"Engineers are particularly spoiled. They can take an arbitrary sabbatical from work..." (on the about page) "...Currently a principal engineer at AppNexus on sabbatical..." ???
Ad hominem
San Francisco Bubble
91–100 of 393 posts
Re: San Francisco Bubble
#92I've tried to have this conversation with many people on that coast, and there was even a panel at TechCrunch about it.
"Do you make your startup people eat more ramen, or do you provide more funding?"
As costs keep going up, people STILL think they have to move to SF to get funding or find talent. Yet there is plenty of talent or ideas in other places but the money doesn't move, the dumb part is the VC dollar will go farther in other places.
So who's job is it to prompt the move? The idea makers or the money providers?
Re: San Francisco Bubble
#93I feel like the best reply to this is:
"Well, yeah. So?"
Re: San Francisco Bubble
#94Money has been close to free for years. As the interest rate ticks up everything will change. It's already starting to. More expensive borrowing, less leverage, and better places to put dollars than venture. The one thing I really agree with though is the funny thing that happens here with the word "engineer". If you can make a website you somehow qualify for the title software engineer. By Bay Area standards, I myse…
> I've never written anything that lives in a real production environment
You've never maintained a production app and you're getting offers as director of engineering?
Re: San Francisco Bubble
#95Earlier quoted context omitted.
Yup. It's still shockingly easy to find good beer at a reasonable price in the SFBA. Same for food if you know where to go. The only thing that's really hard to avoid spending way too much money on is housing.
> The only thing that's really hard to avoid spending way too much money on is housing. Live in a van down by the river, or a cargo truck in a Google parking lot.
TruckBNB
Next billion dollar startup
Re: San Francisco Bubble
#96In Austrian business cycle theory, this phenomenon is known as malinvestment, see https://wiki.mises.org/wiki/Malinvestment, there are some historical bubble examples there.
The general idea, as I understand it, is that if someone invests and makes a ton of money, then other investors come in trying to do something similar to make a lot of money too, only what they are investing in is no good. But all the money creates a temporary illusion of an economic boom, which is what has been happening in the S.F. Bay area for some time now.
I'm old enough to remember the .com bust quite well. At the time the "irrational exuberance" (as Greenspan/Shiller dubbed it) made perfect sense, and the ideas were fundamentally sound, the problem was that investors did not understand that it would take another 10-15 years to get to ubiquitous Internet, and the impatient ones got burned when the bubble burst.
Re: San Francisco Bubble
#97Earlier quoted context omitted.
Ignoring the hypocritical nature of this statement, I take offense in this generalization in particular. If you're an engineer with a family here in SV, you cannot take a sabbatical. In most cases you need to get a job in a week or the rent will drive you to bankruptcy.
Oh come on with the hyperbole, if you didn't spend so much money on a nice area and expensive stuff you could afford it easily. I don't get people who are so smart and yet simultaneously so stupid that they think spending $100,000 a year is normal. Wake up, you're rich, you're just too stupid to realize you could be living at a much cheaper level.
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.
Re: San Francisco Bubble
#98Kind of a weird swipe at bootcamps comparing them to devry. The top bootcamps produce junior engineers better than the average undergrad with more work experience (although in a different field such as mechanical engineering or accounting). Many have STEM degrees from places like Berkeley, Stanford, UMich, UW, UCLA, Harvard, etc. I'd prefer to have their weirdness to the vanilla CS undergrad anyday, and their unique…
The only guy I've ever worked with whom I knew to have trained at DeVry was a great sysadmin.
Re: San Francisco Bubble
#99Earlier quoted context omitted.
"There are thousands of dumb startups" This is a feature not a bug. The whole VC model the Bay Area thrives on is based on the premise of hitting on only a small percentage of successful startups and you never know what's going to be a hit. Many successful startups have pivoted out of "stupid" ideas. I'm sure at one point "Blogging 140 characters at a time" was considered a stupid idea.
Twitter is well funded. Whether it's a successful business depends on when you bought in.
If we're talking about the VC's who funded they made out just fine ;-)
Re: San Francisco Bubble
#100> Everything is too expensive. I’m from New York... I take issue with this one. It's entirely possible to live frugally while living IN San Francisco. I moved here about 7 months ago and expected it to be incredibly expensive but it hasn't been the case (beyond rent). The author mentions $15 crappy local IPAs but I've actually never found a beer for this price. There is no shortage of $7 craft beers you can buy at a…
$7 beer? Frugal? In Berlin a beer costs $1 from the shop and maybe $2-3 from a bar.