> Hordes of newly minted and newly wealthy tech bros, flush with Silicon Valley VC cash, ruined what once had been an all-are-welcome cool, gray city of love, where the funky landlady Anna
This article nicely represents the narccisistic hubris of the ivory tower leftist viewpoint, and in-group social behavior at large. Tech Bros are the nerds that were (and still are, despite shallow appropriations of nerd culture in the mainstream) cast off from "normal" society. This has been the norm in the U.S. for decades. It's not cool to be smart and have geeky interests.
Now tech is hot and the in-group is having trouble competing with people for whom this wasn't just a job or a class, or even a hobby, it was an escape. So they go after their characters to justify quotas and the now deliberate social stigma they were previously oblivious to enforcing. Tech Bros is a dirty class stereotype which totally ignores the passion and skill of the people who are revolutionizing society, for better or worse. And at the end of the day it's just the weird nerd kids being bullied as always.
There's an obscure blog by a guy who talks about the three or so stages of popular subcultures, and how one of the three groups eventualy ruin everything, linked in the comments below which is related.
> And at the end of the day it's just the weird nerd kids being bullied as always.
This. So much. I've been a nerd since middle school and have experienced a fair amount of bullying while growing up.
But the fact is, nothing has really changed between then and now. It has always been 'safe' to bully the nerds. No other group of people receives this level of public venomous screed. We shrug and accept it because we are used to it.
We as a group need to get better about advocating for our rights to live and work as humans just like everyone else and be more deliberate about pointing out the completely bizarre policy environment of California in general and San Francisco in particular that has led to this explosion of issues.
> It has always been 'safe' to bully the nerds. No other group of people receives this level of public venomous screed.
It’s because nerds are too busy following our interests to bother attacking back. Defending oneself in general doesn’t work: attacking back does. The maxim “Never defend, always attack” is a maxim for a reason.
The only real “solution” here is to attack back and bully the people who bullied you in the first place. And is that really a solution?
If as nerds, we defend ourselves, then we stay in the frame of the bully. If we attack back, we become bullying nerds.
Society needs scapegoats. For decades and decades, nerds have been safe to pick on. It’s not until you get an extremely aggressive nerd like Bill Gates that a member of the “nerd class” even begins to defend themselves. And aggressive nerds are rare and generally self-interested. Rather than attacking back for the “nerd class” as a whole, they attack companies competing with theirs.
What is the solution to this quandary? Everyone who’s read Girard knows we need scapegoats. If not nerds — oh wait, I mean “tech Bros” — then who else can we scapegoat as a society? The answer should obviously be Wall Street IMO, but that moment seems to have passed when the Occupy movement got culturally supplanted by in-group identity politics.
IMO in order to stop the bullying, we must become bullies ourselves which poses two questions:
* do we really wanna do that?
* and would it even work since Occupy failed so dramatically?
Nerds are at best a subculture, not a social class. And usually it's not even a subculture, but a collection of different subcultures and interests and archetypes and stereotypes, often mutually exclusive and conflicting.
The difference between a subculture and a social class is blurry at best. Many social classes are composed of different subcultures — like the nerd social class.
Because nerds are not a real class deserving protection, any more than amorphous arbitrary groups such as “SJWs” or “bros”. These are (pop) cultural designations based on folk definitions without any real basis in reality.
Furthermore, being scolded in Buzzfeed News now and then does not constitute bullying and is not actual persecution. The closest thing to actual violence against “nerds” (wrt the actual subject of TFA) were rocks thrown at tech company shuttle buses a few years ago in the Bay Area, which doesn’t seem to happen anymore. And those actions can be framed as relating to real issues such as tension between different economic classes and how localities change with economic development.
It’s ludicrous to claim that there’s such a thing as a “nerd class” and hold Bill Gates as an exemplar of one, when his time at Microsoft can be likewise framed as nerd exploitation- see everything about Microsoft’s monopolistic actions in the ‘90s impacting other “nerds”.
Unlike classes based upon religion, race, nationality, gender, or socioeconomic status, “nerds” are a tribe that don’t actually exist beyond the schoolyard. At least, it’s far more fuzzy, even compared to other identities such as “hacker”, the latter which is at least tied to specific technical professions and activities that exist in the real world.
Finally, if people are going to codify nerd identity, then we’re going to end up relitigating the tiresome “nerd culture is being appropriated” pop culture battles over comic book and sci-fi/fantasy movies and video games becoming mainstream, and that’s a very tedious can of worms.
How are you bullied in your daily life? I visited your about section on your page you list in your profile and you look like a normal dude, and it says you are 29.
High school wasn't great for me. But by 29 I knew people had it worse and I realized nobody wants to hang out with a perpetual victim. Do you think you shouldn't have to work to get laid?
Again, really curious how you are are being bullied. Are people pushing you into lockers? Or do you just equate bulling with not getting the respect you think you deserve?
You implied he was premature, a perpetual victim, and asked loaded questions implying he can't get laid. By trying to belittle and demean him, you ended up strengthening his point.
I can't fathom what you tried to accomplish by looking up his age. No matter what number you find, you'd dismiss him with either "you're only N years old, too young to realize that..." or "by N I was old enough to understand that..."
Tech bros are not the nerds and geeks of years past, suddenly rich. That was the dot.com boom.
These are sons of the elite who used to mainline to investment banking on Wall Street, or maybe a MBB shop — they follow the money.
There are plenty of nerds coming here, and they make a bit more money if they snag a FAANG job, but VCs and bros make sure they don’t get too big a slice of the startup pie.
I've been called a tech bro, late 20 something 1m in net assets. Me and my group of friends are absolutely the geeks of yore. Ffs my last pitch had a wh40k reference in it and the guy financing it spend more time talking about warhammer lore than about the actual startup.
People who only get their understanding of Silicon Valley and the wider hacker and startup cultures from the mass media. Which mean the Ubers, WeWorks, and Googles. They think this is the sum of tech and it totally ignores the average day-to-day life of working in tech.
There's a million companies making millions or selling for hundreds of millions (or even 10s) who never make the headlines. They do weird obscure niche stuff that would take 20min to explain to an outsider.
And 99% of them are all run by normal hardworking nerds-from-high school type people who aren't pretentious or failed to grow out of University stereotypes of educated males, and yes males do a lot of dumb ignorant stuff in their late teens and early adulthood.
But the average entrepreneur isn't the 20 something prodigy the news fawns over, it's usually a 40+ guy whose been in the industry for a long time and found niches problem sets which they can specialize in and make a lot of money automates/dramatically improving how businesses are run in those markets.
Then there are the super nerds who work at Google and Tesla and Twitter, but mostly they are mid-teir nerds just happy making a living being able to work with other really-smart people. There isn't anything toxic about any of this. It's just highly curious people working on problems that interest them. And occasionally that involves pushing uncomfortable hard-changing solutions society isn't quite ready for - or nerds who weren't quite ready for society.
It's a learning process and SV will get better at interacting with the wider world. I hope too that the world starts treating SV (and the tech hubs around the world) with more respect.
You're arguing over the characteristics of a stereotype. Even if what you say is true, journalists wrap programmers in general up in their manufactured connotation. And that's, as they increasingly say in tech hubs, "problematic."
The reality is that incredible returns could've been had by anyone investing in public tech stocks over the last decade. You didn't need to be employee #10 at a unicorn.
Apple 25x'd over the last 10 years and is at all time highs.
Microsoft is at all time highs.
Tesla is at all time highs.
Amazon, Netflix, Salesforce, Google, FB are close.
Heck, some go into MBB then do startups. Look at the Plaid cofounders - both super broey-looking Bain guys. I would be shocked if neither went to fancy elite private schools before heading to their elite colleges for undergrad.
To me the evictions dwarf every other concern. It's a result that's straightforwardly inhumane, and I don't think any reasonable person would disagree.
Personally, I'm inclined to blame NIMBY San Francisco homeowners for this, but of course they would blame me and other "tech bros" for moving here. In the meantime, those hardest hit, low-income renters, are a member of neither bickering party.
Ok give me your address. I'll call a developer and well start a 120 story highrise where you live. You'll end up living in a much worse place when it's all said and done but anything else would be immoral.
I don't know about 120, but an edifice with just 102 stories, the Empire State Building, sort of made the vicinity of it better. At the very least, nearby properties did not depreciate.
Of course if you don't like bustling city life, you may see it differently. I would recommended moving to suburbia it the countryside then.
> Prices changing alongside supply and demand is not inhumane.
It is. It is inhumane.
I agree with you that policies which artificially constrain the supply bear much of the blame, but an outcome can be inhumane in and of itself, even if it emerges from "supply and demand".
People getting thrown out of their homes because the value of their labor no longer covers the cost of their dwelling is bad.
Is not giving food to those who cannot afford buying that particular food inhumane?
Sure demanding people to leave the place they are used to live in isn't the nicest thing to do. But it can be done in a reasonable way, e.g. with a plenty of warning ahead of time.
(Disclaimer: I was asked to leave a rented apartment twice, not in SF; both times I was told so just a month ahead of time.)
Someone having to rent a smaller apartment in a less desirable neighborhood is not inhumane.
SF has far more housing demand than it has housing supply. The pie is a fixed size. Policy can pick and choose the winners this way or that way. Either way you have the same number of winners and same number of losers. All you're doing is arguing over who you think should win and who you think should lose. The net amount of "inhumanity" is the same.
Maybe in your preferred policy the people who were there first get to be the winners. Good for them, I guess. You picked one winner. But there's 5 losers who are denied access to economic opportunity because they didn't rent someone else's home 15 years ago. That's inhumane if you ask me.
SF is one of the most desirable places to live in the entire world. Not everyone gets to live there. There's no universe in which everyone gets to live there. If we lived in a fantasy Star Trek future with no money then even still not everyone who wants to live in SF would get to. The fact that not everyone can live in a highly desirable location is not inhumane. Someone living there and then later having to live somewhere else is not inhumane.
So you're saying the value of housing stock should not appreciate? That's going to be a tough sell to its owners.
If we want housing to be an investment, we have to acknowledge it's going to rise in value faster than inflation (otherwise it's a crap investment), which means it won't be affordable.
Conversely, if we want housing to be affordable, it cannot rise in value faster than inflation, which means it can't be a good investment.
As Charles Marohn says, it's not even a "problem", in that problems have solutions. It's a predicament.
It's called "housing", seems to me that the core functionality is to house, not to gain wealth. We might have comingled it with investing, but there's no need for that.
Also housing can't rise faster in value than inflation long term. It can for a while but eventually it'll reach a point where even with a 30 year loan you can't purchase it with any job in the area where the house is located.
So if housing is fundamentally unsuited for gaining wealth in the long term for anyone but the wealthy and if it's core function is to house people, then I don't see a need for housing cost to appreciate above inflation.
While it's already kind of problematic to call nerds 'cast off from "normal" society' like they were an oppressed minority, I don't think the comparison is relevant. Most tech bros would have been working in finance or as lawyers or some other lucrative field. Many of them don't care about technology beyond how it can make them money, you see this attitude again and again on HN (countless posts about how the only value a programmer brings in business value). Most tech bros are not nerds that love technology for the sake of it, although there are of course people that work in tech that have this passion. The only way your comment works is if you apply "tech bro" to everyone working for a tech company...
>Tech Bros is a dirty class stereotype which totally ignores the passion and skill of the people who are revolutionizing society, for better or worse.
[Emphasis added] Well, this is certainly true. It's worth thinking for a moment about why "tech bro" has become a pejorative phase. Perhaps it has something to do with the "tech", which, for the most part, is really just online-ad-tech, UI/UX optimization, and a couple other things. Non-technical people don't really understand what most of this stuff is that "tech bros" work on, even though it really does affect them. And so it seems reasonable that they are a little confused as to how the "tech bros" got so rich working on "tech", which, again, is allegedly going to make us all better off. At least that's what we were all told growing up.
To be frank I think the hubris comes more for the other side of this equation that you do, and I don't think it's a uniquely leftist viewpoint to be skeptical of all of this (as I am not a leftist). When I visit SF (which is probably a dozen times a year) I'll see plenty of new billboards and ads for new startups working on the "hottest new stuff". I'm a technical person and can actually grasp what they're working on. Some of it is great. But working people who can't afford to live there now don't get what any of this is, and they're right to be skeptical about it. Who cares how passionate you are about revolutionizing an algorithm to better serve adds on social media. Long term, that's probably going to hurt society. Not help it. And if criticism of this is now "bullying" then, well, I'm Biff Tannen.
> Who cares how passionate you are about revolutionizing an algorithm to better serve adds on social media. Long term, that's probably going to hurt society. Not help it. And if criticism of this is now "bullying" then, well, I'm Biff Tannen.
Most of Silicon Valley isn't working on ad-tech (although a large chunk of it is). To dismiss everyone working in SV as working in optimizing ads doesn't make much sense.
There are other sectors of the economy completely wrecking the Environment (Energy, Global Warming), Global Economy (Finance, 2008 crisis) etc. While those sectors get their fair amount of attention, it seems like its cool to pick on those in tech now.
There have been multiple Hollywood movies depicting how big business and agribusiness are screwing up the environment. The Big Short was a great film about how Wall Street is totally corrupt and straight up caused the housing crisis.
Should we have a movie made about ad tech and social media and their deleterious effects on society? Just to make it even.
Most of Silicon Valley isn’t working on ad tech, yeah, I get it. But for crying out loud what the hell are they working on? Thats my point. How this is interpreted outside of tech circles is that “tech” is just a thing to make “tech” people more rich.
Edit: I’d actually like to know what percentage of SV is working on ad tech, which I consider useless for American society at best and dangerous at worst.
"Most of Silicon Valley isn’t working on ad tech, yeah, I get it. But for crying out loud what the hell are they working on? Thats my point. How this is interpreted outside of tech circles is that “tech” is just a thing to make “tech” people more rich."
If you are being left behind, if you're smart enough to know that, certainly it's not going to make you feel any better to know more about what people are doing that you can't do.
I wonder if anyone has written about the strangeness of the world being taken over by social media, specifically juxtaposed with the general belief that the people who develop tech lack social skills. That seems like a deeper challenge to what people believe than just nerds getting rich.
I would be surprised if the number of millionaires minted from being an employee (not founder) at a private tech startup founded in SF was over 1000 over the last 10 years.
Even if you're employee #10 the amount of equity you receive is, if you're lucky, maybe .20%, and drops exponentially from there.
Employees working at the big cos likely made much more depending on how long they held on to their RSUs than your average startup employee.
> I would be surprised if the number of millionaires minted from being an employee (not founder) at a private tech startup founded in SF was over 1000 over the last 10 years.
That would be roughly 100 a year. Y Combinator definitely funds more than a 100 startups a year, and it funds a small minority of all startups. Given that there were over 250 yet to IPO unicorns as of 2018 and Google alone made over 100 millionaires when it IPOed I think you’re off.
> Employees working at the big cos likely made much more depending on how long they held on to their RSUs than your average startup employee.
Most employee stock options are more akin to joining Stripe now than to joining a company that just left YC.
Again if you’re granted .2% as a very early employee you will make low millions if it does IPO for over $1B. The 100th employee at that company is not making anything close to that, especially the non-technical ones.
Working at a unicorn and receiving equity does not automatically mean your grant is anything close to 1M. It completely depends on when you joined, job title, seniority, and whether it’s a technical role or not.
I would estimate that the typical software developer working over that 10-year period and putting the money into either S&P 500 or a house saw an increase of $1M in their net worth.
Uh no. My point was that being a tech worker in SF, even at a “unicorn”, does not automatically mean you’re going to be rich, and that anyone who invested their savings in public equities available to anyone could’ve turned a modest amount of capital into something much larger without having anything to do with SF or working in tech.
There's a huge difference between an average person in a random place investing $10K left over after their bills are paid, and an SF tech employee working with at 5-10 times that amount.
Again depends. Not everyone is working at a FAANG, meaning if they have been working at private tech co yet to IPO then their equity comp is all illiquid so they don’t necessarily have a ton of cash.
> I'm at a company that minted over a thousand millionaires, assuming they held onto their options.
Okay, so that requires the company to be sold for at least $1B, the employees collectively own 100% of the company, and the stock is evenly distributed. Given the investor's share and uneven distribution among employees, for there to be 1000 millionaires, the company would have to sell for at the very least $5B (probably much more). There are only a handful of companies that have sold at that level, certainly not common.
1000 millionaires at a private startup that went public?
Only one I can think of is Uber where there could’ve been that many employees with significant equity, but that is really a generational company. Thinking of the ones that reach peak value in the low billions.
AFAIK engineers were getting around 12K RSUs pre IPO, maybe 20K for senior ones, which at today’s valuation is not even close to a million.
I'd say, in the early days, programmers were more geeky because computers were newer, rarer, and much harder to use. Most kids didn't grow up with computers in their homes. If they did, the computer was a big, ugly, unfriendly beige box, not a sleek sliver of glass and aluminum. When you booted it up, you were greeted by a blinking monochromatic command prompt, not an welcoming graphical interface. You had to learn cryptic, non-intuitive commands to operate it. Only a certain type of person would have the interest, focus, and abundance of free time to master it.
Nowadays, kids are raised on computers. Software engineering is widely seen as a viable career path. The act of programming hasn't changed much, but we've removed some of the barriers to entry and made the career path accessible to a broader group of people.
No, computers were not everywhere in, say, 1970s, so working with computers made you another kind of tech specialist, like working with, say, aircraft tech. Maybe cool, but your impact is limited; no way to make billions out of your job.
Now computers are literally everywhere, and literally always before people's eyes. Also, there's the internet that connects them across the globe. Now anyone with a good idea and good business execution can start a billion-dollar business from home or garage, and reach global audience with little technical effort.
On top of it, there are oodles of money looking for return, and high-risk, high-return investment looks better than no investment to many. This has radically changed the balance. As an engineer, you can build a very valuable, far-reaching company. Even if it's not turning profit yet, you have relatively much easier time to have millions invested in it.
> There's an obscure blog by a guy who talks about the three or so stages of popular trends, and how three groups of people interact to eventually ruin any nice thing. If anyone knows that I'm talking about I'd appreciate a link!
By this formulation, it’s hard to argue that “tech” as a subculture hasn’t been overrun by sociopaths. Just compare the tech heroes of yesteryear (thinking the 70s/80s) with those of today.
>If the scene is sufficiently geeky, it remains a strictly geek thing; a weird hobby, not a subculture.
To some degree you may be correct, but tech is unique. It primarily falls into this category, however in recent times, probably as during the tech boom, the culture is also rightly seen as a strong career path. And the people who spend their lives coding out of pure passion make these things look extremely easy to outsiders - you can't deny that someone who spends 4-8 hours a day coding in their spare time since teenagehood isn't likely to outperform someone who just does this for a living. So there will be a particularly strong pressure to coopt the subculture - but my point is that tech is different, because it isn't a subculture, it's a passion that cannot be simply emulated because in the end code either works or it doesn't.
I think that’s a separate concern from what this post is describing though, which (in this framing) is whether tech continues to exist as a geek driven is consumed by sociopaths and made into something instrumental and without any real ethos. Geeks (your spending 4-8 hours a day coding) and sociopaths both exist a priori in this argument. It’s about which faction is the dominant one and the consequences of their being dominant.
1) Social Justice isn’t mainstream left, it’s a very loud and quite powerful subculture.
2) The mainstream left is way too big to be coordinated on a mailing list or over Twitter and couldn’t agree on San Francisco if that was true. If there was never a coherent Left position on the smoldering wreckage that is Detroit why would there be on SF?
3) SF is just going to keep regulating, taxing and not building housing until there’s an event that everyone decides means SF is no longer absolutely the best place to be if you’re into startups and it’ll dissipate into the general Bay Area and the US, like Detroit and Michigan after Detroit started burning.
>Social Justice isn’t mainstream left, it’s a very loud and quite powerful subculture.
Seems to me that it's becoming the mainstream left, considering the demographics are younger and more migrant-y than the old-mainstream of the Clinton era. The exact rate this is happening is up for debate, of course - we'll see after the primaries.
As for why anyone would be more motivated to go after SF rather than Detroit: because SF has lots of money. Because after a certain unknown period, the budget deficits plus medicare plus social security etc will become bigger and bigger issues, and SF is just there, looking plump and delicious and terribly unjust.
>Tech Bros are the nerds that were (and still are, despite shallow appropriations of nerd culture in the mainstream) cast off from "normal" society.
I'd counter with something more radical for HN: that "Tech Bros" are the beneficiaries of a colossal intergenerational wealth transfer, constructed (consciously or unconsciously) to ensure that the vast majority of that wealth stays within the hands of relatively highly-educated, middle class white people. The myth-making that this "revenge of the nerds" fantasy is a subset of is in service of countering the obvious observations that would make such a wealth transfer untenable politically (in this case, hiding the fact that Tech Bros tend to come from privileged backgrounds). Another example is tech's dogmatic obsession with the notion of meritocracy, disguising the gatekept (and, otherwise, often arbitrary) nature of its job market and feeder pipelines in education and networking. With the general public's perception of the tech community cemented in this way, its members are free to wield influence and exoform their political, social, and cultural environment as they see fit.
This doesn't have to be a conspiracy to work; instead, what often happens is that investment entities headed and funded by elite, wealthy, often white Boomers look independently at pitches for companies that make widgets, if anything at all; that sell advertising and the profiles of the advertised-to; and that will never turn a profit, and ultimately determine, "I like these guys, they could turn this thing unicorn." They never will, of course - hopefully FAANG will buy you out for the technology you built to better sell ads - but in the meantime, dozens, hundreds, thousands of people will have access to incredible salaries and opportunities. Just as long as it's the "right" people.
I say this from the perspective of someone on the outside looking in, locked out of tech prosperity by circumstance, not lack of desire or aptitude: Tech Bro-dom bullies, ignores, and eventually leaves in the dust, professionally and economically, the people who are really on the margins.
That's funny, because as member of the tech community myself, I can unequivocally state that if there is one group that can be defined by the narcissistic hubris of its most prominent and influential members, it's techies.
I mean, we're talking about people whose idea of "disruption" is bending and breaking all kinds of rules and laws. AirBnB, Uber, Theranos, Facebook, Google, you name it... they're all led by people who think they are better than others, know more than others.
THAT is the real reason there's a backlash against us.
That's exactly what I'm talking about. You can cherry pick good and bad actors in any industry. This ignores all of the dedication poured into open source and support in frequently thankless roles - have you ever noticed how dry and professional OSS support forums like github and stackoverflow tend to be? To the point where people feel the environment is offensive (though I disagree). All of the positive contributions to control systems that link the globe and drive our factories and machines. Brilliant, completely free GPU based mathematics libraries in multiple languages - do you have any idea how far these technologies are driving the future? Tech is the foundation of the future. Maybe not now but it is inevitable, if we don't destroy ourselves, the live of the average person will undoubtedly become more and more computerized.
Also, what technology do you think is enabling clean tech? We simulate everything on the back of a subset of the tech industry.
> do you have any idea how far these technologies are driving the future?
I think unlike you I know the past. I can see both it and the future. I don't like this future. All I see is you guys are building machines to exploit people.
But “techies” mostly aren’t the CEO-types who try to do all this disruption. They’re mostly developers who like to get paid to do semi-interesting work. The messianic stuff is largely confined to a small, loud group, I think.
This is exactly it. There's a lot of apex fallacy going on in the discussion of tech.
Most of us in tech don't have any say in the direction of the industry. Many of the rank and file workers would actually prefer to live someplace cheaper like Seattle, but it's the leadership of the tech industry (VCs, execs, etc) that have been slow to geographically diversify the industry.
There's too much blaming of all techies for the actions of the people at the top of the tech hierarchy.
This article nicely represents the narccisistic hubris of the ivory tower leftist viewpoint, and in-group social behavior at large. Tech Bros are the nerds that were (and still are, despite shallow appropriations of nerd culture in the mainstream) cast off from "normal" society. This has been the norm in the U.S. for decades. It's not cool to be smart and have geeky interests.
Now tech is hot and the in-group is having trouble competing with people for whom this wasn't just a job or a class, or even a hobby, it was an escape. So they go after their characters to justify quotas and the now deliberate social stigma they were previously oblivious to enforcing. Tech Bros is a dirty class stereotype which totally ignores the passion and skill of the people who are revolutionizing society, for better or worse. And at the end of the day it's just the weird nerd kids being bullied as always.
There's an obscure blog by a guy who talks about the three or so stages of popular subcultures, and how one of the three groups eventualy ruin everything, linked in the comments below which is related.