The Silicon Valley-ization of San Francisco

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

by clarkm • 13 years ago

83 84 13 years ago

slate.com

ojbyrne• 13 years ago

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.

radley2• 13 years ago

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).

eruditely• 13 years ago

The title is pretty off.

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

radley2• 13 years ago

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

minimax2• 13 years ago

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.

randomdata2• 13 years ago

If you are making somewhere around $75K per year (roughly where the top 15% places you for individual incomes), are you really in the position to be bidding up housing prices in SF (assuming you don't have a wealthy partner to help fund your ventures, won the lottery, or something to that effect)?

The rule of thumb for buying a home is three times income, which means you can realistically only afford a $225K home. However, the US national average seems to be closer to five times income, so if we allow you that, you still can realistically only afford a $375K home. I've never tried buying a house in San Francisco, but by all accounts, you're not even close to being in the market, let alone bidding the prices up.

I also wonder how you would not notice food prices triple with that kind of income, but perhaps you grow everything you consume and thus would not feel the fluctuations the same?

With that said, one thing I notice regularly is that people seem to grossly overestimate how much other people make, so perhaps you actually are closer to the top 1% than you realize?

tsunamifury• 13 years ago

Top 15% in SF,LA,NYC areas would put you around 180-225K combined, making his statements true. 75k in a rural small town x2 with a wife would be more than enough to buy a house, have kids and have 1k in spare change every month.

But I think his sentiment was more that he would bid up home prices if had the money, even as a relatively 'normal-income' individual and that most higher paid individuals spend only 5-10% of their income on necessary non-housing items.

PavlovsCat5• 13 years ago

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.

PavlovsCat5• 13 years ago

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]

bmelton6• 13 years ago

Just because people are poor, i.e. defenseless, doesn't mean others should be able to have their home automatically.

In all fairness, if he's buying a home, someone else is selling it. I don't see anywhere he suggests that he's nefariously evicting people from their homes so that he can reside within them and laugh maniacally.

In short, he's buying empty homes, or homes that the owners are moving out of. He's not displacing anybody in doing so.

minimax2• 13 years ago

I was trying to put myself in the position of the guy who wrote the article. I.e. someone who is a "progressive" but moved into SF and has a decent income. If I'm moving to SF and there isn't any new construction to buy, I'm going to have to bid against the existing residents for a place to live.

It seemed like the point of the article was like "Look, not all us SF techies are assholes because we don't say asshole things" and my point was more that it's the economic consequences of your lifestyle that have the biggest impact on the city's preexisting long-term residents.

11thEarlOfMar• 13 years ago

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

fro• 13 years ago

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

whyenot• 13 years ago

Yes. Unless it's an insult. In that case, no.

7Figures2Commas• 13 years ago

Greg Gopman mentioned alongside Peter Thiel and Paul Graham? Really?

benihana• 13 years ago

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• 13 years ago

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

seanmcdirmid2• 13 years ago

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

thecage411• 13 years ago

I just looked around my floor. 1 woman out of 27 people.

rhizome• 13 years ago

I live in NYC, and I often wonder what Silicon Valley is really like.

To translate to NYC, the issues here are tantamount to having to account for New Jersey and Connecticut.

rayiner• 13 years ago

I spent part of a summer working in Menlo Park, after having lived in Chicago and New York. As far as I can tell, its a mixture of the worst parts of New York City and suburban DC (where I grew up). A highway is the major reference point. Nice restaurants are in strip malls. Its way more suburb-y than Westchester or Greenwich, and more disconnected from the central city. It is, however, very clean by virtue of religious power washing.

What's most disturbing is the monoculture. I got a haircut and the hairdresser was talking about startups. Also, in New York you're likely to see kids in the same visual frame as bankers. In Silicon Valley, families seem segregated from the working age people in the characteristically suburban way.

Aloisius• 13 years ago

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

There are a shockingly large number of articles posting about how great Boulder, BC, NYC, Chicago, etc. are better than SV. Many of them are thinly veiled self-serving attempts to get more engineers in their area so that they won't feel so alone (ie, turn it into exactly the same environment as San Francisco where your average barrista is exceptionally familiar with the newest and greatest iPhone app and is friends with at least a half dozen founders or works part-time on his own project (s)he is attempting to launch).

It seems like certain neighborhoods are full of fairly wealthy tech guys, but that it's not all white dudes.

I know female founders, black founders, indian founders, asian founders, etc. There are around. Some are more prolific than others. The same goes for VCs, there is a large contingent of non-White people. Sadly VC is one of those areas that women are still the serious minority (though I know several of them.) It really just depends on who you surround yourself with.

I will say that there are some sexist jerks who play favorites. Someone I was dating got brought into a well known Data Science company and was relegated to doing Social Media (because you know, women, communications) on top of her current job (she has an MFE).

But I feel like there is a pretty strong informal movement to call out these kinds of assholes.

Are women getting hired at the more progressive companies out there? Cause these articles make it seem like it's only men out there.

There is a bit of a gender imbalance down he peninsula. It is more pronounced at certain tech companies than others. Up in San Francisco, you'll see far more gender diversity, but it still isn't near parity (on a larger demographic level though, San Francisco proper has a 50.9/49.1 split of genders). Certainly there are more companies up in SF that care about hiring women and many women-only or largely women-only startups do exists.

From a sexuality standpoint, you can't get much better than San Francisco. I live in the Castro so I might be biased, but the LGBT community thrives here and I know plenty of gay founders and tech workers. I've worked with transmen and transwomen in several startups (though there is still background stigma against it still being worked out).

WalterBright2• 13 years ago

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• 13 years ago

49ers...

robbyking2• 13 years ago

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.

onedev• 13 years ago

Can you give specific examples of things you saw that make you say that? I'm genuinely curious. I'm not a native San Fransciscan but I've been to the city many times and have many friends there.

long• 13 years ago

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

simoncion4• 13 years ago

As am I! Also, what was the place like during and shortly after The Bubble?

leothekim2• 13 years ago

There were lots of tech layoffs, and a lot of people were leaving the city around that time, so it was a _little bit_ tumbleweed-y. The Mission is the most markedly changed. Back then it was still a little sketchy with all the heroin addicts and prostitution on happening around Capp. Lower Haight was also iffy. Though it had its fair share of gentrification during the dotcom boom, there were still regular shootings in that area.

cdibona• 13 years ago

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.

robbyking2• 13 years ago

It's difficult to cite specific examples because the zeitgeist (the defining spirit, not the bar) was completely different at that time. The Mission and SOMA used to be neighborhoods where you could live relatively inexpensively and still have space to make art or music or raise a family, so most of us who lived there had a vested interest in seeing the neighborhood thrive culturally.

Of course parts of those neighborhoods were terrible -- it's difficult to argue that 6th and Mission isn't better now than it was 10 or 15 years ago -- but to define entire neighborhoods by those types of intersections would be wrong. 16th and Mission was -- and honestly, still is -- often overrun with drug dealers and prostitutes, but if you were to have walked two blocks in any direction back then you would have passed countless independent art galleries, rehearsal spaces, and performance studios, not to mention an even greater number of family owned restaurants, grocery stores and shops.

And the best thing about all of these places was their accessibility: nearly anyone could afford to go out to dinner or an art opening, see a band play, or just have a couple drinks down the street from their house. It's that accessibility that's missing now: working class families, artists, and musicians can't afford the neighborhoods they helped build, so slowly, through Ellis Act evictions or sheer frustration, they start to trickle out of the city, taking with them what made the area desirable in the first place.

negamax• 13 years ago

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

was_hellbanned2• 13 years ago

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• 13 years ago

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_hellbanned2• 13 years ago

That's kind of the point.

ChrisNorstrom• 13 years ago

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".

simoncion4• 13 years ago

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.

bmelton6• 13 years ago

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.

michaelochurch• 13 years ago

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.

yetanotherphd2• 13 years ago

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

grogenaut4• 13 years ago

I thought nerd was a good term now a days. Just as other disparaged groups had done with their derogatory term to make it hip.

GFK_of_xmaspast2• 13 years ago

Hacker News right here, everybody.

tptacek2• 13 years ago

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• 13 years ago

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• 13 years ago

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.

socialist_coder2• 13 years ago

Almost every single person I know in California who would be considered part of the tech industry "rich" definitely agree with you regarding the taxes.

What I hate is that no one in politics or even in the news wants to talk about the tax situation. Income inequality is already bad and only getting worse- readjusting taxes seems like a viable plan. I think we need to raise tax rates way up for the top earners (including most of us in the tech industry). But, it's never going to happen because our nation is ruled by the rich in politics and in the media, virtually guaranteeing no change to the current system.

I feel very strongly about this. So strong I left the US for Germany where I'm enjoying higher taxes, universal health care, and a stronger social safety net.

sarah2079• 13 years ago

Prop 13 helps to maintain the economic dominance of those who got here first though, which is why property taxes are often complained about in CA, even by those who tend not to complain about taxes.

thrwyy• 13 years ago

Bro, you've been drinking before commenting on this. Fwiw, I have read your comments for a few years and this comment is perfectly coherent and sensible.

grogenaut4• 13 years ago

I see your anecdotal evidence and raise you:

1) I have no idea how socially liberal SF tax accountants are. 2) I raise you that I don't know any engineers that go to church but I know a lot that go to burning man. I can name 12. That's more than "Most" which is not a number in the real number system. 3) I don't know any software engineer who complains about taxes. Well one, Dukeness, but he also complains about the SEC, Weather, Obama, Bush, The Rams, and a lot of other things. 4) I have no idea what you are trying to say. Construction sentence communist. Also who is everyengineer?

sbov• 13 years ago

The point, I think, is that if you live in SF you're probably fairly socially liberal, regardless of job.

rietta• 13 years ago

I am a software developer who works with startups who goes to church. So by a loose definition of 'know' in that we both have posted on HN, that increases the count by at least one.

tptacek2• 13 years ago

I'm surprised I have to spell this out to someone who writes software for a living, but about 50,000 people total go to Burning Man every year, a subset of which are software engineers. There are something like 500,000 software developers in the country. If fully half of Burning Man's attendees were practicing software developers that would still only be 5% of all developers (of course, nowhere near half of Burning Man attendees are practicing software developers).

Meanwhile, 40% of Americans regularly attend church (FWIW: I am not one of them, though I am sort of idly Catholic). If developers were 1/4th as likely to regularly attend church as other Americans (a stretch, though it might not seem that way if all the developers you know are San Francisco twentysomethings, but I'll stipulate that it's possible) than, meeting a random software developer on the street, you are talking to someone who is twice as likely to attend church as burning man.

agorabinary2• 13 years ago

"... 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_coder2• 13 years ago

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.

agorabinary2• 13 years ago

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.

GFK_of_xmaspast2• 13 years ago

Bitcoin's only interesting for laughing at the true believers and shaking one's damn head at all the scams.

axaxs• 13 years ago

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.

dylandrop2• 13 years ago

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• 13 years ago

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.

dylandrop2• 13 years ago

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...

brucefancher2• 13 years ago

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.

The Silicon Valley-ization of San Francisco

Related Stories