10 ms·

In defense of San Francisco's techies

43 points by coloneltcb 13y ago

quackerhacker 13y ago
This is absolutely appalling that this is going on...I've never even heard or would fathom this in SF. I was raised in San Francisco, right there on Mc Coppin and Market...smack damn in downtown. I've always known SF to be the most accepting and tolerant place I've lived in. How could this type of prejudice go on in a city that allows nudes in parades, diversity in sexuality, and a bunch of 12 yr olds to run around downtown on Razor scooters at 3 in the morning. I'm just speechless to hear this about my hometown.
- rdouble 13y ago
  In the first dot com boom DIE YUPPIE SCUM was stencil painted on all the sidewalks in SoMa and the Mission, so nothing new... http://www.salon.com/1999/10/29/yuppies/ http://www.salon.com/1999/10/29/yuppies/
  - quackerhacker 13y ago
    That's crazy, although I was 11 when this was going on...so I'm guessing the eyes of a child may not be a great reference here. What I do remember in 2000 when I was there....WebTV, WebVan, Yahoo Auctions, and having Lycos go fetch a search....that's when I was 12. I do remember everyone had prejudice against the homeless, and I vaguely remember talk of trying to oust them.
    - deleted 13y ago
      [deleted]
    - wavefunction 13y ago
      It's because yuppies/techies don't like their poor and disadvantaged in their faces, they want them in clean well-lit community centers preferably located in minority areas far away from their adult playgrounds.
      - deckar01 13y ago
        Or because "having the disadvantaged in their face" gives them problem to solve. I don't think you understand the difference between getting rid of homeless people, and trying to solve homelessness.
- deleted 13y ago
  [deleted]
- WildUtah 13y ago
  1998. Mission Yuppie Eradication Project. http://foundsf.org/index.php?title=Mission_Yuppie_Eradication_Project http://foundsf.org/index.php?title=Mission_Yuppie_Eradicatio...
- michaelochurch 13y ago
  My problem is that it's going to target the wrong people. Low-level software engineers (who suffer the high rents like everyone else) are being lumped in with the douchebag underachievers whose boarding-school friends in VC handed them VP positions in startups (i.e. rich people welfare). I stopped supporting violent revolution when I realized that it was the fringe of the elite (i.e. people like me) rather than the ones really in charge who tend to get killed.
wwwong 13y ago
Having witnessed the eras of gentrification in the mission district (my family has a small business around 20th and mission), the same people that are complaining that 'techies are forcing them out' are the same people that forced out the large hispanic community in the mission just 5-years earlier. I shall not shed a tear.
- walshemj 13y ago
  As they say "Never trust a hippie"
  - walshemj 13y ago
    Obviously the SF nimbys are in action on HN :-)
- michaelochurch 13y ago
  I have little patience for hipster leftism. Liberal politics, for hipsters, is just a way of saying, "I'm nonreligious, so you can assume I put out". As a nonreligious leftist with more restraint than that, I'm offended by their use of those stereotypes. They turn into New York's limousine liberals 15 years later. They gripe about "capitalism" but run nonprofits that are even more authoritarian and exploitative of the low-ranking people than most companies. Bitch, please. You just hate capitalism because you couldn't make it in that world.
Apocryphon 13y ago
This article is about an intriguing subject, but ends up becoming a bland editorial at the very end. The author brings in interesting anecdotes and a few stats, but it doesn't explore the suggested trend- that there is growing animosity between tech workers and non-tech workers- very much. He writes that "a growing number of San Franciscans are fed up" but doesn't seem to pinpoint who exactly this number is composed of. Lower-income anti-gentrifiers? Non-STEM hipsters? The author brings up both, but without more data, this trend seems ambiguous and undefined. This article is about a news item that is still in development. But it'd be nice to see in which direction (i.e., who are the most active anti-tech worker segment) it's developing.
tommorris 13y ago
"If the tag on Valencia had read "F- immigrants," or that piñata was made to represent a transvestite" Yeah, because entrepreneurs and technology businesses are marginalised by society just like immigrants and trans people are.
- supercanuck 13y ago
  that was the exact sentence that caused me to leave and check HN comments. If only someone would think of the poor techies! geesh.
- walshemj 13y ago
  Well in the UK engineers are seen as second class people compare the number of MP's who have a technical background and the average pay in the other professions to engineering. And outside of SV the same is true to an extent in the USA certainly in DC and the corridors of power people with technical backgrounds are rare. And MP like John Robertson (Glasgow North West) who was a LCM for British Telecom before he entered Parliament is very rare. Any congresmen or senators start as a line man for the phone company?
  - tommorris 13y ago
    I'm in the UK. If I'm a second-class citizen qua my being a software engineer, I'd say being a second-class citizen pays pretty fucking well. Let's see: good pay, mostly recession-proof work, often interesting work. Crikey, it's like apartheid South Africa or the Deep South during Jim Crow being in engineering...
    - walshemj 13y ago
      Realy when your next in London go to Holbourn and walk into one of the Inns of court and see what the offices of the £2000/ hour barristers look like. Compare a medical Dr with say 15 years experience to an engineer no contest. Or work in the city and have your end customer in fiance say oh I have a pair of shoes that cost more than your entire wardrobe. Just because your paid well compared to a shop assistant doesn't mean the technical people are not second class citizens.
maxcan 13y ago
"hipster on hipster hatred"
- wavefunction 13y ago
  This is some hate I can get behind. Is there an online petition or something I can sign?
raldi 13y ago
The solution to all these problems is housing density, especially in places like the Mission, which have excellent public transportation. The anger should be directed at low-rise zoning restrictions, and at the incredible power we provide obstructionists to endlessly delay development projects.
- wavefunction 13y ago
  Actually the real solution is not focusing on concentrating all technological development in the Bay Area or NYC or Boston but spreading it out across this great wide country (and world) of ours so that everyone can take part in and benefit from the modern economy.
  - raldi 13y ago
    Could you express that in concrete terms? For example, my suggestions would be: * Remove height restrictions near public transit * Make the building permit process more similar to that of a typical American city. Specifically, reform CEQA and the SF Discretionary Review process.
    - wavefunction 13y ago
      I mean that instead of concentrating technology that the new economy depends on in places that have already reached their carrying capacity like SF, NYC, Boston, existing companies expand in smaller cities and towns, that telecommuting and the attendant improvements in management of distributed teams is encouraged, etc. There are plenty of smart and creative people that want to live in "flyover country" that have to move to the coasts for any sort of opportunity to work in cutting edge tech, and its mostly because of the biases of executives, management, venture capitalists, investment bankers, etc. This would take pressure off the unrealistic housing and cost-of-living in places like SF and the East Coast and would help lead to more prosperity in the rest of the country. You know, the part that gets continually glossed over by the media, government, and the "tech" industry in general.
    - snogglethorpe 13y ago
cooop 13y ago
I've never been to SF, but I'd imagine that the tag's popularity lies in its irony, not the fact that it's a hard hitting sociopolitical statement.
ritchiea 13y ago
It's tough, I've long empathized with complaints about SV taking over San Francisco and the soaring rents. Largely because I believe SV culture is intentionally blind to or intellectually dishonest about the fact that it is first and foremost a business sector that generates revenue, not a community that innovates for the betterment of humanity (and I think we should be okay with being a business sector! it's creepy to try and avoid that obvious truth). And the claims you occasionally hear about SV being a "true meritocracy" are deeply concerning. Being a "true meritocracy" of people with elite educations is a joke. I do include the self educated people in that comment, once again, great work but a huge percentage of America and the world grow up in places where the idea that they could learn Python and make 100k is unfathomable. And quite frankly, do not have easy access to the educational and cultural environments that aid in developing the soft skills that are necessary to be a self educated success in SV. In short, there are a lot of ways the SV is full of itself, so I empathize with people feeling they are being shoved around by privileged elites. That said, some of the anger at SV is starting to remind me of general resentment of nerds, in a very high school way. My guess is both of these things are going on and they are getting conflated and that's causing real discussion to halt. Which is a shame because both are real problems, some SV people are clueless elites and blanket anger towards geeks is unreasonable. Any intelligent conversation about the culture of San Francisco should keep those things in mind and be very careful not to conflate them.
- michaelochurch 13y ago
  That said, some of the anger at SV is starting to remind me of general resentment of nerds, in a very high school way. Actually, the real enemy of both categories (engineer "nerds" suffering calibration scores and cliffing vs. San Fransicans being priced out by useless, bland people) is the same for each: the executive douchebags who beat those nerds up in high school and are now VPs of BizDev in those supposedly engineer-centric startups.
  - rdouble 13y ago
    This isn't 1996. The douchey executives who invented the calibration scores also have EECS degrees from Stanford.
tptacek 13y ago
They shouldn't be angry at techies, who, after all, are helping fund the city with their taxes. They have good reason to be angry, at the city itself. It's comically mismanaged. San Francisco spends more than 2x per capita than Chicago does, and something like 3.5x what Los Angeles spends. Its outcomes across the board are poorer. Moreover, the city is infected with NIMBYism that prevents it from employing the rational response to a housing crunch, which would be building more freaking housing. San Francisco is small, and, more importantly, locked in geographically. It's a metro area that can't afford irrational density restrictions; it's a Manhattan that zones like it's Des Moines. People have written about the mismanagement and quality of life problems in San Francisco for a decade and a half. It shouldn't surprise anyone that people on the streets in San Francisco are happy to look for scapegoats, since it's a lot easier to beat up a pinata of a Google bus than it is to make new housing happen, or get libraries and hospitals built, or ensure that quality public transportion is universally available in all parts of the city, or mitigate crime.
- rdouble 13y ago
  I'm not a fan of SF's bizarre city politics and NIMBYism, but... where can more housing be built? Much of the western half of the city is single family homes. As are neighborhoods like Glen Park, Bernal Heights, Potrero Hill, etc. The dense parts of the city like the loin and nob hill are already pretty dense. In semi-dense neighborhoods like SoMa, Hayes Valley and the Mission existing renters have to be given the boot in order for new housing to be built. That actually happens, and the anti gentrification crowd protests being edged out by yuppies, because that is what is actually happening. I'm not sure where the city could put more high density housing.
  - arjunnarayan 13y ago
    Build up. The same way every other big city deals with this problem. http://www.amazon.com/Gated-City-Kindle-Single-ebook/dp/B005KGATLO/ref=pd_sim_kstore_1 http://www.amazon.com/Gated-City-Kindle-Single-ebook/dp/B005...
    - rdouble 13y ago
nthitz 13y ago
Picture of the graffiti mentioned http://instagram.com/p/aSl87rK-IR/ http://instagram.com/p/aSl87rK-IR/ edit: someone registered www.fuckyourstartup.com
protomyth 13y ago
Read a newspaper from western North Dakota and you will get the same story. Booms are incredibly hard on fixed or lower income residents. It might be an interesting contrast given the towns in ND have an expansionist bent.
michaelochurch 13y ago
Technology is a weird space because it has some of the best individual contributors, but also many of the worst managers on earth. Now that the elites have caught on to technology being actually important, they've colonized us as a people. Just as they've colonized the space in major cities (see: San Francisco and New York) they have taken over us and our economy, and we are now under occupation. And there is a Damaso Effect going on when it comes to technology management. What's the Damaso Effect? It refers to the theologically incompetent friars often sent from Spain to the colonies, such as the Philippines. The good ones stayed on the mainland; the inept, fired ones who were sent away to die ended up in the colonies and became local authorities. You see a weird and unstable dynamic in a colony relationship where the best people of some society have to answer to the worst of another. It leads to a lot of violence as those with natural leadership talents (the best of the colonized society) refuse to subordinate to people who are, although from a more powerful nation, in all other ways inferior. That's what's happening to nerds/"techies". We're being subordinated to the worst of another kind. See, in the business/executive/finance world, the good ones who can actually sell and motivate and mentor (rather than bumbling middle managers who can't motivate shit to stink) are off writing billion-dollar private equity deals and flying around the world on private jets. It's the bad ones, mostly, who get stuck managing nerds or who end up being a mere product manager (of a product that was someone else's idea) at 32. The reason I am writing this is because it's important point out that "we" (the technology people) and "they" (the ones being priced out) have a common enemy: the useless executives and colluding VCs who are actually both (a) running up house prices while (b) destroying the technology sector.

43 points by coloneltcb 13y ago

This is absolutely appalling that this is going on...I've never even heard or would fathom this in SF. I was raised in San Francisco, right there on Mc Coppin and Market...smack damn in downtown. I've always known SF to be the most accepting and tolerant place I've lived in. How could this type of prejudice go on in a city that allows nudes in parades, diversity in sexuality, and a bunch of 12 yr olds to run around downtown on Razor scooters at 3 in the morning. I'm just speechless to hear this about my hometown.

rdouble 13y ago
In the first dot com boom DIE YUPPIE SCUM was stencil painted on all the sidewalks in SoMa and the Mission, so nothing new... http://www.salon.com/1999/10/29/yuppies/ http://www.salon.com/1999/10/29/yuppies/
- quackerhacker 13y ago
  That's crazy, although I was 11 when this was going on...so I'm guessing the eyes of a child may not be a great reference here. What I do remember in 2000 when I was there....WebTV, WebVan, Yahoo Auctions, and having Lycos go fetch a search....that's when I was 12. I do remember everyone had prejudice against the homeless, and I vaguely remember talk of trying to oust them.
  - deleted 13y ago
    [deleted]
  - wavefunction 13y ago
    It's because yuppies/techies don't like their poor and disadvantaged in their faces, they want them in clean well-lit community centers preferably located in minority areas far away from their adult playgrounds.
    - deckar01 13y ago
      Or because "having the disadvantaged in their face" gives them problem to solve. I don't think you understand the difference between getting rid of homeless people, and trying to solve homelessness.
deleted 13y ago
[deleted]
WildUtah 13y ago
1998. Mission Yuppie Eradication Project. http://foundsf.org/index.php?title=Mission_Yuppie_Eradication_Project http://foundsf.org/index.php?title=Mission_Yuppie_Eradicatio...
michaelochurch 13y ago
My problem is that it's going to target the wrong people. Low-level software engineers (who suffer the high rents like everyone else) are being lumped in with the douchebag underachievers whose boarding-school friends in VC handed them VP positions in startups (i.e. rich people welfare). I stopped supporting violent revolution when I realized that it was the fringe of the elite (i.e. people like me) rather than the ones really in charge who tend to get killed.

wwwong 13y ago

Having witnessed the eras of gentrification in the mission district (my family has a small business around 20th and mission), the same people that are complaining that 'techies are forcing them out' are the same people that forced out the large hispanic community in the mission just 5-years earlier. I shall not shed a tear.

walshemj 13y ago
As they say "Never trust a hippie"
- walshemj 13y ago
  Obviously the SF nimbys are in action on HN :-)
michaelochurch 13y ago
I have little patience for hipster leftism. Liberal politics, for hipsters, is just a way of saying, "I'm nonreligious, so you can assume I put out". As a nonreligious leftist with more restraint than that, I'm offended by their use of those stereotypes. They turn into New York's limousine liberals 15 years later. They gripe about "capitalism" but run nonprofits that are even more authoritarian and exploitative of the low-ranking people than most companies. Bitch, please. You just hate capitalism because you couldn't make it in that world.

Apocryphon 13y ago

This article is about an intriguing subject, but ends up becoming a bland editorial at the very end. The author brings in interesting anecdotes and a few stats, but it doesn't explore the suggested trend- that there is growing animosity between tech workers and non-tech workers- very much. He writes that "a growing number of San Franciscans are fed up" but doesn't seem to pinpoint who exactly this number is composed of. Lower-income anti-gentrifiers? Non-STEM hipsters? The author brings up both, but without more data, this trend seems ambiguous and undefined. This article is about a news item that is still in development. But it'd be nice to see in which direction (i.e., who are the most active anti-tech worker segment) it's developing.

tommorris 13y ago

"If the tag on Valencia had read "F- immigrants," or that piñata was made to represent a transvestite" Yeah, because entrepreneurs and technology businesses are marginalised by society just like immigrants and trans people are.

supercanuck 13y ago
that was the exact sentence that caused me to leave and check HN comments. If only someone would think of the poor techies! geesh.
walshemj 13y ago
Well in the UK engineers are seen as second class people compare the number of MP's who have a technical background and the average pay in the other professions to engineering. And outside of SV the same is true to an extent in the USA certainly in DC and the corridors of power people with technical backgrounds are rare. And MP like John Robertson (Glasgow North West) who was a LCM for British Telecom before he entered Parliament is very rare. Any congresmen or senators start as a line man for the phone company?
- tommorris 13y ago
  I'm in the UK. If I'm a second-class citizen qua my being a software engineer, I'd say being a second-class citizen pays pretty fucking well. Let's see: good pay, mostly recession-proof work, often interesting work. Crikey, it's like apartheid South Africa or the Deep South during Jim Crow being in engineering...
  - walshemj 13y ago
    Realy when your next in London go to Holbourn and walk into one of the Inns of court and see what the offices of the £2000/ hour barristers look like. Compare a medical Dr with say 15 years experience to an engineer no contest. Or work in the city and have your end customer in fiance say oh I have a pair of shoes that cost more than your entire wardrobe. Just because your paid well compared to a shop assistant doesn't mean the technical people are not second class citizens.

maxcan 13y ago

"hipster on hipster hatred"

wavefunction 13y ago
This is some hate I can get behind. Is there an online petition or something I can sign?

raldi 13y ago

The solution to all these problems is housing density, especially in places like the Mission, which have excellent public transportation. The anger should be directed at low-rise zoning restrictions, and at the incredible power we provide obstructionists to endlessly delay development projects.

wavefunction 13y ago
Actually the real solution is not focusing on concentrating all technological development in the Bay Area or NYC or Boston but spreading it out across this great wide country (and world) of ours so that everyone can take part in and benefit from the modern economy.
- raldi 13y ago
  Could you express that in concrete terms? For example, my suggestions would be: * Remove height restrictions near public transit * Make the building permit process more similar to that of a typical American city. Specifically, reform CEQA and the SF Discretionary Review process.
  - wavefunction 13y ago
    I mean that instead of concentrating technology that the new economy depends on in places that have already reached their carrying capacity like SF, NYC, Boston, existing companies expand in smaller cities and towns, that telecommuting and the attendant improvements in management of distributed teams is encouraged, etc. There are plenty of smart and creative people that want to live in "flyover country" that have to move to the coasts for any sort of opportunity to work in cutting edge tech, and its mostly because of the biases of executives, management, venture capitalists, investment bankers, etc. This would take pressure off the unrealistic housing and cost-of-living in places like SF and the East Coast and would help lead to more prosperity in the rest of the country. You know, the part that gets continually glossed over by the media, government, and the "tech" industry in general.
  - snogglethorpe 13y ago

cooop 13y ago

I've never been to SF, but I'd imagine that the tag's popularity lies in its irony, not the fact that it's a hard hitting sociopolitical statement.

ritchiea 13y ago

It's tough, I've long empathized with complaints about SV taking over San Francisco and the soaring rents. Largely because I believe SV culture is intentionally blind to or intellectually dishonest about the fact that it is first and foremost a business sector that generates revenue, not a community that innovates for the betterment of humanity (and I think we should be okay with being a business sector! it's creepy to try and avoid that obvious truth). And the claims you occasionally hear about SV being a "true meritocracy" are deeply concerning. Being a "true meritocracy" of people with elite educations is a joke. I do include the self educated people in that comment, once again, great work but a huge percentage of America and the world grow up in places where the idea that they could learn Python and make 100k is unfathomable. And quite frankly, do not have easy access to the educational and cultural environments that aid in developing the soft skills that are necessary to be a self educated success in SV. In short, there are a lot of ways the SV is full of itself, so I empathize with people feeling they are being shoved around by privileged elites. That said, some of the anger at SV is starting to remind me of general resentment of nerds, in a very high school way. My guess is both of these things are going on and they are getting conflated and that's causing real discussion to halt. Which is a shame because both are real problems, some SV people are clueless elites and blanket anger towards geeks is unreasonable. Any intelligent conversation about the culture of San Francisco should keep those things in mind and be very careful not to conflate them.

michaelochurch 13y ago
That said, some of the anger at SV is starting to remind me of general resentment of nerds, in a very high school way. Actually, the real enemy of both categories (engineer "nerds" suffering calibration scores and cliffing vs. San Fransicans being priced out by useless, bland people) is the same for each: the executive douchebags who beat those nerds up in high school and are now VPs of BizDev in those supposedly engineer-centric startups.
- rdouble 13y ago
  This isn't 1996. The douchey executives who invented the calibration scores also have EECS degrees from Stanford.

tptacek 13y ago

They shouldn't be angry at techies, who, after all, are helping fund the city with their taxes. They have good reason to be angry, at the city itself. It's comically mismanaged. San Francisco spends more than 2x per capita than Chicago does, and something like 3.5x what Los Angeles spends. Its outcomes across the board are poorer. Moreover, the city is infected with NIMBYism that prevents it from employing the rational response to a housing crunch, which would be building more freaking housing. San Francisco is small, and, more importantly, locked in geographically. It's a metro area that can't afford irrational density restrictions; it's a Manhattan that zones like it's Des Moines. People have written about the mismanagement and quality of life problems in San Francisco for a decade and a half. It shouldn't surprise anyone that people on the streets in San Francisco are happy to look for scapegoats, since it's a lot easier to beat up a pinata of a Google bus than it is to make new housing happen, or get libraries and hospitals built, or ensure that quality public transportion is universally available in all parts of the city, or mitigate crime.

rdouble 13y ago
I'm not a fan of SF's bizarre city politics and NIMBYism, but... where can more housing be built? Much of the western half of the city is single family homes. As are neighborhoods like Glen Park, Bernal Heights, Potrero Hill, etc. The dense parts of the city like the loin and nob hill are already pretty dense. In semi-dense neighborhoods like SoMa, Hayes Valley and the Mission existing renters have to be given the boot in order for new housing to be built. That actually happens, and the anti gentrification crowd protests being edged out by yuppies, because that is what is actually happening. I'm not sure where the city could put more high density housing.
- arjunnarayan 13y ago
  Build up. The same way every other big city deals with this problem. http://www.amazon.com/Gated-City-Kindle-Single-ebook/dp/B005KGATLO/ref=pd_sim_kstore_1 http://www.amazon.com/Gated-City-Kindle-Single-ebook/dp/B005...
  - rdouble 13y ago

nthitz 13y ago

Picture of the graffiti mentioned http://instagram.com/p/aSl87rK-IR/ http://instagram.com/p/aSl87rK-IR/ edit: someone registered www.fuckyourstartup.com

protomyth 13y ago

Read a newspaper from western North Dakota and you will get the same story. Booms are incredibly hard on fixed or lower income residents. It might be an interesting contrast given the towns in ND have an expansionist bent.

michaelochurch 13y ago

Technology is a weird space because it has some of the best individual contributors, but also many of the worst managers on earth. Now that the elites have caught on to technology being actually important, they've colonized us as a people. Just as they've colonized the space in major cities (see: San Francisco and New York) they have taken over us and our economy, and we are now under occupation. And there is a Damaso Effect going on when it comes to technology management. What's the Damaso Effect? It refers to the theologically incompetent friars often sent from Spain to the colonies, such as the Philippines. The good ones stayed on the mainland; the inept, fired ones who were sent away to die ended up in the colonies and became local authorities. You see a weird and unstable dynamic in a colony relationship where the best people of some society have to answer to the worst of another. It leads to a lot of violence as those with natural leadership talents (the best of the colonized society) refuse to subordinate to people who are, although from a more powerful nation, in all other ways inferior. That's what's happening to nerds/"techies". We're being subordinated to the worst of another kind. See, in the business/executive/finance world, the good ones who can actually sell and motivate and mentor (rather than bumbling middle managers who can't motivate shit to stink) are off writing billion-dollar private equity deals and flying around the world on private jets. It's the bad ones, mostly, who get stuck managing nerds or who end up being a mere product manager (of a product that was someone else's idea) at 32. The reason I am writing this is because it's important point out that "we" (the technology people) and "they" (the ones being priced out) have a common enemy: the useless executives and colluding VCs who are actually both (a) running up house prices while (b) destroying the technology sector.