What it is like to maneuver to San Francisco and not using a tech job
When I moved from Austin to San Francisco in 2019, I ended up in a huge house on Mission with a typical cast of SF characters: a neuroscientist throwing techno shows, a surfing biomedical researcher, and a guy who owns a burger joint everything in their mid-30s. Our fifth roommate? A summer sub-letter fresh out of college that has worked ambiguously “in technology”.
According to the numbers, this house was a rarity. According to Marketwatch, in 2020, 30% of the workforce in Silicon Valley and San Francisco were in the tech industry. The pandemic resulted in a tech exodus and a sharp decline in the new workforce (the inflow to outflow ratio fell by 35.3%), but the return is reportedly already underway. Every week brings daunting new data on affordability, like a study that shows you need to earn 4.9 times the minimum wage to afford the average two-bedroom apartment. A drop in rental prices may have given bohemian types a short window of time to find a cheap studio, but despite this temporary drop, many mid-career professionals will be surprised to learn that they qualify for affordable housing.
The bottom line is that a San Francisco transplant is not easy without a high paying job, and most of those high paying jobs are “in the tech.” The topic has inspired countless Reddit threads and my mom was sincerely concerned. But until you move here you can’t really understand what it feels like to live in a city and can’t explain what the biggest private employer is actually doing.
People outside the Bay Area might refer to me as a unicorn, a term that has nothing to do with the corporate equivalent of an inflatable wallet in the rest of the world. Working in a creative field in San Francisco, even in a technically adjacent field like online journalism, makes you curious about dinner parties. Your job is “interesting” when you can’t explain it for any other reason. That’s a nice feeling. What is not a nice feeling are certain “charms” of living together, which for me once included finding my roommate’s used menstrual product on the bathroom counter.
If you move to San Francisco without a technical job, you need to rethink the meaning of the word “adult”. It’s not the classic Peter Pan Syndrome (though I shouldn’t start with SF’s costume obsession), but rather a series of small sacrifices for your privacy, autonomy, and financial well-being that would be red flags for a 36-year-old -old like me where I live anywhere other than New York. I had got used to certain lifestyle perks, like not sharing a wall with anyone and being able to afford the best bread money can buy. But without a six-figure salary, you don’t expect a clean shower drain or $ 15 tartine rye every week. Don’t get me wrong, it is possible to live comfortably enough without a tech salary, but at the cost of saving for the future.
Money is the elephant in the room, but people don’t just talk about it, they hold its trunk and take selfies. San Francisco will bring you classroom awareness in new and uncomfortable ways. I’ve seen the best minds of my generation discuss their six-figure stock profits in coffee shops, free branded backpacks over their shoulders, shuttling past homeless camps on electric unicycles, Teslas parked next to mobile homes with laundry drying on the roof, sleeping with them in towering lofts Look at tent cities that can’t explain their jobs to anyone who doesn’t have a TechCrunch subscription. It is enough to make the ghosts of Ferlinghetti and Ginsberg scream and break the silence in the quietest room in town.
The folks in tech will be in disbelief when you arrive, wondering why anyone comes here without a comfortable bubble on Emeryville campus and it’s glorious (they’re tech neighbors but still). Whatever your job offers you, you’ll be jealous of bottomless sandwich breakfast buffets and any systems engineer’s three favorite letters (I, P, and O).
While tech geeks can be easily stereotyped that they have no friends outside their industry and that they eat DoorDash at every meal, they are not all created equal. It is possible to build a life outside of these tech companies, but whatever your interests, you will feel the coldness of the industry’s shadows. After leaving a sloppy dance party at a SOMA bar, your next 2am stop could be another sloppy drag show tucked deep in Twitter headquarters.
If you’ve got a sideline, be it a fortune teller or a DJ like me, December will get you booked up for lavish Christmas parties where your NDA keeps you from revealing the name of the CEO whose drunken FK-filled speech sounds like a Impression of Russ Hanneman from “Silicon Valley”. When you date, you end up in a pub with someone who “got out of technology” to do data science for a cannabis brand and describes their ex as an overnight millionaire.
This is modern San Francisco, tangled in technology that dies forever. But if you’ve been here for a few years, you learn that the city’s health has always been precarious at best. Its status as a beacon for outsiders has always made it a place of conflict, from the gold rush era to the struggle for LGBTQ rights. It feels like an eerie valley now because the newest group of misfits, the tech disruptors, have been given the keys to the city.
While San Francisco may appear to have bowed to its will, there are literally hundreds of traditional restaurants, theaters, and bookstores that existed long before people ran close to six digits to pimp their dogs on Instagram. And these facilities are the ones you can most likely afford without a technical salary.
To use the parlance of my old home in Texas, there are still a lot of people and places that make San Francisco weird. Hippie holdouts are still crawling out of their vans. Punk rockers still play loud music on quiet beaches. The Godfather of Skate is still rolling on the sidewalk in Golden Gate Park. A secret piano is still calling on the sidewalk. And Danny Glover is not going anywhere.
Your challenge as a newcomer is to look past the Salesforce Tower and the sky-high rents and constant announcements of doom and find your own place in San Francisco’s long line of newcomers. It might be hard to see, but it’s there if you really want it.
