't quite ready for - or nerds who weren't quite ready for society. It's a learning process and SV will get better at interacting with the wider world. I hope too that the world starts treating SV (and the tech hubs around the world) with more respect.

claudeganon 7y ago

>There’s an obscure blog by a guy who talks about the three or so stages of popular trends Is this what you’re referring too? “Geeks, MOPs, and Sociopaths”? https://meaningness.com/geeks-mops-sociopaths https://meaningness.com/geeks-mops-sociopaths By this formulation, it’s hard to argue that “tech” as a subculture hasn’t been overrun by sociopaths. Just compare the tech heroes of yesteryear (thinking the 70s/80s) with those of today.

allovernow 7y ago
>If the scene is sufficiently geeky, it remains a strictly geek thing; a weird hobby, not a subculture. To some degree you may be correct, but tech is unique. It primarily falls into this category, however in recent times, probably as during the tech boom, the culture is also rightly seen as a strong career path. And the people who spend their lives coding out of pure passion make these things look extremely easy to outsiders - you can't deny that someone who spends 4-8 hours a day coding in their spare time since teenagehood isn't likely to outperform someone who just does this for a living. So there will be a particularly strong pressure to coopt the subculture - but my point is that tech is different, because it isn't a subculture, it's a passion that cannot be simply emulated because in the end code either works or it doesn't.
- claudeganon 7y ago
  I think that’s a separate concern from what this post is describing though, which (in this framing) is whether tech continues to exist as a geek driven is consumed by sociopaths and made into something instrumental and without any real ethos. Geeks (your spending 4-8 hours a day coding) and sociopaths both exist a priori in this argument. It’s about which faction is the dominant one and the consequences of their being dominant.

scottrogowski 7y ago

> And at the end of the day it's just the weird nerd kids being bullied as always. This. So much. I've been a nerd since middle school and have experienced a fair amount of bullying while growing up. But the fact is, nothing has really changed between then and now. It has always been 'safe' to bully the nerds. No other group of people receives this level of public venomous screed. We shrug and accept it because we are used to it. We as a group need to get better about advocating for our rights to live and work as humans just like everyone else and be more deliberate about pointing out the completely bizarre policy environment of California in general and San Francisco in particular that has led to this explosion of issues.

dondawest 7y ago
> It has always been 'safe' to bully the nerds. No other group of people receives this level of public venomous screed. It’s because nerds are too busy following our interests to bother attacking back. Defending oneself in general doesn’t work: attacking back does. The maxim “Never defend, always attack” is a maxim for a reason. The only real “solution” here is to attack back and bully the people who bullied you in the first place. And is that really a solution? If as nerds, we defend ourselves, then we stay in the frame of the bully. If we attack back, we become bullying nerds. Society needs scapegoats. For decades and decades, nerds have been safe to pick on. It’s not until you get an extremely aggressive nerd like Bill Gates that a member of the “nerd class” even begins to defend themselves. And aggressive nerds are rare and generally self-interested. Rather than attacking back for the “nerd class” as a whole, they attack companies competing with theirs. What is the solution to this quandary? Everyone who’s read Girard knows we need scapegoats. If not nerds — oh wait, I mean “tech Bros” — then who else can we scapegoat as a society? The answer should obviously be Wall Street IMO, but that moment seems to have passed when the Occupy movement got culturally supplanted by in-group identity politics. IMO in order to stop the bullying, we must become bullies ourselves which poses two questions: * do we really wanna do that? * and would it even work since Occupy failed so dramatically?
- Apocryphon 7y ago
  Nerds are at best a subculture, not a social class. And usually it's not even a subculture, but a collection of different subcultures and interests and archetypes and stereotypes, often mutually exclusive and conflicting.

remarkEon 7y ago

>Tech Bros is a dirty class stereotype which totally ignores the passion and skill of the people who are revolutionizing society, for better or worse. [Emphasis added] Well, this is certainly true. It's worth thinking for a moment about why "tech bro" has become a pejorative phase. Perhaps it has something to do with the "tech", which, for the most part, is really just online-ad-tech, UI/UX optimization, and a couple other things. Non-technical people don't really understand what most of this stuff is that "tech bros" work on, even though it really does affect them. And so it seems reasonable that they are a little confused as to how the "tech bros" got so rich working on "tech", which, again, is allegedly going to make us all better off. At least that's what we were all told growing up. To be frank I think the hubris comes more for the other side of this equation that you do, and I don't think it's a uniquely leftist viewpoint to be skeptical of all of this (as I am not a leftist). When I visit SF (which is probably a dozen times a year) I'll see plenty of new billboards and ads for new startups working on the "hottest new stuff". I'm a technical person and can actually grasp what they're working on. Some of it is great. But working people who can't afford to live there now don't get what any of this is, and they're right to be skeptical about it. Who cares how passionate you are about revolutionizing an algorithm to better serve adds on social media. Long term, that's probably going to hurt society. Not help it. And if criticism of this is now "bullying" then, well, I'm Biff Tannen.

pm90 7y ago
> Who cares how passionate you are about revolutionizing an algorithm to better serve adds on social media. Long term, that's probably going to hurt society. Not help it. And if criticism of this is now "bullying" then, well, I'm Biff Tannen. Most of Silicon Valley isn't working on ad-tech (although a large chunk of it is). To dismiss everyone working in SV as working in optimizing ads doesn't make much sense. There are other sectors of the economy completely wrecking the Environment (Energy, Global Warming), Global Economy (Finance, 2008 crisis) etc. While those sectors get their fair amount of attention, it seems like its cool to pick on those in tech now. /shrug
- remarkEon 7y ago
  There have been multiple Hollywood movies depicting how big business and agribusiness are screwing up the environment. The Big Short was a great film about how Wall Street is totally corrupt and straight up caused the housing crisis. Should we have a movie made about ad tech and social media and their deleterious effects on society? Just to make it even. Most of Silicon Valley isn’t working on ad tech, yeah, I get it. But for crying out loud what the hell are they working on? Thats my point. How this is interpreted outside of tech circles is that “tech” is just a thing to make “tech” people more rich. Edit: I’d actually like to know what percentage of SV is working on ad tech, which I consider useless for American society at best and dangerous at worst.

wbl 7y ago

Where is my flying car? Clicking on ads is not revolutionizing society.

lazylizard 7y ago
I think it has actually. It motivated go, brotli, quic, tensorflow, kubernetes, vp9/av1, webrtc, hack, rust, hadoop, node, etcetcetc

sandoooo 7y ago

I somewhat look forward to SF's gamergate moment, where the mainstream left decides that it would rather convert the things that SF built into pure(r) SocJus, rather than just have SF as an ally: "codebros are basement-dwelling cryptonazi freaks!" "coders are dead!" "the word 'coder' is outdated and carries a baggage of racism and sexism! what's coding anyway? Aren't we all working with computers in some way? This means we're all coders!"

barry-cotter 7y ago
1) Social Justice isn’t mainstream left, it’s a very loud and quite powerful subculture. 2) The mainstream left is way too big to be coordinated on a mailing list or over Twitter and couldn’t agree on San Francisco if that was true. If there was never a coherent Left position on the smoldering wreckage that is Detroit why would there be on SF? 3) SF is just going to keep regulating, taxing and not building housing until there’s an event that everyone decides means SF is no longer absolutely the best place to be if you’re into startups and it’ll dissipate into the general Bay Area and the US, like Detroit and Michigan after Detroit started burning.
- sandoooo 7y ago
  >Social Justice isn’t mainstream left, it’s a very loud and quite powerful subculture. Seems to me that it's becoming the mainstream left, considering the demographics are younger and more migrant-y than the old-mainstream of the Clinton era. The exact rate this is happening is up for debate, of course - we'll see after the primaries. As for why anyone would be more motivated to go after SF rather than Detroit: because SF has lots of money. Because after a certain unknown period, the budget deficits plus medicare plus social security etc will become bigger and bigger issues, and SF is just there, looking plump and delicious and terribly unjust.

tempsy 7y ago

I would be surprised if the number of millionaires minted from being an employee (not founder) at a private tech startup founded in SF was over 1000 over the last 10 years. Even if you're employee #10 the amount of equity you receive is, if you're lucky, maybe .20%, and drops exponentially from there. Employees working at the big cos likely made much more depending on how long they held on to their RSUs than your average startup employee.

echelon 7y ago
You're definitely wrong. I'm at a company that minted over a thousand millionaires, assuming they held onto their options. That's just one company.
- tempsy 7y ago
  1000 millionaires at a private startup that went public? Only one I can think of is Uber where there could’ve been that many employees with significant equity, but that is really a generational company. Thinking of the ones that reach peak value in the low billions. AFAIK engineers were getting around 12K RSUs pre IPO, maybe 20K for senior ones, which at today’s valuation is not even close to a million.
- speedplane 7y ago
  > I'm at a company that minted over a thousand millionaires, assuming they held onto their options. Okay, so that requires the company to be sold for at least $1B, the employees collectively own 100% of the company, and the stock is evenly distributed. Given the investor's share and uneven distribution among employees, for there to be 1000 millionaires, the company would have to sell for at the very least $5B (probably much more). There are only a handful of companies that have sold at that level, certainly not common.
doublement 7y ago
I would estimate that the typical software developer working over that 10-year period and putting the money into either S&P 500 or a house saw an increase of $1M in their net worth.

dmix 7y ago

This comment is 10/10. Excellent cultural critique.

Impossible 7y ago

While it's already kind of problematic to call nerds 'cast off from "normal" society' like they were an oppressed minority, I don't think the comparison is relevant. Most tech bros would have been working in finance or as lawyers or some other lucrative field. Many of them don't care about technology beyond how it can make them money, you see this attitude again and again on HN (countless posts about how the only value a programmer brings in business value). Most tech bros are not nerds that love technology for the sake of it, although there are of course people that work in tech that have this passion. The only way your comment works is if you apply "tech bro" to everyone working for a tech company...

bsanr2 7y ago

>Tech Bros are the nerds that were (and still are, despite shallow appropriations of nerd culture in the mainstream) cast off from "normal" society. I'd counter with something more radical for HN: that "Tech Bros" are the beneficiaries of a colossal intergenerational wealth transfer, constructed (consciously or unconsciously) to ensure that the vast majority of that wealth stays within the hands of relatively highly-educated, middle class white people. The myth-making that this "revenge of the nerds" fantasy is a subset of is in service of countering the obvious observations that would make such a wealth transfer untenable politically (in this case, hiding the fact that Tech Bros tend to come from privileged backgrounds). Another example is tech's dogmatic obsession with the notion of meritocracy, disguising the gatekept (and, otherwise, often arbitrary) nature of its job market and feeder pipelines in education and networking. With the general public's perception of the tech community cemented in this way, its members are free to wield influence and exoform their political, social, and cultural environment as they see fit. This doesn't have to be a conspiracy to work; instead, what often happens is that investment entities headed and funded by elite, wealthy, often white Boomers look independently at pitches for companies that make widgets, if anything at all; that sell advertising and the profiles of the advertised-to; and that will never turn a profit, and ultimately determine, "I like these guys, they could turn this thing unicorn." They never will, of course - hopefully FAANG will buy you out for the technology you built to better sell ads - but in the meantime, dozens, hundreds, thousands of people will have access to incredible salaries and opportunities. Just as long as it's the "right" people. I say this from the perspective of someone on the outside looking in, locked out of tech prosperity by circumstance, not lack of desire or aptitude: Tech Bro-dom bullies, ignores, and eventually leaves in the dust, professionally and economically, the people who are really on the margins.