The Graver Threat of the Growing Tech Backlash • Hacker News Board

Re: The Graver Threat of the Growing Tech Backlash

#51

Post by drhayes9 » Fri, Jan 03, 2014, 7:43 PM UTC

LanceH wrote: post #47

drhayes9 wrote: post #13

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I don't see the big government argument here. If the residents of San Francisco are voting to keep the city a certain way, how does that align with traditional "big government" narratives of over-regulation, bloated spending, etc? You could say the residents of SF are using city regulations a certain way, but that doesn't imply big government to me.

Government dictating what may and may not be done with private property. Not in the spending sense as it is normally used, but definitely in the invasive sense.

I think it's awfully reductionist to blame the "government" and stop there. It simplifies a lot of what is really going on and threatens to become a thought-terminating cliche; "Well, that's big government for you."

This is the democratic reaction of a lot of city residents (many of whom are blue collar) to the new economic realities within their hometown. That leads to many more paths of resolution than just saying "big government".

In other words, government isn't the problem here. The SF housing crisis, the coming class war, the inequities of late-era capitalism -- these are the real problems.

Re: The Graver Threat of the Growing Tech Backlash

#52

Post by michaelochurch » Fri, Jan 03, 2014, 7:46 PM UTC

bananacurve wrote: post #2

Starting off by citing the thoroughly debunked Google bus incident is not going to help your credibility but no one probably even read the article anyway.

The only part that I'm aware of being fake is the entitled Google employee (who was not a Google employee, but a union activist posting as an entitled tech worker).

That was a terrible play. It cost the good guys a lot of credibility and anyone with half a brain would realize that people would find out almost immediately that he wasn't a Googler.

Re: The Graver Threat of the Growing Tech Backlash

#53

Post by nikoio » Fri, Jan 03, 2014, 7:46 PM UTC

Is it the browser I am using, or is recode not thinking about smaller sized screens?

opera 12.16 on Linux

http://imgur.com/dK0et3M

Re: The Graver Threat of the Growing Tech Backlash

#54

Post by csense » Fri, Jan 03, 2014, 7:50 PM UTC

You would think the tech industry would be more open to people working remotely. This problem is caused by insisting that everybody you hire be local, no matter how much it inflates salary requirements due to the SF housing market.

Re: The Graver Threat of the Growing Tech Backlash

#55

Post by michaelochurch » Fri, Jan 03, 2014, 7:52 PM UTC

api wrote: post #34

On a side note... I find it kind of amazing how pollyanna many techies' view is of their own industry. The fact is that the tech industry is often surprisingly sleazy and includes quite a few very shady characters. Some of the sketchiest people I've ever met have been businesspeople involved in tech, and when I was in college I had friends who were into drug trafficking and thus had a little bit of indirect contact w…

Many tech businessmen aren't nerds. They're in the game to take advantage of nerds' poor social skills, inability to organize or negotiate for their own interests, and willingness to overwork themselves due to a lack of long-term, strategic thinking.

Also, tech has the Damaso Effect. The best of our world answer to the worst of theirs, because we've been colonized by the MBA culture, and most colonial soldiers and officers are people who failed in their own countries. The good businessmen stay in New York and start hedge funds. The leftovers in their set are the ones who end up in VC or as VC-funded founders-- and they're bitter about it, too.

Much of the tension in tech comes from the fact that tech's best end up, due to the extreme power of the VCs and moneymen, answering to the rejects of the business world-- the ones who weren't able to get themselves into hedge funds.

Re: The Graver Threat of the Growing Tech Backlash

#56

Post by elwin » Fri, Jan 03, 2014, 7:56 PM UTC

gaius wrote: post #20

If person A calls person B a "reactionary", then that only really tells you something about person A.

The label stood out to me too. I can't remember seeing it seriously applied to anyone in any writing more recent than the 1950's.

Re: The Graver Threat of the Growing Tech Backlash

#57

Post by AnimalMuppet » Fri, Jan 03, 2014, 7:59 PM UTC

kevingadd wrote: post #32

apsec112 wrote: post #29

Earlier quoted context omitted.

If, tomorrow, Google bought Caltrain and started running it competently (unlike the current clowns), I'd throw a party to celebrate. But I'm sure the anti-Google-bus crowd would condemn that too. It would be 'corporatizing our cherished community institutions' or something.

I don't think anyone could decry better management of Caltrain with a straight face. everyone hates how Caltrain is run.

Define "better".

Everyone hates how Caltrain is run. But if you change anything - any one thing - to make it better, you'll get a particular noisy group screaming "You can't change that!"

That's why Caltrain is so badly run. It has too many competing interests pulling at it, and it listens too much to too many of them. Fixing it is going to involve making people mad.

Disclaimer: I don't live in California. I don't actually know anything about Caltrain. I just have an idea of how government works, and why it goes bad.

Re: The Graver Threat of the Growing Tech Backlash

#58

Post by api » Fri, Jan 03, 2014, 8:05 PM UTC

michaelochurch wrote: post #55

api wrote: post #34

On a side note... I find it kind of amazing how pollyanna many techies' view is of their own industry. The fact is that the tech industry is often surprisingly sleazy and includes quite a few very shady characters. Some of the sketchiest people I've ever met have been businesspeople involved in tech, and when I was in college I had friends who were into drug trafficking and thus had a little bit of indirect contact w…

Many tech businessmen aren't nerds. They're in the game to take advantage of nerds' poor social skills, inability to organize or negotiate for their own interests, and willingness to overwork themselves due to a lack of long-term, strategic thinking. Also, tech has the Damaso Effect. The best of our world answer to the worst of theirs, because we've been colonized by the MBA culture, and most colonial soldiers and of…

"The best of our world answer to the worst of theirs, because we've been colonized by the MBA culture, and most colonial soldiers and officers are people who failed in their own countries."

Thank you. This is why I love Hacker News. :) That is remarkably clear and concise and from my experience absolutely true. In one of my worst examples of a total sleazenugget from high-tech, it is literally true. I know for a fact that the guy tried and failed to become a high-finance type and was indeed incredibly bitter about it, so he entered high-tech and tried to hustle nerds (like me) out of technologies he could (fail to) flip.

Re: The Graver Threat of the Growing Tech Backlash

#59

Post by ylou » Fri, Jan 03, 2014, 8:08 PM UTC

xacaxulu wrote: post #50

gum_ina_package wrote: post #7

Everyone sees the success, but no one sees what it took to get there. They don't see the intense, competitive interviews tech workers go through. They don't see the grueling comp sci/engineering coursework they do leading up to said interviews. And they definitely don't see the thousands of hours programmers put into teaching themselves new skills and technologies.

This is a great counterpoint. And as someone who has done incredibly difficult physical labor (former US Marine with multiple deployments) I can tell you that what has been much harder for me has been the CompSci courses I've taken, thousands of hours of pouring over API documentation, and countless late nights coding. Just because we aren't sweating in some warehouse somewhere doesn't mean that the work isn't incred…

I would like to believe that I'm paid as much as I am paid on merit alone. Perhaps based on some universally objective measure of work ethic and difficulty.

But that is a fantasy. We are paid according to how much the market has decided we are worth. We are rare and therefore, in demand. That is it. I could say that I got here on hard work alone, but that's not the whole truth. How I got here is a mixture of one part hard work, one part privilege, and one part fortune.

Re: The Graver Threat of the Growing Tech Backlash

#60

Post by AnimalMuppet » Fri, Jan 03, 2014, 8:09 PM UTC

xacaxulu wrote: post #50

gum_ina_package wrote: post #7

Everyone sees the success, but no one sees what it took to get there. They don't see the intense, competitive interviews tech workers go through. They don't see the grueling comp sci/engineering coursework they do leading up to said interviews. And they definitely don't see the thousands of hours programmers put into teaching themselves new skills and technologies.

This is a great counterpoint. And as someone who has done incredibly difficult physical labor (former US Marine with multiple deployments) I can tell you that what has been much harder for me has been the CompSci courses I've taken, thousands of hours of pouring over API documentation, and countless late nights coding. Just because we aren't sweating in some warehouse somewhere doesn't mean that the work isn't incred…

I sometimes describe what I did during a particular day as "trying to shove my brain through a concrete wall". (Usually applied to debugging, where the "concrete wall" is the reasons why what's happening is impossible. The trick is to find where the crack is in the concrete wall,..)