In San Francisco now, I no longer feel like a useful, contributing member of The City’s social or cultural scene. Merely by virtue of being “a developer”, I feel like I’ve become Part Of the Problem.<\/p>\n
I sure as hell try not to be. I try to encourage the arts; I try to defend and promote nightlife and clubs; I try to encourage affordable<\/em> housing. I’ve lost track of how many times I’ve tried to explain to other laissez-faire, “the free market will fix everything!” types why just building “housing” (i.e., market-rate housing) in San Francisco right now means “building housing for millionaires and multi-millionaires”, housing that people making less than, say, $200,000 a year cannot possibly afford.<\/p>\n But when a dear, beloved friend tweets: “Had one of those little things happen today that upped my feeling of “threat level” and need to bug the F out of SF.”, I don’t just feel the need to respond with “Do you want to talk about it?” or “Is there anything I can do to help?”<\/p>\n I also feel the need to say: “I’m sorry.”<\/p>\n Not just in the sense of “I’m sorry to hear that a bad thing happened to you today,” but in the sense of “I feel like I’m personally partly to blame for this, and I am sorry about that.”<\/p>\n Because I’m a developer. I’m not part of startup culture, thank Goddess — I bailed out of that toxic mess of sexism, overwork, and self-delusion five years ago, and haven’t looked back. But I am still part of “high tech” culture, to some degree.<\/p>\n And despite my efforts to improve it, I’m sick and tired of being associated with it.<\/p>\n I’m not about to change careers, of course. For one, I have a dependent; I can’t just chuck everything and take months to retrain myself (in what, anyway?) and do a career-shift. And for two, I don’t want to cede the field to the kind of brosephs and entitleist assholes who are making “developer” a dirty word in places from San Francisco to Hamilton, Ontario<\/a>. Better that I stay and fight to make high-tech and software development be the forward-looking, inclusive, diverse kind of field I want it to be.<\/p>\n I just don’t feel like it’s working, right now.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":" In San Francisco now, I no longer feel like a useful, contributing member of The City’s social or cultural scene. Merely by virtue of being “a developer”, I feel like I’ve become Part Of the Problem. I sure as hell try not to be. I try to encourage the arts; I try to defend and promote […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[1],"tags":[75,96,21,57,153,154,88,30],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/kagan.mactane.org\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/599"}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/kagan.mactane.org\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/kagan.mactane.org\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/kagan.mactane.org\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/kagan.mactane.org\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=599"}],"version-history":[{"count":3,"href":"https:\/\/kagan.mactane.org\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/599\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":687,"href":"https:\/\/kagan.mactane.org\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/599\/revisions\/687"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/kagan.mactane.org\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=599"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/kagan.mactane.org\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=599"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/kagan.mactane.org\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=599"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}