Intrigued by the captivating image of accomplished professionals thriving in iconic hubs like San Francisco, contributing to groundbreaking developments. Curious to explore the accuracy of this perception regarding America’s economic and technological prowess. What is feels like to be there to live a life for this ?
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It depends. I don’t live in San Fran but that is the stereotype(albeit it’s also known in this country as being the city that best depicts California’s massive problem with cost of living that is a major part of why it’s losing people.) However, outside of the coasts, especially areas like Silicon Valley, it can be very different. For instance, here in Flyover Country, it is very rural, very spread out, and very working class. So in short, the coasts have a stereotype as being fairly elitist(for lack of a better term) tech hubs filled with dreamers, whereas the Heartland has a reputation as being more salt of the Earth and having more conservative values of God, family, and country.
I mean yes, thats true. For those people. There certainly are many innovators, researchers and creators in all sectors, tech, medical, military etc. And they are mostly (not always, depends on the area of expertise), very rich. While the US does create and innovate breakthroughs and new tech its not the majority of people. I doubt its the majority of people in San Fran even.
Most people are just living their lives.
A small group of very talented and imaginative people do get to live that life but most people in America live and work ordinary lives/jobs. A senior software engineer might make anywhere from 140,000 to 250,000 a year at most places, and if you get hired by Google or Facebook that might even be 500,000.
I live in Seattle and work for a major tech company. Tbh, it’s mind boggling how much money these ppl have. Feels very disjointing when so much of the country is struggling with cost of living right now
America is a country of extremes. Everything here is extreme. From the weather to the wealth division. We have everything all at once.
Most people are in the middle of all of those extremes if that makes sense
New York City is a perfect example. Billionaires in high rise penthouses blocks away from homeless junkies shooting heroin in an alley. The city feels like something closer to India or Southeast Asia in the Summer with oppressive heat and humidity. In the Winter it feels more like Moscow with bitter cold and snow everywhere. And the ordinary people have to exist in the middle of that mess.
That’s kind of me. Part of my job is to research and gauge the effectiveness of AI at performing specific tasks. I’m on a research team, so I’m compiling and analyzing data to help illustrate the differences of these different softwares to my superiors.
America is the world’s leader when it comes to technology. This doesn’t mean that we are the only ones developing new technology, but it does mean that we tend to be the most open minded to these new technologies and their applications. It also means that in regards to my research – we don’t typically confine ourselves to only looking at American solutions to American problems. We try to find out what everyone is doing, gauge how effective that is, and whether or not that solution can be ported over to our situation.
Most people aren’t participating in groundbreaking research but America often is at or near the forefront of technological development.
The “accomplished professionals thriving in iconic hubs” bit gets really fucking old tbh. For every 25 year old millionaire, there are 100 homeless people on the street that they (or their parents) fucked over to get there. The coasts are incredibly eliteist hubs filled with people that are too self important to give you the time of day. Especially people from California.
Yes, it’s very real.
It’s really exciting that the US plays a disproportionate role in tech, and there are a lot of intellectually stimulating jobs for an engineer like me. But from the outside, those are just non-descript steel/glass office complexes. You get used to the idea that there’s exciting stuff being developed, because in the short term it doesn’t materially alter the aesthetics of the broader city you’re in overall
Every stereotype has a grain of truth in it, as long as you remember that everything has a downside.
Yo, we’re humans just trying to survive.
> accomplished professionals thriving in iconic hubs like San Francisco, contributing to groundbreaking developments
There are people like this, most of us are just normal folks trying to get through the week.
Yeah its real, but real work like that is a matter incremental steps but we’ve had a long time to get there. You can live it too if you able to contribute in those tech fields.
I’m a lifelong San Franciscan and I don’t think I know anyone who does any work I’d consider groundbreaking. I know a lot of people in tech, but there’s a lot of important work (as well as less important work) that’s not groundbreaking and I’d guess there are far more people working in areas like data security than there are people developing new and actually useful products. And of course, there are plenty of other fields and plenty of people even in cities people think are flashy who are not at all tied to those industries. We still have plenty of teachers and bus drivers and any other kind of professional that needs to exist in every city. You do meet a lot of tech people here, but they’re not the default or anything.
I mean. I’m from Pittsburgh and it happens relatively often enough. Supposedly someone there just built a rocket they’re sending into space?
People are people. They are not robots. Those professionals living in those iconic places are no exception.
They get divorces, they have mental breakdowns, they have family problems, they worry about money (San Francisco is expensive), they have to do their laundry and go grocery shopping and visit the dentist. They worry about their children and their elderly parents. Or finding a girlfriend. Or a million other things. They don’t walk on clouds. Work is one part of their life, but not all of it.
And lots of companies go bankrupt and lots of start-ups power down. There is no guarantee of success in the tech business, for companies or people. You might be on top of the world and then out of a job. You have to be flexible.
You will find innovative things in most large cities in the US. That’s a minority of people in any city, though.
With housing the way it is in the bay area (and really all over right now), San Francisco people in particular are absolutely NOT thriving. They may be innovating, but they’re not always seeing rewards proprtionate to what they’re doing, especially in the monetary sense.
Don’t look at L.A.
I work for a major consulting firm (MBB) so I can speak to this from experience.
Growth happens unevenly. Most startups fail. Groundbreaking developments do happen and most come from people who work their asses off, but there’s a heaping dose of luck/timing in the mix. Innovation does tend to occur in cities because that’s where people live. But it’s not like NYC and SF have a monopoly on innovation. Plenty of groundbreaking stuff happens in Chicago, Denver, and even Dallas.
For every accomplished professional who thrives there are two who fail and two more who burn out and move into a position that requires less than 80 hours per week.
And for every five of the people mentioned above there are 95 just living their lives.
I live in San Francisco but don’t work in the tech industry. It does feel like everyone works in that industry though and you do see a lot of innovation here.
So, I think it’s kind of real. Of course it isn’t everyone’s reality.
One thing to keep in mind is that even if there are advanced tech developed that doesn’t mean it will get implemented. There was a story that a lot of ATMs still run on a very old version of Windows.
Also, not a lot of developments are “ground breaking” or as exciting as people thing. For most people, a job is a job.
In San Francisco, if you aren’t one of the small number of people who actually are accomplished professionals thriving and making groundbreaking developments, it can feel pretty shitty to be surrounded by so much wealth and not be able to save any of your own money because your rent and daily expenses are so high.
It’s pretty real in Boston especially if you work in Biotech/research like me and my friends do. It’s pretty cool to feel like you’re on the cutting edge of technology. I love my job, I really feel like i’m doing something important.
Imagine working in a building with some of the best and brightest people on the face of the planet. People who are working on the latest scientific problems, people doing basic research (meaning research into issues that have no immediate application, but are exploring the frontiers of science), people doing focused research into product development and trying to make the process work to bring a product from concept to market.
Yeah, you’re imagining it wrong.
It’s just like any other company. A bunch of people with their heads down, trying to figure this shit out, asking their buddies for help when they get stuck, using their networks to try to find someone else who can understand their problem.
I mean, sometimes you get to do cool stuff. Cool stuff being stuff that is different from your normal, day to day grind. But mostly, you do your job. And any job gets relatively mundane, as you settle into your rhythm and GSD. (In fact, that’s the really dangerous part about a lot of dangerous jobs… they become routine and you slip up out of boredom, you forget a step or a safety precaution.)
I see this quite a bit in Silicon Valley. The key is the interaction of universities, startups, and capital.
That image exists in America but it’s not an image of America because America is very diverse.
Silicon Valley can be a hub of innovation, technology, wealth, etc., but you go into the city of San Francisco and you can see rampant heroine addicts taking dumps on the sidewalks so frequently that I’m pretty sure someone made an app to track them.
Go further to Montana and you can be in a beautiful mountainous landscape with no civilization in sight.
America is the size of all Europe combined and more so of course it’s very diverse. Imagine the difference between England and Romania.
I live in San Francisco and run in those circles. I can give you my personal take:
**Tl;dr**
It feels a little unreal sometimes, both in good and bad ways, because the city encompasses such an extreme niche in society that it can feel like an alternate reality. It’s like the extreme best and extreme worst aspects of US society concentrated all in one tiny area, since the actual city is only 7 x 7 miles.
**The best:** the excitement of being part of something bigger, the enthusiasm, the diversity, the entrepreneurship, being on the cutting edge, the high salaries, the “young and beautiful” people, the fast life, the extremely progressive politics.
**The worst:** extreme wealth inequality, consumerism and decadence, insane housing and living costs, the fast life, the extremely progressive politics.
**Long-winded explanation:**
The tech, biotech, and finance jobs are so highly compensated (friends all making $150K-$400K base salary before total comp) and the rent is so high ($2K/month for a studio apartment, $3.5K/month for a 1-bed, and we were paying $5K+ for a modern 1-bedroom), that virtually everyone you meet is a successful professional in their 20s and 30s, unmarried and without children. The people who aren’t move out of the city.
…And most of them are living with roommates. Like, the product manager at Apple might be making $350K base and he’s living in a house with 3 other guy friends also working in tech for similar wages.
But that can also be fun! It’s like another decade of your university days, but this time with money!
You’re making new friends all the time. You’re going to a house party in that house. You’re going out to the bar and the clubs well into your 30s. You’re roadtripping to music festivals. You’re all pitching in to rent a big house and go skiing on the weekend and having a blast. You’re organizing group trips abroad with all your friends because everyone can afford the time and money. You meet up with your friends to work remote from cafes or from the park just like you did back in school. Everyone is single so everyone is going on online dates all the time and there’s relationship gossip to go around.
The high concentration of money and Type A personalities means mostly everyone is eating well, taking care of themselves, and staying fit. The obesity rate in San Francisco is only 15% vs 50-60% in other US cities.
Every event is a networking opportunity because everyone has a coveted position and people like to talk about the exciting stuff they’re doing. Sometimes you walk out of a party with a reference to a new high paying job. Sometimes people reveal company secrets (even though they’re not supposed to) so you find out about new tech coming down the pipeline.
At the same time, it’s weird excess. Lots of drugs. Decadent spending. For example, your drunk friend will drop $500 on a VIP table at the venue just because the line is long and they don’t want to wait to get in. Group botox parties but everyone is in their 20s. Way too much casual discussion of money and stocks (though I’ve had people argue that this is a good thing because more transparency means more fairness).
But also the culture of tech money is to still dress down in jeans and a t shirt and drive a modest car and all that. So, walking around the city, the unassuming person wearing Allbirds in the cafe line might actually be a multimillionaire or billionaire and you wouldn’t know.
The atmosphere of entrepreneurship is truly exciting. It’s common to quit your tech job to try to start your own company and you’re rooting for all your friends’ startups. Work breaks and failures are accepted and forgiven on your resume. There’s an optimism and energy in the city that’s infectious. A lot of emphasis on bucking old systems and “changing the way X is done forever.” So many cool ideas getting funded. At the same time, many dumb ones also getting too much funding and there’s a lot of stigma against criticism or naysaying if the idea is dumb.
The tech companies take care of their employees with huge campuses that include bussing services, food courts where everything is free, gyms and personal training, movie theaters, music studios, etc. I try to get guest pass access through my friends as a sort of field trip sometimes. They cover the cost of freezing your eggs if you’re a female employee. At the same time, the subtext is clearly “make your work the center of your entire life” and office politics and dumb company policies exist everywhere.
The city gets the shiny new technology first. So, we already have the Waymo self-driving car service set up and running for users to book around the city. We have biometric pay at the grocery stores. The modern apartment buildings come with Teslas in the building garage for residents to drive with an app. Stuff like that.
But then you also have tent cities, heroin zombies in the streets, and rampant property crime.
I personally love my life here, but would never raise children here. I don’t want my kids thinking this is normal.
The [distribution](https://fredblog.stlouisfed.org/2021/05/the-distribution-of-patents-across-u-s-states/) of patents by state is pretty fascinating. There are groundbreaking innovations happening all across the US, not just in the iconic hubs.
Detroit is an engineering powerhouse; it’s not really surprising but it’s not really an iconic hub in popular imagination compared to SF, Boston, etc.
Those people exist, but most people aren’t that.
Not really, you are California dreaming.
Lots of us go through that phase as well.
this is real for the people that are taking part in it.
They ain’t no skunkworks. They’ll probably ruin everything — revenge of the nerds – we actually haven’t seen anything yet!