...their lives are increasingly impossible in a city taken over by tech, and the socioeconomic stratification it fosters.
It's strange to blame the tech industry for San Francisco's fate, because there is nothing peculiar about what the tech industry has done. Astronomical returns to capital for a few senior people, high salaries for a large body of skilled professionals, and concomitant demand for office space, housing and services from other industries -- that's what successful industry looks like everywhere. Usually the result is not shortages, homelessness, and lack of services.
There was -- and is -- a failure of public policy here.
Yup. Prop 13. NIMBYism. Bad mix. Consider NYC's similarities and differences to SF: finance instead of tech (but also tech now too), no prop 13, got too big for NIMBYism before NIMBYism was a thing, but NYC also has had bad housing policy (rent control, rent stabilization, and who knows what other bad ideas). Bad ideas lead to bad outcomes.
> There was -- and is -- a failure of public policy here.
It’s very strange that he didn’t criticize elected officials one bit. Instead, he blames some faceless cabal of venture capitalists for being out of touch. Who is trying to divide us here?
but, indentured labor on H1B visa, as a caste exists all over USA. Not just in SF.
Probably, all big cities in US with considerable tech industry has people of this caste. Indentured, almost forever, with the green card dangling in front of them on a stick. All they need to do is keep walking, thinking that they are getting closer to the dream.
But, I think the travails of (most) H1b visa holders (and their dependents) are not a topic of discussion because this caste is way lower in the pecking order, much lower than the "untouchables of Bay Area".
Huh. I see them discussed all of the time; they are your co-workers at just about any tech company. I've worked with a bunch who got green cards. Not much like a caste.
It depends on the country of birth of the H1b visa holder. So its pretty much like indentured labor if your co-worker on H1b was born in India. "got green card" is a loaded term. The process is not easy to understand for those who dont go through it. And if you weren't born in India or China, it can be hard to understand the wait times (15-70 years) for green card applicants now.
Having said that, I’d be very leery of the action plans born from that analysis.
Already covered that, in anticipation of being dragged pointlessly down the “evil communism” HN rabbit hole. His analysis was good, the way people chose to use it to justify their political systems was not. Of course the same can be said of many things, from politics to religion. I can admire the tenants of Christianity while acknowledging how it’s been abused for millennia. Both can be true.
His philosophy was a prediction that groups in the 19th/20th century coopted because the rhetoric was useful. The first communist nation's were supposed to be Western Europe and the US: capitalist to industrialize and then revolution. Eastern Europe and china were not industrialized when they had revolutions. It's not surprising it didn't work out too well.
There's a difference between social classes, which exist in nearly every country, and a caste system. Castes are hereditary, you are born into a caste.
Very few people are born into tech. Anyone working in San Francisco probably realizes that most people in Bay Area tech weren't even born in the Bay Area. Working in Bay Area tech is a choice, one which requires hard work and quite a lot of luck.
People are born with varying degrees of privilege, which makes it easier for some than others to get a tech job, that isn't a caste system.
I've been on a tech career path since I was a teenager, but with one parent who was a teacher and the other who was a construction worker, it wasn't like I was born into it. I've worked with plenty of people who have made the transition to a tech career later in life. Like one person who said he was tired of digging ditches so he went to tech bootcamp.
The classes in SF are extreme. The pay disparity is too large. It is really hard for a lot of people to get by. But it isn't a caste system.
You are given some advantages from the people around you. My father was a construction worker. He also was a hobbyist technical person, and besides the obvious of introducing me from computer to computer since a very young age, he also taught me how to think in ways that are very advantageous for thinking technically, rigorously, and logically.
Education is important and the people you have around you either compete against information or reinforce it. Construction is mechanical work. It operates in accordance to rules that are easy to observe and aren't subject to chaotic, dynamic shifts. It is a literal concrete foundation of how to build things. Don't excuse my puns, they are intentional.
Some people simply don't have enough information in the background to reinforce one way of reasoning versus another, and lots of these kinds of things can direct what path you wind up traveling in, especially when as a child, you don't have the awareness to understand how world views get constructed, because you haven't seen enough cycles of it happening, nor had the time to think about it.
You're a counter example, but many professions are indeed hereditary. With some probability, anyway. Calling it a caste system is an exaggeration, obviously, but there's a nugget of truth.
Go survey some dentists. You'll be surprised how many of their parents were dentists.
This caste system is naturally what happens with a huge influx of money into a constrained job and housing market. If there was way more low cost housing, more people outside of the Inner and Outer Parties could make their own sort of life in the interstices, engaging in commerce and creating in those interstices. With the constrained housing market, the interstices disappear, and the economic entities in the markets created by them either disappear or adjust to serve the Inner and Outer parties.
Add into that, a culture of conformity of thought and ideology in the Inner and Outer parties, and the analogy with the two models is complete. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Manufacturing_Consent -- Wherein 1980's America managed to produce an analog of Pravda-esque propaganda, but without sending people to Gulags, without airbrushing photos, and without outright censorship. Instead, the mechanisms are technically "Free Market." Now 2018 San Francisco is inventing another analogue through free market mechanisms.
The job and housing market constraint is due to poor public policy. Overly-generous tenant rights, anti-chain laws, anti-gentrification measures - all of these are creating problems that you don’t see (dilapidated housing, extreme rents) in other high-density urban areas.
Everyone is blaming VCs. They should be blaming themselves.
He didn't mention "the Mexicans". There's a weird tacit racism here: SF is very progressive and liberal, but there is a definite culture gap between mainstream and ethnic cultures. Asians in general, have bridged that gap pretty well, but anyone who hails from any country from Mexico to Argentina is a "Mexican" and will have a hard time breaking into the mainstream culture unless they assimilate (the obvious marker is to lose the accent.) This applies even if you're from California (CA was part of Mexico before it was a part of the U.S.A.) but "too mexican". Being considered "mexican" in this weird racist way isn't even about being Hispanic. Many Philippinos are caught in the same cultural second-class status, for example.
If you ever have the chance to visit e.g. the Google campus this caste system is on display in the most obvious way: Almost all of the "green suits" are white or Asian, while almost all of "orange suits", the service staff, are actually Hispanic or otherwise "mexican" in the sense I'm talking about. They are trained not to fraternize with the "real" employees (in fact, they can get in trouble for it), and they are not encouraged to improve their technical skills. There are no programming classes for the janitors and groundskeepers. They don't get to attend lectures or other perks, etc.
You can see the same "split-level" economic/cultural divide everywhere in the Bay Area. The entire economy rests, in part, on the backs of folks who are not encouraged to participate in the techno-utopia to the same degree as the "blessed" class.
This is a truly ridiculous over simplification of reality in the Bay area and so loaded with personal biases to be taken seriously.
The majority of people I know and work with are mostly in between the inner and outer circle the author describes.
That's a very large group who are paid well (many also sitting on options that will continue to pay well). Being a software/hardware engineer, marketing, finance or other back-office roles does not automatically put you in the "outer circle" on the edge of the middle class.
This is a classic example of an author with a very narrow world view based solely on their personal experience which doesn't look like reality.
From my perspective, your reply supports the article's point.
Yes, the inner and outer circles are paid well. And yes, nothing is completely black and white, there are spectrums in many dimensions. Everything is complex, but it is sometimes helpful to look at something from a perspective other than your own to maybe notice things you don't normally notice, in this case the mass of people that the author calls the "service class" and the "untouchables", and the way they are perceived and [mis]treated by the "higher" classes.
I'm not accusing you of mistreating people in these groups. But you admit you don't know many people in them, and I think the article is valuable in pointing that out.
That you had to relate your rebuttal in the terms that the author describes only serves to further illustrate their point. You can't call their worldview narrow when you had to tacitly accept it to make your point.
I'm challenging the authors over simplistic breakout of inner and outer circles which is not supported by anything other than opinion. My observation (and opinion) is there is a big gap in between the two that's not represented in his simplistic caste system.
If you want to state your opinion then state your opinion without an attack. Say, "I don't agree" or "I feel the situation is more complex" because when you mount an attack and call someones' idea "ridiculous" you better back it up and make your statements solid.
Every statement you made was harsh, negative and unjustified. You deliberately mounted an attack without evidence. Without evidence you shouldn't attack anyone, with only an opinion all you can do is share it in a friendly manner.
I was an engineer in the "outer circle" who quit and lived for four months with "untouchables" in a homeless camp.
When I was an engineer I definitely felt the artificial distance between me (a human being) and a large group of other human beings serving me who were treated far worse than me. I did not think of them as lesser people, but the system certainly treated them as such.
When I was homeless I definitely felt the being ignored (or seen as a nuisance) by higher-class people. It's very obvious how people's behavior toward you changes when they see you walk out of a tent camp on the street. Actually, it's not just being ignored when people create artificial complaints about your group to get the police to brutally displace you.
Everything is complex of course, it's not black and white, there are spectrums in many dimensions. IMHO the point is to try looking at things from a new perspective and maybe notice things you didn't notice before, that feel wrong. It helps for people with power to notice things that are wrong, since then they can become impassioned to change things.
Maybe the folks in the tent camp should consider why passers-by wrinkle their noses.
I remember back when no-smoking signs were just getting started. Smokers used to complain about their right to smoke, forgetting about everyone else's right to breathe fresh air. It's like motorcyclists complaining about noise regulations for the type of muffler they need.
Caste system is so infamous because it can't be changed. You don't have to live the Bay. Many people, including myself is preparing to leave Bay Area. I don't like it, but I have a choice, and don't have to suck it up for the rest of my life.
Make an analogy between social economic class to caste system is ignorant and irresponsible journalism. Sad to see even Wired succumbs to clicks.
OT: was there ever a time in the US when there were groups that were discriminated against and for whom the word "caste" was actually applied to in common usage?
I'm curious because the preamble to Article IX, "Education", of the Washington State Constitution says: "It is the paramount duty of the state to make ample provision for the education of all children residing within its borders, without distinction or preference on account of race, color, caste, or sex".
I have not been able to find out what groups they had in mind when they chose the word "caste" in that.
"I'm not a millionaire and I think I should be! It's the rich folks' fault! It's the government's fault! It's technology's fault! I hate it here and I'm not going anywhere!"
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There's (3.8million - 54)mi of the United States available yo travel to. We can travel freely throughout our great nation, that alone is a huge advantage over many other places in the world.
There's no such thing as gentrification. This is a misunderstanding of real estate and how it works. If rent goes up, you have to pay. If you can't, nobody OWES you anything, you failed the economic selection for that place and now that you can't cut it, you have to relocate.
Come to New York! 30min commute from Hoboken (where I can rent an entire house for 3500/mo) and you have the most advanced tech industry in the country at your fingertips.
> California is the future of the United States, goes the oft-cited cliché. What the US is doing now, Europe will be doing in five years, goes another.
Let's hope not. I have already stated in a different thread that I will NEVER relocate to the bay area for employment.
There are a lot of very apparent social problems with the bay area and most of these have to do with inflated stratification and social connectedness.
1. Cost of living and housing shortages there are stupid absurd. If you make enough to live in a tiny house with a tiny yard close to work then life is good, but most people cannot afford a million dollar home. Instead move to Fort Worth or Atlanta where you can purchase 5 homes for the same price with each being substantially larger.
It isn't just houses. EVERYTHING costs more in the bay area whether talking about fuel, food, or consumer goods. Nothing says social stratification like where and how you live.
2. Political correctness and social sensitivity. There are sensitive people in the world, but only on the west coast do they stop working to band together to send political action letters to the corporate leadership. If I wanted to play politics I would get involved with a community political action program to make a difference. However, I would rather program at work, since this is what I get paid for and what I actually enjoy doing with my time.
People overly sensitive and band together to play politics at work because it is a luxury provided by the employer and the immediate socio-economic climate. You won't see the contracted security guards or janitors at a major valley campus banding together to whine about a military contract.
Allowance of extreme sensitivity in the work place feels like a huge risk to your career. God forbid you make a process control recommendation to improve the cleanliness of code and leave people offended and sad (probably because they suck). When their sadness becomes a cause for complaint that becomes a management problem it is a problem that ultimately falls on somebody. Yes, I have been through foolishness like this. This feels like putting your career in a blender. At least that example is work related. This one is not: https://www.wsj.com/articles/netflix-ceo-fires-top-executive...
3. Youth. I have been programming for a long time and have come to the conclusion that in most cases young inexperienced programmers generally suck. Yes, I know there are brilliant exceptions, but generally speaking the youngest developers are the least disciplined, least aware of second and third order consequences, and least prepared for negative feedback.
As an employee you don't get to be hostile because your code sucks and some poor soul has the unfortunate circumstance of conveying this message to you. Yes, I have actually encountered this, and no I am not exaggerating. This is the so called "millennial" behavior, but it has long existed before millennials were a group and generally doesn't exist with older people.
There are age discrimination laws in the US that prevent discrimination based upon age for individuals aged 40 and higher. This means, fortunately, it is perfectly legal to outright refuse to hire persons at any age below 40 for their age alone. As a start up I imagine discriminating against young people would be beneficial in the rare circumstance you need fantastic code shipped immediately and you are loaded with huge piles of cash as necessary to entice experienced employees to work for your startup who would otherwise know better than to take a risk on a startup.
Start ups generally prefer young developers because they can be worked to death, are more risk averse, are willing to work for less pay, and (most importantly) are gullible and/or idealistic. Older people tend to be personally invested with things such as a family, business interests, social responsibilities, multiple employments, and various other responsibilities that the young simply don't have, which means they aren't giving 16 hours of work a day to your startup. Concentrating your employment population around a seriously disproportionate youthful demographic substantially expands stratification.
Re: your #2. This is also something I've been thinking about.
I jokingly talk about "The Fear". The Fear is what makes people work hard. The Fear that your company might not exist, that it might all come to an end, that you'd better get after it, work hard, and generally do your best work.
People at Tesla have The Fear. People at startups have even more of it. People at Google, emphatically, DO NOT have The Fear. It might be because they're basically a monopoly in many things (search) or because their management encourages it, I don't know. But it feels like they're worried about a lot of things and business success / customers / shipping / competition, the things people usually care about in a competitive market economy, isn't a big part of it.
I've heard that great societies often fall when their elites become too inwardly-focused and fight each other too much, rather than whatever enemy/competition they have. I think this is what's going on at Google; their elites are so distracted by political correctness, gender politics, etc. etc. that they're opening themselves up to get overtaken. I don't know by who or what, but it does feel like so much of all of this is such a giant distraction.
I think this sort of thing is going to get more common in tech though. There are such huge reward to monopoly and let's face it, Google has no real competition in search, or short video playback (Youtube), or Internet advertising other than facebook.
I can't comment on point 1 since I don't work in the Bay Area. But going by the reported this makes sense. However, there must be ways for employees to be making significant money, else everybody would just insist on moving to some other place.
The second one doesn't resonate with me. Its okay for people to take action when they are in a position to do so. Sure I agree that its not a luxury for everybody since some labour might be easily replaceable but when people are able to force corporates to correct course, that is a good thing. As far as the thing with young programmers go, I can understand. Most of us didn't really handle very big projects since it was never necessary. Aside from some courses, most involved writing assignment level code which doesn't require much thought over issues like code design. And they were never graded as such except for certain courses where a few commits actually made it the main code base of some big project. Experienced programmers (like yourself) aren't required to write code as much as mentor others, otherwise most of the young and immature ones would just convert to old and immature programmers.
On your second point: you're very vocal about the need for other people not to be so vocal about the things they care about. I find myself wondering if you express that at work.
In comparisions like these where they make claims that 100k isn't enough for a family of four, do they take into account the significant amount of equity people get working at the Bay Area. I guess all major money is in the stock grants, right ?
The article makes no such claim. What it says is that 117k is considered low income.
This is determined by the US Department of Housing and Urban Development, where "low income" is defined as 80% or less of the median income in the area.
It's strange to blame the tech industry for San Francisco's fate, because there is nothing peculiar about what the tech industry has done. Astronomical returns to capital for a few senior people, high salaries for a large body of skilled professionals, and concomitant demand for office space, housing and services from other industries -- that's what successful industry looks like everywhere. Usually the result is not shortages, homelessness, and lack of services.
There was -- and is -- a failure of public policy here.