
The Silicon Valley-ization of San Francisco - clarkm
http://www.slate.com/articles/technology/the_next_silicon_valley/2013/12/silicon_valley_s_invasion_of_san_francisco_not_quite_the_ayn_rand_nightmare.html
======
tptacek
_As 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
I 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
_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._

== 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.

------
robbyking
I'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.

~~~
long
I'm curious - what were Mission, Soma, and Lower Haight like in 2002?

~~~
cdibona
SoMa didn't have the ball park yet so it was kinda sketchy anywhere past the
highway, and there were a bunch of weird muggings/knifings when a person of
the wrong race would go to the wrong bar or place. We knew not to go the
Korean club on Harrison. Meth heads would surround the happy donut and south
park was a bit of a homeless tent city, and while there were some of the same
hotels near the convention center, the west hall hadn't been built yet and it
was all kinda run down the way most of moscone is.

I used to do a fair amount of work in the Potrero hill area in 2000 or so and
dreaded parking there. Then the bust happened and not only did a lot more
parking appear, but many of the good restaurants in that area shuttered almost
overnight.

We lived in lower Haight until 1999, and it was okay, if you could roll with a
little bit of homeless person screaming in the middle of the night just
outside the place we rented. Our cars were broken into a few times and we got
a few parking tickets a year but that was the price one paid to live in SF. It
largely wasn't worth it. First me, then my soon to be wife got a job in the
south bay, we moved to los altos to skip the commute.

The funny thing is the big 'displacement' story in the city around 2000 was
the gentrification of the Castro, where older more established gay folks were
making it difficult for younger, poorer gay people to find places to live near
the Castro (which is sort of the traditional gay nexus in SF)

IMO SF is in much better shape nowadays, and it has a lot to do with the
thousands of tech companies in and out of the city employing people who add
their money and the rest to the city.

~~~
sedev
Coming from San Francisco, but not living there right now, I continue to be
dismayed about the city government. They're about average for a local
government in most respects, very good in some, and abysmal in a couple of
important ways. The one that I see most often lately is about the most basic
fundamentals of economics. The city, very broadly, would like to see the price
of housing flat or falling - "affordable." Leaving aside the many possible
negative side effects, the only way to get to a falling cost of housing is for
less of it to be demanded or more of it to be supplied. The city government
can't much affect the former, and has resolutely, bullheadedly, stubbornly
refused to improve the latter. It's disastrous. It is is fine and worthy to
say - hey let's keep the character of our neighborhoods. Great! But in pursuit
of that, they've basically given existing residents a veto on anything new,
nearly down to the single-block level in some cases. There are many aspects of
the current issues with San Francisco. One aspect that is fully under San
Francisco's control is, "shall we build more housing or not?" \- and the city
government is working as hard as possible to make the situation worse in that
aspect. Drives me to tears.

------
WalterBright
> 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
49ers...

------
was_hellbanned
SF 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
You 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
That's kind of the point.

------
minimax
I 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.

~~~
PavlovsCat
> 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.

Why can't you try to get something nice for the "going rate"? And how does
money not enable you to make just about any place nice? Use any remaing lack
of niceness to fuel your lobbying for affordable housing being built. Not that
I want to pick on _you_ , but:

 _Of course it 's extremely easy to say, the heck with it. I'm just going to
adapt myself to the structures of power and authority and do the best I can
within them. Sure, you can do that. But that's not acting like a decent
person. You can walk down the street and be hungry. You see a kid eating an
ice cream cone and you notice there's no cop around and you can take the ice
cream cone from him because you're bigger and walk away. You can do that.
Probably there are people who do. We call them "pathological." On the other
hand, if they do it within existing social structures we call them "normal."
But it's just as pathological. It's just the pathology of the general
society._

\-- Noam Chomsky

Just because people are poor, i.e. defenseless, doesn't mean others should be
able to have their home automatically. You might as well say "when I ride on a
bus that is very full with mostly strong people, I have to pull an old lady
from her seat, so I can sit somewhere nice". No, you don't _have_ to. Apart
from dying and involuntary muscle reflexes there is nothing anyone _has_ to
do.

~~~
PavlovsCat
For the one who downvoted me without comment:

You pick a random web dev forum, and I post there suggesting my business plan
of low maintainence (for me), super cheap websites to get a start with
freelancing or even disrupt it. People will say I shouldn't undercut market
rates. And then I will say what the poster said, "I am a nice guy, and I try
to help others on stack overflow, but if I want a nice career, I have to
underbid. Sorry to everyone else."

You hold the stopwatch and see how long it takes for me to get flamed to hell
and back. [the fact that pricing low doesn't really lead to a "nice career" is
besides the point btw, you get the idea anyway]

~~~
ivanplenty
I didn't downvote you (just catching up to posts), but I wanted to thank you
for providing a contrasting view (via Chomsky no less!) to the conundrum:
Should I pay the crazy housing prices or should I go elsewhere? I don't know
what the right answer _is_ , but I appreciate different vantages.

You may be surprised how much of what does get posted here is full of bias
(confirmation bias, selection, survival, small sample sizes, etc). We're
human, it's normal. I've seen some posts about YC competitors get flagged off
the front page while other YC-related firms tend to get more airtime, so-to-
speak. Is it intentional or just a reflection of the community? I don't know,
but I do know you can't take it personally.

Thank you for contributing and helping round out this complicated discussion.

------
agorabinary
"... 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
I 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
The 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.

------
ChrisNorstrom
Fun 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
One 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
Regarding 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
Yes. 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".

~~~
simoncion
Rent control is what allows anyone who's not in finance to live in SF. Look at
the price of a condo to get an idea of what city-wide unregulated rents would
be like.

The thing that's eating SF from the inside out is the dire lack of new
apartments. Build enough and the city will approach affordable for the average
worker.

(Sorry for the huge delay in posting. HN has been unusually flaky at my site.)

------
radley
SF 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).

------
negamax
This is eyeball grabbing article to bank on the recent events, which are
nowhere near the norm. Let's not promote this here.

------
eruditely
The title is pretty off.

The article does some pretty poor posturing though, "meteor more important
than... bitcoin...." etc.

~~~
radley
It's an amateurish, last minute rant that starts off chasing a popular topic
and quickly plummets into assumptions about techies.

------
7Figures2Commas
Greg Gopman mentioned alongside Peter Thiel and Paul Graham? Really?

------
ojbyrne
I 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.

------
dylandrop
Some 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
Wealth, 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
Bill 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/1...](http://philanthropy.com/article/The-Stubborn-2-Giving-Rate/139811/)

------
axaxs
This 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.

------
11thEarlOfMar
Is it a compliment to say one has a John Galt complex?

~~~
fro
It can be, but certainly not in this circumstance. Didn't expect such a
politically charged article when I clicked the headline.

------
benihana
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, 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
There are no women here. Rural India has a better gender ratio than Sillicon
Valley.

~~~
seanmcdirmid
How about compare to an oil town in Alaska? There are plenty of women around
rural India (as far as I can tell!).

~~~
falsestprophet
Empirically, 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
That 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!).

------
michaelochurch
I 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
Techie is to Nerd as Colored is to N----r. We should use the word Nerd because
that is what they are thinking anyway.

~~~
GFK_of_xmaspast
Hacker News right here, everybody.

~~~
yetanotherphd
What an intelligent argument, why didn't you post it under your real account?

------
brucefancher
Sadly, 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.

