How not to write satire

[mr_web_engineer]

You say that you have a different take on the causes of the rent increases in SF, that doesn’t involve “scapegoating” a single group, but then cite the tech boom as one of the causes. The fact is that the tech sector is just about the only industry actually growing in SF, certainly the fastest growing— almost all of the others are actually contracting. I’m part of the tech sector, talk to them all the time, read their blogs and Twitter feeds, and I can tell you that those people are not moving here because of the scenery, or because of the “intact urban fabric”- they’re moving here for the high salaries and the jobs, since the tech industry is one of the few bright spots in the US economy, and, despite technological advances that make remote work possible, our mindset hasn’t caught up and tech businesses usually insist on having people in traditional offices. The fact is many of these tech workers find San Francisco dirty, smelly, flooded with dangerous homeless people, and complain about it constantly. God knows enough of them have ended up having to pull blog posts and issue apologies when they make their true opinions known though.

I also don’t believe the tech sector is being scapegoated. When the population of San Francisco exploded from 1000 in 1848 to 25,000 full-time residents by 1850 because of the Gold Rush, would it be scapegoating the miners to point out that they were the mainly responsible for that growth? Of course not. They were mainly responsible. And statistics point out today that the influx of people to SF are primarily tech workers. Are tech workers raising rents on their own? Of course not. Property owners and speculators are, in order to make the maximum amount of profit possible, regardless of what that means to San Francisco. As pointed out by Harvey Milk back in the 1970s, when you get speculation like this, it kills not only the poor, but also the middle class, and then the entire city, because it pulls so much money out of the pool of disposable income because all of that money is going to pay rent instead of to a wide variety of local businesses. This dispels the myth that all of that tech money will “trickle down”- it won’t, because it all goes the property owners and speculators.

What will be incredibly interesting to see is what will happen now, since the US government’s short-sighted surveillance culture has made US proprietary hardware and software tainted in the eyes of the world, and all of the denials of our companies and government officials meaningless, since we can’t trust a single thing they say because 1) we catch them in lies every day, and/or 2) the law won’t even allow them to tell the truth if they wanted. Many people were already predicting that this current boom only had two or three more years left, but given the actions of the US government, I believe it will be over much, much quicker.

[namenotreserved]

I’m particularly perplexed by the bus stop issue. Are they in some way blocking public transit? If not, what is the problem?

With regard to the age issue, would you be willing to report to those 20 somethings, and take a lesser salary than them?

[mr_web_engineer]

It’s my understanding that there have been cases where the bus stops are blocked by the private buses. Also, legally, those stops are only for public transit vehicles, so the they are breaking the law. This has been pointed out as another instance of the city government and police ignoring the laws when it might make things awkward with tech companies. I’m hardly an expert on this issue though. There are many, many articles online.

As for the “age issue”, I just need to point out that it’s odd that in our society age is one of the few categories left where we might ask a question like that based on a characteristic that can’t be changed. I can’t do anything about my age, just like I can’t do anything about my skin color, or sexual orientation, or height, yet few would ask if I were black would I have trouble working with/reporting to whites, or if I were gay would I have trouble working with/reporting to straights. We don’t ask people if they would have trouble working with/reporting to people older than them. The truth is that we better get used to having older workers in the work place, because we can’t fill all of the jobs with younger people forever— the population demographics just don’t work. I couldn’t care less about the age of my direct supervisor. After all, they can’t do anything about their age either.

As for compensation, even though some companies post every employees salary these days for all to see, I personally don’t believe it’s any of my business in most situations what my supervisor makes. They negotiated their deal, I negotiated mine, if I wasn’t happy with my deal I shouldn’t have taken it. Our job functions are different also, I have over 30 years of experience, since I started programming mainframes professionally as a teenager, so maybe I would be hired directly into management, or coding, or both, but regardless, my job wouldn’t be the same as my direct supervisor. I personally find management less interesting than actually developing software, so if someone else wants to do it good for them.

Also, especially in software engineering, we can’t make the assumption that someone managing a software engineer makes more money than the software engineer they’re managing. That is often just not the case, and hasn’t been for over a decade. For example, when I managed a team of software engineers at a major research university back in 1999, my salary was lower than theirs. I had no problem with that because the opportunity and challenge was worth it.

The truth is that in the vast majority of companies in the United States today, after you’ve been out in the workforce for a while, somewhere above you leading to the top of the food chain in a company there is almost always someone younger, someone richer, and maybe even someone with less experience in the industry.

Just to be clear: when I first started interviewing with a few select SF startups a couple of years ago, I wanted to work with them because I thought the technical challenges they were facing would be very interesting. I no longer want to work with startups in SF now, because I’ve since learned that the vast majority of them are run like frat houses with big checkbooks and no concern about actually producing a real, quality product. They’ll run you through endless rounds of interviews like you’re trying to get the last seat on the next launch to Mars, but if you do get that seat, the trip is tremendously disappointing.

[davey]

Gentrification and overpopulation are destroying Austin, Texas. Even as a 30yo white male, I can’t write much about these young, white, apolitical assholes who’ve overrun my home, simply because I can’t relate to them in the least. I can’t wait to see the mass exodus two or three years from now when the water runs out. (crossing fingers cause I love this land and I don’t want to see it in the hands of these obnoxious little shits 10 years from now)

[TornPaperNapkin]

I hear you. I can’t say as much though because to be honest I’m not thrilled to be stuck in Texas still, though I guess if you have to be you might as well be in Austin. I’m not sure I want to be stuck here long enough to see the aftermath. For me it’s weird because I’m from here but I was gone a long time. Coming back it’s kind of a strange parody of itself, with the things I actually remember being bulldozed by spiffy replicas. There seem to be a lot of the old folks here just hunkering down and waiting to see if it passes. I think a lot of what people aren’t getting is that it was never that this was such a great place, but rather that people had to pull together to have community here in a state where, well, your options were limited. I don’t think it will really pass though because there aren’t that many cities to choose from in Texas. You have DFW (which most of the people moving here have never really seen, and most wouldn’t really mind living in if they knew what it was like) Houston (same goes)… maybe San Antonio. Anything else will be waaay too Texas for most non-Texans to deal with unless they were already from say, Oklahoma or Arkansas. So in some ways Austin was just delaying the inevitable (large wealthy urban population gobbling up the pretty views and then gutting them to put in golf courses). Now it looks a lot like the other Texas cities. IME when resources become scares the elites won’t be the ones who have to give up and run.

[daneel]

Only Texan city I’m really familiar with is Waco. When I was working there getting to Austin occasionally was about the only thing that kept me sane. Well, that and drinking too much in Cricket’s.

[victorhazzard]

the OP specifically said they were blocking transit. people are very pissed and the google buses have come under physical attack.

[FoolishOwl]

There are two things I find unique about San Francisco: the relatively progressive tone of local politics and the closely associated tolerance for nonconformity and bohemianism; and the relatively integrated residential and public space. Rebecca Solnit’s recent essay at least touches on how the two may be connected. The conflict between San Francisco’s prevailing political and social values, and the values prevailing among techies, has been commented upon quite a bit here already.

In short, I think we’re afraid of San Francisco being conquered by the world of Little Boxes, a song inspired, coincidentally, by housing developments around Daly City, just south of San Francisco and north of Silicon Valley on the peninsula.

As a child, hearing that song, I was excited by the idea of the university, which sounded like an interesting place that was neither suburban tract housing nor a regimented workplace. That meant I quite missed the criticism of the role of universities in training for conformity, but my romanticized ideal of universities was not without merit; the civic life around many university campuses is quite different from that elsewhere, and that is related to the important role college students generally play in social movements.

What I’ve long found striking about San Francisco, distinct from other places I’ve lived, is how in many neighborhoods in the city, I always see people walking around, in the parks and public spaces, and in the cafes and restaurants and shops, from morning to night. The typical pattern in much of the city is for buildings with shops on the ground floor and apartments above – a common pattern and an ancient one in many cities, but not one I see in many California communities. Instead, in most of California, I see residential neighborhoods sharply divided from anything else, and seeing other people or doing much of anything requires driving for miles.

I sometimes find it alarming when I talk to my co-workers in IT, or other people who commute to work, that they feel little or no connection to the community they live in, and find people with different lifestyles or different backgrounds, from outside their loop of household, extended family, and workplace, to be threatening. Worse, I’ve met middle class families in San Francisco, with posh homes, but who regard much of the city they live in and many of the people who live there, as threatening, in need of being cleaned up and brought under control.

Which, come to think of it, makes attacking the Google buses seem ironic, and quite the wrong approach to the problem – at least once past the initial stage of calling attention to a problem.

[NathanHornby]

That’s about 20 minutes where I am. You should let them know that in replying to their email you’ve exhausted their budget, and include the invoice.

[Shane_Simmons]

I mean, they had this API where you send them a request and you get back JSON. An unscrupulous person could have just written a short class that just called method_missing and that’s that. But even as hard up for cash as I am, I don’t think I’d do even that much for $50.