11 ms·

> When I mention it to someone that I want to take time off for a couple years to have children in silicon valley, they look at me as if I'm an alien. As if wan

by dcow 6y ago

> When I mention it to someone that I want to take time off for a couple years to have children in silicon valley, they look at me as if I'm an alien. As if wanting to be pregnant and not working at the same time as being sleep deprived and wanting to spend time with my own baby when they are at their youngest is some strange outlandish fantasy. And this happens way more than people lead on and for the exact BS reasons you call out. As someone who dated in SF not for the hookup but to try and find a life partner who wanted to prioritize and raise a family, it was bleak. We almost seem intent on reinforcing “career is king”, not tearing it down.

andrepd 6y ago
I don't want to sound like an extremist but this is what happens when everything in life is mercantilised. Money becomes king.
- AnthonyMouse 6y ago
  It's really housing and then money only as a prerequisite to that. To start a family you need somewhere to live. When housing costs are insane you need crazy money to afford it, so everything becomes about money.
  - kungito 6y ago
    It's ridiculous how often people repeat this because they want to live in expensive areas. You don't really have to do that.
    - samr71 6y ago
      I'm sure most of the people working in Tech in the Bay Area could go get a job at some firm in Cincinnati, with substantially lower COL. Of course, they would have a substantially lower salary as well, probably low enough to make the Bay Area the better option economically, even including the high COL. Of course, that doesn't mean we can't lower the COL of the Bay Area! Make Silicon Valley as dense as Tokyo, and I assure you rents will fall.
      - sjwalter 6y ago
        See, you're looking purely in terms of financial economics. But, just as there are other forms of wealth than financial wealth, there are other forms of economics, like social economics. Your decision to take the XX% improved pay in the higher COL area surely will improve your balance sheet over a decade. But what will your peers look like after that decade? Will they be a bunch of 40yo millionaire single people all secretly worried that they took a bad tradeoff? Will the dating pool be full of careerist greedy types? Or family-focused types? I've lived all over the US, and can't recommend enough making actual sacrifices for family. As in, yes, less 401k contribution this year, but I get a house proper for raising children and a stay-at-home wife that is extremely happily homeschooling our brood. So funny, too: Building intergenerational capital for your family is now easier in low CoL areas, because the sacrifices imposed upon children raised in high COL areas are arguably much more damaging than them having smaller college funds. (specifically: dual-income requirement means less parental time, plus high COL areas have spent the past decade making their schools less competitive in order to eradicate, for one example, the horrid specter of white supremacy from the math classroom, where it has loomed large for generations, apparently, which makes the "but the schools" argument basically irrelevant). Can't recommend enough: Move to the country, homeschool your kids, spend as much time as possible with them. Finally, basically the very most common deathbed confession is guilt regarding prioritizing work over family. Do you actually care about regret-minimization? Or do you really truly care about buying baubles and ensuring your children are just as entranced with the rat race as you and all your peers are? If the latter, stay in SF!
        samr71 6y ago
        This is a fantastic point I don't think I've ever seen brought up before. I'll need to think on this.
      - kaitai 6y ago
        I've done the math with my Midwestern salary and I still come out ahead in the Midwest on average. Yes, you're looking at it all economically, disregarding culture, quality of life, access to nature, family, etc, but even economically, good schools are cheaper here, cultural events are cheaper here, college is cheaper here, day care is cheaper here. That's why a lot of people do move away from the Bay when they've got kids to raise.
    - AnthonyMouse 6y ago
      > It's ridiculous how often people repeat this because they want to live in expensive areas. You don't really have to do that. It's not a problem limited to "expensive areas" though it is dramatically worse there as a result of zoning restrictions on top of everything. It's a problem caused by near-zero interest rates inflating housing prices everywhere.
    - ovi256 6y ago
      When living in an expensive area, one doesn't have to wonder if it's a desirable area. It's obvious it is, look how expensive it is. We copy what others want, a lot, unconsciously.
- monoideism 6y ago
  It's partly that, but it's partly what the GP comment says: the prevalent idea that true equality of the sexes is for women to become exact copies of men. Since women and men are not exact copies, this causes problems.
  - throwaway6734 6y ago
    Imo it's because there's less social resistance for women to take on the roles of men. Until men that take on the former roles of women are viewed equivalently in the dating market, it's going to be a much harder slog
    - deleted 6y ago
      [deleted]
    - JPKab 6y ago
      Women across all income demographics desire men who make as much or more than them. It's a fundamental preference that OKCupid identified a long time ago. As a man, I don't fault this. The risk to a man of reproducing with a woman who isn't great at making money isn't as high, at a fundamental level, as it is for women. A man isn't incapacitated in any way by the act of reproducing. Nor is he prevented or blocked out of reproducing with others, at an evolutionary level. A woman is at great risk for mating with a man who isn't a good provider. If he abandons her, she's stuck. This was the reality for our ancestors, and those preferences are baked into our genes. The opportunity cost of mating with a loser was horrific for women. In case anyone thinks that preference is cultural, it's not. It exists across every culture on the planet, not unlike the biological attraction men have to women who display physical features that are indicative of high fertility. Biology is brutal and doesn't care about fairness or morality.
      - jxramos 6y ago
        > Biology is brutal and doesn't care about fairness or morality. I still try to meditate on the evolutionary advances for sexual vs asexual reproduction to begin with. There's got to be a huge advantage of the separation of the sexes that is hard to fathom just because it's everywhere. Is it a springboard of genetic diversity that optimizes in ways we can't imagine otherwise? The 'compared to what' is always something I wanted to contemplate. Like why did organisms split into near copies of each other with male and female? Why had one developed that carried the womb and the other not? Was it just simple reproductive concurrency? The separation being the better evolutionary choice is so mysterious to me.
- tomcam 6y ago
  Big capitalist here. I agree completely. The reason I'm a millionaire instead of a billionaire is that my first priority was always to have a stable family and marriage. I noticed all the billionaires seemed to go through a few wives before settling down. Didn't like what that did to the children, or what I imagined it might have done. This kept me out of SV (and in much more, at the time, stable and family oriented Microsoft country).
  - sky_rw 6y ago
    If becoming a billionaire or not was simply a matter of choice for you I’m surprised you couldn’t figure out a way to do it without running through wives.
    - tomcam 6y ago
      Sarcasm noted. As I’m sure you can tell, I’m not that smart. But I figured out I could do if I worked hard enough and smart enough to get the fuck out of the neighborhood/family I lived in and never get abused or beaten again. I managed that much. I’ve done in-depth studies of successful people since I was a young kid, and the richest ones simply didn’t seem to have time for family. You could probably crack that nut. I can’t. I have a house and a farm and a family close to me, however flawed. I’ll take it.
  - madengr 6y ago
    Hell, I’d be a trillionaire but drinking beer is my first priority, so I’m only a thousandaire. As soon as I get off the couch the $$ will roll in.
  - Dracophoenix 6y ago
    Have you considered that going through wives might have more to do with how divorcing HNW individuals is a perverse incentive created by the legal system rather than a fault of the individuals in question? In your marriage, how do you hedge against that?
  - astrange 6y ago
    Elon has six kids, so can you.
zippergz 6y ago
I have a lot of friends in SF. At least in the tech industry, it seems that the main reason people live in SF despite the significant downsides is for career options and pay. So I'd guess that the SF dating pool is already strongly skewed to people who choose career over all else.
- fossuser 6y ago
  The bay area M/F ratio is extremely skewed and the dating market is extremely competitive - (has way too many men). I would guess that in cities with high skew (in either direction) this creates a disincentive to staying together for one person in the relationship. I'd also guess the NIMBYs and extreme housing cost also incentivize delaying things. If there was a lot of housing supply the financial risk of having kids would be way lower.
JPKab 6y ago
As a father who had his first child at 23 years of age, the corporate/SV world is just AWFUL to women who don't want to have to rely on IVF to have kids. And often the worst perpetrators of said awfulness are other women who themselves are delaying having kids. They have sacrificed, and really don't like the women who they view as "not making the same sacrifice". It's all around just awful to pit human biology against corporate norms. And the parent commenter you responded to above really hit the nail on the head with the things women's rights activists have prioritized. Because activists are primarily based out of universities and urban centers, they are really pre-occupied with the wants/needs of 20 something women, and could give two shits about things outside of landing that sweet job at Google. The effect on our society is insane. It's basically incredibly common now to encounter a stereotype: The couple in their 40s with twins, often born premature, a consequence of IVF technology leading to incredibly high rates of multiple births. My brother and I are identical twins, born before IVF was remotely affordable. Twins used to be rare. Now they are everywhere, and fit a certain demographic. It's absolutely twisted and toxic that workplace norms and cutthroat competition in said workplace have been allowed to remain static, and demanded that humans delay reproduction. What a testament to how absolutely corrupt the feminist movement is that it looked at the Don Draper character in Mad Men, and concluded that their mission should be to create female Don Drapers, instead of challenging and upending whether ANYONE would want to be Don Draper. Edit: Dang and other commenters correctly pointed out that I violated some HN norms in here and also my wording was poor and undermined my point. I'm leaving the above unedited for others to learn from my stupidity, and will clarify here: I have zero problem with people having kids later in life. I only have a problem with people being FORCED to have kids later in life when they otherwise wouldn't have, due to inflexible and arbitrary corporate norms which were established for male only workplaces. (That forced decision was what I viewed as toxic) I'm a full advocate of women's rights as well, and my frustrations with feminism expressed above were intended to express my view that it didn't go far enough, and "settled", leaving women in a perpetually unfair position compared to men.
- jacobolus 6y ago
  Your comment would be a lot more effective if it didn't suggest that women's rights activists only care about landing jobs at Google and are "absolutely corrupt". The sentences linking identical twins to "twisted and toxic" are also weird. There are some kernels of insight there, but this is not a remotely accurate characterization of any of the women's rights activists I have ever met, and it largely comes across to me as paternalistic victim-blaming. 20-something feminist activists have limited power and influence, and are not responsible for toxic workplace culture in industries dominated by middle-aged men.
asoneth 6y ago
Of more than a dozen friends who moved to Silicon Valley for work/education, all but one left California around the time they started their families. The impression I get is that they're happy they had a chance to work there for a decade or so and now they're happy to live somewhere else. Silicon Valley sounds like a great place to do many things and it's OK if having a family is not one of those things. I'm not saying it's not possible -- one of my friends is making a go of it. But it does sound like having a family there is playing on Hard Mode. Contrast that to NYC where most of the folks I know who started families there still work in the city, though some did move a little further out into the suburbs.
- whydoyoucare 6y ago
  I believe it primarily has to do with cost of living than anything else.
  - asoneth 6y ago
    Yes, though salaries are a factor as well. When I ran the numbers on some offers years ago my estimate was that moving to Silicon Valley would be a financially sound decision if I lived frugally because I'd be less exposed to the high cost of living. But once you start factoring in things like owning a home, childcare, etc the salary premium compared to cities like NYC, Boston, Seattle, Portland, etc just isn't sufficient. So it makes some sense that the area attracts young people looking to strike it rich but pressures them to leave if they haven't won the startup lottery and still want to have a family.

by dcow 6y ago

andrepd 6y ago

I don't want to sound like an extremist but this is what happens when everything in life is mercantilised. Money becomes king.

AnthonyMouse 6y ago
It's really housing and then money only as a prerequisite to that. To start a family you need somewhere to live. When housing costs are insane you need crazy money to afford it, so everything becomes about money.
- kungito 6y ago
  It's ridiculous how often people repeat this because they want to live in expensive areas. You don't really have to do that.
  - samr71 6y ago
    I'm sure most of the people working in Tech in the Bay Area could go get a job at some firm in Cincinnati, with substantially lower COL. Of course, they would have a substantially lower salary as well, probably low enough to make the Bay Area the better option economically, even including the high COL. Of course, that doesn't mean we can't lower the COL of the Bay Area! Make Silicon Valley as dense as Tokyo, and I assure you rents will fall.
    - sjwalter 6y ago
      See, you're looking purely in terms of financial economics. But, just as there are other forms of wealth than financial wealth, there are other forms of economics, like social economics. Your decision to take the XX% improved pay in the higher COL area surely will improve your balance sheet over a decade. But what will your peers look like after that decade? Will they be a bunch of 40yo millionaire single people all secretly worried that they took a bad tradeoff? Will the dating pool be full of careerist greedy types? Or family-focused types? I've lived all over the US, and can't recommend enough making actual sacrifices for family. As in, yes, less 401k contribution this year, but I get a house proper for raising children and a stay-at-home wife that is extremely happily homeschooling our brood. So funny, too: Building intergenerational capital for your family is now easier in low CoL areas, because the sacrifices imposed upon children raised in high COL areas are arguably much more damaging than them having smaller college funds. (specifically: dual-income requirement means less parental time, plus high COL areas have spent the past decade making their schools less competitive in order to eradicate, for one example, the horrid specter of white supremacy from the math classroom, where it has loomed large for generations, apparently, which makes the "but the schools" argument basically irrelevant). Can't recommend enough: Move to the country, homeschool your kids, spend as much time as possible with them. Finally, basically the very most common deathbed confession is guilt regarding prioritizing work over family. Do you actually care about regret-minimization? Or do you really truly care about buying baubles and ensuring your children are just as entranced with the rat race as you and all your peers are? If the latter, stay in SF!
      - samr71 6y ago
        This is a fantastic point I don't think I've ever seen brought up before. I'll need to think on this.
    - kaitai 6y ago
      I've done the math with my Midwestern salary and I still come out ahead in the Midwest on average. Yes, you're looking at it all economically, disregarding culture, quality of life, access to nature, family, etc, but even economically, good schools are cheaper here, cultural events are cheaper here, college is cheaper here, day care is cheaper here. That's why a lot of people do move away from the Bay when they've got kids to raise.
  - AnthonyMouse 6y ago
    > It's ridiculous how often people repeat this because they want to live in expensive areas. You don't really have to do that. It's not a problem limited to "expensive areas" though it is dramatically worse there as a result of zoning restrictions on top of everything. It's a problem caused by near-zero interest rates inflating housing prices everywhere.
  - ovi256 6y ago
    When living in an expensive area, one doesn't have to wonder if it's a desirable area. It's obvious it is, look how expensive it is. We copy what others want, a lot, unconsciously.
monoideism 6y ago
It's partly that, but it's partly what the GP comment says: the prevalent idea that true equality of the sexes is for women to become exact copies of men. Since women and men are not exact copies, this causes problems.
- throwaway6734 6y ago
  Imo it's because there's less social resistance for women to take on the roles of men. Until men that take on the former roles of women are viewed equivalently in the dating market, it's going to be a much harder slog
  - deleted 6y ago
    [deleted]
  - JPKab 6y ago
    Women across all income demographics desire men who make as much or more than them. It's a fundamental preference that OKCupid identified a long time ago. As a man, I don't fault this. The risk to a man of reproducing with a woman who isn't great at making money isn't as high, at a fundamental level, as it is for women. A man isn't incapacitated in any way by the act of reproducing. Nor is he prevented or blocked out of reproducing with others, at an evolutionary level. A woman is at great risk for mating with a man who isn't a good provider. If he abandons her, she's stuck. This was the reality for our ancestors, and those preferences are baked into our genes. The opportunity cost of mating with a loser was horrific for women. In case anyone thinks that preference is cultural, it's not. It exists across every culture on the planet, not unlike the biological attraction men have to women who display physical features that are indicative of high fertility. Biology is brutal and doesn't care about fairness or morality.
    - jxramos 6y ago
      > Biology is brutal and doesn't care about fairness or morality. I still try to meditate on the evolutionary advances for sexual vs asexual reproduction to begin with. There's got to be a huge advantage of the separation of the sexes that is hard to fathom just because it's everywhere. Is it a springboard of genetic diversity that optimizes in ways we can't imagine otherwise? The 'compared to what' is always something I wanted to contemplate. Like why did organisms split into near copies of each other with male and female? Why had one developed that carried the womb and the other not? Was it just simple reproductive concurrency? The separation being the better evolutionary choice is so mysterious to me.
tomcam 6y ago
Big capitalist here. I agree completely. The reason I'm a millionaire instead of a billionaire is that my first priority was always to have a stable family and marriage. I noticed all the billionaires seemed to go through a few wives before settling down. Didn't like what that did to the children, or what I imagined it might have done. This kept me out of SV (and in much more, at the time, stable and family oriented Microsoft country).
- sky_rw 6y ago
  If becoming a billionaire or not was simply a matter of choice for you I’m surprised you couldn’t figure out a way to do it without running through wives.
  - tomcam 6y ago
    Sarcasm noted. As I’m sure you can tell, I’m not that smart. But I figured out I could do if I worked hard enough and smart enough to get the fuck out of the neighborhood/family I lived in and never get abused or beaten again. I managed that much. I’ve done in-depth studies of successful people since I was a young kid, and the richest ones simply didn’t seem to have time for family. You could probably crack that nut. I can’t. I have a house and a farm and a family close to me, however flawed. I’ll take it.
- madengr 6y ago
  Hell, I’d be a trillionaire but drinking beer is my first priority, so I’m only a thousandaire. As soon as I get off the couch the $$ will roll in.
- Dracophoenix 6y ago
  Have you considered that going through wives might have more to do with how divorcing HNW individuals is a perverse incentive created by the legal system rather than a fault of the individuals in question? In your marriage, how do you hedge against that?
- astrange 6y ago
  Elon has six kids, so can you.

zippergz 6y ago

I have a lot of friends in SF. At least in the tech industry, it seems that the main reason people live in SF despite the significant downsides is for career options and pay. So I'd guess that the SF dating pool is already strongly skewed to people who choose career over all else.

fossuser 6y ago
The bay area M/F ratio is extremely skewed and the dating market is extremely competitive - (has way too many men). I would guess that in cities with high skew (in either direction) this creates a disincentive to staying together for one person in the relationship. I'd also guess the NIMBYs and extreme housing cost also incentivize delaying things. If there was a lot of housing supply the financial risk of having kids would be way lower.

JPKab 6y ago

As a father who had his first child at 23 years of age, the corporate/SV world is just AWFUL to women who don't want to have to rely on IVF to have kids. And often the worst perpetrators of said awfulness are other women who themselves are delaying having kids. They have sacrificed, and really don't like the women who they view as "not making the same sacrifice". It's all around just awful to pit human biology against corporate norms. And the parent commenter you responded to above really hit the nail on the head with the things women's rights activists have prioritized. Because activists are primarily based out of universities and urban centers, they are really pre-occupied with the wants/needs of 20 something women, and could give two shits about things outside of landing that sweet job at Google. The effect on our society is insane. It's basically incredibly common now to encounter a stereotype: The couple in their 40s with twins, often born premature, a consequence of IVF technology leading to incredibly high rates of multiple births. My brother and I are identical twins, born before IVF was remotely affordable. Twins used to be rare. Now they are everywhere, and fit a certain demographic. It's absolutely twisted and toxic that workplace norms and cutthroat competition in said workplace have been allowed to remain static, and demanded that humans delay reproduction. What a testament to how absolutely corrupt the feminist movement is that it looked at the Don Draper character in Mad Men, and concluded that their mission should be to create female Don Drapers, instead of challenging and upending whether ANYONE would want to be Don Draper. Edit: Dang and other commenters correctly pointed out that I violated some HN norms in here and also my wording was poor and undermined my point. I'm leaving the above unedited for others to learn from my stupidity, and will clarify here: I have zero problem with people having kids later in life. I only have a problem with people being FORCED to have kids later in life when they otherwise wouldn't have, due to inflexible and arbitrary corporate norms which were established for male only workplaces. (That forced decision was what I viewed as toxic) I'm a full advocate of women's rights as well, and my frustrations with feminism expressed above were intended to express my view that it didn't go far enough, and "settled", leaving women in a perpetually unfair position compared to men.

jacobolus 6y ago
Your comment would be a lot more effective if it didn't suggest that women's rights activists only care about landing jobs at Google and are "absolutely corrupt". The sentences linking identical twins to "twisted and toxic" are also weird. There are some kernels of insight there, but this is not a remotely accurate characterization of any of the women's rights activists I have ever met, and it largely comes across to me as paternalistic victim-blaming. 20-something feminist activists have limited power and influence, and are not responsible for toxic workplace culture in industries dominated by middle-aged men.

asoneth 6y ago

Of more than a dozen friends who moved to Silicon Valley for work/education, all but one left California around the time they started their families. The impression I get is that they're happy they had a chance to work there for a decade or so and now they're happy to live somewhere else. Silicon Valley sounds like a great place to do many things and it's OK if having a family is not one of those things. I'm not saying it's not possible -- one of my friends is making a go of it. But it does sound like having a family there is playing on Hard Mode. Contrast that to NYC where most of the folks I know who started families there still work in the city, though some did move a little further out into the suburbs.

whydoyoucare 6y ago
I believe it primarily has to do with cost of living than anything else.
- asoneth 6y ago
  Yes, though salaries are a factor as well. When I ran the numbers on some offers years ago my estimate was that moving to Silicon Valley would be a financially sound decision if I lived frugally because I'd be less exposed to the high cost of living. But once you start factoring in things like owning a home, childcare, etc the salary premium compared to cities like NYC, Boston, Seattle, Portland, etc just isn't sufficient. So it makes some sense that the area attracts young people looking to strike it rich but pressures them to leave if they haven't won the startup lottery and still want to have a family.