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> I'm not sure I understand. > The whole article is just describing literally anyone in any industry.

Teachers. Surgeons. Physiotherapists. Soldiers. Artists. Grocers. Cleaners. Miners. Forestry. Farmers. Elder care. The people who drive your shuttle bus.

Most industries require contact with other humans, and implicate you in their happiness. In techland, we are already a step removed from our customers (because we create autonomous artifacts.) But beyond that, now we’re powered by overwhelming amounts of capital. And the whole point of that capital is to create vast power imbalances between you and the people you’re allegedly serving.

In a previous decade, computer programmers could have counted themselves as citizens. Connecting and empowering people. Maybe a lot us still are. But lately, a lot of what we’re doing is finding new ways to yank Jenga pieces out of society, in hopes that all the pieces will fall into our bosses’ laps.

> Most industries require contact with other humans, and don’t rely on overwhelming amounts of capital to try to create vast power imbalances between you and the people you’re allegedly serving.

I agree with the statement, but I'm not sure it squares with your list? Tech and banking aren't unique in offering the chance to sit alone in an office and turn early advantages into ludicrous excess.

Broadly, we're talking about jobs that have power-law payouts among their practitioners, require highly skilled (and hard to interchange) labor, and don't intrinsically punish jerks (meaning limited interaction with coworkers or customers). Not all of them make billions, but they get something exponential that encourages them to compete - fame or professional power or job security.

That's a lot of careers. Orchestral musicians fit, lawyers fit, surgeons fit in spades, artists and mathematicians and philosophers all fit.

Obviously tech and banking are not equivalent to those things - heart surgeons have never destroyed the economy. But I think it's a catastrophic mistake to try and understand why tech and banking cause these problems by acting like the professional demeanor is unique. That is at best a starting point, a way of acknowledging that if yanking pieces out of society is easy and rewarding it will happen. The question from there is "how do we stop that from happening?"

(I'm not sure how much we honestly disagree, I just think the distinction is important. That Jenga metaphor is fantastic.)

Something of an aide from the main thrust of your argument:

> Orchestral musicians fit

My friend who was in the Boston Pops disagrees - the pay was crap (he had to provide music lessons on the side to maintain a reasonable income), the pressure was humongous, and their off-hours practice to keep at the top of their game puts our own hobby programming efforts to shame. Like video games, all musicians want to perform in the big orchestras, creating a highly competitive supply glut.

I'm also fairly certain that most mathematicians and philosophers come nowhere near to our power distribution curve.

That leaves us in the company of bankers, lawyers, and surgeons. Not the highest prestige group of people to exist alongside. Especially since, while well off, we're making nowhere near their "Fuck You" levels of money.

From the responses here, I think I was unclear with the power law part.

I don't just mean "the pay distribution is exponential". I mean any system where the rewards of the work (as judged by the people doing it) accrue primarily to a small fraction of the workers. This isn't about the size of the payout, it's about a system where competition and potentially ruthlessness within the labor force have substantial benefits. (Contrasted with careers like factory labor where getting 'ahead' of coworkers doesn't have much to offer.)

So for orchestras, "all musicians want to perform in the big orchestras, creating a highly competitive supply glut" aligns nicely with what I mean, even if that supply keeps salaries down. Most talented musicians don't make it into a career, most career musicians teach in schools or play weddings or otherwise don't make it to the Pops. Video game design is another power-law return - most people don't get to lead teams, most team leads don't make hit games. The same for mathematicians - the payouts are largely status, tenure, and prestigious institutions, but they're still exponentially distributed.

A decent definition would be any profession where the stereotypical example and the prototypical example are completely out of sync. The prototypical truck driver is basically what we imagine them to be. The prototypical software engineer works on an inventory system for a non-tech company someplace outside the Valley, and has nothing much in common with the 'techie' stereotype.

Even in banking people go out onto the street at lunchtime. The whole campus thing is pretty unique to SF tech culture.

Bankers also ride the subway not private shuttle busses. It’s a stupid thing to focus on but optics matter.

I think the truly toxic thing is people not spending money in their communities. One of the things I pick up from anti-gentrification stories is that when new people move in, the existing shops lose customers. No-one goes to the corner store, they get food via an app or wait for a Whole Foods to open.

The (completely unintended) effect of this is that the existing community gets poorer, not richer, when rich people move in.

I think your analysis is great too. The power law advantages are what’s both wonderful and terrifying about this field.

Although surgeons aren’t really in the power-law game; at best they can do a handful of surgeries a week. But yes I chose that example specifically because many of them are tempermentally detached from people, get paid a lot, and are often workaholics. But we don’t see people revolting against surgeons.

Sorry, I was a bit unclear on power law - I was thinking about the career side, not just the outcomes.

So power-law for surgeons would be doing the hardest surgeries in the highest-stakes fields, heading up a clinic, ending up rich and famous. A great brain surgeon doesn't save vastly more lives than an average one, but people like Ben Carson and Sanjay Gupta get exponentially more fame and status.

I think we agree though - it's a great example of a field with similar social dynamics to programming, and a very different societal role.

>Most industries require contact with other humans, and implicate you in their happiness.

Most do, but many don't. Including some that were considered prestigious jobs (Wall Street, law firms, etc). A number of these jobs involved really boring grunt work with minimal contact with others.

> I'm not sure I understand. The whole article is just describing literally anyone in any industry.

The fact that you think that really underscores how much of a bubble you must live in. No, that's not any industry. Indeed, the only people who live like that in my mid-sized town are college students. College is cool, but it's kind of a half-way house for real-life, not something to be extended indefinitely like the tech firms do.

And isolating yourself from your fellow citizens in this way is a particularly bad idea when you're creating products that have outsized influence on our free time, relationships, health, and elections.

It is _any_ industry. San Francisco has a ridiculous problem where the city has become so tech-centric that your entire life will be tech even if you try and distance yourself from it. Your friends will all be in tech. People you meet on the street will be in tech. Your uber drivers will pitch you ideas. You'll overhear the next big ICO at every party you go to. Your life is changed by every small startup trying to remove any small inconvenience in your life. And this becomes one _humongous_ bubble within the city. So then you have this entire world that is just completely and entirely oblivious to anything outside of it.

If you travel to cities which are known for specific things, you'll often find these culture pits. SF is just a really special case. Its just the size of the city that exacerbates it so much there. Its tiny. Theres no room for growth. Anyone not in tech got pushed out. And now you have a culture silo.

I specifically moved away from San Francisco to Toronto to avoid this very problem. I'm still in tech. Theres no shame about it here at all. Hell, I get excited if I meet someone also in tech now. The city is so big and has so much space to sprawl and have startups anywhere that tech simply doesn't define anything here at all.

It doesn't have to do with the industry entirely. The tiny city is the problem IMO.

"All previous artistic beauty that was in SF is just gone now and replaced with tech kids"

What "artist beauty" are you talking about?

Some of the areas that "tech kids" took over were basically slums (like around the Tenderloin), or (much more frequently) industrial eyesores in SOMA. None of these had the least "artistic beauty" about them that I could discern.

Now opposite the rows of shuttered businesses around the Tenderloin and warehouses of SOMA there are some nice, new, open businesses, with employees that spend money on other local businesses, helping to revitalize the area.

Speaking of "artistc beauty", have you looked in to the lobbies of some of the office buildings on Market St around the Civic Center BART? Some of those have truly impressive, beautiful, and creative art displays inside. Some artists were hired to create those. Money that would not have been spent and artists who would not have been hired had the "tech kids" not come around.

Anything that was previously there or anything that might enrich the lives of those outside our bubble. As the infamous Dropbox soccer bros video[1] suggests, "we're part of the community" often means something more like "our money and presence entitle us to have our way here" than "we'd like to share in your way of life."

[1] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=awPVY1DcupE

I pay my taxes and abide by the law therefore, I'm a citizen </END>