
Annual note to self: most of the world exists outside the tech bubble - chmaynard
https://steveblank.com/2017/08/12/working-outside-the-tech-bubble/
======
unknown_apostle
Working class people are being subjected to ultra efficient hypercapitalism,
as in Uber drivers discovering they worked for free when they need to purchase
a new car.

Meanwhile Wall Street has been bailed out 2 times in the last 15 years alone
with monetary policy. How many people went to jail? (And they haven’t learned
a thing, on the contrary and quite spectacularly so.)

If you want to know where the tech bubble comes from, don’t think about the
talent pool in SV.

Think 2008 and central banks. It's not normal for investors to accept
visionaries wasting endless billions for years on end. Except when the
availability of capital appears infinite and risk appears almost non-existent.

In contrast, a big group of people stagnate and even get squeezed. Not rich
enough to enjoy the high life of the zero/negative yield world. Or to overcome
decades of inflation. Not poor enough to just give up and go on food stamps.

Ultimately, it’s not about a tech bubble. It’s about a credit cycle on
steroids, held together with spit, rope and gum and massive moral hazard. Who
gets access to the funny money first? And who will be left holding the bag?

~~~
rayiner
It's interesting that you identify ultra efficient hyper capitalism as the
problem, then point the finger at Wall Street traders betting on mortgage
backed securities. They really have nothing to do with each other.

To the extent you can blame anyone for ultra efficient hyper capitalism, blame
programmers. It's programmers that allowed Uber to turn the inefficient and
leisurely taxi industry into the Uber/Lyft rat race. It's programmers who
develop the on-demand work scheduling algorithms at places like Wal-Mart.
Programmers are the reason why Amazon can take over all the mom & pop stores,
turning warehouse workers into appendages of machines. Programmers are the
ones who enable international mega-corps to enjoy unlimited economies of
scale.

~~~
nine_k
You speak as if _customers_ do not also enjoy lower prices, faster delivery,
lower fares, wider choices, etc. All this is also enabled by the very same
platforms.

~~~
rayiner
I didn't say otherwise. I like paying $10 for an Uber ride from someone scared
I'll give them a bad rating, instead $15 from a surly, unaccountable cab
driver. I'm just pointing out that if you think that's a problem, blame the
people responsible for it.

~~~
rockinghigh
Who do you think is responsible for low prices?

------
bmwe30is
>Some are rooted, embedded in their communities; and some are trapped —
because housing is unaffordable where the better paying jobs are. And the jobs
that are high paying are not the jobs they built their lives on.

There's some texture and nuance to this statement. I remember on NPR, they
interviewed a lady whom mentioned similar sentiments; her and her husband had
built a family, worked in the blue-collar industry (precision machining) for
decades, and now were losing their jobs. She also mentioned that they had been
living in a small town for a long, long time.

That last part bothers me a lot. It seems a lot of people just don't want to
move. Anecdotally I've moved nearly 6 times in the last 8 years. My parents
have done the same.

People are stuck on this idea of living and dying in the same city once they
buy a home or have children. That just isn't the case anymore.

Mobility and a willingness to learn new skills seems to prevail. It's what
other generations have done, millions of immigrants (my parents included).

~~~
jboggan
It's really not easy to uproot and move from an economically depressed area to
an active metropolis. I've done it (Athens, GA to San Francisco in late 2012)
and it was incredibly expensive and involved a large amount of personal credit
use, cash assistance from family, and time. It was a huge stretch at the time
for me to move across the country and break into a new industry, and I did it
as a single man, willing and able to sleep on couches and occasionally a cheap
hotel room (which left me going to the next job interview itching with flea
bites). I spent a lot of days scrambling to figure out where I was sleeping
that night while I navigated the terribly tight housing market in San
Francisco. I would have never been able to do that with any sort of family.

If you are coming from a town where $28,000 is a really _good_ salary for a
job and your rent (as a single person with roommates) might be $250-$300 a
month, how on earth do you save up enough to get two months rent in SF or even
Oakland? Especially considering how little savings most families have in
America, and that's when you haven't been laid off.

When you have certain highly fungible skills moving around is relatively easy.
Now that I'm a programmer I can theoretically get a job in pretty much any
American city I choose, and probably negotiate a starting/moving bonus so I'm
not out-of-pocket for any costs associated with moving. That's true for all of
my former coworkers and a lot of my friends out here in California, so I think
it's easy to forget how abnormal that is.

~~~
nostrademons
What I don't understand is why people don't use the time they have in the low
cost-of-living area to develop the skills (via the Internet) that would make
them attractive to employers in big cities? That was my approach - I lived at
home with my parents after graduation, basically did nothing but program (both
for work and after work), and after 3 years Google came knocking and paid for
my move out to Silicon Valley. This is fairly common among tech companies, or
even any sort of wealthy corporation - if they want someone remote and the
person is willing to relocate, they'll pay for the move.

I have several friends here with similar stories - they're from even more
economically depressed areas (Alabama, Tennessee, Indiana, Cleveland, etc.),
but spent their free time coding, and then Google came calling.

Honest question here - what's going through peoples' heads when they decide
that reading Breitbart or watching TV is a better use of their time than
developing the skills that will make them desirable to those evil corporations
that are making all the money?

~~~
jboggan
A lot of survivor bias among you and your friend group I would think. I did
code in all my free time back in Georgia but I had no CS degree and I had
never held a programming job. There were a lot of things that I didn't know I
didn't know, as I soon learned when I showed up in SF.

I have a lot of friends and contacts back in the Atlanta area that are doing
just what you described . . . and they will continue doing just what you
described . . . and it will not lead to a job at Google or any West Coast tech
company. Reading HN and messing around with your GitHub is one thing, but
there are a ton of people who are talented but have no idea what employers out
here are actually looking for, or how to focus on those skills or showcase
them if they already have them. That's just within programmers, which is one
of the best markets right now. If you are a skilled lathe operator what are
you going to do, learn to code?

I'd like to think everyone could learn to code because it would mean I
wouldn't have to consider the economic sorting going on, that I benefit from,
and how a great many people are stuck on the other side of it. If everyone
could learn how to code I not only can pat myself on the back for doing so and
bettering my life, but I can also avoid having to empathize so much with
people who never will and are in worsening economic straits because of it.

What other skills can you develop via the internet that make you appealing to
employers in big cities?

~~~
nostrademons
> What other skills can you develop via the internet that make you appealing
> to employers in big cities?

Sales, digital marketing, community management, UX, and data science are some
examples. Known "influencers" in online forums, for example, often get hired
for digital marketing, because they have real-world on-the-ground experience
that big corporations that lack (for an infamous example, see Saydrah on
Reddit). If you can get a video to go viral on YouTube, you're often qualified
for many marketing jobs; I had an English-major friend get a job at a startup
(albeit a terrible one) for a rant he made on YouTube that went viral.
Independent researchers who can come up with an interesting & rigorous blog
post based on publicly-available data often get data science job offers.
Redesign a major product and convince a significant number of people that your
version is better (this is non-trivial) and oftentimes you'll get a job as a
UX designer or PM for that product.

------
darod
I wonder how long it will take for this thought to fade from Steve's mind once
he returns to SV. It's easy for people come to these realizations after
getting outside of their comfort zone but just as easily return to the status
quo. I think one of the biggest myths about tech in general is that it's here
to help people. It's really not. It's job is to remove barriers to make
workflows more efficient, typically to the detriment of people, as they
generally are that barrier. Once a company gets a robot/computer to do what a
person does it's next logical step is to layoff those workers. You don't have
to go to your summer home to see people are having hard times. You just have
to walk down Market Street.

~~~
isostatic
But this is a good thing.

In our Delhi office, each elevator has an attendant who's sole job is to push
the button of the floor you want. This means less space in the lift for
passengers, and lifts being taken out of commission because there's nobody to
push the button.

Removing this job (by having the technology to allow passengers to select
their floor themselves) means improvement for the users.

The same applies to shop checkouts - I'd far rather go through an automated
checkout rather than deal with a person at a till, faster and less distracting
from what I'm doing. Same thing with buying things from amazon rather than
going to a legacy shop, watching a movie on Netflix rather than renting a
video from blockbuster, or returning library books to a computer rather than a
person.

The problem comes when those who lose the jobs lose out - the guy who's job is
to push a button I can easilly push myself, or the taxi driver who's job
vanishes when the computer does the driving instead. We deal with those issues
by education (so people can do better jobs that aren't automated), and social
safety nets.

If a robot can do your job, it's a terrible job. You may need it with our
current economic system, But that isn't a good thing.

~~~
darod
>We deal with those issues by education (so people can do better jobs that
aren't automated), and social safety nets.

However, there really are no social safety nets and the US continues to
decrease investments in education year after year. Additionally, I rarely hear
of companies reinvesting that money into educating their employees or the
community.

>If a robot can do your job, it's a terrible job.

This is a bit of a stretch. Some people care more about efficiency, which it
seems is the case with yourself. Others value service more and robots have yet
to match the service quality of a human.

~~~
jpetso
> Others value service more and robots have yet to match the service quality
> of a human.

That would imply that the robot cannot do the job, so it doesn't really
contradict the parent's statement.

------
maxxxxx
He should rename this to "Working outside the millionaire bubble". Plenty of
people in tech feel the squeeze too. What it comes down to is that a lot of
people with money have lost touch with the rest.

~~~
d3ad1ysp0rk
People in tech rarely feel the squeeze to the degree that those in service /
manufacturing industries do.

~~~
maxxxxx
We get paid ok but most of us barely have one home. There is no common bond
between the regular tech guy and a successful VC. Different worlds.

~~~
wott
> We get paid ok but most of us barely have one home.

If the average 'tech' worker is 28 and single, that's normal, not a sign of
'squeezing'.

~~~
speeder
I think you got it the other way around.

I am 29, and single...

But I am single BECAUSE I am nowhere near owning a home, in fact I don't own a
home, or a car, or anything, to the point I stopped looking for a girlfriend
because... why bother? It is not like I can even take her to a cinema.

~~~
chris_7
Neither me nor my girlfriend own a car or a house (and hopefully we never
will). Why would either of those be an issue? Plenty of people date and live
together in apartments.

------
johngalt
Being outside the tech bubble is hardly a desolate wasteland. Certainly many
of you have friends and family outside of tech circles, and already know this.
Tech is certainly a nice field filled with opportunity, more than many other
professions at the moment, but there are often massive downturns in tech which
make other careers suddenly seem much more compelling. Not to mention that no
one asks if a 40 year old building engineer is still capable of being a
building engineer.

------
bsaunder
This is the use case for universal basic income. Its largely not their fault
for their current economic situation. They played by the rules. They worked
hard. If we could only remove the "necessity" of a job and the puritan shame
of unemployment to live a moderate life of meager means. People should be
encouraged to contribute to society not to simply "get a job".

~~~
darod
I think UBI would be unsustainable without additional investments in
education. If you are going to be taking public monies, that time should be
used to educate oneself or provide some form of public service.

~~~
int_19h
What's the point, if the jobs keep getting automated? Why should we force
people to do "public service" that robots can and will do better?

~~~
darod
so what do you do with the people?

~~~
int_19h
"We" don't do anything with people - we don't own them. They do whatever they
want to do with themselves. Maybe art and crafts. Maybe some meaningless but
interesting research. Maybe just live a life of pleasure. I suspect there'd be
a lot of different answers. None of them are wrong.

------
seshagiric
"....but it’s easy to see why they might feel as if no one in Washington is
living their lives...."

As an non-American I personally think this is why large number of working
class voted for Trump, and something Clinton either missed or did not give
importance to.

~~~
vostok
I don't think Trump lived a working class life before becoming president.

~~~
ganoushoreilly
I don't think it was about that, it was about him being someone from outside
the establishment that they perceive as being out of touch.

I've still not met anyone that's pro trump and believes most of what he was
promoting. Sadly the most common response I get is "I wasn't voting for
Hillary, so I voted Trump".

I truly believe these Americans feel they are are in desperate circumstances
and someone from the outside that even acknowledged them, let alone claimed
solutions, was bound to grab their attention.

~~~
vostok
I feel like Trump is also pretty firmly part of the establishment.

In my mind, the real reason people voted for him is that he said things that
people were thinking. This seems to be something that nobody wants to admit.

~~~
CaptSpify
> I feel like Trump is also pretty firmly part of the establishment.

I completely agree with you, but I think a lot of people still perceive him as
being outside the establishment. And they voted based on that perception.

------
HillaryBriss
_But today, Americans are less mobile ... some are trapped — because housing
is unaffordable where the better paying jobs are. And the jobs that are high
paying are not the jobs they built their lives on._

this is what i think about every time a politician, journalist or economist
says that the answer for all these workers is government funding for "job
training."

------
foxhop
I work remote for Silicon Valley type companies but live in a location very
similar to the author's New England vacation home. I try to buy locally and
often joke that I'm slowly siphoning money out of the tech bubble and re-
purposing it here.

All joking aside many parts of this country are struggling and I think we need
to come up with more local solutions.

------
humanrebar
> There isn’t an app to fix this.

Well, we could make it socially important to make remote work possible. The
geographic concentration of tech thought and culture has been at least partly
intentional.

Early internet culture seemed eager to do exactly the opposite. The
inefficiencies of colocation were problems ripe for innovation.

If tech workers could live in small towns more easily, they'll have middle-
class-squeeze conversations with friends and family, not just overhear other
people having these conversations at local shops when they visit.

~~~
irq11
We could also make it socially important to spread the tech industry across
the US, instead of trying to cram everything in the eastern third of San
Francisco.

------
DubiousPusher
I can't take this kind of piece seriously anymore. The decrying of an out of
touch elite is a cliche.

This problem isn't getting any better because 1 it's a hard problem and 2
political gridlock keeps us from modernizing economic policy one way or
another.

Most the people in the tech bubble I know are keenly aware of their relative
advantage. They want something done about income inequality. A lack of
awareness is not the problem here.

~~~
whipoodle
It feels extremely cynical to me. How can you not open your eyes? Every time I
visit SF I see people who are so obviously going through hard times. It's not
only the people living a pastoral fantasy sipping phosphates at the soda jerk
who are worth thinking about.

~~~
DubiousPusher
Edit: I see that I didn't understand your comment actually, I agree. Privation
is a rural/urban problem.

I'm not sure you read my entire comment. As I said toward the bottom, income
inequality is a serious concern to me. I'm from a rural community and the
individual struggles I see there are very upsetting.

But most people I talk to in tech are not in a bubble. They are aware of how
hard it must be for people and want solutions.

The problem is we have two roughly equally sized political factions with
mutually exclusive ideas on how to solve it that are pretty hostile to
compromise.

~~~
ianai
I don't think it's the two sides that are the problem. They're symptoms of
multiple problems. The voting system itself created a duopoly. One side of
that duopoly has moved to extremes over the last 30+ years and dragged the
other side with it. We need a way out of the two party situation.

~~~
isostatic
The US has no extreme in the mainstream political left - Clinton, Obama, even
Sanders are no more extreme than Macron or Blair. You don't even have a Corbyn
figure, let alone someone like Maduro.

------
epx
I do this regularly - go to the countryside, sleep in a hotel of a very small
city, take pictures of abandoned buildings in once-thriving communities that
died because the railroad station no longer has passenger service, or because
most people migrated to cities. I don't live in SV, but it does help to put
life into perspective the same.

------
tomrod
Second sentence starts with:

> We have a summer home ...

Is this common for people living inside the tech bubble?

~~~
pault
Steve Blank isn't common:
[https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Steve_Blank](https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Steve_Blank)

~~~
tomrod
Ah, that makes sense. Thanks pault.

------
nitwit005
It would be nice if "the problem" was simply that people lived in a bubble and
didn't understand. That would be a relatively easily solvable problem, but
this is not the case. Sure, people can be isolated from the experiences of
others, but the overwhelming majority of us have friends and relatives working
normal jobs.

A lot of empathy does exist. Empathy alone does not lower the rent, or cause
those "good jobs" to reappear.

------
RealityNow
The paradox of capitalism is that business interests (capital) are in direct
opposition to workers' interests. Businesses are incentivized to reduce costs,
which means paying workers as little as possible, squeezing as many hours out
of them, and laying them off as soon as they're not needed.

Sure everyday workers are sometimes the customers as well, but that's becoming
less and less the case. Google and Facebook don't make their money off you,
they make them from advertisers working on behalf of businesses. Real estate
developers in Manhattan don't make money building affordable middle class
housing (hence the non-existence of such developments), they make them off
luxury high-rises targeting the wealthy.

Combine that with technological advances and globalization allowing
increasingly consolidated corporations to replace workers with robots/software
and move jobs overseas, and the end result is that wealth is more
concentrated, the economy is more concentrated (plutonomy), and your average
Joe living in rural New England just doesn't matter as much to the vault-
holders in an economic system where we only see each other as dollar signs.

No amount of retraining or "bootstraps" is going to bring the jobs back. It's
just not possible to compete with the corporations and their larger moats and
bankrolls. The only option is to work for them, or perish. These corporations
aren't building anymore satellite offices in rural areas or opening up to
remote work (due in part to the increasingly competitive job market), so the
only option is to move to expensive cities with chronic housing supply
shortages. These rural areas are as economically useless to the wealthy elites
who run the show as the homeless people camped outside their offices.

Anybody who claims we're not ready for a UBI yet is living in a bubble.

~~~
CPLX
> No amount of retraining or "bootstraps" is going to bring the jobs back.
> It's just not possible to compete with the corporations and their larger
> moats and bankrolls.

This, frankly, is patent nonsense. And this sense of learned helplessness is a
specifically American affliction.

There really just isn't a reason why there can't be reasonably compensated
manufacturing jobs, or why corporate and industrial policy can't help
depressed rural areas. As anyone who's traveled across Germany or Switzerland
is well aware.

As a society we choose policies that concentrate wealth in this way. The point
of view you're expressing -- that this is inevitable and unstoppable -- is not
at all fact, but rather the product of decades of public relations by vested
interests in this country.

~~~
RealityNow
So what's the solution? How do we bring jobs back to these depressed rural
areas?

------
whipoodle
No need to leave SF to escape the tech bubble and encounter those being left
behind. Look closer.

~~~
theandrewbailey
Leaving SF means that the cultural and societal environment is different.
Going to places like these means that the technology, money, hope, and jobs
are physically far away and beyond livable reach; places where people wonder
why anyone would ever live in SF.

------
nibstwo
If you feel guilty enjoying the product of your work, you were probably doing
pointless zero-sum work that did not need to be done. It is fine to say you
want other people to be economically empowered, but the amount of guilt flying
around here is incredible. Why not apply the constraint of only doing things
that actually benefit other real humans at the start of your career, and feel
good when you end up being successful at whatever constrained but moral
venture you undertake. Feeling guilty about it accomplishes nothing. We made
the collective bargain to build a technological society, we cannot go back
now. Fix the real problems and it won't feel dirty.

------
peterwwillis
One of the main reasons I don't live in SF is the conversation.

The first time I visited, I heard tech talk in bars, cafes, on street corners.
If I can't get a beer or a coffee or take a walk without hearing about work,
it's not for me.

~~~
asteli
I was on BART a few weeks ago and had two tech dudes strike up a conversation
about JIRA directly across me, shouting over the din of rail noise. It can get
obnoxious.

------
alkonaut
Also new note for 2017 is that "economic anxiety" doesn't mean "economic
anxiety" anymore. Need a new term for that now.

------
60654
> Most people aren’t in tech or law or teaching in universities; they fall
> solidly in what is called working-class. They work as electricians,
> carpenters, plumbers, in hospitals, restaurants, as clerks, office managers,
> farmers, etc.

I'm surprised that he's surprised by this. Even in SV you can have a reality
check, if you just deign to strike up a conversation with the cooks and the
bus drivers and the janitors who work all around you. No need to take a road
trip to the summer house to have this epiphany, just open your eyes.

~~~
trynewideas
He's not surprised. The point is that SV culture is designed around
intentionally obfuscating people who aren't in tech or law or academia behind
apps and services.

Yes, obviously, those people live and work in parts of SV, just like anywhere
else. But SV is built around not having to see or interact them as human
beings who have lives and problems outside of the narrowly scoped tasks people
in the bubble hired them to perform. Thus the entire bubble metaphor that was
the point of the article.

------
fiatjaf
There are other bubbles.

------
k__
which is good,so there are more people to sell to.

------
davidreiss
Even within the tech world. Most of the tech world exists outside the tech
bubble. The tech bubble is concentrated around a few select cites.

------
throw-away--
A counterpoint. [https://www.theguardian.com/us-
news/2017/aug/08/unlearning-t...](https://www.theguardian.com/us-
news/2017/aug/08/unlearning-the-myth-of-american-innocence)

------
1_2__4
Replace this with "coal bubble" in WV, "oil bubble" in SD, "Hollywood bubble"
in LA, etc. etc. etc. or just title these "20-something learns there's a world
outside their immediate environment and boy howdy is it different."

~~~
gammarator
Steve Blank is not 20.

~~~
mythrwy
Yes, but he is worth 20 something hundred million dollars. That kind of makes
him a 20 something.

~~~
tpallarino
Genuinely laughed out loud.

