8 ms·
The Silicon Valley-ization of San Francisco
- ojbyrne 13y agoI know that when I read the stuff about Greg Gopman, a startup CEO, and he was described as a "techie," I was not impressed. This article pretty well captures why.
- deleted 13y ago[deleted]
- lgieron 13y ago> Furthermore, the contrast between young well-paid, well-dressed younger people and people sleeping and panhandling on the streets, with virtually no other groups (middle class of any kind, children, late middle-aged people, affluent african americans) in between, started to make me, an affluent white male engineer and entrepreneur, feel bad every time I left the house. A glimpse into the West's future?
- 5vforest 13y agoWow, right as I clicked reply to say "kudos for admitting this", the original post was deleted. What's up?
- deleted 13y ago[deleted]
- radley 13y agoSF has been predominantly for the young for a long time. Been here 20+ years and heard the same thing when I first arrived. You get to a certain age and move on (if you can).
- eruditely 13y agoThe title is pretty off. The article does some pretty poor posturing though, "meteor more important than... bitcoin...." etc.
- radley 13y agoIt's an amateurish, last minute rant that starts off chasing a popular topic and quickly plummets into assumptions about techies.
- minimax 13y agoI was just thinking today that if food prices tripled I would barely notice except that rest of the world would be on fire. I am not the marginal buyer for anything you really need to go on living. Food, energy, clothing. My personal income is probably somewhere in the top 15% for the United States. I am a nice enough guy, and I typically vote for progressive candidates too, but if I move into a city with a limited housing supply, I'm going to have bid the prices up so I can have a nice place to live. Sorry about that, everyone else. disclaimer: I have only been to SF like once and I don't really know what is going on there.
- deleted 13y ago[deleted]
- randomdata 13y agoIf you are making somewhere around $75K per year (roughly where the top 15% places you for individual incomes), are you really in the position to be bidding up housing prices in SF (assuming you don't have a wealthy partner to help fund your ventures, won the lottery, or something to that effect)? The rule of thumb for buying a home is three times income, which means you can realistically only afford a $225K home. However, the US national average seems to be closer to five times income, so if we allow you that, you still can realistically only afford a $375K home. I've never tried buying a house in San Francisco, but by all accounts, you're not even close to being in the market, let alone bidding the prices up. I also wonder how you would not notice food prices triple with that kind of income, but perhaps you grow everything you consume and thus would not feel the fluctuations the same? With that said, one thing I notice regularly is that people seem to grossly overestimate how much other people make, so perhaps you actually are closer to the top 1% than you realize?
- tsunamifury 13y agoTop 15% in SF,LA,NYC areas would put you around 180-225K combined, making his statements true. 75k in a rural small town x2 with a wife would be more than enough to buy a house, have kids and have 1k in spare change every month. But I think his sentiment was more that he would bid up home prices if had the money, even as a relatively 'normal-income' individual and that most higher paid individuals spend only 5-10% of their income on necessary non-housing items.
- 11thEarlOfMar 13y agoIs it a compliment to say one has a John Galt complex?
- 7Figures2Commas 13y agoGreg Gopman mentioned alongside Peter Thiel and Paul Graham? Really?
- benihana 13y agoI live in NYC, and I often wonder what Silicon Valley is really like. Most of the news I read oh HN regarding it is very negative and cynical, but this article seems to think it ain't so bad. It seems like certain neighborhoods are full of fairly wealthy tech guys, but that it's not all white dudes. Are women getting hired at the more progressive companies out there? Cause these articles make it seem like it's only men out there.
- im_a_lawyer 13y agoThere are no women here. Rural India has a better gender ratio than Sillicon Valley.
- seanmcdirmid 13y agoHow about compare to an oil town in Alaska? There are plenty of women around rural India (as far as I can tell!).
- falsestprophet 13y agoEmpirically, in some places in India proportionally fewer females are delivered. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sex-selective_abortion#India http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sex-selective_abortion#India
- seanmcdirmid 13y agoThat is just birth rate. In Alaska, everyone in these oil towns are migrants, and most are men. The migrant situation is more analogous to what is going on in SV then what is going on in India (people in SV aren't having sex-selection abortions!).
- thecage411 13y agoI just looked around my floor. 1 woman out of 27 people.
- rhizome 13y ago
- WalterBright 13y ago> everything that artist-friendly, countercultural, way-left-of-American-center San Francisco has historically stood for. This is ironic considering that SF got its impetus from being a gold rush town filled with people determined to strike it rich.
- conover 13y ago49ers...
- robbyking 13y agoI've lived in San Francisco most of my adult life (having moved to the city after I graduated high school in the late 90's), and the current tech boom has been bittersweet for me and a lot of my friends. To be honest, I agree with -- and for the most part fit into -- the portrait this article paints of Bay Area engineers ("more of them go to Burning Man than to church"), but what's heartbreaking as a San Franciscan is how much influence on the city's culture the vocal minority of "loudmouthed techies" has had; neighborhoods I used to live in and love -- namely the Mission, South of Market, and Lower Haight -- would be unrecognizable in their current forms if my 2002 self were to see them. I understand cities are living things, and they grow and change and people come and go, but the complete disregard for the city's culture is what's been so difficult for me. When I moved here I was young and naive, too, but I like to think I used the opportunity to learn about different cultures, backgrounds and perspectives, not marginalize them.
- onedev 13y agoCan you give specific examples of things you saw that make you say that? I'm genuinely curious. I'm not a native San Fransciscan but I've been to the city many times and have many friends there.
- long 13y agoI'm curious - what were Mission, Soma, and Lower Haight like in 2002?
- simoncion 13y agoAs am I! Also, what was the place like during and shortly after The Bubble?
- deleted 13y ago[deleted]
- leothekim 13y agoThere were lots of tech layoffs, and a lot of people were leaving the city around that time, so it was a _little bit_ tumbleweed-y. The Mission is the most markedly changed. Back then it was still a little sketchy with all the heroin addicts and prostitution on happening around Capp. Lower Haight was also iffy. Though it had its fair share of gentrification during the dotcom boom, there were still regular shootings in that area.
- deleted 13y ago[deleted]
- negamax 13y agoThis is eyeball grabbing article to bank on the recent events, which are nowhere near the norm. Let's not promote this here.
- was_hellbanned 13y agoSF hasn't been cool since probably the 90's. People flock their, latch on to the manic imprint they burn into their mind in their first few years[1], and proceed desperately fight change. The infrastructure is wildly outdated, the social network can't support the excess homeless, and the building codes prevent the sort of compact, high-density living necessary to allow exactly the sort of lower-income people and families that everyone claims they want to keep around. [1] as evidenced by my own comment about it not being cool since the 90's, though I think I could wrangle an objective argument out of it by looking at the explosion of housing prices, gentrification, and the sort of Urban Outfitter's commercialized uniformity of the modern "counter-culture".
- dragonwriter 13y agoYou know, in the 1990s, I heard people make the exact same complaints about SF, except that it was that it hadn't been cool since the 1960s or 1970s. Even your footnote about the supposed changes since the 90's that you could "wrangle an objective argument out of" point to "since 1990s" problems that are exactly problems that people were talking about in SF in the 1990s.
- was_hellbanned 13y agoThat's kind of the point.
- ChrisNorstrom 13y agoFun Conspiracy Theory: New York elite are conspiring to move Silicon Valley companies and talent to New York by running these pieces right around the same time that MASSIVE New York Tax Cut incentive (no income, no property, no state taxes for 10 years) for Tech companies was announced. There's been increasing criticism of Tech and the Bay Area so much so that it would make you think SF/SV is a bad place for startups and doesn't welcome them. It started about 2 weeks before the big tax cut incentive and is probably going to increase. And it's working, an HN member below stated, "I live in NYC, and I often wonder what Silicon Valley is really like. Most of the news I read oh HN regarding it is very negative and cynical".
- simoncion 13y agoOne would hope that two side effects of this plot would be 1) Increasing wages in SV to attract and retain talent. 2) Medium-to-large-scale exodus of impressionable folks, reducing pressure on apartment rentals and bringing the rental market back to within screaming distance of sane prices.
- bmelton 13y agoRegarding 1) That's an effect of the market. If the talent can't afford to live and work in the valley, they won't. Generally speaking though, that's not who's affected by low wages, it's usually the non-talent, or, to put it as delicately as I'm able, the lower-skilled positions. In short, it's the engineers and designers making it expensive for the janitors, waitresses and security guards that serve them. As for 2, that could be fixed easily if San Francisco eased up on housing regulations and allowed for more building in the area.
- brucefancher 13y agoYes. As the economist Assar Lindbeck once said, "next to bombing, rent control seems in many cases to be the most efficient technique so far known for destroying cities".
- 13y ago
- michaelochurch 13y agoI hate the word "techie". It sounds like something a four-year-old came up with. Can we fucking retire it, please? The article is right that the average character of professional software engineers and technologists is quite good-- and far better than that of the VC-istan "cool kids". The problem? The former don't matter much, not in terms of the ability to set the terms of cultural and civic life. It's the Randtard billionaires who get to play that game; they have the free time, influence, and disposable income. The upsetting thing is that this backlash, like all, will target all the wrong people. Do rank-and-file Googlers, commuting by bus for two hours each day, deserve to bear the brunt of it? Of course not. They're not the ones who pushed through the NIMBY codes and caused San Francisco's rent problem, and they're victims of this bullshit system just as much as anyone else.
- yetanotherphd 13y agoTechie is to Nerd as Colored is to N----r. We should use the word Nerd because that is what they are thinking anyway.
- grogenaut 13y agoI thought nerd was a good term now a days. Just as other disparaged groups had done with their derogatory term to make it hip.
- WalterBright 13y agoI'm a nerd.
- grogenaut 13y agoWhy did I get a downvote? I said nerd was GOOD. And it's in no way an endemically racist term that needs to just be removed from the language no matter how much owning of the term can be done.
- GFK_of_xmaspast 13y ago
- tptacek 13y agoAs a software engineer, here are some rough statistical generalizations I can make based on the thousands of engineers [...] While I find his summary congenial to my own beliefs, here the author commits the same sin that Paul Graham (and Eric Raymond before him) committed: making a broad claim about the beliefs of a class of people that one belongs to that sounds an awful lot like a specific claim about ones own beliefs. A real engineer, as it turns out, is someone who looks an awful lot like Paul Graham. Or like Eric Raymond. Or like David Auerbach. Shall we break it down a little? Well: * There are plenty of socially conservative engineers. They tend not to live in San Francisco. But did you happen to notice how socially liberal San Franciscan tax accountants are? * More software engineers go to church than to Burning Man. I have no idea how basic arithmetic could have failed to make this clear to Auerbach. * Every software engineer I know complains about taxes. Particularly property taxes. * I don't know a single software engineer who thinks about the millions of dead victims of communism that are metaphorically spat upon when someone claims Obamacare is "communist". This, by the way, was the point where it became clear in this post that Auerbach had decided that he was the everyengineer.
- timr 13y agoI don't complain about taxes. So now you know one engineer who doesn't. That said, I do sometimes complain about what gets done with my taxes and occasionally I wonder if the system is fair -- but those are different things. I certainly don't begrudge paying taxes to support a civil society (and if I were massively wealthy, I wouldn't begrudge paying more taxes than I do now). I think a lot of poor people pay far too much, and most rich people pay far too little. It pisses me off, for example, that I have to pay taxes on every employee I hire, regardless of whether or not my company is profitable. Likewise, it pisses me off that someone making $30k a year in San Francisco has to pay income tax at all. That's just wrong. Finally, as a resident of a city with outrageous rents, I think that property taxes are the one tiny, completely inadequate hedge that our society has against the total economic dominance of the people who were lucky enough to get here first.
- 001sky 13y agoIt pisses me off, for example, that I have to pay taxes on every employee I hire, regardless of whether or not my company is profitable. == A Complaint about taxes. Right there. =D Seriously though, you are conflating assets and income. Low income and low assets are not the same thing. Frankly, owning assets and controlling them are also a grey area. Lots of wealthy companies and many "non-profits" are set up to maximize expednitures and minimize-or-otherwise shelter "profits" from the tax man.
- agorabinary 13y ago"... a new startup, Meteor, an open-source Web app development platform more interesting than Coin, Bitcoin, and Uber put together." Oh yes, another colorful dev framework is more interesting than programmable money. Who is this pleb author and why are we giving this article any consideration whatsoever? It's such a poor attempt to dress up what is only a libertarian-hate article as a genuine analysis (see: purely anecdotal) of some urban culture shift. I'm noticing more and more articles like this coming from the left, to which the only appropriate response is: "Okay, we disagree. Let's have a discussion. Just don't lock me up for disagreeing." Freedom. It isn't something to scoff at.
- socialist_coder 13y agoI really enjoyed the rest of the article but that part about Meteor was definitely crap. I think the general points of the article (and my primary feelings as well) is that there are a significant amount of very well paid software engineers who think income inequality is a very bad thing and the best way to tackle it is to increase taxes on the wealthy (including themselves). And that we need to come back together as a society where "we're in it together" instead of a society of private fire departments and schools. That isn't "hating libertarians", its just a disagreement. No one is scoffing at your Freedom, we just have different ideas as to what freedom should consist of. Personal and individual freedoms- very good. Economic freedom to plunder and horde- very bad.
- agorabinary 13y agoThe thing is though, the only society that allows individuals to "agree to disagree" and still live peacefully is a purely libertarian model. Perhaps you do believe in a different version of freedom --- no one in such a model is stopping you from organizing an opt-in commune, or a public, collectively financed school, or an employee-owned coffee shop. You can have those things, but they have to be purely voluntary. Once any degree of force is introduced into the equation, then we are not peacefully disagreeing but instead actively oppressing. And using words like "plunder" and "horde" suggest to me you are conflating free markets with capitalist imperialism, which is a very common myth. Imperialism is force, of course, and is intolerable.
- axaxs 13y agoThis guy obviously hasn't traveled far outside his little circle before making such broad statements. From Kentucky, I could say almost the complete opposite to every point and be correct, though I'm not small minded enough to think that represents every engineer in the nation.
- dylandrop 13y agoSome problems with the Paul Graham quote mentioned in the article -- "...hear that the richest 5% of the people have half the total wealth, they tend to think injustice! An experienced programmer would be more likely to think is that all? The top 5% of programmers probably write 99% of the good software." I've never understood this quote. First thing I don't understand is the last sentence -- I can't really imagine any scenario in which 5% of programmers have written 99% of the good software. What must PG's standards of good software be in order for this to be true? If anything, software development seems like a place where there is a healthy supply of people writing "good code", often working in large teams to make great projects. Second thing I don't understand is his analogy -- he's claiming that programming accomplishments is to software developers as money is to the rich? Huh? Is wealth a skill? So we've just assumed that because someone is rich, that it obviously means they've earned it through hard work... and not only hard work, but hard work on the order of how much time and effort was spent developing 99% of the good code in the world, which to me sounds problematic at best.
- mikegreco 13y agoWealth, on a scale of being in the single digits percentage-wise, often has a lot to do with skill. Some skills, such as empire building, get you there faster than others. See Bill Gates as an example. First he built a tech empire, then a charitable empire. The man is very good at enacting world wide change. Secondly, 5% producing 99% sounds very reasonable. If you ever have the misfortune of having to work with code written by contracted companies, you would realize a LOT of code is slapped together with no care at all. The average person contributing to open source or participating on hacker news cares. The average person coding is looking for a paycheck, and doesn't give a single damn.
- dylandrop 13y agoBill Gates is one anecdote, but what about the heir to a fortune? Did they build that wealth out of skill? Certainly not. Furthermore, so few people actually give half of their wealth like Bill Gates does [1]. Could you really argue that every wealthy person, or even a slim plurality mirrors Gates? Also -- you'd have to make vast assumptions to claim that such a huge percentage of programmers just don't care, enough to the point where their code isn't "good". It's not at all reasonable. I wouldn't consider myself in the top 5%, surely there are those who are more driven to improve their skill. But I wouldn't at all say that my code is careless or definitely not "good". Also Hacker News commenting doesn't really require caring, it just requires free time -- not sure what you're going for there. [1] http://philanthropy.com/article/The-Stubborn-2-Giving-Rate/139811/ http://philanthropy.com/article/The-Stubborn-2-Giving-Rate/1...
- brucefancher 13y agoSadly, he's correct that there really aren't that many classical liberals (the correct term for what he calls "libertarians") in Silicon Valley. Despite the fact that economic freedom in general and the technology industry in particular have brought an unbelievable level of comfort and prosperity to people at all income levels in countries fortunate enough to have relatively free markets, too many people who work in the industry fail to make the connection. Instead of taking note of such triumphs of economic redistribution as Detroit, they bite their nails with worry and yammer on about "income inequality", as if Mark Zuckerberg's or Sergei Brin's billions somehow came at the expense of other people. Oh, and the reason rents are high in San Francisco is because there's too much regulation, not because there's too much money there.