
San Francisco Bubble - thelarry
http://blog.larrold.com/2016/01/29/san-francisco-bubble/
======
mbesto
This is why the free market is so great.

1\. Everything too expensive? Good, don't live here, eventually enough people
will leave to drive all of the costs back to other market norms.

2\. Dumb startups? Good, they will fail, people won't be able to afford to
live here and they'll leave.

3\. People are spoiled? Uber is cheaper and more convenient in some cases than
taking the local transportation. When people stop taking public transportation
because it's fundamentally broken (ps - it's awful in SF) then it will force
government organizations to re-think their planning.

4\. Bad engineers? Yup, I've met some of them. They'll eventually leave too
when the system weeds them out.

I too think it's weird here, but since I do enjoy my life in the Bay area
enough, I'm happy to wait for the market to correct to normalcy. The people
who are here just to chase the "me too's" will soon be forgotten.

EDIT: I should probably clarify my overall sentiment. People who come to SF
and complain that this situation is less than ideal have the freedom to simply
choose not to play. The cost of living is driven by the simple laws of supply
and demand. Speak with your wallets, not with your mouths.

~~~
josh2600
Part of the fallacy of this is the implication that you need "good" engineers
for most startups. I think, frankly, that many startups need a website with a
google form + some excel sheets to get started and if the thing takes off they
can hire someone who can use google to bang on stackoverflow.

Very few things require genuinely novel pieces of code to work. Yes, lots of
value can be captured using code, but you could totally start something like
airbnb with a lot of manual labor clicking in a GUI.

Djikstra said "Beware premature optimization" and that's quite true. I think
automation should be used when things hurt to bad to do manually anymore. For
some people, that's any task which must be performed twice and then you write
a script. For others it might be years manually updating excel for bookkeeping
every night. One can go real far manually updating excel...

~~~
nawitus
>I think, frankly, that many startups need a website with a google form + some
excel sheets to get started and if the thing takes off they can hire someone
who can use google to bang on stackoverflow.

I agree, but this is mostly true because there's so much low-hanging fruit out
there. If you look at the current successful startups like Uber and Airbnb,
they're really trivial applications. That doesn't mean they can't create huge
amounts of value by "trivially" repackaging services and connecting people.

Once the low-hanging fruit is developed during the next 10 years or so we can
finally start focusing on actual high-tech engineering startups.

~~~
JackFr
Tens of thousands of man hours have gone into making them seem trivial, and
the fact that they seem so to you is a testament to their design.

~~~
pc86
Well the fact that they've hammered on them for years doesn't mean they're not
trivial, it just means they've spent a lot of time on them. And I think we've
got to differentiate between _the app_ being [non-]trivial and the
infrastructure behind it supporting the massive load being [non-]trivial.

~~~
Inthenameofmine
Uber and Airbnb are most definitely not trivial. Anybody who has ever worked
on a remotely complex two sided marketplace project can tell you that. The
UI/UX alone is incredibly hard yo nail down. The fact that they made you think
that they're trivial really shows that they are doing a lot of things right.

------
philfrasty
"Engineers are particularly spoiled. They can take an arbitrary sabbatical
from work..." <\---> (on the about page) "...Currently a principal engineer at
AppNexus on sabbatical..." ???

~~~
avitzurel
Ignoring the hypocritical nature of this statement, I take offense in this
generalization in particular.

If you're an engineer with a family here in SV, you cannot take a sabbatical.
In most cases you need to get a job in a week or the rent will drive you to
bankruptcy.

~~~
mattmanser
Oh come on with the hyperbole, if you didn't spend so much money on a nice
area and expensive stuff you could afford it easily.

I don't get people who are so smart and yet simultaneously so stupid that they
think spending $100,000 a year is normal.

Wake up, you're rich, you're just too stupid to realize you could be living at
a much cheaper level.

~~~
gedy
Hey, you know that the vast majority of businesses are not very friendly to
remote work, and moving away from these areas frequently means a pay cut or
sometimes inability to find work?

I'm not defending this at all, as I think it's stupid, but they are not
"rich". They are frankly just less screwed than other middle class folks.

~~~
mattmanser
The median _household_ income in the US is $51,939 (2013).

You seriously think having double or probably triple from just one salary
isn't rich?

And where exactly are all your caterers and cleaners and gardeners and nannies
and baristas and tavern workers and shop people living and buying their food
with their minimum wage in the bay area? Obviously they aren't remote working.

Perspective is a bitch.

~~~
bduerst
SF has the highest CPI and rent index in the entire U.S., so comparing it with
median salary of the U.S. is non-sequitur.

...Especially when talking about _perspective_.

------
themagician
Money has been close to free for years. As the interest rate ticks up
everything will change. It's already starting to. More expensive borrowing,
less leverage, and better places to put dollars than venture.

The one thing I really agree with though is the funny thing that happens here
with the word "engineer". If you can make a website you somehow qualify for
the title software engineer. By Bay Area standards, I myself am director level
engineering talent—and I get offers for such all the time—and yet I don't even
remotely consider myself an engineer. Because I can make a website? Because I
know a little python, ruby and node? Come on. I've never written anything that
lives in a real production environment and you want to hire me as your
director of engineering? Are you mad?

~~~
heraclez
In Canada, you get sued if you call yourself an engineer when you're not part
of an order of engineers.

Even if you're a bona fide engineer, but not enrolled in the order, calling
yourself one opens the floodgates of hell where spaghetti coders do the same
and get hired by retarded HR departments to take the lead on some mission-
critical software.

I like this. I am a self-learned developer. When my peers call themselves
engineers, I spit my coffee.

~~~
brianwawok
I wish it were a protected word in the states, maybe an Engineering
association sitting over it. Would help with things like H1B flooding

~~~
heraclez
As an experienced Canadian developer who is seeking a work visa to work in the
US, it is actually extremely difficult to get one.

It seems as though the US prioritizes shit-developers/wannabe-engineers over
experienced Canadian developers. Which kind of makes sense, in that you feed
your own before feeding your neighbour.

So I really doubt that H1B flooding is a thing. Open to debate though.

~~~
jobu
It's difficult for people like you specifically because of the H1B flooding.

[http://www.nytimes.com/2015/11/11/us/large-companies-
game-h-...](http://www.nytimes.com/2015/11/11/us/large-companies-
game-h-1b-visa-program-leaving-smaller-ones-in-the-cold.html)

 _" Many of the visas are given out through a lottery, and a small number of
giant global outsourcing companies had flooded the system with applications,
significantly increasing their chances of success. While he had one
application in last year’s lottery and lost, one of the outsourcing companies
applied for at least 14,000."_

A quick fix would be to award H1B based on salary instead of lottery.

~~~
heraclez
Yes that makes sense. I stand corrected. Thanks for the info!

------
ejcx
> Everything is too expensive. I’m from New York...

I take issue with this one. It's entirely possible to live frugally while
living IN San Francisco. I moved here about 7 months ago and expected it to be
incredibly expensive but it hasn't been the case (beyond rent).

The author mentions $15 crappy local IPAs but I've actually never found a beer
for this price. There is no shortage of $7 craft beers you can buy at a
brewery or bar, no shortage of Trader Joe's with the same prices as, say,
Charlottesville VA.

I've found that other than rent, the prices are comparable to other places. If
you get a salad delivered on postmates or uber eats or something then that's
what you're paying for. That isn't SF.

I think a lot of people are living a lifestyle where they have no problem
paying for stuff like a delivered salad when they can walk next door, or uber
instead of taking the bus, but lots of people are walking and grocery shopping
and not paying those prices.

~~~
rorykoehler
$7 beer? Frugal? In Berlin a beer costs $1 from the shop and maybe $2-3 from a
bar.

~~~
thecopy
Im thinkning of moving to München, this might be another reason too. A
Heiniken 33cl beer in Stockholm costs around 12 USD if you are at a nightclub,
otherwise around 10 USD.

~~~
longlivedeath
> otherwise around 10 USD

wat? it's 1.5$ actually

[http://www.systembolaget.se/dryck/ol/heineken-153603](http://www.systembolaget.se/dryck/ol/heineken-153603)

~~~
thecopy
Sorry, I meant at a pub or a bar.

------
pyrrhotech
Can we stop the whole "engineers make a lot of money" spiel? Most engineers
make between 120 - 160k in SF, where the median household income is 104k. They
don't make more than product managers, project managers or even many BART
operators. See [http://www.mercurynews.com/salaries/bay-
area](http://www.mercurynews.com/salaries/bay-area) if you don't believe me.
Sure, they make a bit more than average, but if that's the standard of "a lot
of money", you have a totally skewed view of how capitalism works and the
wealth gap in the US. Very few engineers are members of the capitalist class,
commonly referred to as the 1% that own 40% of the country's assets. Making
50% more than the median is not a lot. Making 500% more is a lot.

~~~
swalsh
I think a lot of engineers make more money then the value they provide. Last
year I worked for 3 different places. I worked at one startup, and one large
company on a new product in a new market. Both products were purely
speculative plays They did make money, but not enough to support the staff. My
pay was not based on how much value I provided, but how much value I could
have provided if the products took off (they didn't, thus the 3rd job).

All i'm saying is you should look at other markets that have been propped up
by speculation... and see what happens when the market corrects. Most of the
time they over-correct before finding a new better more stable price.

~~~
YuriNiyazov
Your pay was based on how much value you provided plus a risk premium for
working on something highly speculative that would cause you to work at 3
different places in a year and take a hit on your résumé.

You have to understand risk in order to understand that you were not overpaid.

------
YuriNiyazov
"They can take an arbitrary sabbatical from work, they cannot be told no or
reprimanded, and they make so much money that they can just take random breaks
from employment to chill."

I have yet to hear a convincing argument why this is a bad thing.

~~~
fweespeech
Honestly?

It isn't sustainable and its not a productive use of capital.

This lifestyle is going to implode when the economy stumbles.

~~~
YuriNiyazov
Yea, no.

JM Keynes said eons ago that with increases in efficiency we will eventually
be able to get to a 15-hour work week. So, a particular industry in a
particular area was able to get to an approximation of that, and the counter-
argument is that this is not a productive use of capital?

Besides, TFA complains that all these people are working on silly startups,
which is presumably not a productive use of capital either. You can't have it
both ways.

~~~
munificent
> a particular industry in a particular area was able to get to an
> approximation of that

On the backs of whom? How much are those Uber drivers, grocery deliverers, and
artisanal salad chefs making?

It is good that one group of people is moving forward, we just have to be
careful that we aren't doing it at the expense of other groups. The impression
I get is that in the US today, it's not just that some people are getting
richer, many others are getting poorer.

~~~
YuriNiyazov
I'm confused. At least in this subthread we are discussing just the sabbatical
part here, not the general economic inequality. Are you saying that someone
who has enough money to take a sabbatical is doing it on the backs of uber
drivers and grocery deliverers?

------
avitzurel
"There are thousands of dumb startups" This.

Most of the blame is cast on the big companies (Twitter, Facebook etc) but the
reality is that there are hundreds of smaller companies choosing SF and the
valley in general.

And again I say, until companies allow people to work from _wherever_ this
will be fueled more.

Finding talent is getting ever more difficult already, if you expand your
search area to the entire country/world there's a better chance you'd find
people no?

~~~
mikeryan
_" There are thousands of dumb startups"_

This is a feature not a bug. The whole VC model the Bay Area thrives on is
based on the premise of hitting on only a small percentage of successful
startups and you never know what's going to be a hit. Many successful startups
have pivoted out of "stupid" ideas. I'm sure at one point "Blogging 140
characters at a time" was considered a stupid idea.

~~~
avitzurel
"Blogging 140 characters at a time" was considered a stupid idea.

I struggle with this _all the time_

I try to put myself in the shoes of VCs hearing AirBNB, Uber, Twitter and
other pitches. I'm pretty sure I wouldn't give them money. (and then, I would
post on HN saying "How I missed AirBNB. Including email threads with the
founders and beating myself up).

This is indeed the premise of VCs but even with that in mind, some startups
being funded are just ridiculous.

~~~
Avshalom
It's worth remembering that at the time it wasn't "blogging 140 characters at
a time" it was "SMS blogging" which is a much easier idea to pitch in that the
use case is more obvious (being on the go) and the character limit isn't
arbitrary.

------
wesleyfsmith
I have to say that I didn't really understand the perspective the writer was
coming from. It kind of felt like he just wanted to finger wag at SF.

> Everything is too expensive.

Just normal supply and demand economics. This happens all the time all over
the world when lots of high earning people suddenly move to an area.

> There are thousands of dumb startups.

Yup. And most of them will die. And some of them will become AirBnB. The
problem is, it's extremely difficult to predict which is which. That's just
the nature of searching for "the next big thing". I'd rather live in a world
where there are lots of dumb companies so that the few exceptional ones have a
chance to get started.

> People are spoiled.

No, people in SF value their time, as it's the only resource you can't get
more of. I absolutely understand why someone with the money would have
groceries deliver for them. It's more efficient. The locally sourced and
organic thing does feel a bit silly though, although I would say that's a fad
you see everywhere.

> There cannot be these many quality engineers.

I'm sure there are some bad engineers there. But SF has a massive pool for
exceptional talent, and while I'm sure not every engineer is extremely high
quality, I have no doubt that a substantial amount of top tier programmers are
in SF. If the majority of programmers weren't making meaningful contributions
to their companies, I don't think you would see them being compensated the way
they are.

~~~
sandworm101
>> I absolutely understand why someone with the money would have groceries
deliver for them.

There is s difference between lazy, spoiled and pretentious. Rich people have
existed for a very long time. Few have ever had groceries delivered. The hire
personal shoppers, housekeepers, chefs, maids to buy their food. This getting
groceries delivered is a passing fad, an affectation for people looking to
cultivate an image of themselves. Having more money than time is nothing new.

------
encoderer
tldr: Guy comes to SF, figures it all out in a weekend, sees things that I've
never seen living here like 'dozens of co-working facilities in 10 blocks'.
Here's my take: The concentration of wealth here still pales to NYC area,
Google, Apple, Facebook alone are giant money funnels from the whole world
into this area, and there are more funnels being built every day. Not saying
it will or should go up in a straight line, but personally I'd bet on the
trend.

~~~
thelarry
No, it was a three day period in the middle of the week.

~~~
mikeryan
Well that's plenty of time to make sweeping generalizations. Carry on.

~~~
david927
Sweeping and evidently spot on as well. Carry on!

~~~
derrickdirge
What's the evidence that it's spot on?

------
robbyking
A couple quick notes from a longtime (20 year) San Franciscan:

 _Everything is too expensive_

Things are expensive, yes, but more so in neighborhoods with high
concentrations of new residents, namely SOMA and most of the Mission. You can
get an IPA at nearly any of the bars in my neighborhood for $4, and coffee for
$2.

 _There are thousands of dumb startups_

I agree 100%. I've had the (figurative) banana hammock recruiter call me, too,
and it's shocking to me how many people are repeating the mistakes of the 90's
boom.

 _People are spoiled_

Don't confuse a small yet vocal minority with the City as a whole. There are
still plenty of starving artists, passionate musicians and dedicated
activists; they just live in different neighborhoods than they did 5 or 10
years ago.

 _There cannot be these many quality engineers_

Again, I agree 100%. During the 90's dotcom boom I worked with a web developer
who literally didn't know how to write HTML; all his code was copied from
other parts of the project. It's not surprising that it's happening again this
time around, but as mbesto wrote, they'll eventually leave too when the system
weeds them out.

All in all, most of these are things long-time San Franciscans dislike about
our city, too. What's left to be seen is whether or not enough of the people
who made San Francisco a desirable place to live can afford to live here once
the tech market cools off.

------
crabasa
This is probably the worst item I've ever seen rise to #1 on Hacker News. It's
poorly written, is based completely on a weekend worth of anecdotes and makes
several claims that seem impossible ($15 IPAs).

------
gravity13
Re: There cannot be these many quality engineers.

I've seen grads come out of boot camps that are better programmers than people
who have been programming for years. They might lack the knowledge, but
they've got good sense and hustle, and at the end of the day, I'd take that
over a stubborn engineer who looks like they're gonna age into a Dilbert
comic.

~~~
brianwawok
I mean, if I am developing an app for millions of users - I would hope there
is at least 1 engineer on the team that understands O(n) vs O(n^2).

If the app is for 10 users or for the other 75% of employees, may be less
important...

~~~
wesleyfsmith
I taught at a bootcamp for a while and always covered big O. It's pretty
important for interviewing. Bootcamp kids know more CS than you might think...

~~~
niuzeta
It sounds like prep school for _interview exam_

------
njudah
Not withstanding everything else, I've lived in this town for years, and
always found it easy to find a reasonably priced beer.

~~~
skewart
Yup. It's still shockingly easy to find good beer at a reasonable price in the
SFBA. Same for food if you know where to go.

The only thing that's really hard to avoid spending way too much money on is
housing.

~~~
toomuchtodo
> The only thing that's really hard to avoid spending way too much money on is
> housing.

Live in a van down by the river, or a cargo truck in a Google parking lot.

~~~
beamatronic
TruckBNB

Next billion dollar startup

------
emcq
Kind of a weird swipe at bootcamps comparing them to devry. The top bootcamps
produce junior engineers better than the average undergrad with more work
experience (although in a different field such as mechanical engineering or
accounting). Many have STEM degrees from places like Berkeley, Stanford,
UMich, UW, UCLA, Harvard, etc. I'd prefer to have their weirdness to the
vanilla CS undergrad anyday, and their unique perspectives add meaningful
contributions to a team.

~~~
jessaustin
The only guy I've ever worked with whom I knew to have trained at DeVry was a
great sysadmin.

------
csomar
We have been hearing and reading similarly titled articles for the last couple
years. This, however, is the most stupid one in my opinion.

What the author describe is a lavish (according to him) standard of living,
judged startups to be dumb by their name/description (but they got investor
money). He concludes that we are in a bubble.

Here are the metrics that matter:

* Are current startups generating enough money to pay salaries.

* Are current startups raising enough funds to make ends meet.

* Are there new startups funded.

* Is the number of exits/IPOs higher to create new millionaires.

* Is the number of failed startups higher to create new unemployed engineers and free capacity.

If someone is interested to know these numbers, maybe finance me for a couple
months of research and get the right facts.

~~~
shostack
I think you forgot another important metric:

* Are the startups that are hiring taking up enough of the talent compared to large established companies with billions in the bank such that if there were a bubble, and it were to pop, it would actually make an impact on the hiring environment.

I'd love to see some hard data on the % of people employed by the "startup
ecosystem" vs. large established giants like Google, FB, Apple, Adobe, MS,
Amazon, etc. These companies have MASSIVE hiring needs and will likely
continue to for some time. Should interest rates cause lots of startups to
die, I have a hard time believing it would result in a similar situation to
the last dotcom bust. Salaries might be depressed for a while, but these
giants would still be fighting each other to swoop up the talent.

I'd seriously love to see some hard data on how much of an economic impact it
would have in the Bay Area housing market and the public markets in general if
all of the funded startups were to go _poof_ overnight. My current bet is "not
much in the scope of things."

~~~
uglysexy
Hiring is definitely a good indicator of the bubble bursting because hiring
indicates that startups are getting funding and they turn around and hire
people. When the funding dries up, these same startups tighten the belt, the
hiring drops and then the layoffs start.

A good indicator of a bubble in SF/SV startups is measuring the IT job market
using local Craiglist and Dice job postings since startups heavily use them.

I used both websites on & off since the late 90s to find contract & permanent
full-time jobs. Back then at the height of the dot-coms, the Dice home page
showed 120,000+ jobs, right after the crash (2001-2003) that number fell to
around 20,000-30,000. Now it's around 80,000.

On Craigslist, at the dot com height, the Software section for the Bay Area
([https://sfbay.craigslist.org/search/sof](https://sfbay.craigslist.org/search/sof))
had so many job postings per day that the list of postings for that day would
spill over to the next page (there are 100 listings per page). A year & a half
ago (late 2014) there was a good amount of postings and I got a frenzy of
replies when I contacted them. Now, there's only a handful of postings per
day.

~~~
shostack
I guess I'm making a clear distinction between "startup" (ie. no clear
business model or path to profitability yet) vs. "established tech giant."

The latter has such massive hiring needs in comparison that even if funding
dried up (which they do not need since they have lots of profit and are
already oftentimes publicly traded), I don't think it would slow down the
market THAT much.

~~~
paulddraper
Yahoo and AOL aren't hiring these days.

"To big too fail" isn't a thing.

~~~
uglysexy
> Yahoo and AOL aren't hiring these days If I may ask..how do you know this?
> And can you provide some detail?

Bottom line is - hiring (or lack of) is a leading indicator of a company's
financial health. A company that doesn't have any open jobs for a sustained
length of time (3-6 months to a year) is in belt tightening mode - which comes
right before layoffs or worse, closing shop.

Btw - Yahoo is already doing layoffs or 'downsizing'. If Yahoo wasn't hiring
during the past 3-6 months, that definitely was an indicator of this.

Yahoo Downsizes In Latin America, Closes Mexico And Argentina Operations
[http://techcrunch.com/2016/01/28/yahoo-downsizes-in-latin-
am...](http://techcrunch.com/2016/01/28/yahoo-downsizes-in-latin-america-
closes-mexico-and-argentina-operations/)

Here are some news sites that track layoffs. I recommend keeping a close eye
on things.

[http://techcrunch.com/tag/layoffs/](http://techcrunch.com/tag/layoffs/)

[https://twitter.com/search?q=layoff%20OR%20layoffs%20OR%20%2...](https://twitter.com/search?q=layoff%20OR%20layoffs%20OR%20%22laid%20off%22&src=typd)

Or better yet, keep an eye on the Dice jobs number which is prominently
displayed on the Dice.com home page.

As of today, January 29, 2016 that number is 84,201. My take is that if this
number goes below 60,000 then the bubble is bursting.

------
minimaxir
Looks like this week is "Maybe Startups Aren't Inherently Great" week on
Hacker News. :p

That being said, the number of startups in San Francisco is fine as long as
there is corrective balance. At the least, startups which are failing will die
faster due to rent alone.

~~~
nordic_nomad
Valid point. Maybe rent is a control factor. Otherwise they'd just hang on
forever.

------
nugget
It's a gold rush. Nothing new. Fun to watch once you have the context to
understand what is happening.

~~~
zzalpha
Except in a gold rush everyone is trying to get a piece of a real, actual
resource.

What are folks flocking to? A unique combination of deep VC pockets and
gullibility that can only be found in the SF geological record?

No, this looks more like a regular ol bubble to me... The flywheel is spinning
up, driven by run of the mill irrational exuberance and a belief that everyone
in the bay area is just smarter than everyone else. Anyone on wall street in
2007 should find that eerily familiar...

~~~
chipsy
Gold isn't particularly real, as resources go. It doesn't have that many
practical uses.

That's what makes gold rush economics similar to bubble economics: Everyone
decides to chase after a nebulous source of value.

San Francisco has always been the Gold Rush City.

------
skewart
I can see where this guy is coming from. Though he's obviously exaggerating
things by a mile.

SF is pretty ridiculous in a lot of ways. But I would take an SF as ridiculous
as if everything he said were exactly true over one where there weren't any
truth to it. Through all that froth does come actual creativity and
innovation. The banana hammock delivery disrupters will fizzle in due time.
The people who got inspired by all the energy and potential and decided to
build a VR product that revolutionizes medicine will survive. I'd rather see a
lot of false positives than risk a couple of false negatives. And besides, it
makes for an endless supply of entertaining stories for people aren't from
here.

------
daenz
I've never lived in SF, but I've talked to companies out there over the years.
Then I look at a cost of living calculator and rent prices and quickly write
it off.

The place sounds like a magnet for talent, no doubt. But the flip side of that
is, everyone going to SF leaves other locations talent-starved and willing to
be _very_ accommodating.

------
rdlecler1
The guy makes some good points, and there does seem to be a lot of
questionable startups, but it's not like they're tapping into public funds.
Somewhere, somehow, some angel investor thought that it was a good team and a
good idea and they were happy to part with their money. It's better that we
live in a more optimistic world than one where every crazy idea is a bad idea.

However, how is taking Uber to work every day 'spoiled'? I bet the guys owns a
car where he is from and spends significantly more on monthly transportation
than I do. For $4 more than a bus, I get point to point pick up and drop off,
and save about 40 minutes of my time (which I can use to go work out in the
mornings).

And some others have figured out that it makes sense to spend $20 on grocery
delivery rather than spending 90 minutes doing it yourself if you're working
60-80 hours per week and make more than $20/hour. To be sure, a lot of people
work long and hard. They make certain sacrifices but just because they are not
the same sacrifices that the author would make it doesn't mean they're bad.

~~~
amyjess
> For $4 more than a bus

Depending on where you live, Uber/Lyft can be a _lot_ more expensive than a
bus.

In Dallas, a monthly public transport pass costs $80. This comes with
unlimited uses of the buses and trains for an entire month. Let's say you work
twenty days (four weeks) a month, with a trip each way. That amortizes to $2 a
trip, less if you also use your pass for personal trips on weekends.

Lyft costs me about $11 on average to get me between home and work. If I were
to take Lyft to and from work every day for a month, again assuming twenty
working days a month, I'd be paying about $440 a month. That's not $4 more;
it's $9 more. That's 5.5 _times_ how much I'd be paying for public transport.
Again, that's not counting using it for personal trips on weekends (here, the
minimum is $5.70, including the trust & safety fee).

If Uber/Lyft is only $4 more than a bus in SF, then buses are way expensive
there.

~~~
jamesfzhang
Agreed that it definitely depends on where you live. I don't, but could, take
an Uber/Lyft for my commute everyday and it would cost about $5-$7, whereas a
ride on SF public transit would take $2.25 and + 10-20 extra minutes.

------
gtrubetskoy
In Austrian business cycle theory, this phenomenon is known as _malinvestment_
, see
[https://wiki.mises.org/wiki/Malinvestment](https://wiki.mises.org/wiki/Malinvestment),
there are some historical bubble examples there.

The general idea, as I understand it, is that if someone invests and makes a
ton of money, then other investors come in trying to do something similar to
make a lot of money too, only what they are investing in is no good. But all
the money creates a temporary illusion of an economic boom, which is what has
been happening in the S.F. Bay area for some time now.

I'm old enough to remember the .com bust quite well. At the time the
"irrational exuberance" (as Greenspan/Shiller dubbed it) made perfect sense,
and the ideas were fundamentally sound, the problem was that investors did not
understand that it would take another 10-15 years to get to ubiquitous
Internet, and the impatient ones got burned when the bubble burst.

------
tomasien
According to the about page, the author is an engineer at a startup and is on
sabbatical. That feels weird given the criticisms leveled in the piece.

FWIW I live in New York and prefer it massively to SV, but I mean....

------
devsquid
LOL, you can tell this article touches on something sensitive from the
reaction to it on HackerNews. Its a pretty accurate description of SF, I just
doubt NY is any different.

------
mikeryan
Hmm.. Here's Rosamunde's beer list plenty of $6 IPAs..

[https://www.beermenus.com/places/1609-rosamunde-sausage-
gril...](https://www.beermenus.com/places/1609-rosamunde-sausage-grill-
mission)

------
DannyBee
I'm surprised he didn't have the $16 artisanal salad delivered to him by one
of the 37 delivery services.

This is pretty much the only place i know of where people are okay with paying
$30+ total for a salad and think it's normal

~~~
antisilent
I've lived here since 2005 and have yet to see a $30 salad.

~~~
DannyBee
I said "$30 total" (IE salad + delivery).

------
caffeineninja
Written exactly like someone who visited SF from NYC for a few days. The pen
is dripping with poison and vitriol.

------
supergeek133
I've tried to have this conversation with many people on that coast, and there
was even a panel at TechCrunch about it.

"Do you make your startup people eat more ramen, or do you provide more
funding?"

As costs keep going up, people STILL think they have to move to SF to get
funding or find talent. Yet there is plenty of talent or ideas in other places
but the money doesn't move, the dumb part is the VC dollar will go farther in
other places.

So who's job is it to prompt the move? The idea makers or the money providers?

------
scorpion032
Does anybody know of any major open source contributor that lives in SF?

I used to be active in the Python/Django community earlier and am getting
involved in the JS-React-Redux community. Not only do most people live outside
SF, they live in a remote place that you wouldn't have heard about.

Software, good software is creative and creativity needs serendipity. The
pressure to meet the next funding round criteria or to get an Uber through the
traffic hearing my next track not making eye contact with my uber-pooler isn't
the best frame of mind conducive to creativity.

I'm sure a lot of top CEOs and the top guys in select areas have a great
social circle - smartest people who they eat/hangout with, which is very good.
But there are also a lot of me-toos, for whom just living in SF is the thing
they are achieving that feed their egos.

------
azerty1
interesting op is on a sabbatical himself

> Currently a principal engineer at AppNexus on sabbatical, I am trying to
> have a new post every day.

------
wambotron
Who cares? If you're not part of the scene there, why does it matter to you?
If those people weren't in "silly" startups, they'd probably end up in silly
corporate roles. Or even worse, they'd be unemployed and be another strain on
the current system.

There are a lot of ideas you may find silly but others find interesting enough
to spend their working hours to make a success. If you only focus on finances,
tons of them will fail. If you look at the experience they'll have doing it,
I'm sure some of them will find it was a success.

I've worked at a couple startups and I've worked at some big corporations.
There are bad coders everywhere. There are bad ideas everywhere. There are
also a lot of jealous people who apparently get bent out of shape because
people who are not the best engineer ever are making more money than them and
getting to take time off arbitrarily.

Instead of focusing on how much you think their startup is stupid, or how they
shouldn't get time off because they're not as good as you (based on who knows
what), why not just focus on what you have, what you do, and what you like?
Stop living against them and live for yourself.

------
swang
nothing against the author but it seems like he is painting a very wide brush
with something he's seen for 3? days.

i certainly have never taken ubers everyday to work even though i could
probably(?) afford to do so. seems like an expensive daily habit though.

i actually live in the city where it's not some huge loft in fidi/downtown.
good for anyone who can get their groceries sent up to their room but i'm not
sure how close to the norm that is. tech workers are all across the board in
terms of how they live, how much they get paid and how willing they are to
fetch their own groceries.

i live on the first floor of a older apartment complex, but i have to walk
down a hill to fetch my groceries. i do sometimes use one of the gazillion
food delivery services to eat dinner though.

anyways i would say this is similar to someone who goes to ny, visits the
financial district in manhattan for 3 days and then proclaims, "everyone in ny
is rich! of course they can afford all that housing! they're so stuck up! why
are the cabbies so rude? why are new yorkers so rude?"

------
uglysexy
I think a good indication of a bubble is measuring the IT job market using
Craiglist and Dice job postings.

I'd like to ask you all about what you've experienced & seen on Craiglist and
Dice that would give you an idea on how good or bad the IT job market in San
Francisco (and the Bay Area in general) is or was. I hear conflicting stories
of qualified people not able to find jobs after a year of searching (like the
SOAP architect below) and on the flip side, of companies not able to find
people (the so-called 'IT talent shortage').

I used both websites on & off since the late 90s to find contract & permanent
full-time jobs. Back then at the height of the dot-coms, the Dice home page
showed 120,000+ jobs, right after the crash (2001-2003) that number fell to
around 20,000-30,000. Now it's around 80,000.

On Craigslist, at the dot com height, the Software section for the Bay Area
([https://sfbay.craigslist.org/search/sof](https://sfbay.craigslist.org/search/sof))
had so many job postings per day that the list of postings for that day would
spill over to the next page (there are 100 listings per page). A year & a half
ago (late 2014) there was a good amount of postings and I got a frenzy of
replies when I contacted them. Now, there's only a handful of postings per
day.

I think it'd be good to get an idea of SF/SV IT job market's fluctuation over
the years by compiling these data points. I did a Google search for charts
with these data points but couldn't find any. If any of you used these two
sites anytime from the late 90s to today and remember the # of postings for
that specific date or time period, please post. Ideally, month to month data
with high interest on data points from 1999-2003 (dot-com bubble) and 2006 to
today (credit bubble).

------
tyre
The talent issue is particularly acute.

If you're mature and hardworking, I have no problem with you taking PTO
whenever you need it or not committing to hard deadlines. But those are earned
privileges based on trust and a history of delivering.

It is so hard to hire software engineers and there are tons of them. Bootcamps
are not the answer. It is not a quantity problem, it is a quality problem.

------
lucio
The problem is that you never know which one of the "silly" startups will
succeed. ¿How about a startup disrupting the "large" market of air-mattress
renting to complete strangers?.... mmmm... Let's toss a breakfast in... That's
is, let's call it: "Air Bed and breakfast"... it is silly?

------
ctulek
I don't think an engineer being able to take sabbatical or paid well is
something to label engineers as spoiled. As long as work ethic is there, this
is actually what an employee in any profession should get.

That people are paid here well is a result of the huge imbalance of wealth in
the world is another discussion topic.

------
duren
> People are spoiled. A friend of mine takes an uber to and from work every
> day, and apparently that is fairly common.

Hard to take any of this seriously. Lots of people regularly taxi to work in
large cities and I cannot imagine how it's indicative of a bubble. Author
seems too emotional about such an assertion.

------
svhoapres
No one wants to "throw this out there" but I will.

SV has been overpriced for decades and it is only the importation of CHEAP h1b
labor that has allowed the growth to continue.

You know something is a miss when you build ever and ever more future slums
being 4+ story apartment buildings resulting in h1bs stuffed 12+ into an
apartment paying $3K+ or even more for a 1BR apartment.

Americans won't live like that. Or so I hope.

If you didn't have h1bs then the jobs most likely would have gone to cheaper
parts of the country as the wage costs would have started to rise to levels
such that the products couldn't be developed here.

Works for me.

We have (or had) a choice of allowing IT to be offshored "like everything
else" or wreck Silicon Valley making it into a (future) slum.

We made the wrong choice.

------
matzipan
It still shocks me that Europe hasn't yet built a response to SF. Sure,
London's a tech hub, but not anywhere close to SF.

Eastern europe has a lot of talented engineers, but lacks capital and know-how
on building an international business, places are cheap to live in and so on.

~~~
vellum
They're too risk-averse. In SV, it's ok to fail. In Europe, it's not.

------
angryasian
The most ironic thing about this article is that it sounds like he's
complaining about tall the niceties of living in SF but he himself works at an
ad tech company and is currently on sabbatical and wants to write a new blog
entry once a day. WTF???

------
dap
I don't necessary disagree with any of the claims, but it has a very "Old Man
Yells at Cloud" sound to it:
[http://i.imgur.com/91sn32Q.jpg?fb](http://i.imgur.com/91sn32Q.jpg?fb)

------
malandrew
One of the best and most underrated thing about all these crappy startups? It
gives a lot of people the opportunity to learn valuable skills on someone
else's dime. Those that are good engineers in crappy startups eventually
migrate to the unicorns. The shitty startups may not go anywhere, but they
allow a lot of young people to accumulate skills that they can take with them
to companies that actually need that talent.

Without the shitty startups acting as free training wheels, the unicorns would
have a much harder time finding quality talent.

------
sixQuarks
Regarding dumb startups - I can't wait for the coming collapse. There are lots
of talented developers/designers working on dumb startups, which makes it very
difficult for me to find good people to work with.

------
colmvp
There might be a bubble, but extremely limited anecdata isn't enough to prove
it.

Who cares if people are spending money to get shit done for them that they
don't want to personally do (laundry, groceries). As long as they can pay for
it and are utilizing hours to what they actually want to do in life I don't
see the harm.

And expensive food exists in most major cities.

There might be some truth to the title, but the article lacked the data to
support any of it. I'm flabbergasted that it got upvoted on the frontpage of
HN.

------
outworlder
While I agree with the sentiment, the attitude of the post is appalling.

> This reminds me of the first dot com bubble where people with degrees from
> devry were joining companies and making big salaries

Why do you care about where people got their degrees from? What does that have
to do with commanding a high salary or not? If the people seem to be overpaid
for what they do, fine. But that has nothing to do with their degrees. Or even
their abilities.

------
kelvin0
Well all we need is to look at historical facts to understand what is going on
in SF:
[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Mansions_of_the_Gods](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Mansions_of_the_Gods)

Seriously though, this movie does touch many aspects related to gentrification
and what happens when supply stays the same but demands spikes sharply ...
chuckles all around.

------
someear
There are lots of dumb startups. But a handful of these dumb startups are
going to turn into big, meaningful companies that change some aspect of
people's lives, hopefully in a positive way (at a minimum they will offer
employment). Because of that, it's worth putting up with these "dumb" ones
because 0.1% of them will pay off the other ones.

Companies evolve, and some don't stay dumb forever.

~~~
crimsonalucard
meaningful way? Something like Facebook has certainly changed things, but
whether or not the change is meaningful remains up for debate. Most of these
'changes' just make our lives slightly more convenient or seem a bit more
futuristic, but these are illusions.

Change that is categorically meaningful involves things like a cure for
cancer, a new source of energy, etc..etc.. If we are to judge whether this
startup trend has changed peoples lives in a meaningful way, we should look
for changes that are categorically meaningful.

------
mwnz
Ugh, don't feed the troll.

~~~
mwnz
Glancing through the comments, it looks like the troll has succeeded. SF
bashing has begun.

You don't have to move here, so chill out, people.

------
bobby_9x
I think the problem is that many of the business models of these startups is
basically taking VC money and shuffling it around.

I've been to many startup competitions in the last couple of years and most of
the winners have no business model.

For instance, last year, the winner was a startup that was "Twitter with 255
character limit". It think it was awarded $20,000

------
alphonse23
I agree, things are probably too good to be true right now. I really don't
think it's fair to blame engineers though. My only advice to people working in
this industry is to save your money -- be sure to be keeping your money in an
emergency fund of some kind incase something happens. That's my best practical
advice.

------
scelerat
> people with degrees from devry were joining companies and making big
> salaries

one of the best engineers I've ever worked with has a degree from DeVry. I
know many great engineers who don't have CS or engineering degrees. And I know
plenty of dummies with lots of letters after their name.

------
davidw
> People are spoiled

I recall when I was in SF in 1999, limo after limo pulling up to what was a
pretty ordinary club. I didn't really care how people pissed their money away,
but it seemed so bizarre and so detached from reality. I was glad to get out
of there.

------
lubesGordi
Part of the whole venture capital startup game is diversification if
investment. VC's expect a lot of their startups to fail (angel investors too),
while a few grow and maybe if they are lucky one of them takes off.

------
leroy_masochist
> A company to “disrupt the banana hammock ordering process” cannot possibly
> do well yet someone invested money into it and it is paying employees.

Is this actually a real company and if so can someone post a link?

~~~
scholia
I didn't even know that "banana hammocks" were a thing. Maybe whoever runs
bananahammockworld.com reads HN....

[http://www.bananahammockworld.com/banana-hammocks-for-
men/](http://www.bananahammockworld.com/banana-hammocks-for-men/)

~~~
Paul_S
Should carry a NSFW warning. I had no idea what a banana hammock was, I
thought it was an actual hammock.

~~~
tragic
I thought it was somehow tied into the hipster-foodie thing, like you'd get
charged $15 for a 50 cent banana if it was delivered to you by some
precariously employed scooter driver swaddled up like the baby Jesus.

Perhaps it's my unadventurous lifestyle, but I have never found myself in a
situation where I so urgently needed a posing pouch that 'Uberising' the
industry would have helped me out.

------
wooptoo
Replace San Francisco with London and your article is still valid.

------
yanilkr
When you compare that to Detroit trouble, you will see that bubble is not that
bad after all. All those overrated engineers will have connections and
confidence.

------
bischofs
I would rather have too many startups then not enough - I am from Detroit and
we would love a more entrepreneurial environment and more investment capital.

------
ruok0101
So its a bubble. What do you do about it? Move?

~~~
hugs
That's what I did in early summer of 2008. I moved away from Mountain View
because everything felt over-priced and unsustainable. So I voted with my
feet. Hello from Chicago. :-)

~~~
shostack
Typing this from MV right now having moved from Chicago in 2013. Really
wishing I'd moved out here in summer of 2008 as it would likely mean I'd be
able to afford much more home than I can right now.

------
gragas
>Every food item has to be locally sourced and organic, which seems more
important than taste and quality.

Ummm... that's the point?

------
jerf
Next up on TechCrunch, "The 'Bubble' Bubble: What It Means To You When It
Pops"

------
miseg
> People are spoiled.

I'll extend that statement to any of us living the western lifestyle!

------
svhoapres
The jobs are all going to h1bs working 168 hours a week for $300.

------
AlwaysBCoding
Yes, there are a lot of dumb startups but I'm still not convinced this is a
bad thing. Why does every 24-year old have to be changing the world?

Imagine you have a 2x2 matrix where the x-axis is positive value added to the
world and the y-axis magnitude of impact. You want your job to be in the top
right corner, high impact, high value added to the world but there's two ways
to get there. You could do something that has high value but low impact like
working at a non-profit in DC helping with excel spreadsheets or whatever,
you're delivering value to the world but making a very small impact. The other
approach is that you could learn how to build a large scalable system for
delivering a solution to millions of people first. Maybe you're making the
100th best photo sharing app and it will never add large value to the world,
but you're learning how to deliver impactful solutions you just need to figure
out how to deliver real value. I'm not sure why there's a bias against the
second approach. I lived in DC for five years and most of my friends are doing
less interesting things than my friends in SF. Someone who gets experience at
a startup that builds interesting technology but never takes off could be the
next CTO of a political campaign for all you know.

Also, it's a complete myth that San Francisco is expensive to live in. You can
leave cheap or expensive in any city. SF has a culture where being poor is
totally cool. Everyone gets it, you're in tech you're an entrepreneur etc...
There's no pressure to go to nice restaurants for social status like there is
in New York. I spend much less money in SF than I did living in DC just
because of the lifestyle I'm living. Buying a house in SF is impossible due to
the insane prices, but it's really not that bad living in an apartment here.

I don't think people are spoiled here, I think your perceptions are off.
First, programming takes place entirely inside a persons head. Mental state is
really important, and the 9-5 office job with a commute to and from the office
every day doesn't work very well for engineering. I like to break up my day
into two halves. The first half of the day and the second half of the day,
this gives me two discrete time periods where I can do work and I like to take
a bike ride in between because I can think about the problems, and then not
have to go to the gym later in the day. When I was working for a company in DC
there was no way I could have left at 2:00 to take an hour bike ride, even if
that's how I work best. I think it's ridiculous to say that people working in
their optimal workflows makes them spoiled.

And again, it takes probably 3 years to become a high-quality engineer. So I'm
not sure what you would want coding bootcamp graduates to do after 3 months,
get together and talk about how hopeless life is? I'm glad that people are
getting into the industry, the only way you're going to get better is by
getting real world experience. So what someone with 8-months experience isn't
a great engineer yet? By continuing to get better over the next couple years
he will become a better engineer and then be able to add significant value to
the world, I'm not sure why you would want to discourage developers from
perfecting their craft. This would be like heckling a Med School student for
not being a great doctor yet.

~~~
wtracy
> _Also, it 's a complete myth that San Francisco is expensive to live in._

Cool. Can you point me to where I can get an apartment in SF for less that
$1k/month?

~~~
AlwaysBCoding
Bernal Heights, Portrero Hill, actually there's < $1,000 rooms all over the
city, just look on craigslist.

Maybe not a single apartment to yourself, but definitely a room in a shared
apartment.

There are a lot of cities btw where you can't get a single one-bedroom
apartment for < $1,000

~~~
popmystack
You can't just change the qualifications of his question and then go "I
answered it!"

~~~
AlwaysBCoding
But if the question is getting a single one-bedroom apartment for < $1,000 a
month I think that excludes a lot of cities. New York, DC etc... So it's not
meaningful to say SF is a bubble because of a trait that exists in many
cities.

------
svhoapres
The jobs are taken by h1bs working 168 hours a week for $300.

------
varelse
If you hate current day SF, you'll looooovvve NYC...

~~~
seiji
I moved from The Bay Area to NYC. Things I miss about The Bay Area include:
meetups where the attendees are actually useful people you want to talk with,
more similar developers (NYC developers tend to have +20 years on SF
developers unless you're at a we-only-hire-22-year-olds startup), developers
more plugged in to current trends instead of _just_ getting on board with what
was introduced 5 years ago, in NYC every other company is in "adtech," in NYC
the typical career path is startup/company -> create your own HFT startup,
lack of winter (but I don't miss the lack of water), ....

~~~
varelse
What do you like about NYC? I spent a couple weeks there recently, to which I
was really looking forward since I had never been there, and after about a
week I loathed the noise, the garbage everywhere, and the lines at all the
stores. Shortly thereafter, I caught the Norovirus from delivered food and I
was knocked out physically and mentally for almost 2 weeks.

What did I like? Seeing a few famous landmarks, a couple of the restaurants,
and my rental apartment had free NetFlix.

~~~
seiji
What I like: not needing a car (no car payment, no car insurance), any event
(concert/meetup/parade/show/etc) is only 20-30 minutes away door-to-door and
you don't need to park since you have no car, central park is okay (but it's
no red rocks or la honda), you'd think having 6 million people within a 6 mile
radius would make it easy to meet people but... not so much, housing prices
are (supposedly) less than SF but it's still painful, tons of non-chain places
to eat, my 300+ Mbps home Internet access for $80/month, can be at any airport
in about 30 to 60 minutes (taxi to LGA or subway+airtrain to JFK or nj
transit+airtrain to EWR), etc.

I've done the whole norovirus dance once too. It really does knock you out for
a week or two. (I started feeling sick when walking around outside one
morning, decided to take the subway back home, the first sickness struck while
waiting for the train—I just had to throw up on the subway tracks. Pretty
awful. Some nice bystanders gave me an unopened bottle of water they had with
them which was nice.)

~~~
varelse
I found that there are a lot nice people in NYC that have to put up with a
minority of absolute jerks that give the place a undeserved bad rep. This part
is not much different from SF IMO.

~~~
seiji
Yeah, the weird thing about NYC is it's more heavily actor/waiter/bartender
focused on the youth spectrum so everybody you meet is almost maximally
different from everybody else. It causes a strange effect where people form
overly homogenous groups when they do find people who are similar (crossfit
cults, every actor has slept with every other actor, revolving doors of
finance firms, etc).

In some ways it seems all the "regular" people get absorbed into other levels
of success/purpose outside of technology here, so technology is left with a
larger weirdo population than SF since there are many more non-techonlogy
things to make regular people happy around here.

------
NDizzle
I feel like the best reply to this is:

"Well, yeah. So?"

------
p4wnc6
Didn't Arcade Fire say this years ago?

------
m1117
A bit dramatized, but the concept is good.

------
minimax
_local IPAs are $15_

Is that actually true?

~~~
jdminhbg
Barring some kind of super-rare specialty (Russian River's Pliny the Younger,
maybe), no.

~~~
etjossem
Toronado has $5 pints of Pliny. So no, the author's totally off mark.

------
halis
You should rename this thread California Bubble...

------
whybroke
Please be aware that moving to the bay area for any reason other than fun will
be a serious life mistake.

If you move to the bay area in your 20s, by the time you're in your 40s you
will have a specific knowledge of a fad language that is 20 years old. But
even if you somehow keep up with new tech in your spare time, you will look 40
something and thus be nearly unemployable solely on those grounds.

And you simply will be unable to save any reasonable amount of money no mater
how many beers you don't drink. Like anyone else in the states, your sole
savings would be home equity which you won't have because you won't be able to
buy any kind of home in the few years your age makes you employable.

If in doubt, for those still in SF, determine the savings of your co workers
in their 20s and 30s (who are now near then end of their employability), and
whether they rent or own (good luck finding a 50 something coworker to ask).
Be aware that you do not leave the bay area rich, you leave it because you
can't afford it. And be aware there are few middle aged and effectively no old
people there. And beware that 45 is only half way to retirement age.

~~~
niuzeta
I'm in Canada and every time I consider prospects of getting into _United
States_ , comments like this frighten me. More specifically the Valley area
for its renowned reputation of tech-oriented culture, and make good earnings.
Compared to what I see in, say, Toronto area with bad housing and a bunch of
old .NET 2.0 I feel that it must be _better_ there.

What I find lacking in such comments, though, is some explanation on why and
the suggested alternatives. Would you mind sharing why? Java/C# were _the hot
things_ of 10-15 years ago and people still make a living out of it. It sounds
like an argument for classic Red Queen problem where the only winning move is
not to play.

~~~
api
There's a happy medium somewhere between the wasteland of legacy "enterprise"
jobs (.NET 2.0 and such) and the nutzo SF/SV orbit.

I live in Southern California (LA/OC). It's not cheap by any measure but it's
within the bounds of economic sanity compared to SF/SV. There are tons of very
interesting tech jobs in cutting edge areas like computer vision, AI/ML, the
latest web and DevOps tech, and a lot of hardware/EE stuff. There are many
other places like this. Canada probably has a few too. Even NYC, which is more
expensive than LA, is still "sane" compared to SF when you consider what you
get. In NYC car ownership is very optional, which mitigates the high rents,
while in SF you must own a car if you ever want to leave the peninsula.

I've turned down numerous offers in SF/SV because it just seems economically
insane. The housing prices are clearly unsustainable and the OP's comment
about it being a "serious life mistake" rings true. The craziness has also
priced out much of the interesting culture that made SF compelling in the
first place.

Edit: I keep hearing about the relentless ageism in SF/SV tech. I don't see so
much of it elsewhere. Is it really that bad? If so it seems like a SF/SV thing
and not necessarily true everywhere. In that case it might make some sense for
young people to spend some time in SF/SV getting into the latest stuff and
learning and then bail before 30.

