You should be. If you enjoyed this article, you owe it to yourself to read Dan Lyons' Disrupted, which is basically this in book form and a little more funny, a little more biting, a little less forgiving. You should also be aware that Dan Lyons has been a staff writer on HBO's Silicon Valley for two seasons and it shows. The style of writing can trace a direct lineage to Douglas Coupland's Generation X: Tales from An Accelerated Culture of 1991: Which, really, is where the current crop of Silicon Valley proletariat comes from. Those of us who came of age during the first tech bubble were either well-placed, well-protected and ruthless or utterly annihilated by the washout. The annihilated never recovered; they're the guys that started OWS, they're the guys that write dystopian tech journalism, they're the ones that talk about radical homemaking and living with less. The well-placed and well-protected became VC founders and corporate flacks where they distribute their parents' money to their friends. One thing about this bubble vs. the last: at least my friends made money. I had friends at Loudeye making $180k a year. I knew a low-level programmer at HomeGrocer.com that made enough with his severance to buy a brownstone bunker in Oakland. This time 'round the market has been primed by the recession of '07 so everyone is willing to work for shit money plus stock options... which never vest and never will. You think Bernie Sanders was a force in '16. The socialist backlash in 2020 and 2024 are going to be fearsome. An entire generation of Americans is currently getting a tip-of-the-spear lesson in income inequality. I do not envy you.I'd sooner have died than admit that the most valuable thing I owned was a fairly extensive collection of German industrial music dance mix EP records stored for even further embarrassment under a box of crumbling Christmas tree ornaments in a Portland, Oregon basement. So I told him I owned nothing of any value.
I think it'll happen between election cycles. Trump and Hillary are both widely hated, and neither of them is going to do much good. The bubble is gonna pop, maybe accompanied by another major recession(maybe not directly in the US, but a bad enough recession in Europe will still cause major problems), and people are going to get mad. Already, most people know that the political system does nothing for us. It will just be more and more evident. The real question is, will it be France 1968 or Russia 1917(February, of course)?
The rush out of the coastal states is going to be a tsunami of people who have been saying 'fuck the flyover states' for a generation. Then they are going to realize that a huge tract of the nation where people can actually afford to live don't want a ton of SV and Brooklyn rejects. I remember reading people in Portland, OR whining about all the dan Californians moving north. The next migration is going to make that look like a holiday weekend.
Or currently: the people in Portland whining about the Californians moving north, the people in Seattle whining about the Californians moving north, the people in Tacoma whining about the Seattleites moving south and the Californians moving north, and the people in Eugene/Olympia/Spokane not really being affected...yet.
The first programming job I had I constantly had a pile of uncashed paychecks on my desk, and I wasn't the only one. Cool problems were way more interesting than money. The industry beats that out of you eventually, but I don't think the tech industry is going to have to worry about the peasants revolting for a long time. There are always more coming. And at least they're getting paid something, most industries where the work is an end in itself for a lot of workers have realized they don't even need to pay the new blood.
I wonder. The paychecks were yours. They were in your possession. They may have been neglected and they may not have been your prime motivator, but they were a concrete thing that formalized the pact between your time and their growth. They handed you the carrot. Whether or not you had a bite isn't the point. This new generation is being told tales of carrots.