Sharing experience as someone who has lived in SF and around the Bay Area, and now has moved to another popular US city. At least pre-pandemic, there is a vibe difference, a sort of "magic" of having the expertise colocated (not necessarily in office though!). The best I can analogize it is imagine the networking value of being at a tech conference all the time. You'd meet people and they would know what you meant when you described your job, and you could have a conversation with them about it. Versus where I'm at now, people simply do not get it, you talk with them about tech things and their eyes glaze over, they discount you as "nerd" and usually remove themselves from the conversation. The sharing of ideas is far better than any online community (HN included) than I've ever experienced. It's hard to convey, you truly have to live it to feel the difference.
I don't mean to sound snarky, but... aren't we supposed to be valuing diversity above all else these days, and the idea of building a homogeneous community should be anathema?
FWIW, where I live (outside Austin, but I don't think that's specifically relevant), as you predict, I don't feel that everyone just understands exactly what my job is. On the other hand, I do feel like people are curious and eager to learn. I find (I know, just one datapoint) that whether I'm talking to somebody from our local semiconductor industry or a lifelong Texas rancher, there's some respect for the idea that we prosper by being a community from all walks of life.
ETA: I'm not necessarily talking about any kind of "protected class" of race/gender/whatever. I mean people that are rich and poor, Christian and Buddhist and atheist and whatever, techies and ranchers and oilmen, and so forth. In other words, people who really have different ways of interacting with the world, not just skin deep.
> aren't we supposed to be valuing diversity above all else these days,
Perhaps, but after years of you being the person who is not valued, precisely because you are 'diverse', the idea of a homogenous group is likely appealing. I don't quite count myself in there, but I do live in a rural area, and there aren't as many people in software as there are in other industries. I don't particularly get the sense that people who don't know what I do care to learn or are all that curious, on the whole.
+1 I wasn't intending to say all of SF/BA are tech people. I'm saying a noticeable difference in the number of people who are Tech aware and tech open minded.
I used to live at 8th/Mission, I have felt the difference you speak of and still I could never live there again. There is a cold, passive hostility there that you don't feel in other places.
I don't think the parent is arguing for SF, but for A place where tech is highly concentrated. I moved away from SF in 2013 and miss the tech focus all the time. I feel like I moved away from the center of the earth. I loved my time in SF, but likewise cannot imagine moving back due to all the problems around crime and crazy prizes due to NIMBYism. I'd love to live in a place like SF in the late 00s/early10s though.
I didn't feel safe in SF until maybe the mid-late 90s. SF was seriously a violent place until the tech boom. China Basin, where the ballpark is now, was one of the worst parts of the city.
A "safe" SF only existed for about 20 years total.
San Francisco is safer (in terms of violent crime rate) today than it was at any time in the 1990s. (It also went up from the late 1990s to the mid-00s, so if you only started feeling safe in the late 1990s, that was probably your personal circumstances, not the actual safety of the city.)
It’s like how all the glass makers lived on a single island in Italy during the Renaissance. I could be wrong, but advancements in telescopes, microscopes, and even beakers are somehow related to the glassmakers in Florence
Zoom and FaceTime won’t replicate this. The question is whether AR and VR can come close within 10 years?
I go back and forth around whether these dense communities of industry are bad or not. It certainly creates bubbles and echo chambers, but there's also a lot of real innovation that happens because there's a rich ecosystem of skilled people to hire to build things.
This is coming from someone who has never lived in SF.
You can hire people from anywhere with the internet. Economics alone are likely to dictate that things move from centralization to decentralization.
$3m dollar homes, extremely high office rents, wasted energy and time on commuting, higher comp expenses, smaller hiring pool. Even if centralization/in-person is more efficient, likely not efficient to enough to overcome these economics.
The businesses that learn how to maneuver in a decentralized/online first manner have huge starting advantages over those that don't. Though, we will see in time.
It's possible the centralization gap will be much smaller in cities that choose to meet demand for housing/office/amenities.
That only really applies to work that can be efficiently done remotely. While a lot of software can, there's a significant chunk that cannot and never will be able to. As soon as you have situations where you need specialized hardware, remote work becomes really inefficient/untenable.
True, though many types of hardware work can still be distributed.
More than one phone prototype can be made and shipped to different branch offices, for example. Do you need the entire company working off one hardware prototype? Is that even a practical way to iterate? Not really. It's only the more bespoke/expensive hardware that is more difficult to distribute.
But software employment is currently much larger percentage of the IT workforce anyway
Or centralize it in the Midwest and put it next to the work that enables us to eat and use diesel to make consumable calories. Columbus, Des Moines, Oklahoma City. This is the way.
I'm sorry, I'm sure this was an innocent typo, but seeing a "tech bro" mythologize the midwest and then misspell Oklahoma is just too funny. You realize OKC has a higher violent crime rate than SF right?
Oklahoma had the highest incarceration rate in the United States (or the world if you compared it to other countries). Most of the people in prison there are in for drug crimes.
I just think it's so bizarre watching people act as if Oklahoma of all places is a beacon of rational governance and domestic tranquility.
(Source: I grew up there and it's no different from most other places in the country. Our country's problems are dispersed fairly homogeneously. The opioid crisis is not limited to cities and neither is homelessness)
I don't know if people really comprehend that it's a national issue and not localized to any area. Inequality + years of segregation and neglect + drugs have been left to fester and our only tool against these issues has been a big boot.
Suburbanites are insulated by 20 miles of highway from the problematic areas and can't even fathom what it's like-- the talking heads on their TV are more real to them than whatever is happening in the inner city. But even then their kids are popping xanax and getting DUIs. They just have a better support system and can continue functioning in society instead of getting locked up. In rural areas too, there's so much drug crime and violent crime.
The unfortunate part is that our anti-poor propaganda works flawlessly even on the conventionally "smart" as we can see in threads like these.
What happens is SF doesn't have the traditional US organizational structure of 'heavily policed mall-like downtown -> elevated highway over poor neighborhoods -> suburbs' (like it or not, even NYC has turned into that with the gentrification of Manhattan and extreme Western Long Island).
So people see all that a city has to offer when they go to SF, while they'll never set foot in East New York.
For the most part, anywhere that Democrats have held TOTAL power for decades is a dump. They become more of a dump as the politics become more progressive and they hold even more power. We should acknowledge this. That having total Democrat control results in really bad places. They need to be challenged.
NYC is a great example. Was a dump until Giuliani came in and became the gold standard city when Bloomberg took over for 12 years. He called himself a Democrat at the end, but they all hated him because he was pragmatic and got shit done. There was a tension there though and it worked out well.
DeBlasio came in and almost immediately things started to turn. As SF has consolidated power it has just fell off the deep end. Chicago has this story going for 50 years.
2000 vs 2021
Murder 673, 488, down 185 27.5%
Rape 2068, 1491, down 577 27.9%
Robbert 32562, 13831, down 18731 57.5%
Felony Assault 25924, 22835, down 2089 11.9%
Burglary 38362, 12811, down 25551 66.6%
Grand Larceny 49631, 40870, down 8761 17.7%
Auto Theft 35442, 10415, down 25027 70.6%
> every midwestern city of any size is violent as fuck. STL, KC, Indy, Chicago, OKC
If there's nothing there, why are they so violent? Answer: they really aren't. If you've lived in a midwestern city you'd know that there are areas that have more violence (like probably any city) than others, but I would wager that proportionally they're much smaller compared to outlying metro areas than larger cities.
I've spent a few weeks in each of SF and Chicago. SF constantly felt worse/scarier/more tense.
Most of that time in both cities was in business and/or tourist districts. There are pockets of Chicago I would definitely avoid, but the core felt safe. In SF, the core does not feel safe.
Fixed. I’ve edited my reply a few times. I can’t imagine a tech-bro ever employing me. Given the baseline on the site it is not an unreasonable guess.
I don’t have a mythologized impression of the Midwest. I spent a lot of time working in emergency services in one of Ohio’s poorest counties before moving on.
I am familiar on a first person basis with the Columbus metro’s problems at a minimum. No, I don’t think New Albany or Upper Arlington are representative.
* Oklahoma had the highest incarceration rate in the United States (or the world if you compared it to other countries). Most of the people in prison there are in for drug crimes.*
At least in the Midwest the thugs have the courtesy to congregate in known bad areas.
I'm fully for that. I'm fully remote now and based in Asia (between HK and Taiwan). I much prefer tech to be decentralized. But if the hub is going to stay in the US and somewhat centralized, almost anything would be better than SF.
For that to happen, people need to accept more remote work related technologies like AR and VR. AR is still far away with NReal being the closest thing that’s usable. With VR, the device form factor is so intimidating to people that many refuse to even try it.