Sunday, May 17, 2015

The Real Teens of Silicon Valley

Fascinating.

At the California Sunday Magazine, "Inside the almost-adult, insular lives of ambitious teenagers flooding into Silicon Valley to join tech startups":
As the demand for tech labor grows, ambitious teenagers are flooding into San Francisco. There’s no official tally of the number of teens who work in tech, but Fontenot estimates that there are as many as a hundred recent high school dropouts working on startups in the city. Some were too distracted by programming projects and weekend hackathons to go to class. Others couldn’t pay for college and questioned why they should go into debt when there is easy money to be made. Still others had already launched successful apps or businesses and didn’t see why they should wait at home for their lives to start. In Facebook groups for young technologists, they saw an alternative: teens lounging in sunny Dolores Park (dolo, as they call it), teens leasing expansive South of Market office space, teens throwing parties whenever they want. And so they moved to San Francisco, many of them landing in houses like Mission Control.

Their parents watch from afar, some more supportive than others. “We just miss him. We miss him a lot,” Tanya Latta, Zach’s mom, told me. “But the ultimate goal for us as parents is to have our kids be able to be self-sufficient and happy. So when we saw that he’s reached out a little early, we were really happy that he’s in his element. But it happened so fast.”
RTWT.

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