The Graver Threat of the Growing Tech Backlash

http://recode.net/2014/01/03/the-graver-threat-of-the-growing-tech-backlash/

by krohrbaugh • 13 years ago

43 63 13 years ago

Starting off by citing the thoroughly debunked Google bus incident is not going to help your credibility but no one probably even read the article anyway.

smtddr2• 13 years ago

I know there was a fake[1] one beforehand, but this[2] one happened for real. Or are you say this is fake too?

1. http://news.cnet.com/8301-1023_3-57615006-93/fake-google-emp...

2. http://blog.sfgate.com/stew/2013/12/09/protesters-block-goog...

michaelochurch2• 13 years ago

The only part that I'm aware of being fake is the entitled Google employee (who was not a Google employee, but a union activist posting as an entitled tech worker).

That was a terrible play. It cost the good guys a lot of credibility and anyone with half a brain would realize that people would find out almost immediately that he wasn't a Googler.

ojbyrne• 13 years ago

From someone living in Mountain View, this seems stupid on the part of San Francisco based protesters. There's been many, many examples of cities being hollowed out and losing their entire tax base because of the need for "equality." Push too far, and all those tech workers might decide that living in the suburbs isn't too bad.

ianbicking• 13 years ago

Is this anything more than a concern about gentrification in the Bay Area? "Tech" isn't causing gentrification anywhere else, and none of the other offenses (worker safety, taxes, privacy) seem to engender any strong emotional response towards the tech industry.

The Bay Area has pretty intense class issues, that is true, but the relation of those class issues to the tech industry is purely local.

gum_ina_package3• 13 years ago

Everyone sees the success, but no one sees what it took to get there. They don't see the intense, competitive interviews tech workers go through. They don't see the grueling comp sci/engineering coursework they do leading up to said interviews. And they definitely don't see the thousands of hours programmers put into teaching themselves new skills and technologies.

swalsh• 13 years ago

Don't overwhelm your ego here, the guy who prepared my lunch today is working harder than me. And since that job doesn't pay enough to survive, he has two of them.

You get paid more, not because you "worked hard" or "studied harder"... its because you have a line of work that both creates a shit ton of value, and the supply and demand for people with our skill sets works out in our favor.

pm90• 13 years ago

...and this is why I love the tech community. I'm guessing (guessing because that is just the impression I get) that such a humbling observation on one's profession would not be given by, say, a banker.

But maybe, that's just my impression...

gum_ina_package3• 13 years ago

You're correct in that how hard someone works doesn't result in how much they earn. However, I got into the industry I'm in through hard work. Going back to my main point, people don't want to see that - they just want to see the success which fits into their narrative where anyone with any success got it because they exploited someone else.

xacaxulu• 13 years ago

This is a great counterpoint. And as someone who has done incredibly difficult physical labor (former US Marine with multiple deployments) I can tell you that what has been much harder for me has been the CompSci courses I've taken, thousands of hours of pouring over API documentation, and countless late nights coding. Just because we aren't sweating in some warehouse somewhere doesn't mean that the work isn't incredibly complex and difficult. I'd argue that we work quite harder than guys who makes sandwiches, and we are paid for it accordingly. Working in tech takes a lot of sacrifices early on.

ylou• 13 years ago

I would like to believe that I'm paid as much as I am paid on merit alone. Perhaps based on some universally objective measure of work ethic and difficulty.

But that is a fantasy. We are paid according to how much the market has decided we are worth. We are rare and therefore, in demand. That is it. I could say that I got here on hard work alone, but that's not the whole truth. How I got here is a mixture of one part hard work, one part privilege, and one part fortune.

AnimalMuppet2• 13 years ago

I sometimes describe what I did during a particular day as "trying to shove my brain through a concrete wall". (Usually applied to debugging, where the "concrete wall" is the reasons why what's happening is impossible. The trick is to find where the crack is in the concrete wall,..)

quanticle• 13 years ago

Everything in this article comes back to housing. That's not the tech. industry's fault. The tech. industry would love to have more housing in San Francisco and the rest of the Bay Area. Housing prices have increased so quickly, and are currently at such a high level that even highly paid tech. workers are thinking twice about moving to SF. We see it often enough in the comment threads right here.

The problem is that the existing residents of San Francisco would like to preserve their relatively low density city, and simultaneously cram several million more people into it. In every other growing city, swathes of older, low-density housing are torn down and replaced with higher density apartment and condominium blocks. These high-density urban high-rises relieve the pressure on the remaining, cheaper, low density residential properties, while simultaneously adding additional economic growth and neighborhood vitality. It just seems that the residents of San Francisco have made a collective choice that they'd rather have the "charm" of their "historic" (like you can call anything less than 200 years old historic) city, rather having a city that people can move into and live in on less than programmer wages.

gum_ina_package3• 13 years ago

Spot on. Not trying to be cliche, but big government is what's causing these problems. If they would allow high rises to be built, we wouldn't be seeing these issues.

drhayes93• 13 years ago

I don't see the big government argument here. If the residents of San Francisco are voting to keep the city a certain way, how does that align with traditional "big government" narratives of over-regulation, bloated spending, etc?

You could say the residents of SF are using city regulations a certain way, but that doesn't imply big government to me.

kllrnohj• 13 years ago

Big government has nothing to do with this. The protesters themselves are the problem. Not because of their current protests, but because of their previous protests against more housing.

The government has tried, many times, to zone and build more dense housing which would have prevented this problem. The people of SF have been organizing and protesting every step of the way against that for the last 15 years.

Hell, even today they are protesting the increase in housing costs while simultaneously protesting against increased housing.

api3• 13 years ago

I turned down a really great salary offer in the Bay Area recently because it was not that great given the housing prices. Basically you'd have to offer me over $175k to even consider coming there... and even then I'd be concerned about continued real estate inflation pricing me out of any chance of getting desirable housing and paying it off in a decent amount of time.

The other thing is that in Silicon Valley you're paying for RE like it's New York but you don't live in New York. You live in a boring and IMHO rather ugly suburb. I was shocked at how bad it was... I was driving around and thinking "I cannot think of anywhere else in the USA where so much gets you so little."

rayiner3• 13 years ago

Some of the DC suburbs are getting close in terms of how expensive it is to live in desolate suburbia.

SheepSlapper• 13 years ago

I found that out the hard way. Six months ago I got a job in SF that paid me 50% more, and moved to the East Bay where I pay almost 3x the rent (for the same square footage, in a much crappier neighborhood). I could buy a nice house where I'm from (WA) for what I'm paying in rent now, and that stings a bit.

It's definitely been a fun experience (there're TONS of cool things to do here), but had I known 6 months ago what I know now... I'm not sure that I would have made the transition.

varelse• 13 years ago

For many years, I've wanted to move from the South Bay to SF.

Not anymore.

It's too damned crowded now. So I predict it will just get more crowded and there will be no changes to the zoning to improve mass transit and housing to embrace and handle that crowding. Even a small change like repealing rent control would work wonders for new residents by increasing housing supply and reducing opening rents at the expense of existing residents having to come to grips with market rates. Not gonna happen: the inmates are solidly in charge of this asylum.

So instead the overflow will continue early adopting Oakland and eventually gentrify the place. Not my cup of tea at this point in my life, but I'm happy to jump off the appropriate BART stops and enjoy their restaurants and coffee shops on the weekends as they appear.

That said, attacking the tech shuttles makes as much sense to me as shooting up an unemployment office when one loses one's job. All you're doing is venting your anger on people slightly less unlucky than you are. The people they truly hate are safely ensconced in Pacific Heights, Tiburon, Palo Alto, and Atherton with excellent security.

For the record, here's a description of what an Ellis eviction entails:

http://www.andysirkin.com/HTMLArticle.cfm?Article=3

schiffern• 13 years ago

In every other growing city, swathes of older, low-density housing are torn down and replaced with higher density apartment and condominium blocks.

…which generally means going from bad design to worse when it comes to human health. Mental illness, social isolation, physical inactivity, and poor performance in school are all correlated with living in high-rise buildings (even after accounting for socioeconomic factors).[1]

This isn't to say that healthy high-density living can't be done, just that it generally isn't what's done. Singapore is a good counter-example.[2]

[1] http://web.uvic.ca/psyc/gifford/pdf/ASR%20High%20Rises%20pro...

[2] http://www.livablecities.org/articles/high-density-livabilit...

Futurebot• 13 years ago

This is exactly it. I've posted about ideas for fixing this a few times in the past:

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=6549063

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=6944259

The unfortunate thing right now is that these ideas have no real traction outside of econoblogs, the most popular being Matt Yglesias' MoneyBox. City Halls, historic preservation committees, online comment sections, community boards, and others have endless rants about their grievances, or piles of suggestions that don't touch the problem at all.

In the case of this article, it's mentioned in passing, but dismissed as the equivalent of "it'll be too little, too late." If a place is as important as it seems (like New York has been for a very long time in a number of industries), these problems aren't going anywhere - regardless of bubble pops - and should be dealt with right away. Are there any serious commentators or analysts that believe that the SFBA will disappear if "social" vanishes? I think that's incredibly short-sighted.

Short version: there are solutions, but those who matter aren't really listening.

apsec1122• 13 years ago

If tech companies pay their workers generously, then it's their fault for rising rents. But if they are misers and pay little, then it's their fault for mistreating working people (see: Apple and Foxconn).

If the tech companies all move to San Francisco, then it's their fault for changing the fabric of local communities. But if they leave San Francisco, why, it's their fault for crashing the local economy.

If the tech companies try to establish a libertarian utopia, this shows they don't care about average people. But if they stay in SF and try to work within the current system, well, that's the nefarious influence of money in politics.

If the tech companies send buses to pick up their workers, this is terrible because it drives up housing costs. But if they don't send buses, why, traffic would be so bad that 280 and 101 would grind to a halt, and clearly that's the tech companies' fault.

"Friedrich Spee von Langenfeld, a priest who heard the confessions of condemned witches, wrote in 1631 the Cautio Criminalis ('prudence in criminal cases') in which he bitingly described the decision tree for condemning accused witches: If the witch had led an evil and improper life, she was guilty; if she had led a good and proper life, this too was a proof, for witches dissemble and try to appear especially virtuous. After the woman was put in prison: if she was afraid, this proved her guilt; if she was not afraid, this proved her guilt, for witches characteristically pretend innocence and wear a bold front. Or on hearing of a denunciation of witchcraft against her, she might seek flight or remain; if she ran, that proved her guilt; if she remained, the devil had detained her so she could not get away." - http://lesswrong.com/lw/ii/conservation_of_expected_evidence...

memracom2• 13 years ago

There is another way.

In London a group of businesses got together and lobbied government for better bus service among other things: http://www.londonriversidebid.co.uk/our-achievements/

For that matter England has http://www.bettertransport.org.uk/about_us which lobbies for improved transport all over the country.

You want to disrupt the old way of doing things? Setting up a private bus service is not disruption. The initiatives linked above are true disruption. They are all about doing government differently.

daniel-cussen• 13 years ago

That would fall under "nefarious influence of money in politics."

apsec1122• 13 years ago

If, tomorrow, Google bought Caltrain and started running it competently (unlike the current clowns), I'd throw a party to celebrate. But I'm sure the anti-Google-bus crowd would condemn that too. It would be 'corporatizing our cherished community institutions' or something.

dasmoth• 13 years ago

Campaign for Better Transport used to be Transport 2000, which was set up by the rail unions.

calibraxis• 13 years ago

False dichotomy to set up "damned if I do, damned if I don't". Then conclusion likens SF's privileged techies to women facing literal witchhunts, a form of terrorism.

Techies are free to engage in activism to help their fellow humans.

rictic• 13 years ago

And we do. My coworkers both give generously to charity and volunteer for local organizations and my maligned techie employer actively encourages this (by putting up fliers around the office for local charities to volunteer for, holding volunteering drives, and matching charitable gift donations).

alexakarpov• 13 years ago

Instead of the article, better read Vonnegut: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Player_Piano_%28novel%29

A much better, if also significantly longer, exposition.

SubZero• 13 years ago

Does this article remind anyone else of the culture in Atlas Shrugged?

Iftheshoefits• 13 years ago

To which culture in Atlas Shrugged do you refer: the Galt types or everybody else? And to which subject of the article would you draw the analogy?

memracom2• 13 years ago

This is yet another reason why startups should avoid Silicon Valley. Years ago, the investment climate in SV really was different than elsewhere but that has now changed. Not only are there tech VCs and Angels in other US cities, but they are found throughout the world. You might still have concentrations in particular places, for instance in Canada most action is in Vancouver, Waterloo and Toronto, but that is a far cry from the days when SV was the only place.

Best place to start a new company is where you are right now. That is what Atlassian did and when it made sense for them to be in a different place, they just moved. Second best place is any city where there is a concentration of tech industry but that could be in Vancouver, Berlin, Moscow (Skolkovo) or London (Old Street). You have a choice.

And if your business is growing and beginning to have a local impact, and you are senior management there, then you really should start thinking about how you can improve the local area for everyone, which is a traditional activity of larger successful companies. Spend money on civic projects. If you need better bus service, lobby for it rather than sidestepping the competition. Politics is a different game from business and if you fail to recognize that and act appropriately, then you deserve the brickbats that will be thrown at you.

I'm reminded of when IBM was the big bad boy, and Microsoft was the cool new upstart. Then Microsoft became the bad boy and Google was the cool new upstart. From the sound of things, Google is now sliding into bad boy territory.

charleslmunger• 13 years ago

"Ellis Act evictions, used to eject all tenants from a building to clear the way for a sale, soared 170 percent in the last three years."

This statistic is incredibly misleading - the absolute increase was only 73 evictions. [1]

“From Google buses invading the neighborhoods, to the evictions of elders, to the very real effects of speculator-fueled evictions, the tech industry’s reaction has been shameful,” said Tony Robles, an organizer with Senior and Disability Action who joined the Oakland demonstration, in an email.

This can also be read as "Large companies pay employees too much money and provide too many benefits."

[1] http://www.chicagonow.com/getting-real/2014/01/san-francisco...

theorique• 13 years ago

This can also be read as "Large companies pay employees too much money and provide too many benefits."

Shame!

San Francisco should kick the techies out. Then it can aspire to be Detroit. It's not pretty when a formerly vibrant industry fades away over time.

waps• 13 years ago

That's not what they say is the problem at all. Look, Google's great crime - according to the article presumably written by a tolerant person - is

1) trading a few commercials for the keystone oil pipeline for some other political card.

2) Lunching with Inhofe (not sure who that is).

Google, like most Tech giants, contributes to a hell of a lot of political organisations. Surely that's obvious to anyone ? But apparently merely a tiny sliver of contribution to "bad" political organisations is enough to demonize a 40000 person company.

I hate how "tolerant" America works like this. Associate with the wrong political idea, even a tiny little bit when you're actually apolitical and you really just kind of agree with the idea, or you just want/need to get something done, and ... bye-bye tolerance. You've just become public enemy number 1.

I am sorry, but I was raised in an area with lots of merchants, lots of factory workers and lots of small political parties. A place, like most of the countryside in Europe, where neonazi's organize parties with communists, liberals (the European, rightist, kind) and christians, and imagine this : nobody fights (we have soccer matches for that). Nobody loses their job. Nobody gets nailed to the wall in the local newspaper for having a drink with a girl who is somehow associated with an unpopular party.

You see this in practice as well. San Francisco's tech elite is full with people who openly claim to be democrat even when they're obviously not. There's plenty of Tea Partyers on the street in San Francisco, among the "tech elite", but asking them never yields that answer. I used to wonder why.

I'm saying this from a distance, so I may be wrong, but it seems to me America (and in particular the left) is the least tolerant people I've visited. Especially the part of America that's arguing for tolerance.

rodrodrod2• 13 years ago

Ellis Act evictions, used to eject all tenants from a building to clear the way for a sale, soared 170 percent in the last three years.

For some context, that's an increase of 73 evictions per year (from 43 in 2010 to 116 in 2013[0]). Of course, 73 in the absolute doesn't have the same ring to it as 170%, so it's clear to see why the data is presented the way it is. I think it's rather disingenuous and makes that particular problem seem much dire than it might really be.

[0] http://www.sfbos.org/Modules/ShowDocument.aspx?documentid=47...

kevingadd2• 13 years ago

what is the math that leads you to say 116 entire-building evictions impacts 0.014% of the population? are numbers provided that describe the total number of tenants affected? A large apartment building/complex can be home to hundreds of tenants, many of them families.

rodrodrod2• 13 years ago

Ah, good catch! I mistakenly assumed there was a 1:1 eviction to tenant correlation. I can't seem to find any data indicating the total number of tenants evicted (or, at least, an average count of tenants evicted per eviction on average), so I can't really estimate the % of population impacted anymore, so I've edited that bit out.

gaius4• 13 years ago

If person A calls person B a "reactionary", then that only really tells you something about person A.

elwin• 13 years ago

The label stood out to me too. I can't remember seeing it seriously applied to anyone in any writing more recent than the 1950's.

ForHackernews• 13 years ago

Using tech services isn’t like using a toaster. It’s often an act of faith. Logging into Apple, Facebook, Google or Square products requires confidence that those companies will treat intimate information in an aboveboard manner, including your contacts, communications, location, medical history, shopping preferences, surfing habits and more.

Time and again that faith has been demonstrated to be severely misplaced. If a "backlash" against the tech sector leads to fewer people thoughtlessly handing over their most private lives to giant, amoral entities, then so much the better.

rayiner3• 13 years ago

Every article like this is yet another reason not to start a business in bat-shit crazy San Francisco. Its advertising for Seattle, New York, Austin, Chicago, etc.

erbo• 13 years ago

I'll put in a good word for the Denver-Boulder area. :-)

Seriously, I read things like this:

"Cohen said one concrete way the tech industry could ease the affordability crisis would be to cut big checks. He notes that San Francisco’s hotel tax produces about $5 million a year that goes into subsidized housing, and said it’s appropriate to call on the tech sector for similar contributions since their workforce is primarily responsible for driving up housing costs."

And then I read the "suggestions" in an article[1] linked to this one immediately following that quote, and one word comes to mind: shakedown.

Instead of cooperating with the moral equivalent of a mugging, perhaps companies should move to places where they're appreciated, rather than reviled.

[1] http://www.poormagazine.org/node/4999

andyl• 13 years ago

The tech industry isn't perfect - not by a long shot.

But tech companies aren't putting the climate at risk. Tech companies didn't crash the economy. Over the past decades there isn't another industry that has delivered more growth and value.

The grave threat is to non-credible Media who deal in link-bait and manufactured controversy.

gaius4• 13 years ago

I guess you are too young to remember the NASDAQ meltdown of '01. The recovery from that wasn't a real recovery at all, it was the housing bubble of '08. So we are still feeling the aftershocks .

drhayes93• 13 years ago

I think an important distinction here is that the greatest value the tech industry creates is monetary value. There are others measures of value that it doesn't exceed at.

I'm not one to say that all tech innovation has ceased, but I would love to see more startups addressing the rest of the world's real problems: starvation, poverty, water, oppressive governments. Otherwise we are playing our part in ensuring a grim meathook future: http://zenarchery.com/full-text-of-the-grim-meathook-future-...

Besides, the tech industry didn't crash the economy -- but we sure had a lot of fun benefiting from large-scale economic speculation that came from it the first time.

smtddr2• 13 years ago

Well, the more articles highlighting the problem the more discussion can happen and maybe a solution can be found. On the other hand, looking at all the HN comments coming up with so many different excuses make me less hopeful. I bet this is how the rich elite started; using the same thought process to excuse & dismiss their impact on those around them. Eventually reaching the point of just, "Meh, screw them."

api3• 13 years ago

On a side note... I find it kind of amazing how pollyanna many techies' view is of their own industry. The fact is that the tech industry is often surprisingly sleazy and includes quite a few very shady characters. Some of the sketchiest people I've ever met have been businesspeople involved in tech, and when I was in college I had friends who were into drug trafficking and thus had a little bit of indirect contact with that scene. Let me put it this way... I met people heavily involved in drugs who I'd trust with my kids before I'd trust many of the tech businesspeople I've met. We're talking major fucking sleaze here, hard-core reptilian sociopaths.

michaelochurch2• 13 years ago

Many tech businessmen aren't nerds. They're in the game to take advantage of nerds' poor social skills, inability to organize or negotiate for their own interests, and willingness to overwork themselves due to a lack of long-term, strategic thinking.

Also, tech has the Damaso Effect. The best of our world answer to the worst of theirs, because we've been colonized by the MBA culture, and most colonial soldiers and officers are people who failed in their own countries. The good businessmen stay in New York and start hedge funds. The leftovers in their set are the ones who end up in VC or as VC-funded founders-- and they're bitter about it, too.

Much of the tension in tech comes from the fact that tech's best end up, due to the extreme power of the VCs and moneymen, answering to the rejects of the business world-- the ones who weren't able to get themselves into hedge funds.

api3• 13 years ago

"The best of our world answer to the worst of theirs, because we've been colonized by the MBA culture, and most colonial soldiers and officers are people who failed in their own countries."

Thank you. This is why I love Hacker News. :) That is remarkably clear and concise and from my experience absolutely true. In one of my worst examples of a total sleazenugget from high-tech, it is literally true. I know for a fact that the guy tried and failed to become a high-finance type and was indeed incredibly bitter about it, so he entered high-tech and tried to hustle nerds (like me) out of technologies he could (fail to) flip.

seivan• 13 years ago

I've been in this.

bowlofpetunias• 13 years ago

If there is a tech backlash, it's not about Bay Area gentrification, which is a local issue and happens in urban areas around the world. The fact that in SF the money comes from tech is irrelevant.

(The cognitive dissonance of the fortunate techies on HN who refuse to acknowledge that they are no different from self-centered 80's finance yuppies is amusing, but nothing new is happening here.)

The more universal backlash is about the industries arrogant disregard for existing values, regulations, social conventions and traditions. As if anything done by non-techies is inherently inferior, disruption has become an ideology.

Similar to "greed is good", tech promotes the ideology "disruption is good". Millions who see their society mutilated, their rights trampled and their livelihoods disappearing do not agree.

We like to see ourselves as the good guys, and things like the NSA spying or the British censorship filter as the work of the bad guys. As far as the general public is concerned however, they are two sides of the same coin: technology as a means for the elite to take away what once was theirs.

That is the backlash we may soon be facing. And that backlash may not distinguish between the NSA, the mighty Google empire and your plucky little start up.

gaius4• 13 years ago

Disruption is the polite word for a business model of making money by skirting regulations, e.g. AirBnB vs hotels. To borrow a phrase, it's not scalable.

nikoio• 13 years ago

Is it the browser I am using, or is recode not thinking about smaller sized screens?

opera 12.16 on Linux

http://imgur.com/dK0et3M

csense• 13 years ago

You would think the tech industry would be more open to people working remotely. This problem is caused by insisting that everybody you hire be local, no matter how much it inflates salary requirements due to the SF housing market.

The Graver Threat of the Growing Tech Backlash

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