OP — I’m not that privy to the details of what in the world was running on that MacBook Air, but I’m 100% sure it wasn’t “the production servers for Uber eats Canada.” It was some kind of hack doing some kind of thing on a recurring basis to make sure the service continued. These things were often hacked together by engineers, and sometimes ops people, in the middle of outages, as a stop gap.
Not that I condone this sort of thing, but folks who do need to do it should know about caffeine [0] which allows a Mac to disable it's lid switch and keep running with the lid closed.
yep definitely pulled this move before. Probably on a laptop because it is the only thing that has permissions to do whatever insanely janky thing it’s doing.
Author of the post here — I agree that the "how" might be what's missing the most. The point I'm trying to make with the post is really more of a "what" question. I sometimes talk to entrepreneurs who want to outsource their distribution through some creative channels. I'm arguing that one should fight as hard as they can to keep owning that relationship with the end customer, and that this may indeed be close to the only thing that matters in the whole chain.
That also explains why startups that have "just" a bunch of users, and no revenue, are still able to raise at massive valuations. Sure the proximate cause is that they'll be able to monetize that attention at some point — but the deeper insight is that attention is inherently valuable, because it's upstream of everything. Every transaction starts with a person paying attention to something.
Yes I've noticed this trend as well. Other examples of companies moving from the Bay Area include Expensify (Pittsburgh) and Indinero (Pittsburgh too I think, and the Philippines).
I think that's tragic, as there are strong network effects in ecosystems like Silicon Valley — everyone would benefit from all the talent and capital being in the same place! Studies show that cities get more productive, creative and ecological as they get larger.
That said, even with that trend going on, I still think Silicon Valley will remain by far the #1 tech ecosystem in the US 20 years from now. It just has too strong of a tail wind at this point (the network effects I mentioned above). People have been predicting its demise for about 30 years now. Maybe this time is different, but so far it's always done well for itself.
This kind of comment is exactly what we're referring to. I'm sorry to be blunt, but it's so false that I wonder if it's a parody. SF's government is one of the most left wing of the entire country. Taxes are very high, the economy is extremely regulated (getting a building permit can easily take 6-10 years) and there's a ton of public aid.
In case anyone is wondering SF county (& many of the counties around it) pay 16.2% of their income in taxes putting them in the top 20 of the country [1]. SF/Oakland have some of the longest waiting for permits for residential at 10.2 months on average [2]
I can't seem to find any good sources on exactly how much public aid is spent.
Because I was wondering, the SF MSA ranked 25th out of ~1k in terms of worst income inequality [3]
All of these data points come from different sources and from different years.
Exactly. Travel especially seems much cheaper on Bay Area salaries! I know some people who moved to India, and told me that they'd actually be "richer" once accounting for cost of living. Except they can't leave now, every trip abroad is months of salary.
I hate SV politics too. The upside is: the kind of conversations you can have behind closed doors is very different from what you hear on the public place :)
I mean, arguably people make their choices because they assume they're the best given their conditions. It's not like it was totally random. Isn't it worth sharing the advice with people in similar conditions?
> sharing the advice with people in similar conditions
this piece doesn't do that, since it doesn't analyse what the author's conditions are prior to moving to SF. The reader is not armed with any useful means of deciding whether the author's conditions match their own.
It's also full of sweeping generalizations presented as fact.
> If you’re in tech, you need to move to San Francisco.
that's a sweeping generalization presented as fact, without a hint of irony, suggesting that if you're in tech and you -don't- move to SF ... then, what? You've chosen poorly. You'll regret it. You'll be sad. You'll hate your life.
Hilariously, the author cites Amazon as one of the companies that are in SF, but Amazon is from Seattle.
It says "the coolest companies" under the assumption that the reader shares the author's values. It says this so plainly that it suggests that the author is not even aware that other people could have different values from their own.
> All the coolest companies ... Facebook, Salesforce, Uber
I don't think Uber is a cool company. I think Uber is an evil company that is actively doing harm to society. There is no amount of money that Uber could pay me to work there, because I think that they're unethical. Salesforce ... cool? From my perspective, Salesforce is one of the least cool things that humanity has ever produced.
> A pattern I’ve noticed is that newcomers here tend to fall in love with the city at first sight.
yeah I hate SF, and only go there begrudgingly for work. I would never elect to move there. I know many people in the industry that feel similarly.
but of everything here, this is what I find the most damaging:
> 6 years later, as I predicted, none of them have come, and their roots have gotten deeper. They built companies or careers, took mortgages, got married…
the suggestion here is that people who decided to live a whole life have somehow chosen incorrectly. I would be shocked by the arrogance, but the arrogance of tech industry zealots has long since ceased to be shocking.
I agree, it feels like it's written by someone that has very little experience (professionally and in life in general). One thing experience gives you is perspective. And I actually like living and working in the SF Bay Area.
I've noticed that as well. The problem is Glassdoor very rarely actually includes stocks (though they say they do ¯\_(ツ)_/¯). All my friends making $400k+ make more than 50% of that in stocks.
As individuals, we look at the world through a microscope, so all personal experience is anecdotal. But these $400k+ earning SEs are a double-digit percent of the engineers I know with 6+ years of experience (N > 10).
Can you elaborate more on "make more than 50% of that in stocks"?
It looks like GOOG is up about 120 points compared to this time last year. Is that $200k / year just from projected stock growth / dividends / etc? Do employees in this situation get issued $200k worth of stock every year? Or is it done via options? Is it a case of stocks vesting over time?
I find all this fascinating because it's so different from my experience. I work for a software company in the Philadelphia suburbs, and I have about 15 years of experience (all over the place - C#, Java, some C++, JS, etc.). When I compare myself to my local peers, I feel like I'm a pretty decent developer.
$200k+ / year total compensation seems absolutely massive to me, even factoring cost-of-living adjustments. Like in the realm of "too good to be true" or "results may vary". But now I'm wondering...
(OP)
Yeah maybe I should have made my position more explicit regarding these downsides. I think they're real and annoying; but all cities have their downsides (eg Paris is gloomy all the time and people are insanely grumpy), and that getting a 100-200% salary increase is worth suffering the dirty streets and dysfunctional public infrastructure.
Funny that you're being downvoted. These issues are very real in many parts of the country(other cities have drug problems, expensive housing, homelessness, traffic) and yet SF bears the brunt of these criticisms. Anyway - I agree - I don't live in SF but it is a pretty awesome city and I have loved every moment I have spent there.
It's just the center of attention, I guess. It's almost as if people expect SF to not have the realities of city life? I'm all for progress and solving problems though - don't get me wrong....
> These issues are very real in many parts of the country(other cities have drug problems, expensive housing, homelessness, traffic) and yet SF bears the brunt of these criticisms.
Most of my "metro" experience comes from the midwest (Chicago, Minneapolis/St Paul, Kansas City) and maybe it doesn't count for much, but moving to the Bay Area was like taking those city-living annoyances and putting them on steroids. I can completely understand why SF takes the brunt of the criticisms.
A bit off topic, but I lived in Kansas City for a couple years. I heard gunshots almost every night. There were shootings, stabbings on an almost monthly basis down in Westport. The library branch my wife worked at had a bullet go through the window while she was working there. I saw a dead body on 71 south headed down to my Cerner office as a result of a roving gun battle on the highway. Not to mention the weather.
While the issues may have been hidden from a lot of people living and working outside of KC proper and shielded from the eastside...KC has an insane amount of problems esp wrt gun violence and segregation. Now I have never had the chance to live in San Fransisco, but I would've jumped at the chance to leave KC for SF...and I'm the kind of person who would always choose to deal with midtown KC's issues than to move to the 'burbs.
Comically enough, Kansas City shows up on this list twice due to the state boundary. Anyway - most of these cities are back east. I would take being harassed by a couple hobos, tents, and the occasional human turd over sky-high homicide rates any day - though from what I gather Oakland compares to midwestern cities in this regard.
I suppose I wasn't lumping crime into the "annoyances" category, but yeah I heard gunshots fairly regularly in KC too. I wasn't living out in OP (not to start a JoCo flame war lol).
I'm outside SF now (down in San Jose). I still hear gunshots from time to time, but the crime rate (both violent and non-violent) is way lower than it was back in KC.
