I lived in a similar venue a couple of blocks away during my first month in SF, and the "social community" aspect gets old very quickly due to a lack of basic amenities. It was less of a house, and more of a warehouse with bunkbeds in it. As a further indicator of quality - on the day I moved out (to an actual house, with cheaper rent), the place was being fumigated for cockroaches.
The title here is a tad click-baity, but these places are somewhat exploitative indeed.
The current system is in dire need of reform. I was fortunate enough to get a visa to live/work there for a year, but now I remote work from London, and I strongly prefer it to living in the Bay Area. The immigration process was consistently unreliable and unpleasant. Would rather not have a lottery dictate my future plans, and as the article says, remote working is on the up - a lot of people I know who were in my position agree and are doing the same. American bureaucratic faff aside, the tech sector always finds a way!
It's interesting how a large majority of people, even those most technologically-inclined and most likely to be early adopters, just don't warm to the idea of a smartwatch.
Maybe it's the fact the hardware and software experience just isn't up to scratch, or in my personal case, maybe people just don't want that experience. It's not the awkward stigma of talking to or interacting with your watch in public, but it's the unnerving feeling of connectedness and intrusion.
I currently work as a contractor based in London for a company in SV, but I totally agree with what's said here in that it's a matter of differing viewpoints. There's an inherent stinginess here on the whole, a disparagingly utilitarian viewpoint that software engineers are just "IT guys" - technicians who maintain the digital plumbing. There was a lot of pressure coming out of university to go into finance.
But on the other hand - there is a lot of hot air and shaky foundations out in SV, a lot of money changing hands that is likely to dissipate when confidence is lost in the ecosystem. One could argue that while devs here are paid too little, devs there are paid too much - relatively speaking.
I would agree about Bristol (not that I disagree with the others, I just don't know them that well). I studied there and it is a good compromise between active industry and the laid-back West Country attitude. Working self-employed from London allows me to sidestep the rat-race to some extent however, whilst enjoying a great tech scene and good transport connections.
Author here. This is fascinating to read! I (naively) assumed that things were better across the board prior to any of the tech booms. I lived in SF and commuted to San Mateo which was a non-trivial trip (coming from the tiny UK) and the BART/Caltrain combination was horrendous for different reasons (Caltrain was unreliable, BART was dirty). I did notice that a lot of the Caltrains were old Japanese trains from the 80s. Also, my rent here in London isn't that much different to my rent in SF, but I'm told I got very, very lucky there. Thanks for reading!
I don't remember anything prior to the mid-70's but I have a distinct impression that cities everywhere in the western world were much dirtier and crime-ridden in the past (things began to improve around the 1980s, or Rudy Giuliani time).
That's certainly true of the US in general. The standard narrative is that it was driven by "white flight," which in turn reduced investments in urban infrastructure, etc. Like many narratives, there's some truth in it but it doesn't really account for the fact that at least some Western European cities were also dirtier and more crime-ridden than today.
Giuliani was elected mayor in 1993, which did line up pretty well with New York getting cleaned up a lot. However, this was a more general trend even if it didn't apply everywhere (e.g. Detroit).
The title here is a tad click-baity, but these places are somewhat exploitative indeed.