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Comment by itssometoneelse | Hacker News Reader

"This CEO said the Valley used to be a place of "quirky people" but was now filled with "arrogant" people"

Valuations and market corrections aside, this comment is the thing that resonates with me the most. I got into tech and the Internet as a kid in the early 90s because of all the cool, intelligent weirdos thinking about and building the future. I've been traveling out to SF for about a decade now from NYC to do work, and it's been sad to watch that city go from a place I thought could be the only other place besides NYC I could live to a city I try to avoid. It feels like it's getting harder and harder to find those awesome weirdo hackers. The homogeny is brutal in SF.

The one upside is that it's still the Internet and I don't have to be there physically to enjoy the parts of it I like.

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Reminds me of:

> Here’s the Damaso Effect. [...] They come from the colonizing power, which is the mainstream business culture. This is the society that favors pedigree over (dangerous, subversive) creativity and true intellect, the one whose narcissism brought back age discrimination and makes sexism so hard to kick, even in software which should, by rights, be a meritocracy.

https://michaelochurch.wordpress.com/2014/01/05/vc-istan-8-t...

I've met some people that have moved away from SF who are both intelligent hackers and arrogant. It's possible that your intelligent hackers were transformed by the SF atmosphere.

I got my start in the 90's and there has always been a bit of arrogance in programming and IT. Saturday night live used to have "The IT Guy" who was a rude, arrogant support engineer.

I write it off a lot of times as social awkwardness - which sometimes comes off as rudeness.

Oh, yeah, I've definitely worked with those types before. I still have love for most of them though because of the intelligent, quirky side. I read the OP comment as the wall street types invading the industry, but I guess I shouldn't make that assumption.

"This CEO said the Valley used to be a place of "quirky people" but was now filled with "arrogant" people"

Right on. I remember being in Noisebridge, just after moving to the Bay Area, basically being snubbed and bullied by a poster child for "The Nerd-Jock Convergence." And that isn't even the worst story I can tell.

I've run into as many delusional, arrogant people on coke here in the Bay Area as I did going to an Ivy League school in the 80's. That's not an exaggeration, sadly.

I was a student in Berkeley in 1990's. Soon after Netscape's successful IPO, I distinctively remember a CS student commenting on a change in the make up of students (mainly business school types) hacking away in the CS lab.

You can easily tell apart CS majors and business school types.

1. Comments about X place changing always fail to mention the observer of said changes may have changed. It's easy to conflate the personal loss of youth or time with some "other" loss or change "out there."

2. Or the idea of "weirdo" itself has changed in a way not recognizable to aforementioned observer. Namely, "weirdo" may not be an ostentatious display as it was in the 90s but something entirely different...

You're likely hanging out with "the wrong people". In other words, you probably have existing relationships and connections with people that have grown in their douche-dom as SF has. There's still a lot of cool, quirky, and non-money focused people here.

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