San Francisco
I currently work out of Sacramento, remotely (I recently “celebrated” day 500 of working from home by working from home), but one morning I made the decision to visit my hometown. As I drove in I saw numerous political statements on signs; this was not originally intended to be a political page, but it is hard to separate the city from the politics. The San Francisco School Board came up in the news last year for its decision to replace merit-based admission to Lowell with a lottery system. They also had come up in the news for plans to rename “injustice-linked” schools, such as Abraham Lincoln and George Washington, though the plan was more or less dropped.
These kinds of political issues are COMPLICATED. Though I do not really understand the renaming one, I am familiar with Lowell’s admissions process. Critics of Lowell’s merit-based process, like one I found in this change.org page, argue that “Meritocracy is a myth when the playing field is fundamentally unequal due to historical and structural racism and classism. It is a gross fallacy that we can measure merit through GPAs and standardized tests, tools invented by segregationists and eugenicists.” One might counter that merit-based admission is a fair system, and that Lowell provided a public option for high-achieving students whose parents could not afford other options, but both sides have legitimate points.
Other political issues, if they can be called that, are a little easier to agree on. The average cost of rent is more than $3000…that’s really high, and maybe a valid reason teachers have a hard time living there. More than 25% of California’s K-12 students and nearly 40% of its low-income students lacked reliable internet access when schools were closed during the COVID-19 Pandemic (source). Also, the sight of homeless encampments just buildings away from sprawling tech centers presents a clear image of economic disparity.
We do not all agree on what the solution is, but at least we can all agree that there is a problem.
A Walk Down Memory Lane
When I interned at a tech company near the Embarcadero, as a technical writer (software came later, but that is another story), we volunteered for about three hours at Meals on Wheels. We were asked after the experience to talk about who we had interacted with, and how it made us feel. It would be kind of elitist to say that it was a bizarre experience because a few of us had actually grown up in the city, and had also volunteered at the local soup kitchen and food bank.
…but it was a bizarre experience.
(By the way, I am still curious if any of the other San Francisco interns attempted to complain about the high cost of rent when negotiating salary. Living with your parents is an excellent way to save on rent.)
On my first day back, I returned there with my girlfriend. We met my first-year college roommate. He was working as an EMT.
Success Stories in Tech
I read this article in Wired, but I think the title is a little click-baity: How the Startup Mentality Failed the Kids in San Francisco. The article discusses Willie Brown Middle School at length, but Willie Brown Middle School is no Theranos: The school is still running, the teachers are still teaching, and no one completely gave up on the project and pulled the plug when it became clear that the numbers were not good. You might say that I am missing the point of the article, which is that yes, a public school is not a startup, but I find this about as reductionist as branding Theranos as a failure solely because Silicon Valley mentality had no place in healthcare, which is not true and ignores the unscrupulous actions of its two primary leaders. Silicon Valley is capable of making healthy healthcare startups, and the idea of giving everyone access to a cheap blood panel instead of paying more than $1100 for a full screening without insurance is appealing.
Maybe not as appealing, but it still has its merit.
The main purpose of the trip was to see a high school friend, who had just moved to Oakland. He is a software engineer, but he didn’t feel the need to brag about it on Medium and refer to himself as a success story. He had a gorgeous apartment, but not one of the dozen or so high school friends who attended felt the need to take pictures and post about it on Instagram. One high school friend I had not seen in a while mentioned that he had quit social media, as social media does not represent genuine experience, but perhaps that it is a Facebook post for another day.
I thought about how:
- Even though this WAS a success story, reducing it to a nice picture or LinkedIn update would take away from all the work it took to get there or, alternatively, the passion
- I am still debating in my head whether the thing I missed so much in San Francisco was the technology, the open space, and the teams, or if it was the free arcade, the catered lunches, and the number of likes I received on social media for taking pictures of said arcade and/or lunches
- Whether you work in a gorgeous apartment or a spartan one, an open space full of decorations or a cubicle surrounded by ramen, you still have a job to do. Your job is to take the code, coddle it, whisper in its ear, and have patience with it even when it fails to do what you had asked it to do. Be kind to it, and it will respond in kind. Understand it, and it will reward you for not giving up. If you could find a way to perfectly translate human thought into computer code, you would allow everyone to become a coder, the problems of this world would go away, and everyone would have stable incomes and free kombucha for life…but for the time being, this is not reality and some of us still have to pay like $3.50 a bottle at Sprouts
Why did public school work out so well for us?
Evan’s response might be that it didn’t. He is a pretty cynical guy. Curt Corginia, on the other hand, is an optimist.
We had:
- A public school of extreme poverty. One of my parents complained that this term was misused, and maybe even a little offensive, but it was actually a term that our grant-writer (best librarian ever, bless her caring soul) was using correctly on the basis of what percentage of students qualified for free and reduced lunch. To be honest, the metric may have an issue, but I do not want to get into that here
- A supportive community of students who helped each other to succeed
- A collection of teachers, like my computer science one, who possessed not just industry knowledge but a gift for teaching and who bent over backwards to give us the highest quality education they could. Some of my high school teachers were just as good as my computer science one, but they did not teach the same subject
- Some amount of dedication
- Luck, of course, that we just so happened to be around the same age and collaborate around the same time
- Khan Academy
- Ocean Avenue, the most centralized food location in the area and a reminder that a good meal could get a person through anything. I was kind of disappointed when I found out the song “Ocean Avenue” is not about the one in San Francisco
Closing Thoughts
We spent a good deal of time downtown. We walked by the arrow, sat by the ferry, passed maybe one or two or 18 tech centers. We stayed in the Sunset, found a bakery on West Portal, and struggled a little bit with the BART cards (they only seem to kind of work sometimes). Muni has a new app you can purchase on a smart phone, instead of loading a ticket. To avoid close contact, though any city person might laugh at me for pointing this out, we scanned a QR code and food was ready almost immediately after we ordered. Parking was difficult for one of the people I met in Oakland, but he found out he would not have to return to his car because he could just pay for money from the roof, using his app.
I met someone who was attending college, a little late, after working as a coding instructor for a long time. Judging from the fact that he is a coding instructor, I can only imagine he possesses the skills, but needed the degree.
I talked to someone who was gravitating toward product management. I met someone who said he was starting to have fun with Leetcode. A software engineer there (who made the controversial statement that she is not really a software engineer because software engineers are not real engineers) joked that this was Stockholm Syndrome. Two controversial statements, then.
There are a million ways one might propose for helping the youth of the future. For bridging the gap, so that everyone can learn. For providing access, so that everyone can code…even as others argue passionately that not everyone is cut out for it.
No matter what I hear about this city in the news, from here until the end, it will always feel a little bit like home.
