Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

San Francisco Bubble

blog.larrold.com

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

201–210 of 393 posts

Re: San Francisco Bubble

#201

Post by wahsd »

mbesto wrote: post #62

This is why the free market is so great. 1. Everything too expensive? Good, don't live here, eventually enough people will leave to drive all of the costs back to other market norms. 2. Dumb startups? Good, they will fail, people won't be able to afford to live here and they'll leave. 3. People are spoiled? Uber is cheaper and more convenient in some cases than taking the local transportation. When people stop taking…

If only that were the case. Especially in the internet age, one would expect that you could work in some far off place where you can get a mansion on a huge piece of land and have a drive jusr for the amount you pay in rent in SF, yet for some reason (it's free money bubble, stupid) people, i.e., kids that drank the Tech Crunch Kool-Aid, all cram into tiny little apartments to do useless shit. Ultimately the missing element from the market is rational actors.

Re: San Francisco Bubble

#202

Post by YuriNiyazov »

swalsh wrote: post #176
pyrrhotech wrote: post #130

Can we stop the whole "engineers make a lot of money" spiel? Most engineers make between 120 - 160k in SF, where the median household income is 104k. They don't make more than product managers, project managers or even many BART operators. See http://www.mercurynews.com/salaries/bay-area if you don't believe me. Sure, they make a bit more than average, but if that's the standard of "a lot of money", you have a totall…

I think a lot of engineers make more money then the value they provide. Last year I worked for 3 different places. I worked at one startup, and one large company on a new product in a new market. Both products were purely speculative plays They did make money, but not enough to support the staff. My pay was not based on how much value I provided, but how much value I could have provided if the products took off (they…

Your pay was based on how much value you provided plus a risk premium for working on something highly speculative that would cause you to work at 3 different places in a year and take a hit on your résumé.

You have to understand risk in order to understand that you were not overpaid.

Re: San Francisco Bubble

#203

Post by mempko »

mbesto wrote: post #62

This is why the free market is so great. 1. Everything too expensive? Good, don't live here, eventually enough people will leave to drive all of the costs back to other market norms. 2. Dumb startups? Good, they will fail, people won't be able to afford to live here and they'll leave. 3. People are spoiled? Uber is cheaper and more convenient in some cases than taking the local transportation. When people stop taking…

Your examples are why the market is seriously flawed here.

Why does it take so long for the market to correct and why does the market allow such huge variance from normal?

I think the answer is obvious, people get acclimated to their environment very quickly and lose the ability to see systemic problems.

Therefore it seems the market will tend towards local minimum. Similar to how evolution works. It doesn't handle gross changes without a lot of pain.

Re: San Francisco Bubble

#204

Post by pc86 »

mbesto wrote: post #62

This is why the free market is so great. 1. Everything too expensive? Good, don't live here, eventually enough people will leave to drive all of the costs back to other market norms. 2. Dumb startups? Good, they will fail, people won't be able to afford to live here and they'll leave. 3. People are spoiled? Uber is cheaper and more convenient in some cases than taking the local transportation. When people stop taking…

Disclaimer: I don't live in SF and never would

> When people stop taking public transportation because it's fundamentally broken (ps - it's awful in SF) then it will force government organizations to re-think their planning.

I think what is much more likely is that the government will simply raise taxes to cover the shortfall and let the public transit die.

Re: San Francisco Bubble

#205

Post by AndrewUnmuted »

josh2600 wrote: post #76
mbesto wrote: post #62

This is why the free market is so great. 1. Everything too expensive? Good, don't live here, eventually enough people will leave to drive all of the costs back to other market norms. 2. Dumb startups? Good, they will fail, people won't be able to afford to live here and they'll leave. 3. People are spoiled? Uber is cheaper and more convenient in some cases than taking the local transportation. When people stop taking…

Part of the fallacy of this is the implication that you need "good" engineers for most startups. I think, frankly, that many startups need a website with a google form + some excel sheets to get started and if the thing takes off they can hire someone who can use google to bang on stackoverflow. Very few things require genuinely novel pieces of code to work. Yes, lots of value can be captured using code, but you coul…

An excellent point. In fact, it is stated often that ZeroCater - a YC graduate - began as an Excel spreadsheet. (http://thehustle.co/stories/zerocater/)

Re: San Francisco Bubble

#206

Post by azinman2 »

nawitus wrote: post #197
josh2600 wrote: post #76

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Part of the fallacy of this is the implication that you need "good" engineers for most startups. I think, frankly, that many startups need a website with a google form + some excel sheets to get started and if the thing takes off they can hire someone who can use google to bang on stackoverflow. Very few things require genuinely novel pieces of code to work. Yes, lots of value can be captured using code, but you coul…

>I think, frankly, that many startups need a website with a google form + some excel sheets to get started and if the thing takes off they can hire someone who can use google to bang on stackoverflow. I agree, but this is mostly true because there's so much low-hanging fruit out there. If you look at the current successful startups like Uber and Airbnb, they're really trivial applications. That doesn't mean they can'…

If they were trivial then they'd have been eaten up by competitor now.

Re: San Francisco Bubble

#207

Post by ionforce »

IndianAstronaut wrote: post #174
josh2600 wrote: post #76

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Part of the fallacy of this is the implication that you need "good" engineers for most startups. I think, frankly, that many startups need a website with a google form + some excel sheets to get started and if the thing takes off they can hire someone who can use google to bang on stackoverflow. Very few things require genuinely novel pieces of code to work. Yes, lots of value can be captured using code, but you coul…

>Djikstra said "Beware premature optimization" and that's quite true. This is why a product I was working on almost got killed. The senior engineer working on it wanted perfection before delivery. The project was already one year overdue. He suddenly came in one day and rushed me to finish up something and he wrapped up a couple things and we launched at the end of the week. Found out that the project was going to be…

How does a guy like that become senior? As a senior one should know that there is a pragmatic balance lost in trying to aim for perfection.

Re: San Francisco Bubble

#208

Post by bduerst »

mbesto wrote: post #62

This is why the free market is so great. 1. Everything too expensive? Good, don't live here, eventually enough people will leave to drive all of the costs back to other market norms. 2. Dumb startups? Good, they will fail, people won't be able to afford to live here and they'll leave. 3. People are spoiled? Uber is cheaper and more convenient in some cases than taking the local transportation. When people stop taking…

What about the people who have already lived there, who aren't on engineering salaries and work service positions?

I think it's fun to be flippant, but there still certain demographics that are being displaced and negatively impacted by the bubble.

Re: San Francisco Bubble

#209

Post by yarou »

mattmanser wrote: post #178
gedy wrote: post #97

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Hey, you know that the vast majority of businesses are not very friendly to remote work, and moving away from these areas frequently means a pay cut or sometimes inability to find work? I'm not defending this at all, as I think it's stupid, but they are not "rich". They are frankly just less screwed than other middle class folks.

The median household income in the US is $51,939 (2013). You seriously think having double or probably triple from just one salary isn't rich? And where exactly are all your caterers and cleaners and gardeners and nannies and baristas and tavern workers and shop people living and buying their food with their minimum wage in the bay area? Obviously they aren't remote working. Perspective is a bitch.

>You seriously think having double or probably triple from just one salary isn't rich?

First of all, cost of living varies widely from locality to locality. Making 90k a year in middle of nowhere Idaho or some other piece of flyover country is totally different than making 150k in an urban area like NYC or SF.

Saying: "welp, it's your fault your cost of living is so high, you should move 2 hours away to Sacramento, stupid" is not only incredibly naive, but borders on a level of ignorance that I haven't seen in quite some time.

Re: San Francisco Bubble

#210

Post by wesleyfsmith »

brianwawok wrote: post #140
gravity13 wrote: post #39

Re: There cannot be these many quality engineers. I've seen grads come out of boot camps that are better programmers than people who have been programming for years. They might lack the knowledge, but they've got good sense and hustle, and at the end of the day, I'd take that over a stubborn engineer who looks like they're gonna age into a Dilbert comic.

I mean, if I am developing an app for millions of users - I would hope there is at least 1 engineer on the team that understands O(n) vs O(n^2). If the app is for 10 users or for the other 75% of employees, may be less important...

I taught at a bootcamp for a while and always covered big O. It's pretty important for interviewing. Bootcamp kids know more CS than you might think...
Post reply on HN