For Silicon Valley, the Hangover Begins

Certainly by metrics of the Silicon Valley PR machine that pays them, would greatly prefer to pay them less, to blame them for the housing crisis, and to use as a debate piece for advocating for infinite H1Bs (but certainly not green cards - those employees have rights).

But not by any real metric. Go walk around an open-office plan filled to the brim with programmers, then walk into a VC office with their mahogany desks and high ceilings and private offices. Check out a law office where you'll see similar things. Look at actual salary data. Lawyers make significantly more than engineers, despite the "shortage" of engineers and "surplus" of lawyers (since this always gets brought up - yes, elite Stanford programmers who work at Google make more than some podunk law grad, but that Stanford law grad still does better, and the average programmer is paid less than the average lawyer). Doctors are 9 out of the 10 highest paid positions in the country. Police, firefighters, and teachers get paid actual overtime with pensions that pay out almost their whole salary after they retire, and have infinitely more job security. On the other hand, tech workers seem to think uncompensated 24/7 on-call is a badge of honor, just like spending all your free time doing even more programming to keep up with the endless tech skill treadmill. So why exactly are tech workers on the top of the list to see fail, other than us taking the blame and devilization for the failure of SF residents to properly plan housing and economic growth for years and trying to preserve the "character of the city" over making practical decisions?

Tech is a great career and compared to many people in this country who have been totally fucked over, we have it great. But this trope that tech workers are so spoiled because they give us a ping-pong table and catered lunch while paying us less than many other white-collar professionals is overdone, so drop it.

And what come-uppance do we deserve? Because we have jobs building products people use and value, that we show up to every day, that makes us deserve some retribution? Because we reasonably point out that six figures in the Bay Area is nowhere near an extravagant lifestyle, which anyone who knows anything about the cost of living would agree with?

The biggest problem I see is too many engineers jump on this self-flaggelation train without thinking critically about it or how it hurts them.

The real reason people keep calling "bubble" is because they're unimaginative. It happened before, so it's easy to just say the same thing will happen without really thinking about it. And yes, they say "this time it's different" in every bubble, except in this "bubble" there is no real indication that there is a bubble, and all these market corrections and beatings tech companies take that are pointed to as the existence of a bubble actually prove the direct opposite, because in real bubbles it goes up really fast based on speculation and comes down really fast in a spectacular crash. Tech has been slowly but consistently growing for years and occasionally takes some corrections and downturns, which is like any other market and nothing like a real bubble.