Most of us here work in tech. We know our co-workers. We know where we came from. For many of us, years growing up spent reading, tinkering, being maybe a little anti-social. A lot of us probably found a computer at a young age, and just felt a compulsion to learn how it worked. Now we're getting paid for it.

I guess I just don't see this greedy group of evil doers out to ruin a city when I look at the people I've encountered in the industry. I see people who got a bit lucky that their passion became profitable.

You don't know the real power players. You're right. The average, middle-class tech workers (you, me, and the people you know) are not the enemy. We're upper proletariat, essentially on the same side (if a different tax bracket) as the "true" proletariat that is actually poor. I feel like this controversy is being cooked up to pit the middle class (us) and the working class against each other, in order to distract both us and them from what's really going on.

In technology's upper ranks, you see malevolence and MBA culture. You see Ellis Act landlords and multiple liquidation preferences and all sorts of scumbaggery. You see closed allocation and funding based on family connections and frat boys and Clinkles and Snapchats and Tinders. The press outlet that has the best depiction of what's really leading tech right now is (sad to say it) Valleywag.

However, the upper-working class, $140,000 per year, mid-career software engineer is just as worried, as the poor are, about his childrens' future and the health of the city and just trying to stay competitive in an industry that (a) does not give a fuck about him, and (b) will probably replace him with a clueless 22-year-old in ten years. The fact that he's merely adequately compensated for his skills, education and continuing effort, while the rest of the working class is even more exploited and abused, is hardly his fault.

Yes, the bad guys sit atop the tech industry. They're not the lifelong engineers who top out at $140,000 or even $225,000 per year. They're the VP/NTWTFK (Non-Technical Who-The-Fuck-Knows) para-dropped into companies by their corrupt VC buddies from MBA school. They're the moneymongers who think multiple liquidation preferences and participating preferred (technical jargon for "I've got the connections, so lick my taint, prole") are morally acceptable. Those are the bad guys. Not us.

If we're guilty of something, it's that we enjoy our work (perhaps not our paid jobs, but the ongoing process of learning and building cool technology, even as a hobby) so much that we tend to disengage from political fights: both ours (open vs. closed allocation) and the bigger ones of the world (Ellis Act). The bad guys have become quite adept at exploiting this property of us. When we realize that something's wrong, we focus on minutiae. We focus on the douchebag 27-year-old middle manager who told us everything has to be in Java, and it becomes a complaint about Java, the language, instead of the bigger issue (the investor-level corruption that put the idiot in charge).

That head-in-the-sand behavior of possibly the smartest working class that's ever existed really hurts San Francisco, but it also hurts us. Going forward, we're going to need to fight the "head in the sand" impulse and fucking annihilate MBA culture. Not only San Francisco, but our own jobs (after age 40) depend on it.

We have to fight. So much is at stake. We have a power that humanity will require in order to (a) move away from fossil fuels for energy, (b) cure cancer, and (c) deliver safe, cheap, environmentally sound transportation at the world scale. Humanity's survival (or, at least, the survival of civilization) literally depends on us because the current state is completely unsustainable. Unfortunately, instead of using that power for progressive R&D, we get stuck helping MBA-culture scumbags unemploy people.