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Silicon Valley wages have dropped for non-tech jobs

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Re: Silicon Valley wages have dropped for non-tech jobs

#141

Post by yjhoney »

rhacker wrote: post #134
yjhoney wrote: post #105

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Thanks for the healthy dose of skepticism. We moved away from Github (their closed source policy always seemed fishy to me) and started hosting our own gitlab instance instead. Some products our students are building: llip.io and c0d3.com. The students working on llip.io built an android/ios react-native app as well as a webapp. Everyone working on that project got a job, so there is no development on that anymore. T…

It's awesome what you're doing. Keep it up. I wanted to do something like that a long time ago but never had the willpower. Keep in mind that HN comments are always going to be discouraging. I find the comments to be 80% discouraging, stop what you're doing, and you suck compared to X. Read them, but don't let it kill your flame. Then double down on the constructive posts that make up the other 20%.

Thank you! Aside from the name calling in the comment, it does have some merits so I took out the paragraph about donation and my contributions. Love your positivity, thank you for your encouragement.

Re: Silicon Valley wages have dropped for non-tech jobs

#142

Post by voxl »

yjhoney wrote: post #34

I started a nonprofit 2 years ago (garagescript.org) that hires low income people in San Jose and their full time job is to learn how to code and teach new students. Our nonprofit started off with 20 students, most were making about 25k/year and had no coding experience. I paid each of them 2k / month to quit their jobs and focus on coding full time. From the original 20 students, 6 are left. The other 14 are all ful…

Are you operating at a loss? It's hard for me to see how this is financially stable. Obviously its a non-profit, but you still need to pull in money to maintain the non-profit.

I've heard of other ventures similar to this that would take a percentage of the students wages after getting them successfully hired, but even that seems to have fallen out of the news.

Re: Silicon Valley wages have dropped for non-tech jobs

#143

Post by clubm8 »

Aeolun wrote: post #28

Isn’t it ironic that the rates of poverty are increasing in possibly the wealthiest region in the world?

> Isn’t it ironic that the rates of poverty are increasing in possibly the wealthiest region in the world?

Not really - a natural side effect of corporations not paying their fair share in taxes, alongside employees who are compensated in ways (stock options) where large chunks of their salary are untaxable by local governments.

(It's my understanding it's much harder for local governments to tax stock options as capital gains go to feds, please correct me if I'm mistaken)

Re: Silicon Valley wages have dropped for non-tech jobs

#144

Post by davidgay »

gpm wrote: post #110
Barrin92 wrote: post #21

Earlier quoted context omitted.

the jobs that are mentioned in the article that are being hit the hardest are teachers, firefighters, caretakers and so forth. How many of those have been automated away? It seems that tech workers in the valley have found their own analog to blaming immigrants for downward wage pressure, their particular boogeyman seems to be the robots. No, the answer is much more trivial. As the article points out, the huge influx…

Firefighters - fire retardant buildings, sprinklers? Anecdotally I've heard that we need a lot less fire fighting these days because fires don't spread the same way anymore. I would be interested in seeing real data though. Caretakers - all those robotic vacuums that are starting to become ubiquitous. Certainly not a total replacement but it lowers demand for humans. But you don't need to automate a job to depress it…

> Anecdotally I've heard that we need a lot less fire fighting these days because fires don't spread the same way anymore.

Hmm. In California? No.

[Ok, the bit about "spread[ing] the same way" may be relevant, but not in the implied direction. And yes, the need for large numbers of firefighters in an emergency undoubtably makes planning/costs tricky.]

Re: Silicon Valley wages have dropped for non-tech jobs

#145

Post by jldugger »

throwawaythekey wrote: post #71
grandmczeb wrote: post #45

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> As the article points out, the huge influx of capital in the area is being returned only to the tech sector, who merrily spend it and drive up the cost of living. Most of the cost of living increase is due to bone-headed housing polices happily voted in by existing residents, the vast majority of which do not work in tech. I personally find it very sad that we've prioritized rewarding a tiny, vocal minority at the…

Are the policies bone headed? I'm not American so may not have this perfectly right but the Detroit of the past seems to be a good analogue to SV. Lots of well paid jobs in a single industry. When the eventual downturn occurs you don't want to be left with a ghost town.

Detroit is a ghost town, but the suburbs are fine. The story of Detroit is one of urban decay. Detroit's population has declined, but the metro area's population has been steadily growing. Detroit's downtown is not seeing a resurgence because there basically isn't one. It's a ton of 1950's low density housing stock.

And that housing stock overseen by a corrupt government that embezzled from the public, and a school board presided by a guy who seemingly can't write. It's a city whose politics are scarred by _multiple_ race riots.

In contrast, SV is a network of small suburban towns, all of which are happily constructing new office spaces but virtually no new housing. Rent prices are 3k USD a month, highest in the nation. An economic downturn shifts the local market from 'absurdly unaffordable' to 'merely very expensive'. And due to California's own political schemes, a permanent drop in housing prices would probably help local governments balance the books if it meant they could pay folks less while still taking in the same amount of tax revenues due to Prop 13.

Re: Silicon Valley wages have dropped for non-tech jobs

#146

Post by taneq »

tropdrop wrote: post #118
yjhoney wrote: post #34

I started a nonprofit 2 years ago (garagescript.org) that hires low income people in San Jose and their full time job is to learn how to code and teach new students. Our nonprofit started off with 20 students, most were making about 25k/year and had no coding experience. I paid each of them 2k / month to quit their jobs and focus on coding full time. From the original 20 students, 6 are left. The other 14 are all ful…

From article - > low and middle income jobs, such as teachers and firefighters or nannies and cooks, are key to the local economy. Someone else commented in this thread how all these jobs (meaning every non-tech, middle-class job) will begin to pay more once they're more in demand. The assumption is that programming/tech is highly paid because it's so in demand, and every other job isn't because vice versa. Let's jus…

> However, San Francisco is currently experiencing a teacher shortage of several years [1], so that vice versa I mentioned above is simply not true.

SF only has a shortage of teachers at the currently offered pay levels. If tech jobs paid the same as teaching, there'd be a "shortage" of tech workers too.

Re: Silicon Valley wages have dropped for non-tech jobs

#147

Post by jldugger »

humanrebar wrote: post #112
mlindner wrote: post #53

Silicon Valley has a multi-fold problem. 1. Housing is expensive because of the influx of people immigrating to the state from out of state and also out of country. (I'm one of them.) This causes a housing shortage which will naturally drive up price of housing. 2. The housing prices don't come down because California in general has very restrictive zoning laws, especially in the most expensive areas, that prevent bu…

> ...giving a path to legal immigration for illegal immigrants would help things. I would rather consider paying anyone below minimum wage a form of wage theft and prosecutable as a criminal offense. Dunno why embezzlement is a felony but breaking the law to underpay people is just grounds for a lawsuit.

It's difficult to prosecute considering the employee risks deportation if they report.

Re: Silicon Valley wages have dropped for non-tech jobs

#149

Post by kokokokoko »

CydeWeys wrote: post #128
rrcaptain wrote: post #100

Earlier quoted context omitted.

>My guess is that while your anecdote may infuriate you, the effect of investors who don’t rent out their homes is negligible on housing prices. No that's actually a large part of housing problems. Like a third of Manhattan real estate is empty. And Manhattan is already super dense but still has homeless people.

Please don't make up fake stats. I live in Manhattan and the idea that a full third of the real estate here is empty is laughable. Have you ever visited?? As my sibling comment points out, the real rate (as determined by actual data) is less than 5%.

I think you might be confusing rental property that is unrented vs property that is not in the market but not physically occupied.

"about 30 percent of the more than 5,000 apartments are routinely vacant for more than 10 months a year" [1]

[1] https://www.nytimes.com/2011/07/07/nyregion/more-apartments-...

Re: Silicon Valley wages have dropped for non-tech jobs

#150

Post by masonic »

grandmczeb wrote: post #45
Barrin92 wrote: post #21

Earlier quoted context omitted.

the jobs that are mentioned in the article that are being hit the hardest are teachers, firefighters, caretakers and so forth. How many of those have been automated away? It seems that tech workers in the valley have found their own analog to blaming immigrants for downward wage pressure, their particular boogeyman seems to be the robots. No, the answer is much more trivial. As the article points out, the huge influx…

> As the article points out, the huge influx of capital in the area is being returned only to the tech sector, who merrily spend it and drive up the cost of living. Most of the cost of living increase is due to bone-headed housing polices happily voted in by existing residents, the vast majority of which do not work in tech. I personally find it very sad that we've prioritized rewarding a tiny, vocal minority at the…

  bone-headed housing polices happily voted in by existing residents
"Residents" have no such authority.

Cities and counties don't even have an initiative or referendum power open to residents, generally.

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