San Francisco

New Yorker Anil Dash wrote a piece for SF Tech Workers last night informing them of what he thought they could do to improve their reputation. I do agree with Anil that more could be done but I will also note that tech being in San Francisco has been a boom for the local economy. SF’s unemployment rate is 5.3% vs 8.7% the average in California.

I mostly disagree with the protesters sentiment that feel tech workers are invading their communities, considering many of those protestors pushed families out long before this recent boom. As prices have been rising for years. Affordable housing is definitely a big problem for everyone.

Anil asks for startups to share their “on-site benefits” with the local community (daycare, healthcare, food). I’m not sure what these companies are but not many startups in SF have healthcare onsite, maybe bigger companies would have a doctor but that size of services provided absolutely couldn’t handle a whole community. A company like Google is very unique with their benefits because they have a lot of employees and a lot of space in Mountain View to offer more on-site benefits. I don’t think the place where tech could add value is in these benefits.

As part of the tax break companies like Twitter, Zendesk and Square receive they must give 30% of it to causes in the local area. Zendesk is one of few companies that has really got involved with the local community. They’ve supposedly donated at least 4x their ($30k) tax break to programs like a local church that feeds the community, sponsored a program to crowd-source fixes to problems in the Tenderloin and working with a local foundation to create web service for local residents looking for information like emergency shelter beds and family services.

Organizations like Handup
are doing a wonderful job in helping the homeless in SF and I hope more tech companies work with them to create new programs

I absolutely think more companies should get involved like Zendesk has and agree with Anil that tech workers should reach out more but the idea that these companies are providing good enough services to offer them to the local community is just not feasible. I’ve been planning to get more involved and will endeavor to do so once I return to SF.

I just had this visa thing to sort out first and that’s another big pain.