This is an accurate summary of the article.

However, in my personal experience, it is not an accurate summary of the Bay Area. The startup scene may be truly this toxic, but I think such toxicity plagues any small, homogeneous group of people. It is hardly a tech problem. Indeed, mom-and-pop shop in small towns can be very abusive too.

To offer a counter anecdote, my experience with FAANG has been very positive. My workplace is the most meritocratic, efficient, and transparent organization that I've been in. (And I did spend 6 years on the East coast doing things unrelated to tech.)

I'm certain that the author's experience is true. I also want to caution against generalizing these issues to all of tech in the Bay.

A Facebook engineer just committed suicide last week due (allegedly) to workplace bullying made possible in part by his immigration status. Something like 45 women from Google just came forward claiming they were retaliated against for bringing up sexual harassment claims to HR this week.

You can’t generalize the claim that things are different at FAANGs either.

Don’t Facebook and Google each have over 100K employees just in their Bay Area offices? This is like FoxConn[1]. You can be doing substantially better than average and still have constant bad news by virtue of your size alone.

[1] The suicide rate among their employees was below the general population’s.

> The suicide rate among their employees was below the general population’s.

Was their suicide rate lower or higher then that of employees with a similar socioeconomic status?

No...Google has 100k employees worldwide. Facebook is something like 30k worldwide.

I'm not sure how your logic works: "most meritocratic, efficient, and transparent" does not mean flawless.

not all of us like avocados.

edit: i mean, I do.... but not everyone does.

Absolutely, I mean, I never met one in person, but they definitely exist out there. I'm almost sure.

My college roommate didn't (and still doesn't)!

Don't know why you are being downvoted but you your TLDR is pretty much spot on.

I would suggest to any techie who finds this not true to leave the bay area for a couple months then come back. It is amazing how entitled everyone is over here.

This. I feel like the article is a little bit too negative, but I've been something pretty much similar. I moved to SF, worked for about 4 years, loved it, but then moved back to Europe and realised "oh wow, it IS a bubble".

Now I'm excited to eventually go back to the bay, but it was very valuable to take a step back, go away and think about it!

I'm in the exact same situation as you. Worked here for a couple years then left the bay area for a couple months in between jobs and came back.

Taking a step back allowed me to see how most people live outside of the bay area and how big our bubble is. As you I'm excited to be here but I take everything with a grain of salt.

Everything's a bubble, and that's ok. Wouldn't want every city / region to be the same

When I leave for any length of time, what really strikes me is the entitled impatience. It's always a bit of a shock.

What entitlement do you see?

Lack of self-awareness. Attributing outcomes to merit when such things are often pseudo-randomly distributed. Lots and lots of arrogance, whether overt or subtle.

mistreatment of service workers is absolutely rampant in my experience

In the current era, who are the non-tech people?

Almost everyone uses a smartphone and a computing device. I have never been able to understand this "non tech" part all too well.

One who could operate a phone and open a browser and search well is all one needs to be called 'technical' , thanks to the power of fast search and cheap Internet.