Comment by thwest | Hacker News Reader

Comment by thwest | Hacker News Reader

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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.

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