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I have a theory that some of the anger at techies is driven by the fact that they are, in many cases and in popular imagination, fairly nerdy. People are used to looking down on these people, given America's school system and typical corporate makeup. Perhaps it even has evolutionary roots. And, by and large, nerdy kinda-liberal people are inclined to take it, agree, and supplicate.

Compare and contrast with the treatment of the financial industry in the Bay Area. Even on HN, taking shots at an obviously fraudulent financial system and the people in it will get you jumped all over ("they allocate capital efficiently!", etc, etc. et-tripe-cetera) while articles like this will elicit more balanced and self-aware commentary.

My theory is that this dynamic is more prevalent in the press and non-tech thought leaders, etc. not in the middle and lower classes.

The anger has nothing to do with "nerdiness". It's economic. Since tech is the one job sector that is not suffering, wouldn't it be nice for some of them to volunteer something to help the community? Seeing as they have some to spare and others have very little?

Possibly. But I try to reconcile that idea with the far worse behavior of the financial and elite public sectors, which are far bigger in GDP terms and in total wealth terms, and which elicit nowhere near the same hand-wriging...

So my theory is that, at some level, people in the press and thought-leader elite have internalized that the bankers/politicos "look right" when it comes to obnoxious wealth and behavior.

Why are engineers who make 100-150k expected to give back to society because we percieve them to be so lucky but millionaire and billionaire bank executives see no pressure for this at all? What is the obsession with the idea that people making low six figures are somehow the richest people with the most free time. Hell I don't make a whole lot over 100k and work 60 hours a week. Why am I the audience that is picked on while the bank executive heads out at 4 and never gives anything back? Its a bit insane to me really.

Ya. People seem to think that every Googler, Twit and Facebooker is a millionaire. A friend of mine works at Google. He lives a little more comfortably now than before he started there... but he's certainly not snorting coke off of hookers with $100 bills.

> xenophobic scapegoating of a group of socially awkward outsiders

I don't read Valleywag otherwise, but recently I followed a link to an article in which Sam Biddle ironically asks readers to call SV software engineers "Software Americans".

The goal of the article was to hint that comparing their hatred of "techies" to xenophobia was absurd — the whole if you have privilege you can't be a victim of prejudice etc.

* * *

Because I wasn't giving them ad impressions (NoScript), I took the liberty to skim some of their other articles.

I noticed that they really love to pick on the social awkwardness of the techies. Many implicit or explicit references to autism and Asperger's, suggested as the explanation for what they perceive to be the cultural insensitivity of tech workers.

A supplement: I was checking a Twitter account and, by following the permalinks to some tweets, saw these two tweets that I think are emblematic of this fucking-nerds attitude:

https://twitter.com/KuraFire/status/426393172302774272

https://twitter.com/_danilo/status/426495051875643392

I think newspapers and blogs are also fanning the flames. There were suggestions that this would happen before it did (economist), then the media began reporting rumor, then events started happening (albeit small) these were picked up by the national media and blogs.

This feels more like a game the media is playing with society, rather than a true reflection of how society feels about tech workers. This isn't news.

Bay Area Techies are easy to demonize because they willfully handwave away all the problems they cause. Get real: we are the foot soldiers of global capital. Investors from all over the world are looking to leverage the cachet of the Bay Area, and the real consequence is masses of evictions and neighborhoods being gutted to house more of us. Liberal myopia hides these consequences by focusing on individuals transacting with eachother. Treating techies as an economic class reveals the tensions. This is your "hard reality" of the real estate situation.

My advice is to realize and respect that we are using the dead labor of the globe to inflict our socially awkward outsideness upon those who would not have it. There is a real power imbalance between techie and non. We can either implement formal checks on this imbalance (e.g. shuttle buses become public transport), or we can ignorantly bumble along wielding Capital's power and push aside those we rely upon to make our neighborhoods vibrant and livable.

Seems like the anger you're directing at tech people would be better directed at VCs, who are actually doing the exploiting and getting huge returns while doing little to know work. The idea that people working 50-60 hours a week owe their community because they're well paid is completely ridiculous. Why not expect the same of other professions? Bankers are well paid and literally went out of their way to ruin the American economy yet our anger is with techies?

The bad behavior of techies isn't erased by the bad behavior of VCs. The bad behavior of VCs isn't erased by the bad behavior of Wall Street. The bad behavior of Wall Street isn't erased by genocidal and warmongering dictators. Let's not be so quick to shirk responsibility up the foodchain, when there are local immediate actions we can take to reduce our own bad behaviors.

(Of course yes, we should nationalize the abusive rentier FIRE industries, and use the incomes to fight inequality, but that's a relatively different topic).

The idea that people can work 50-60 hours a week to the benefit of some non-corporeal entity then sit on their ass the rest of the time is also a bit ridiculous. We should be active citizens in some manner, not labor commodities looping while(1) between office and apartment.

I agree, but my point is simply that these added expectations for engineers and not others makes no sense at all.

If your thesis is that what people really care about is expensive rent, then the first suggestion ('get tech CEOs to push for affordable housing') has at least the potential to actually fix the real problem.

If San Francisco didn't have such restrictive zoning, you could build more dense developments, and housing costs would come down. If you wanted to be extra nice, you could even have some set-asides for rent controlled units.

Which the people upset about rent also probably also wouldn't like -- what they want is the what the current rent gets you for lower prices (at least, relative to their own income), not denser packing with the resulting crowding and load on shared services for lower (relative) prices.

Really, what they mostly want is greater effective income.

> and housing costs would come down

I'm unaware of even a single case that shows shows evidence that a buildout alone has reduced housing costs. Every case I'm aware of where housing costs have fallen is at least partially due to falling demand, usually because of a recession.

Rattling off excuses for why "that will never work" and not even attempting will not solve anything either. Funny how design is all about problem solving until it forces people out of their comfort zone and challenges them to meet people who are not like them.

Sorry, right out of high school, I spent 3 years digging ditches, pouring concrete, and putting up drywall before getting into tech.

For me at least, this has nothing to do with "meeting people who are not like me". I have found the tech community to be very diverse and much more tolerant than my colleagues in the construction industry.

Is this a claim that your colleagues in construction are the same housing activists your OP is demonizing?

Indeed. Like the original author points out, NYC techies aren't the villain, Wall Street is!

And SF techies aren't the villain, real estate developers are!

Housing is expensive in SF because it's in short supply. You know who helps alleviate that short supply? Real estate developers!

Seems to me the villain here is anybody who votes for more rent control and tighter restrictions on new development.

Anil Dash said that everyone should do more, and the only reason NYC tech workers don't get as much flack as SFbay tech workers is because Wall Street is right next door to look so much worse. Essentially: the upper middle class doesn't understand why the lower middle class is angry at them for catering to every whim of billionaires? "Don't be mad at us, be mad at our boss. No wait, don't be mad at our boss, blame our boss's landlord."

I believe when you said "votes" you meant to say "lobbies" because otherwise you're saying the real villain is democracy?

> I believe when you said "votes" you meant to say "lobbies" because otherwise you're saying the real villain is democracy?

No, I really did mean it's the voters. In the case of SF (and Berkeley, and NYC), the problem is democracy. Voters are economically ignorant and tend to vote for laws which screw up the housing market, then they gripe about it having been screwed up. I'm not sure how to fix this, but more democracy certainly isn't the solution. The problem is that good government is in the economic sense a public good, so it gets undersupplied. People vote from their gut and do so to broadcast their affiliations - to show that they care - not so much to solve real problems in ways that might plausibly work.

I have occasionally thought about other systems that might work better. The fundamental problem is that we pass laws that sound like they might help solve a problem but we never actually go back to check if they did solve the problem, so over time the legal code becomes an impenetrable thicket of things people have tried that didn't work, but which inadvertently created a new constituency that doesn't want to get rid of them. I'd like to see us treat new laws the way we treat new drugs: Specify in advance what specific problem each law is trying to solve and how we'll know if the solution is helping - what metric will be measured. Then try the law out in some small region, see if it substantially helps, and only expand it further if it turns out it does. First, do no harm.

The true solution is to build more housing. However, no sane person who's dealt with San Francisco's red tape would suggest it.