“Better weather” I can’t help but laugh. One of five Mediterranean climates worldwide, built on apricot orchards, formerly home to one of the most diverse animal and again ecosystems before the arrival of whites. It’s really hard to beat the weather in Silicon Valley. It’s almost non seasonal, anything grows. The diversity currently of this area is very high, it’s the home of top universities, between the two cross pollination of ideas happens non stop. As a “tech person” who lived in 10 years, and just moved away in March, well, it’s nice to move away, but damn, miss the weather.
I've had months and months of continuous rain in the Bay, something I never witnessed when living down South. It's cheaper too. Much much much MUCH more diverse. And food's better as is the landscape.
Only to visit. So, no. I moved away years ago. Couldn't stand the place. Nothing but work work work. And living in between nothing but office parks loses it's allure after a few years.
But I've had my fair share of multi-month El Ninos.
Perhaps you're talking about the east or south bay, but SF proper has awful weather. Moved there from NYC expecting the climate you describe only to find rugged and overcast weather year around. Moved to Los Angeles after a year and can say with 100% conviction that the weather here is categorically better.
I don't mind the SF weather for the most part. (I've never lived there but have spent a lot of time.) But it can definitely have "The coldest winter I ever spent was a summer in San Francisco" thing go on.
I think California has created this myth that constant sunshine = perfect weather. I personally like things like summer thunderstorms, snowy winters, mild cloudy days, and rain. It's definitely not bad weather, but the lack of variety and endless dry smoggy summer months can get pretty old.
I definitely agree with you. I don’t like the Bay Area’s weather and much prefer that of the Midwest and Northeast where you fully experience all four seasons. I like hot summers and winters full of snow. Even within CA I’d prefer the weather of LA over that of the Bay Area. SF in particular had very depressing and disappointing weather for me — uniformly chilly and overcast most of the time.
The myth is from people that moved to California from other states. I moved from the the midwest to Southern California. I can't see myself going back to harsh winters and extreme summers. My overall well being has increased and the sunny days helpf with consistent mood levels. This is coming from someone who loved the four seasons and claimed they were required. I realized that humans populate most climates in the world and there isn't one size fits all.
Same here. I like the "idea" of four seasons. But after living in socal, I discovered I really only need a few days a year of the cold wintery weather. And then I'm over it. I get that from travel. Not to mention how summers are so much hotter in the Midwest and south.
Mid 70s and sunny is hard to beat. It's like an eternal spring.
Yeah, definitely agree there, my enjoyment of winter lasts all of about a few weeks.
There's no perfect climate, and if you do winter sports or something more power to you, but after the beautiful snow, when you have to deal with slush and road salt, I could do with skipping from like, Jan 1 to Apr 1.
There is a place where you can have seasons, yet they are mild. And there is a reasonable cost of living, if you so choose. And it has public transportation, which is not ideal but better that many other US cities. And it has a huge number of software jobs, an educated populace, and culture. Washington, DC
I think that's a personal thing; I found eternal spring pretty boring. It's not objectionable, certainly. It's just kinda meh. Don't get me wrong, you can get far far worse but I'd rather have seasons.
I thought I wanted four seasons when I first moved here, but after a few years I found a short trip to Tahoe quenched my entire desire for winter in a week or less, and I was glad to come back to no snow to shovel. I can't imagine going back to the northeast, and I would melt in the south.
Snowy winters is a nice idea when you can sip a warm drink cozied up inside and play winter sports.
When you have to shovel the drive way twice a day and five minutes later the city snow plow throws half frozen slush on your drive way, you start to crave a warmer climate.
If you're shoveling twice a day, you should consider doing as they do in Alaska and simply stop shoveling it. Drive on the snow if it's snowing so much that you have to shovel twice a day.
What surprised me the most about SV's weather is how it affected my perception of time. Without the slow rhythm of the changing seasons, ten years passed in an uncertain blur. I find it very hard to place memories in any given time.
Maybe that's just an effect of getting older. I just moved away to a place with four seasons again, so we'll see!
I guess that may depend a lot on where you started from. I've lived in Hong Kong and then grew up in Florida, went to school in New England, and then lived in Texas for a while before moving to the Bay Area. The Bay Area weather is insanely good by comparison. The general trends are so stable and predictable. It's nice temperate and dry most of the year. I used to be a pretty avid runner. I went to visit my buddy in Houston and we went running. I had to stop after 3 miles (I normally run 5 to 10 miles in the morning) because it was so hot and humid. It made me really respect people who exercise in areas where the weather isn't so amendable to outdoor activities.
(Updated: I just read all the sibling comments. We are nearly all from other states and have now all become huge weather weaklings from living in CA!)
It's a not a myth if you're in the SF Bay Area. Other parts of CA are terrible. As you've pointed out it's both smoggy and hot. Coming from FL where there are only two seasons, I call Bay Area's weather "air conditioning" weather. It feels like you're in a really nice climate controlled building, but outside with sun. That said, it's not going to last with climate change. Air quality is already taking a beating with all the forest fires, and it's getting hotter and hotter. Pretty soon, it'll be no different from what people think of today as SoCal weather.
I moved to SoCal from New England, and I miss the weather there so much! I don't hate 70s and sunny, but I genuinely miss thunderstorms, clouds giving way to downpours, the quiet after fresh snowfall, the shock of stepping outside on a winter's day, the glee and madness of watching hail suddenly fall on a spring day.
Comparing that to not being able to work outside because the state is on fire and the air quality has been before recommended levels for a week is not my favorite tradeoff.
"Better"'s subjective - some people prefer extreme seasons (Midwest), 4 distinct seasons (East coast), 50s year-round (Northwest/SF), or sunny/70s most of the year (Miami? LA? Texas? Not a lot of experience personally).
At least in Austin and North of there, you start seeing 90s in April but average temperature of 90F+ is Jun-September.
https://weatherspark.com/y/8004/Average-Weather-in-Austin-Te...
I can't speak for South Texas as I am unfamiliar with the climate beyond some occasional visits.
Not sure about Texas[0], but LA is definitely way less humid than South Florida. Don't know too many people who actively like humidity at high temps. Some may not mind it. But those who hate it, like myself, just can't stand it.
I generally hate most warm climates because they tend to be humid. LA was very nice. The nicest climate I've experienced so far. Haven't been to Northern California though (I imagine it's roughly the same but cooler, so may like it more).
[0] seems like the problem there is it gets much cooler at night, more intraday variation.
Right on. The parallels between modern woke culture and medieval religion are too numerous to list. But both seem to involve living in a constant state of apology and self-hatred.
Ya, imagine if someone like, accused the American voting system of being totally corrupt, without evidence and then specifically called out 3-4 of the largest majority Black population cities as being the root of corruption. And specifically called out all the poll workers (most of which are Black) in those cities as being corrupt cheaters.
Just imagine the uproar. No one in their right mind would stand behind someone like that, right?
Of course not. But America's sad history of accusing Black people of crimes or actions they didn't commit means we must be extra careful when making accusations.
In this particular case, the surrounding white suburbs actually voted in larger percentages for Biden vs last time. The primarily Black urban areas voted similarly as they did last election and the one before.
But those white suburbs are not being accused of cheating.
Yeah, that one didn't make sense to me either. Lived in Oregon for the last... oh, wow, times flies... 30 years and I'd never consider moving back to the Bay Area. Except, if suddenly there were about 1/2 the people there and housing prices somehow went to reasonable levels. The weather is generally so pleasant there.
> anything grows
I'm a gardener. Wherever I go I grow a garden. When I lived in the South Bay the soil in our backyard was AMAZING. Never seen soil like that anywhere else. You didn't have to do much of anything to grow stuff. It was easy to dig. It was like it was loam all the way down. So yes, the climate plays a big part of that 'anything grows', but so does the soil there which is exceptional.
You've just described why I don't like Silicon Valley weather, though indeed the easy and plentiful agriculture is a nice aspect aside from the scarcity of water which often ends up prioritizing farmers of things like almonds over actual residents. Where I live now, I get to enjoy all four seasons and don't have to consider water as a locally scarce resource.
Isn't this very subjective? One person's "hard to beat weather" is another person's hell on earth. I personally hate heat and sun so I want to live somewhere where it is cool and cloudy the majority of the year. That is my idea of hard to beat weather. For other people that probably sounds terrible.
A lot of people mistakenly drive North and don't realize how dreadful Oregon and Washington are. It's 10 times worse than anyone thinks on your actual mood. Reading a number of sunny days per year on city data doesn't do it justice. I recommend people move either to Arizona or tornado alley (if you're not worried about them).
Not municipalities but the state's labor laws are highly conducive to the tech culture and don't exist most places in the country. There's not much money for the startup crop that feeds big tech outside the Bay Area. It's all on Sand Hill Road.
I can only speak for myself but I'll never live in a red state again. Not even Texas, it's not worth it. Even where I grew up (the purple midwest) is too socially conservative for me after living in California.
It's hard to describe to people who are both White and American. That's not because they're inherently incapable of understanding. It's just a problem you don't face as much so you don't understand it.
It's like how for most of my life I barely understood the mitigating measures women take in many situations where I don't even notice the situation.
Yeah, it's not a universal thing¹ but the short version is that one of my friends was told how he was "one of the good guys" and not the kind of immigrant they hate.
And another was in sales in industrial manufacturing and there was a lot of misogyny and low-grade racism there.
They're in WA now so and much happier.
¹ the "isn't happening to me" thing is sort of analogous to "works on my machine". Because of the range of stuff, things usually do "work on my machine".
The immigration issue is more complex than that. I met a guy a long time ago who immigrated illegally, but eventually decided to go legit. He built a fortune in the shipping pallet business, and complained loudly about unfair competition from illegal immigration because those companies could pay sub-living wages and skip out on safety and workers' comp insurance.
It's fine to prefer living in one culture over another, which is exactly what both your friend and the people they complained about are doing.
Certainly. I did not mean to imply a global ordering of places to live. I interpreted the original question "what practically speaking is so intolerable about living there or your neighbors?" as "what ... is so intolerable [for someone who doesn't wish to live there] ...". It is perfectly reasonable that you find it enjoyable to live there and I find it intolerable. I interpreted the question as "why do you find it intolerable" not "why should I find it intolerable" since the latter is harder to answer - I don't know your desire vector and/or moral foundations.
And to be clear, I did not mean illegal immigration. I meant legal immigration.
I'm sure that Midwesterners are super polite to other white people, but it was definitely not my experience there as a minority.
I was born in the US but my ethnicity is visually ambiguous and people assume I'm Mexican, Filipino, or Indian (in that order) based on the type of brown person they grew up with. In CA, no one particularly cares what type of brown person I am. But when I lived in Ohio, I was told that I should "go back home where [I] came from", that I'm one of the good ones and should bring more of my family over, or that I'm "stealing jobs from honest Americans," based on whether the redneck in question thought I was Mexican, Filipino, or Indian. My cousin and his wife, in Indiana, used to experience the same harassment regularly until they started wearing their scrubs everywhere so people would know that they're doctors.
I turned down a very well-paying job in Ohio (and came back to CA) because the people there were so vile.
I grew up in a small town in the Ozarks and there was a huge amount of fundamentalist Christian propaganda and social conditioning going on in the public school system. The high school principal passed out bibles, prayer was held before many sports practices or events, recruiters/councilors for Christian youth groups sat with the students at the cafeteria at lunch, etc. Some of the science teachers taught science well, though others made it explicit that they were Creationists and were only teaching evolution/Earth science because they had to, and that the students could stick around after class to hear 'what really happened'.
This was on top of another layer of class conflict between the middle class teachers/administration and lower class/trailer park kids, who mostly dropped out at 16 which was fine with the admin. Lots of additional pressure on other students who didn't conform for various race/gender/etc. reasons. And then completely bizarre stuff like, though the official reason for not having a soccer team was that it would detract from the sacrosanct football program, many of the teachers were clear that believed soccer to be a Communist sport (this was in the 90s when the cold war was long over).
Many of the perpetrators here are very nice people and fine neighbors, but if you aren't an evangelical Christian it can be a challenge. Especially if you're not white: the KKK is still a well known presence just down the road in Harrison, AR, so it's not just woke fearmongering.
It's one thing to live in these environments as an adult and be able to blow a lot of it off, but it's another thing completely to have kids there, which really detracts from the 'leave California to raise kids' motivation.
And it would be better at a larger city like St. Louis or Indianapolis but some fraction of the population of those places are from towns like mine and don't find these beliefs and practices to be particularly problematic.
I don't think most places are like this, but moreover, what is the critical difference between the anti-science fundamentalist Christian indoctrination and a anti-science fundamentalist political indoctrination one finds in Silicon Valley? Is it just which one a given individual finds more palatable (subjective) or is one objectively better than the other (and if so, why?)? And in either case, why pick one fringe or the other when there are so many places across the country that are more ideologically diverse and tolerant?
I grew up in a deeply conservative part of the country. The amount of casual bigotry that permeates even the most mundane social exchanges now shocks me whenever I visit my family. I can't imagine what it's like to be a minority there. Even being a white man who people treat kindly is uncomfortable enough.
With the social changes going on throughout 2020 and beyond, you may want to prepare for SF to go more conservative as the years go on.
Things have a way of flipping during times of significance. California's entertainment industry was formed by a bunch of young, driven people who wanted to escape paying IP royalties to the Edison company. Now, they're doing everything in their legal power to pursue their own IP infringement cases, taking on the form and function of their reason for leaving NY in the first place.
That NIMBY thing has been boiling over for decades now. There will be new stakeholders in that battle attaching themselves to conservative and far-right movements. Get ready!
Is "the [SV] tech culture" the secret sauce (especially noting that the culture has changed a lot in the intervening 10-20 years)? Could tech companies thrive with a different, more ideologically diverse talent pool?
> There was no inherent "supremacy", just one created by a bunch of companies being together.
That is why they have supremacy, though. Agglomeration effects are a big deal. Its why New York has remained a center of trade and finance for centuries, and why Detroit remains a hub for the automotive industry despite the city's bankruptcy.
No matter what brought the companies there in the first place, just "being together" is a huge deal and is hard to replicate elsewhere. We will see if tech will be an exception, but my prior is that proximity is important, even with WFH, and that Silicon Valley will remain the national center of tech companies.
I'd say the jury's still out on WFH. Once more companies put their cost-of-living adjustments in place, I think a lot of employees will change their minds. Additionally, I think many companies won't go "fully remote" - a lot of them will move to a "hybrid" model (e.g. 3 days in-office per week).
I think even if you stipulate for purposes of discussion that a lot of companies in the tech space broadly and elsewhere are going to be more flexible in the future, that still leaves WFH/Remote to cover a lot of territory:
- WFH or in-office 2-3 days per week
- Office every Wednesday
- Team get-together once a month
- Remote in the same/adjacent time zone
- Remote anywhere you want that we can legally hire you (seems unlikely)
- Remote pay-adjusted (or not)
- Whether there is an office or not
In general, I expect the extreme cases will be fairly rare but pretty much every one of the scenarios (as well as whether they're mandatory or optional) will drive different decisions relative to 5-days a week in the office.
Something I realized is that I am not seeing Managers, Directors, and VPs moving.
Could be age / career related - VPs of big companies are usually experienced professionals, so they have strong(er) roots in the Bay Area, with kids in school.
But the number of management moving out is ZERO - at least anecdotally. Once we're allowed to go back to the office and they all go, how long until tech leads and architects also follow? Then "interns and junior employees should be at the office so it's easier to mentor", and then remote becomes something mid-level and seniors-who-plateaued or a CLM position. Which is fine, if you know the tradeoffs...
I've noticed this as well. If upper management isn't interested in working remote, it's going to be a struggle for ICs to get large companies to embrace it long-term. I see the acceptance of remote work by large companies as something that's going to decay post-COVID until we're back to where we were before.
> There was no inherent "supremacy", just one created by a bunch of companies being together.
I think this somewhat understates the strength of acquired advantages in agglomeration economies. Particularly in an economy of ideas it seems to me that acquired advantages account for most of the benefit; beyond "cheap rent" there's not much "inherent" advantage to be had.
Even in traditional industry many of the advantages are acquired (i.e. not geographic, which is what I think you're getting at with "inherent supremacy"), the textbook example being Lancashire's dominance in textiles in the 19th century (https://voxeu.org/article/agglomeration-explains-lancashire-...).
I think it's a reasonable point to suggest that the exodus from SV could accelerate the development of other startup/tech hubs, and weaken the comparative advantage of SV, but I think you may be understating the current strengths of SV by focusing on "original advantages" like rent and other environmental/geographic attributes.
There are great universities outside of sf and even the us. ETH zurich for example. In zurich you also have google, oracle and co. We also have high speed internet for cheap. And are able to fo worldwide business, even in a pandemic. And thats just switzerland.
Not sure if there is any reason for sf once most startups moved sonewhere else.
One of the things that would maybe help Switzerland is to make English an official language (there are already 4 langauges, supporting English wouldn't be that hard). For me dealing with Swiss laws to make a company would make things much harder than for people who speak German well.
You have 4 different official languages to choose from; surely it cannot be that hard to learn one of them for even the most meanly educated tech worker?
I tried to learn Swiss German, but gave up quite fast, it's just not my style. Also even people who came from Germany said that it's hard for them, and Swiss people never really take them in their social circle, that took away all my motivation. I could do everything in English though except the tax returns, it just didn't feel like home to me, so like many others I came away.
I speak several languages fluently, so no big deal for me, but one of my talents is learning languages easily.
The not fitting in is a way bigger deal in Switzerland. Germans will never be accepted, no matter what. Eastern Europeans aren't even considered people.
The "shift" has already been happening for a decade or more, covid just created a few visible outlier migrations that have pushed the conversation into the open.
At this point, Netflix is the only major company I know of that that still locates 100% of software work in the Bay Area.
New England has a ton of world-class universities and yet nothing even close to Silicon Valley. The gravity you mention, is the people, and once they start leaving that "gravity" goes with them.
In fairness, I think that's partly comes from defining "tech" as the stuff that's done in Silicon Valley. SV doesn't have the pharma and biotech that Cambridge has for example. That said, there was something of a shift westward for VC funding and new company formation post the minicomputer era and a lot of the new tech-related employment in the city proper are outposts of west coast companies. (There was basically not a single tech company in Boston proper after Teradyne moved out until the past 20 years or so. The computer companies were all outside; hence "Route 128" companies.)
New England had something close to (or even superior to) Silicon Valley. Most of the leading minicomputer companies were headquartered in the Boston area, and benefitted from the world-class universities there. But that industry collectively missed disruptive changes from minicomputers to microcomputers, and then the Internet.
I think other than proximity to Asia, Austin has all of this and fewer of the problems. I would not be surprised if there is a significant shif in the coming years.
> Especially not because of something as temporary as a pandemic.
One could argue that diseases were major contributors to the collapse of the Roman Empire - internal problems didn't allow them to keep the external forces at bay.
As it happens, tomorrow I’m putting in my 30-day notice to terminate my lease and leave the Bay. (And I’m paying 2 additional months rent in fees to do so)
Not being tied to the office fundamentally changes the calculus of choosing where to live. There just aren’t good reasons to live here anymore for so many of us.
Even if you enjoy the area, chances are you can get a better deal by moving just a bit further away. Actually, I can pay the 2 months rent in termination fees and move almost literally anywhere else in the state and still come out ahead financially. Since commute time is not a factor, many options have become viable.
There's a lot to like about many areas of California. Which ones may depend on your weather, cultural, etc. preferences. But Silicon Valley proper I find not particularly appealing; housing costs are only part of the reason. (SF itself has well-documented pluses and minuses.) I don't live or work in CA/SV. But if I were in SV but no longer needed to commute, I might well stay in CA but I'd probably move somewhere outside of SV commuting distance.
I did this and completely agree. I lived in the bay area since high school, more than two decades ago. Last year I finally moved away from it for good. Not far, just to the Greater Sacramento area. (I've been working remotely for a couple years, well before COVID) Qualify of life improvement is huge. Weather and cultural are important reasons for me to stay in California (plus family and friends), and I still get that here. (in fact, I prefer weather in Sac -- real summers/not chilly, and winters are similar to the bay area). My house now is easily 1/3 the cost of a similar one in the peninsula or 1/2 the cost of a similar one in east bay.
I mean, it's not cold once you get outside of SF/San Bruno. If you're in the peninsula or south bay, it's really fucking hot during the summer. Uncomfortably hot because no one has AC and many of the homes don't have insulation still.
I think you built my case for me. Sac is consistently hot (90s every day for at least 4 months in the summer) and so, basically every house has AC. Many have solar panels (mine does) because of the available sunny days, for sustainability. It makes for a way easier summer than in bay where you get 2 weeks of dreadful summer (because no AC) and then the week after that is in the 60s-70s and you bring out the jackets again.
I wouldn't say the inconsistency in weather is the issue... It's that the homes are ancient and landlords don't want to update them. Why update when you'll not get significantly more money for it (and then have to pay lots of property taxes)? It's why many of the homes that are bought in my neighborhood are completely torn down by new owners and rebuilt. Every single street in my neighborhood with a recent sale has a tear down + rebuild happening.
I'm sure the renter to owner market in Sacramento is different than the bay area...
If this year's summer becomes the norm I think it may be a bit too hot for places like Sacramento. And all the places I lived in SV so far have had A/C so that hasn't been an issue. But what's great about being near the bay is that at night, most summer nights, it still cools down way below 20C so it's easy to simply keep doors/windows open after sunset and close them in the morning to have cool air inside the house, without an A/C, almost every day. There are exceptions of course like we had this summer where there were 2-3 days long heatwaves with no drop below 25C at night, A/C helped with that.
It can hit 100 these days in San Francisco itself in summer, but there is still this weird sanctimonious attitude about air conditioning. We asked some landscape designers about leaving room for a unit in the yard and more than once got a huffy "People don't use A/C in San Francisco" sort of answer. It's extra miserable if the windows have to stay shut due to wildfire smoke.
I moved to Sacramento for all the same reasons, and I also love it here. I remember a lot of people talked down on Sac when I lived in the Bay. It feels like I’ve discovered a secret by moving here.
EDIT: Here are a few more things to like about Sacramento.
There seems to be a large population of highly educated ex-military types concentrated here. It’s been an unexpected source of high quality hires. I never saw these people in the Bay.
I’m in an international marriage. We were worried we wouldn’t be able to find our people upon moving here. That hasn’t been a problem at all. Fellow expats are everywhere. It’s a fairly diverse area.
My problem with Sacramento is 1) crime in Sacramento proper (I have friends in the Sac DA's office, so maybe I am biased by hearing the worst of the worst), and 2) the summer weather. The suburbs of Sacramento, especially to the north, are very attractive to my wife and I and I think that if we do stay in California long-term we will be heading to Sacramento to make it happen.
I ended up leaving SF and moving to Austin, but Sacramento was really high on my list as well. It's a very nice town, and being half-way between SF and Lake Tahoe is pretty hard to beat :)
I think SVs appeal is that you can leave in a quiet suburb close to a lot of easily accessible nature, while still having Amazon 2-day shipping, ridesharing, Uber Eats, and luxury retail. There's not many places in the US like this. Europe has a lot but there's not much tech jobs in them.
You are also close to SF if you like the madness of the city every once in a while.
Other suburby places with nature easily accessible usually have a more spartan retail experience and sometimes the mail/Amazon doesn't work so well.
A lot depends on what the nature you're looking to be accessible to looks like of course. (And I'll be the first to agree that the Bay Area is probably especially nice in this regard.) But I'd say you were describing any significant coastal city, areas of Colorado (can't speak to other mountain states although places like Boise I would think...), etc. If you're looking for a reasonably affluent suburb there really isn't a particular shortage of them around the country--and many have good outdoor recreation options.
> a quiet suburb close to a lot of easily accessible nature, while still having Amazon 2-day shipping, ridesharing, Uber Eats, and luxury retail.
Maybe I'm missing, but I don't see anything in that list that isn't true of almost every metro area in the US. I think people living in SF notice when new services come out that are only available there, like Uber was at first. But they don't notice when those services later spread to the rest of the country. You can get Amazon Prime shipping and rideshares everywhere now. Other cities may have somewhat less luxury retail, but likely have shorter drives with less traffic to get to nature.
The primary point is easy access to nature from a metro area.
Other than easy access to nature, all of those points are true for major metro areas. But other than say, Salt Lake City, does any other metro area offer such close access to nature? Boston and Seattle are even much farther away...
> The primary point is easy access to nature from a metro area.
Define "easy access to nature." Where I live, there's a major state park within the city limits and a very large lake within ~20 minutes drive. In ~2 hours I can be at the beach. In ~3-4 hours I can be in the mountains. And untold amounts of basically empty land just outside the city. If you're going to arbitrarily define "easy access to nature" as "mountains next to ocean right next to me", well OK, not a lot of places fit that bill. But that's a very narrow definition designed to fit basically SV.
Easy access to nature means I can go on a scenic five-mile hike between lunch and dinner. It means I can see a beautiful view without planning a day trip. I can meet with groups of friends of all fitness levels and enjoy a pleasant afternoon outdoors where we all have fun.
I can go see thousands of migratory birds a few miles from my apartment. Half Moon Bay is 30-45 minutes away, depending on road conditions. Fairly strenuous hiking and rock-climbing in the Santa Cruz Mountains is also 30-60 minutes away. Santa Cruz itself is not much farther.
I have lived all over the east coast for most of my life, and this degree of access has made an outdoors person of my notoriously sedentary self.
> Easy access to nature means I can go on a scenic five-mile hike between lunch and dinner.
So can I, as I mentioned there's a major state park within the city limits where I live...
> It means I can see a beautiful view without planning a day trip.
Incredibly vague and subjective. What constitutes a "beautiful view"?
> I can meet with groups of friends of all fitness levels and enjoy a pleasant afternoon outdoors where we all have fun.
Not unique to the SF Bay Area at all.
Again I think this is very much a cherry-picked definition of "easy access to nature" that is designed to preclude any place not named "SF Bay Area." Still, the kinds of things you were describing can be found in metro areas all over the country.
I'm not sure why you feel this need to argue that other regions are just as good as the Bay Area. Are you a tourism promoter? Whether you're right in absolute terms is insubstantial. What matters is that hundreds of thousands of people feel the way I do, and that's why we moved here or stayed here.
I'll grant you the Santa Cruz Mountains if you're on the southern end of the Bay. You've also got the hills in the East Bay and various options in Marin and points north if you're in Marin.
But Boston, in addition to various coastal walks has a bunch of nearby parks and small mountains/hills to the west and in southern NH. Also tons of sea kayaking/canoeing. Depending upon where you live, bigger peaks in NH are maybe 2-3 hours.The Sierras are further than that from the SFBA.
Don't get me wrong. The Bay Area has great recreational options but so do a lot of other cities depending upon what you're looking for.
The variety of landscapes within a 30 minute drive is unparalleled in the Bay Area, though.
I grew up in suburban Boston. It was a very nice town - we lived on an acre of land, with woods behind the house. Drive 30 minutes in any direction, and you got basically - woods. Maybe some ponds and fields, with scattered houses and suburban town centers between. The city (a pretty nice one) was 30 minutes away. You could get to waterfront, in Boston or Salem or Nahant, but there aren't really beaches in most of Massachusetts (outside of Cape Cod). It did have a massive amount of history, though - in that 30 minute drive was basically everywhere significant to the birth of the USA.
I'm on the peninsula now, in the hills. 10 minute walk to a suburban downtown. 3 minute drive (or ~20 minute walk) and we're on some Bay trails. 5 minute drive and we're in the mountains. 5 minute drive to a massive lake over the San Andreas. 20 minute drive and we're on the beach at the Pacific Ocean. 30 minute drive (or 40 minute Caltrain) and we're up in SF. 30 minute drive and we're in downtown San Jose.
I live in Seattle (south end of Ballard). I can jog to Discovery Park and be in forest surrounded by beach, or up to Carkeek and see tide pools and wetlands. I can be on a real hiking trailhead in less than an hour.
Camelback Mountain is half an hour from the center of Phoenix. Virginia Key Beach Park's walking trails are 20 minutes from downtown Miami. Lionel Hampton-Beecher Hills Park is about the same distance from Atlanta. You get the idea.
SF certainly has really nice nature close by, but it's not like other US cities are industrial wastelands.
Having lived in both for many years, I'm not sure how anyone could come to the conclusion that nature is more difficult to access in Seattle than the Bay Area. It is a 45 minute drive from the skyscrapers to the Cascade mountains proper; in the Bay Area, it is a 3-hour drive to reach anything comparable. Seattle is bounded on three sides by fresh and salt water in equal measure, similar to San Francisco, with a large boating culture. The city is even nicknamed ("The Emerald City") by virtue of its many expansive and semi-wild parks in the city, plus the general greenery of the surrounding region.
I am a pretty avid nature enthusiast that spends a lot of time in the outdoors. It isn't even close, whether you are looking for mountains, water, or parks. Seattle's reputation in this regard is well-deserved; I'm not sure if there is another metro of its size that is so embedded in and connected to nature. And if you look at map, it is easy to see why -- the city is essentially surrounded by water that is surrounded by very rugged mountains (which has provided challenges for growth).
FWIW, the other large metros in the Pacific Northwest (definitely Vancouver and to a lesser extent Portland) have similarly exceptional access to nature. Some of the Mountain West cities also have great access to nature, though not as diverse as Seattle.
"nature": beaches, mountains, ski resorts, redwood forests... Seattle is like that or even better but 9 months out of a year the weather is just a big no no.
Except the access to nature aspect. I mean, that is a broad and ambiguous statement, but not too many places are as beautiful as California.
If you were to take access to nature to mean, being within driving distance of nature sites that people travel across the country to experience, then the number of metro areas drops significantly.
Look at a map of national parks. Most of the population of the US is within driving distance of a national park.
The Appalachian mountain range stretches from GA to Maine, and contains dozens of state and national parks that people travel across the country to see. Nearly the entire eastern seaboard is within range of one of them.
The only part that isn’t is Florida, and they have better beaches than California, swamps, lakes, and massive crystal clear springs.
I have family in Wisconsin, and I enjoy visiting. I like parts of Milwaukee, and I've gotten out into the countryside. It's really nice.
This is all subjective, of course, but what can I say? I've been in restaurant and bars at the top of tall hotels in Milwaukee, I enjoyed it and the view of the lake and city... and no, I don't think it even remotely measures up to views of the bay from Pacific Heights or another dozen views in San Francisco. Nor does the surrounding countryside in Milwaukee - which I sincerely do like quite a bit - measure up to redwood forests, Pt. Reyes, the headlands, the coastline from SF to Santa Cruz. A little farther afield, Big Sur and the high Sierras, Sonoma and Napa valleys. I'm not really even sure how to debate it with people, it seems so self-evident to me. California and SF have some really bad qualities, but no, it's not all six of one and a half dozen of the other around any randomly selected US city of 100K in the US. The nature around San Francisco is a differentiator and a selling point (though I would tend to agree that it is now officially overpriced).
Puget Sound is remarkable, though, and the forest around Portland is beautiful. As I've mentioned in another thread, though, the coast is far more accessible in San Francisco.
> I think SVs appeal is that you can leave in a quiet suburb close to a lot of easily accessible nature, while still having Amazon 2-day shipping, ridesharing, Uber Eats, and luxury retail.
Maybe there’s something you’re not explaining here but there’s plenty of places all over the country that fit this bill. Austin, Atlanta, Charlotte, Raleigh, Denver, etc.
And Amazon 2 day delivery is available all over the place...
In some places “easily accessible nature” means you can drive just a few hours. But pull up a map of Cupertino or Mountain View and zoom out just a little. There are dozens and dozens of parks in biking distance. Austin and Atlanta are not like this. Haven’t been to Charlotte or Raleigh in ages but, maybe. It’s a nice climate for sure. Denver is really pretty but it depends how you feel about real winter.
Have you been to Atlanta? It doesn't seem like you're familiar.
The Beltline [0,1], a paved multi-use trail converted from old railway, encircles the city's major neighborhoods and connects everything. It's one of the city's major features. Dozens of parks, including some of the largest -- Piedmont [2], Old Forth Ward, Grant Park, and the old Bellwood Quarry [3] where they filmed Walking Dead, It, etc. -- are all immediately accessible.
The Beltine is being connected to the Silver Comet Trail [4,5], which is a paved bike trail stretching all the way to Alabama (the nation's second longest). Light rail is also being added to the Beltline.
Outside the city you've got access to the Chattahoochee River for rafting. The Palisades [6] provide excellent river-adjacent hiking.
Stone Mountain [7], a giant granite mountain, is 30 minutes east of the city and provides excellent hiking and running.
Kennesaw Mountain [8] is 30 minutes northwest of the city and is great for hiking and dog walking.
Red Top Mountain is 40 minutes northwest, and you have a host of lower Appalachian mountains to the north.
Allatoona Lake [9] is 40 minutes northwest, where they filmed Ozark, and provides excellent boating. Lake Lanier is an hour away and is even bigger.
Atlanta isn't called "city in the forest" for nothing. We have so many trees, parks, and outdoor activities.
I lived in Atlanta (starting from my GA Tech days) for over a decade and I've been in the South Bay for a few years. As much as I love Atlanta and the gigantic house I was able to afford, landscape-wise it doesn't even come close to what the bay area has to offer. Beltline is pretty neat but you will find it rather disappointing if you have ever been to one of the coastal trails in the bay. Not to mention the lack of skiing options (sorry but Gatlinburg ain't Lake Tahoe).
From my office in Palo Alto, I can ride my bicycle up Sand Hill Road, past horse farms, and then up a secluded 2000 ft (~600 meters) mountain with virtually no traffic and return during my lunch break. Or I can take a long lunch and ride out to the coast, through rolling farmlands. And I can do that virtually any day of the year, thanks to the local climate.
Most of the peninsula (which is, arguably, not SV proper) is like this, with tons of hiking within walking distance of where you live or work. The reason is that almost everything west of I-280 is undeveloped. As you ride or drive around that area, it's very easy to find a view where the only sign of humans is the road you're traveling on.
If I want to go skiing, I can leave work an hour early and drive up to Tahoe for the weekend. Or I could drive down to Santa Cruz for the day and go surfing.
Not quite "nature", but many people like to drive up to Napa for a day-trip to visit world-class wineries.
> luxury retail
Then, after work, I can walk over to my choice of Michelin starred restaurants (and I will pass multiple art galleries and branches of private banks). Granted, none of the restaurants in Palo Alto have more than one Michelin star (how gauche!).
If conspicuous consumption is your thing, San Mateo, Palo Alto, and Santa Clara each have high-end malls with practically every luxury brand you can imagine. Want to buy Ferrari or a McLaren? There's a dealer for each one within 10 miles of Mountain View.
> plenty of places all over the country that fit this bill
Many places have some of what SV offers. Very very few have everything, and I would argue that none of the cities you listed fit the bill.
I think the point here is that there's things that justify that price and the other downcomings of living in the area.
I'm the one that started this discussion and it proved controversial. I tried to just talk about like, the amenities of living in the area and tech jobs, but most people replied saying "wait there's two or three of your list of five or six in...".
I may be biased because I'm not a "generalist web developer", I work in either crazy startups or kinda niche embedded/low level roles. I still get two or three really good job offers from big companies per month even when I'm not looking and they are in SV. I was getting one or more per week pre-COVID. Even when actively looking for that type jobs in Colorado and Austin I can't find them.
Colorado would be more interesting for me if I was a citizen and could work the government aerospace and defense jobs but unfortunately I can't.
The premise was that there are lots of other places that have what SV has. And, by implication, that SV's high prices are unjustified.
I was merely pointing out that SV has an array of amenities that are found together in very few other places. And if you want what SV has, there are very few other places you can get it. Supply and demand. It's that simple.
Maybe you don't care about fancy restaurants or art galleries or spending time outdoors. That's totally cool. Maybe all you care about is finding the absolute cheapest apartment on planet earth. Again, knock your socks off.
SV doesn't have cheap housing. If that's all you care about, look someplace else.
As an SV local, I am overly jaded about the place. South Bay is wonderfully boring suburbia to grow up to- and would be to raise a family, if not for the housing prices- and S.F. seems pitifully small, and everything closes so early for a supposed world-class city. Not to mention, BART ends before last call, which is just crazy. The outdoors here are great, but how many times can one climb Castle Rock, Mission Peak, or visit Angel Island, Rancho San Antonio, or Point Reyes? And Muir Woods is always full of tourists, it's like Disneyland in a forest.
Of course, the grass is always greener. But I think natives are entitled to grouse a little bit, given the circumstances. It's just a little scary if this is the best the U.S. has to offer.
"Despising, For you, the city, thus I turn my back: There is a world elsewhere."
>Other suburby places with nature easily accessible usually have a more spartan retail experience and sometimes the mail/Amazon doesn't work so well.
Most suburbs of decent sized cities on the east coast have 2 day Amazon shipping, even the ones close to national parks. And the mail works fine in basically any suburban area.
The Bay Area isn't especially nice in this regard, for one reason:it is crowded. you won't ever get a moment of peace in all of that nature unless you get lucky.
For variety, I actually think the LA area as a whole is better. But it has the same problem.
There’s plenty of quiet, uncrowded nature in the Bay Area if you spend some time exploring off the beaten path. I live in SF and don’t have a car and have still spent hours at a stretch in parks totally alone, not to mention when I do get out of the city.
I think the last unspoken one and perhaps most important one in this list is access to family in the APAC region. The other proposals (i.e. Colorado, Arizona, etc.) have all the other stuff but not the access to Asia.
Looking at air travel - Denver to India or Austin to China - everything is a 1 day+ and over $2000+. SF/LA to these places is about 15 hours and about $1500.
If the business (i.e. Apple/Google making phones) needs to fly execs, production folks as well as if the tech engineers need in person meetings or have family, that's going to be a made much more challenging.
I'm seeing economy flights round trip from Colorado to Delhi at 1300, rounding up, for Christmas week. Don't really know how much this is due to Covid-related drop in demand, but it seems like a useful data point to put out there, since I've definitely seen similarly priced flights during non-pandemic years.
I fly to China quite often from Austin, it's not that bad, you do AUS-DFW-PVR,PEK... you only lose an hour or so for the short hop, the DFW-China leg is basically the same from SFO
Also from AUS, you have Houston and Dallas as two big airport options to get to China.
The most important thing is not the airports. All metros have them. The differentiator is the vast number of asian grocery stores, restaurants and other stores/businesses. In America the Bay Area is only behind Los Angeles in that regard.
Lots of replies are saying this exists in "every major metro" in the US.
But if you start narrowing it to places with pleasant weather, suddenly it starts looking like a smaller picture. The west coast, west of the cascades or central valley in CA. Probably places like the Carolinas, Tennessee. And maybe we'll be nice to Colorado and give them a trophy for at least having sunshine in the winter :)
You don't have to pay SF rents, of course, but you're not buying a $100k mansion and getting all of these things either.
People I know dislike the fact that most of SV is a typical suburb indistinguishable from what you see in any random Florida city. And consider how many busses bring workers from their apartments in SF down to the office in the burbs.
I always answer: fuck off; we're full. California, particularly Bay Area California is so ridiculously dysfunctional, the last thing any region needs is their refugees, who will bring with them the problems they're fleeing. Austin for example. Used to be a great place.
That’s a ridiculous take. There’s a lot of technical talent trapped in the Bay Area and I welcome it in my region. Treating every resident as if they agree with the repressive SF politics is over generalizing.
And who’s full? The main thing the flyover states need is more people.
An influx of coastal refugees has driven real estate up and out of reach of many locals where I'm from. Those are the types of places that are "full", even with loads of building.
You can buy a home cheap in Detroit, that’s not a good thing. Wouldn’t rising home values signal economic growth? As long as there’s room to expand I don’t see the problem. SF’s issue isn’t high prices, it’s archaic zoning laws that limit supply to keep prices high for home owners.
I think there are two issues here. First, housing is somewhat inelastic in that it takes multiple years to respond to a rise in demand and plan out and build new housing even with a reasonably fast permitting / approval process. Second, due to labor and materials costs, the price of housing in many areas is far below the cost to build new housing so housing prices will necessarily go up even with maximum build rates. This can create affordability difficulties for the lower rungs of income.
>Second, due to labor and materials costs, the price of housing in many areas is far below the cost to build new housing so housing prices will necessarily go up even with maximum build rates.
Specifically, the cost of land is what causes the cost to build to be so high. Owning unproductive land is cheap, and incentivizes simply holding onto it until it appreciates sufficiently.
Well the cost of land worsens housing prices, but even assuming the land is of negligible value the cost of construction itself will make new houses quite pricey compared to older homes in non-bubbly markets.
Economic growth that isn't evenly distributed is not good.
If you're a poor person, you'd (probably) rather have a cheap home in a poor city surrounded by other poor people, than be the poor person stuck in a gentrifying neighborhood which is getting increasingly hostile to your presence.
That's a very rational take: all you need do is step in a puddle of human feces in Austin to understand why. Wasn't there even 5 years ago, until the Californians brought their unique brand of urban development there.
The flyover states may need more people: nobody needs Bay Area people bringing their "enlightened" ways with them. Tech literate, rich or not. You guys made your paradise - live in it.
In aggregate, they seem to be. Most vote for dems who want to increase taxes. In a country with a two party system, it's basically the same as bringing their entire policies with them.
I don't think most people leaving the bay area are headed to some remote cabin in Montana or some sleepy town in the midwest - they're just moving to cheaper (comparatively) cities. Anyone pulling up roots with a bay area salary or a home in CA is going to have a huge cash advantage against anyone in the local market just about wherever they move.
On a personal note, it's been tons of fun competing with the multiple bids, sight unseen, over asking on 600-700k+ century old homes in need of another 100k worth of rehab.
The irony is it's the 'fuck off we're full' people that have made CA policy shitty.
It's the NIMBY anti-change response to policy.
The people that want a strong economy, incentivize building housing, and adapting lead to positive non-zero-sum outcomes.
The people that say "fuck off we're full" block any policy and create perverse incentives that create a dysfunctional mess.
This is ignoring the selection bias that the people leaving now are probably also the people not interested in CA anti-housing, high-tax policy and would likely be a better fit on these policy issues in Austin than the commenter thinks.
Largely I think comments like the one you replied to are just responding to what they see as the enemy tribe in the political culture war.
The reason California is such absolute shit to live in: people who live in California vote for the policies it has. You can't blame anyone else. I left to get away from you people, and would dearly like for you all to stay in the beautiful little paradise you have created. Bringing California problems, whether it be zoning laws, riots, real estate prices, unbreathable air due to foolish politically driven forestry management, water shortages, tent cities, traffic jams, electrical blackouts, people shitting in the streets or whatever charming advancements you may come up with next to Austin, Montana, Kuala Lumpur or Des Moines: you people should be treated as the pariahs you are.
I have never lived in Austin. I never will: too many Californians have ruined the place; now they've got skyrocketing housing prices, traffic, homeless tent cities with rivers of human feces and the general high quality of life one can find in other paradisical California shit holes. No doubt they'll find a way to jack the taxes up if enough move to Texas.
Very typical of a Palo Alto resident to think the only problem with California is prop-13 or some obscure housing policy or whatever. You can't even breathe the goddamned air in your utopia, the tax rate makes France look reasonable, the highways are designed for 1/4 the population density, the power outages are Zimbabwe tier, riots over ... people saying things, and you think a housing policy adjustment is gonna make it all better? Maybe you should try leaving your $4m bungalo bubble once in a while? Actually, no, stay right there. Enjoy it; you earned it.
France has taxes around 45% of GDP, California has (including all levels, including federal) around 30%, the US as a whole (again, counting all levels) is around 25%. California is one of the higher overall tax jurisdictions in the US, but unless your argument is that the US as a whole has unreasonably low taxes, I don't get how you can say California makes France look reasonable.
You obviously don't live in California, don't make enough money to pay taxes, or are just being cussed. The US top end tax rate is 37%, plus California is .... what? 13? You're already up to giving away half of what you make in California. Meanwhile you have to pay taxes on physical property like your house, and your house is valued at 7 figures if you live in the Bay Area. Finally, there was a VAT the last time I lived there. Meaning pretty much everything you buy with your money is also taxed. So yeah. France. Except the wine and everything else is shittier and costs more in California. France also has a functioning social welfare and medical system, and somehow manages to keep the electricity on and the air breathable. Pretty sure the murder rate in France, terrorism and everything, is significantly lower as well.
Oh yeah: completely ridiculous criminal things like this basically don't happen as often in France:
Yeah, let's just say my household income is in the top 10% in the state, so no.
> or are just being cussed.
If by “being cussed” you mean “understand the difference between total tax rates and top end marginal income tax rates in a progressive tax system”, then, yes it must be this one.
If not, you've missed at least one important possibility.
> The US top end tax rate is 37%, plus California is .... what? 13? You're already up to giving away half of what you make in California.
If you make enough in regular income that essentially all of your income is taxed at the maximum marginal federal and state, sure.
But virtually no one does that , one, because, first, you have to make a huge amount of income for that to be the case, and, second, if you make enough income for that to be the case, you probably have plenty of opportunity to structure how you make income so that, again, it's not. (Of course, while France’s top marginal income tax rate is “only” 45%, it makes a lot more of it's revenue from non-regular-income taxes than anyplace in the US, with a 20% standard VAT rate and a 42.2% top tax rate, including surtaxes and social charges, on capital gains.)
> Meanwhile you have to pay taxes on physical property like your house, and your house is valued at 7 figures if you live in the Bay Area
You don't have to pay full-value on the house except in the year you bought it, assuming market appreciation of > 2%/annum because prop 13.
> Finally, there was a VAT the last time I lived there
There has never been a VAT in any part of California. There is a sales tax, which is not a VAT, which is not a VAT, and the maximum sales tax rate in the state is 10.25%.
Go look at the title: do you think your household income qualifies as "tech elites?"
The rest of it: I'll let you have the fact that the VAT in California is called "sales tax" -it's the highest in the US, FWIIW. And you evidently are incapable of addition and subtraction, so discussing the rest of it is irrelevant.
Which is pretty much why I want you to stay there. Too many like you. Stay there and enjoy your utopia; you deserve it.
> The rest of it: I'll let you have the fact that the VAT in California is called "sales tax"
No, the sales tax is called sales tax. VAT and sales tax are structurally different.
> it's the highest in the US, FWIIW.
That's true if you talk exclusively of the state-only rate, which makes no sense to use as the basis of comparison; for statewide average combined state and local sales tax rate (the average rate people actually pay for sales tax in the State), California is #9, behind liberal utopias like Tennessee, Arkansas, Louisiana, and Alabama, among others. (Not only is California not the highest for average combined state and local sales tax, it's nowhere close to the highest for peak combined state and local sales tax, that is, the maximum people actually have to pay; the source I have doesn't rank this way, but from inspection it looks like Illinois with a statewide 6.25% and a peak local additional of 10.00% is the top there.)
Oof! Please don't post to HN like you did in this thread. Most of your comments are great but we just can't have this kind of thing here—we're trying against the odds to have HN hover a little above internet median and this kind of thing just sinks us. It isn't only the damage the specific posts cause—it's what it invites from others. I recently wrote a longer explanation of why we moderate this way, if anyone cares: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=25130956
There are other HN users with fire-breathing powers and formidable writing skills whom we eventually persuaded not to post in the enemy-incinerating style here. The argument boils down to trying to have a site that remains at least moderately interesting. There exist communities in which members kick the shit out of each other (or let's be nice, out of opposing arguments) and are higher-quality for it. I like to compare this to rugby teams who beat each other up and then go out drinking together: https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=all&page=0&prefix=true&sor....
HN can't work this way because it's much too big and incohesive—the average quality of contribution is much lower, and there are no relational ties to mitigate the downside. If people start posting in that style here, a copycat stampede will result, only without any insight or wit. We'll end up with mass battles on scorched earth, which is interesting to none of the users that we actually want to have here. Trying to stave off that fate for as long as possible is actually the founding idea behind HN:
One guess I'd have is that an influx of new people creates that anti-housing response anywhere which can lead to some of the same problems. I suspect that's less about CA policy and more about bad incentives around housing being an investment in the US.
If you mean that most people from CA don't like Trump (or the Republican support/defense of him), then yeah I think you're probably right about that (but that's not really CA policy). A lot of people I work with are more center or center-right than the general narrative about Californians would have you believe, I'd suspect those leaving to be more from that camp.
It's not anti-housing. It's never anti-housing. Nor is it ever "neighborhood character" or whatever. The places that people are moving to have plenty of land to build.
What people don't like is that when upper middle class city and inner suburb types move in local ordinances that restrict what you can and can't do on your own land seem to always follow. And given a generation or so of change in that direction, it gets you the same overpriced, impossible to develop hellscape that those people were seeking to flee in the first place. This isn't unique to CA. Their stupidity isn't special. This pattern has played out all over the east coast and midwest.
I wasn't thinking about Trump at all. I don't think he (or any President) is very relevant at a local level, at least not on a short time-frame. The influx of people probably has something to do with it, although in Utah (where I live) there is not much anti-housing response. There is lots of construction going on both in Salt Lake City and in the surrounding areas, and lots of political support for it.
The real problems I see are more cultural ones. Homelessness is rising (as it is throughout the US). Utah had handled homelessness much better than other places due to a unique balance between the local government, the police, and the LDS church (I'm not a member FYI), but changes in the mayor and chief of police disrupted that balance.
I also perceive an arrogance on the part of some of those moving here. The idea that they can just start changing things without understanding how/why things were the way they were before. I don't think I'm against change--it's impossible to stop it in any case--but I also don't think coastal values are right for every area.
> The idea that they can just start changing things without understanding how/why things were the way they were before.
Not exactly a novel proposition. The Europeans who arrived in what is now New England, or the Caribbean or yes, even Utah, felt much the same and acted like it too.
It's not as pronounced here in WA as it is in say Nevada. But, things that I see in WA, off the top of my head (not all government policy):
1 - anti-housing like you say. You see lots of signs in my neighborhood wishing against more-dense housing, despite (relatively) astronomical pricing. At least in Seattle, we do have an issue where we're constrained by water so there isn't a lot of places to build that aren't very far out. So density really is the only solution if you're going to keep computes reasonable. The only people who can afford to buy the existing not-dense housing have a ton of money or income (or both). A >$1m SFH is just not affordable in a city where median household income is $100k.
2 - push against increasing property tax. Sort of a corollary to the housing bit. Which gets doubly odd because we have no income tax in WA. Weirdly regressive.
3 - the strange and ineffectual CA-style push against "assault rifles" as the main item of gun control, despite the fact that all rifles nation-wide kill ~300/yr while pistols kill 30,000/yr, 10k of which are homicide. I say ineffectual because Amdahl's law is a thing, so even if you did magically disappear all riles in the country, it would have a ~1% impact on gun violence.
4 - restaurants heating the out of doors. This spiked a lot with coronavirus so it's hard to talk about now. (This might also be me projecting because I myself am an implant from the Midwest (yes I am a hypocrite), and heating the out of doors is just complete insanity to me)
5 - Many more good restaurants in general though. Sadly, still not a lot of good mexican restaurants.
6 - a change in coffee styles. Take from that what you will, people are kinda religious about it here.
It's really hard to pick out what's actually influenced by CA implants, vs what is just homegrown.
Like I said that might be just me with a personal pet peeve
But it is crazy inefficient to pump heat into the outdoors. It's not as inefficient in most parts of california, even northern california. But when you move north it gets down under 40... (In the Midwest where it gets below 0, it's complete lunacy)
It's a weird thing to be simultaneously in favor of environmental controls and trying to raise awareness for climate change (and doing things in Seattle like banning the use of natural gas for heating?), while also being totally ok with heating the outside for dining.
Ah, fair, it does seem like a valid criticism from an environmental/efficiency point of view. Though maybe it can be made less wasteful if establishments also add tents and other shelters that can better trap that heat.
In my experience Californians move to a new area, often more rural or with a differing local culture and want the same chain-store consumerist culture they left behind in California. And sure, there may be some political differences between their old home and the new place but it's more about the lack of respect for where they're moving and pushing their old culture onto the new place with no disregard to what made the new place nice in the first place. Change is inevitable so I can't complain about it too much but there are fewer and fewer places to escape to that aren't becoming Californicated. Or New Yorkified. Or Floridiated.
It's not just a california problem. Upper middle class suburbanites do this (with the best of intentions) everywhere they go. For every coffee shop their money keeps afloat there's two local businesses getting screwed by new local ordinances.
Sure everyone's land is worth more (as if selling the home you own or the land your business is on is actually an option when you can't readily replace either) but at the end of the day but everything winds up inflated and your standard of living flat-lines or decreases despite the increased stress.
The first "we're full" bumper sticker I ever saw was Austin in 1998. RIP Travis Heights, East Austin.
It's not like most of the SFBA fleeing refugees here were natives. They were kids from schools MI, NY, PA, IL and TX. The Menlo Park, Mountain View equivalents entrenched in West Austin are pretty fed up already so we'll see how it all turns out in 5 -10 years as the nextgen 3.0 descend on Silicon Hills.
To be fair, y'all did your best to dissuade expansion by intentionally avoiding some infrastructure improvements in the 90's and 00's. But then people came anyway, and it became impossible to ignore forever. This isn't to cast aspersions on either people who were fighting for better transit across those decades, or people who wanted to keep Austin somewhat smaller. Just my observations from across my life, with family/friends in the area, spending good amount of time there each year.
The ACT stuff is long-overdue and the new CapMetro Connect project is great. Hopefully it gets funded and built with fewer bumps along the way than Houston's 5-line rail network (which is still sitting at only 3-and-a-half of 5 lines built).
Is this effect stronger with California residents relocating in particular or it will happen with any other residents relocating from different educational/social/political/economic background?
They actually do need more people, there's quite a drain of young people in these communities which leads to closed farms and hollowed out Main Streets. But transient npm ninjas aren't quite the ticket.
You're crazy if you don't understand why a large portion of the population doesn't look at the bay area and say "the last people I want are the people who created that situation".
I think it's a lot more nuanced than that but the sentiment is at the very least understandable.
Unless you are Native American, you or one of your ancestors immigrated to the SFBA. So to say outsiders aren't welcome, when one is or descended from an outsider, is a little bit rich in irony.
It depends on what you’re walking to and for. I walk several miles a day in Austin’s parks and green belt areas. I’m thankful for where I live during COVID.
In my estimation, it has the most coolness-per-dollar. What I actually want is to buy a house, and I just can’t do that around here. Austin is comparatively cheaper and has a culture that appeals to me. It feels a lot like California, but without much of the baggage.
Parts of Colorado, Oregon, and Washington are also strong contenders, but I am predisposed to like Texas.
Ya. Earning a SF wage but living elsewhere is great. But there is a flip side to this coin. As employees realize they can work from home, employers also realize they can have employees work from home. They will soon realize they don't need to pay SF wages. Those who convert their in-office jobs into work-from-home are a covid oddity. Those who will be hired in the future on the assumption that they will always work remotely will likely face much lower wages. I predict a race for the bottom.
We’ve been trying to hire these people for ages locally and remotely and we still couldn’t find them so I have no idea where you think all the talent was hiding until covid 19.
A lot of people, myself included, have been quite hesitant to work remotely until now. I've been pleasantly surprised how well it's gone and would consider a remote position in the future but I think it'd have to be a fully remote team. When offices do return, being one of a few remote workers means you will likely be left out of a lot of teambuilding, conversations, etc.
Every team I've been on since 2015 has been distributed, even when my job is "onsite". Sometimes we're in multiple offices, or we have people in the office & people working from home, but the net effect is almost no one can count on going to an office and only working w/ people in the same physical office. We're all largely working remotely anyway, but we're just not being honest about it.
I agree with this. I cannot find talented and senior folks who fill the niche of my team (deep understanding of Linux systems, containers, and operating distributed systems). There seem to be a lot of SWEs in the world and very few SREs, let alone vanilla systems administrators for hire who are really good.
I think as an industry everyone is pushed towards software engineering and the large clouds have vacuumed up everyone worth their weight for operations. We make it happen but it’s so stressful because our team and workload balance is so far out of whack.
SREs get treated like a cost center and no career progression. The majority by volume of sysadmins were automated out by the wave of cloud vendors, leaving over a decade now of undertraining. Those who are left are mostly mission critical unfireable greybeards.
SWE get to work on new products and get career growth towards bigger and more interesting projects as reward for delivery
Of course people focus on where the opportunities are. It's not the fault of an individual company but an overall industry mindset. "Reward it or lose it" should be a mantra of availability in technical industry expertise.
It's really unfortunate. Cloud allows rapid iteration, but doing a bit of self-hosting/colocation is such an insane cost savings that I think a lot of folks are really missing out on. I know at least 1 startup I worked at that would've had a more comfortable runway had they not went wholesale into AWS instead of playing it smart with hybrid. Paying a small team of folks even an astronomical salary to keep a small number of servers up 24/7 and use cloud where it makes sense (S3, elastic CI/CD with EC2) should still be saving some companies 6+ figures a month.
This is legitimately what we're doing. We're bringing in really junior folks and spending years training/improving them. Unfortunately that doesn't help now. I thought it would be easier this year to hire due to COVID and layoffs, but it just hasn't been.
> no idea where you think all the talent was hiding until covid 19
The talent isn't being converted from potential - as was recently said, "You can't be what you can't see".
I was in Kansas City meeting people in Jan and it's pretty clear that there's a lot of talent hiding out there in downtown Missouri.
The talent there tops out at SSE because there's no vertical space without jumping to management & two years down the folks know are "mid-west-nice" managers with an iron fist behind it.
Several people who should've chased down the principal engineer roles have become these sorts of managers who never made it to directors because they're always been better devs than they were managers. And this seemed twice as bad for the young uns to have a dev-heavy manager squash a few of their attempts to actually own decisions, instead of just proposing them & see that role as a way to get that ability.
Most folks though things would be different if they had moved to SFBA, but all of them hit this point when they already had kids in school with stable single-income households (house all paid for).
In fact, I'd be one of those people in Bangalore if I had a bit more skills as a manager (completely sucking at management is a good way to be forced to chase the dev side).
If they could hired as a principal dev via remote out of being promising senior se, then this process would actually convert a lot of the talent into actual productivity in the industry.
Not satellite offices, I was specifically talking about employers who are entirely local.
Yes, the strong incentive is to stay put, stick to the local employer as long as you can and still get a role that pays more money. The skills you get from sticking around just make it harder to shift as well sometimes. The output gets equated to talent - "built my sixteenth monolith .NET CRUD web app" is not as well respected as it should be.
For example, there's folks in Portland who are looking at the Nike CEO situation with great trepidation - talented people who would do very well in a new job, assuming they don't need to move.
That was my experience at an F500 in the midwest. I wasn't a senior engineer but I was doing the same type of work as the seniors on my team. And I felt like my role could have more ownership. They did have team leads, a few architects, and agile related roles. But there wasn't much else for devs who didn't want to be managers.
My current company in the bay area is a lot better. I feel like I have more ownership, and the IC roles are more granular. I think technically senior can be terminal, and staff/principal roles here require influencing other teams. But my company has thought about promoting ICs, and I clearly see how staff/principals have a more challenging job.
I started a new job in April. Between when I interviewed and when I was started, offices shut down. It's been great.
The fact that everyone is remote is actually a great 'leveler', since the company has a 'main office' and a few satellite offices in other cities. I'm not affiliated with the 'main office', but I actually am concerned that I'll suffer career-wise once the company goes back to in-office, since I'll be in a satellite office missing out on casual-but-important lunch/coffee/hallway conversations.
So, from my perspective, it's a great time to change jobs. YMMV.
I think it's a mistake to believe that being part of an office culture somehow makes you more valuable. You could still be quickly cut by a company focused on the bottom line.
Sorry for not understanding, but I still don't quite get why is it a good time? From the description of your situation it looks like any new job right now is a temporal job. At least that's how I read it.
I mean that everyone who wants to work remotely, now actually has the opportunity to do so, and since everyone is working remote, you are not at a disadvantage based on your remote status. That may change in the future, it may not. But right now, changing jobs doesn't seem like a 'bad time', which is what the parent poster was claiming.
Ah, I see. But I was trying to say that I do not want to change a job right now because of the global uncertainty, not that it is harder for me to do it.
It seems that wages are a lot lower in lower cost of living areas. So what makes it that a developer in SF is much more expansive than the one in, let's say, Chicago?
Or let's flip it around, move the same developer from Chicago to SF and they will suddenly make more money.
I can only imagine that cost of living is the main factor. Naturally there will be a tiny minority of truly brilliant builders and engineers, but we are not talking about them as they are outliers.
The same talent will be hired, they'll just be paid far less if they aren't in a HCOL area because they can be. Businesses don't want to pay more money than they have to and are ultimately in a much, much better position to play hardball than individual ICs, "rockstar" or no.
The fact that some folks think so highly of themselves that they don't believe this to be true in their case is just hubris.
I think for Ops / sysadmin work this is probably more true than general software engineering. Ops people tend to cluster in the bay area more. Probably because Ops work used to be more "physical hands" dealing with physical servers which requires being onsite.
I agree, mostly. The bottom is still decently high even in Midwest cities. But if you’re making $140,000 + RSU/Bonus/Etc., someone from somewhere else will do that job remotely for $100,000 easy.
But I would characterize this as a wealth distribution, and overall net positive for the country. People who don’t have the opportunities to work at the top companies in the Bay Area or NYC or Boston now have better access. And the wages flow to those different areas.
At the moment that may be true but increasing the pool of potential labor rarely results in wealth distribution. I think companies will pay less. That money won't go to other hires as tech companies limit hiring for other reasons than money. The money will go to bottom lines, to stockholders: the opposite of wealth distribution.
1. Americans need to buy and hold equities. Period. When Google cuts costs or makes more money, I benefit as a shareholder (or you can hold total market indexes and the like).
2. Maybe the money will go to new hires, capabilities, expenditures, etc. ?
3. Sure, but this is certainly a good arguing point against immigration, population growth and H1-B visa programs and the like.
4. Increase taxes on the wealthy, etc.
One arguing point I'd like to make though is that if this doesn't result in wealth redistribution (companies will pay less and this is fine) should we all begin moving to a few cities?
Exactly. This argument that cheaper workforce is out in the sticks, waiting for “remote work” is a lie corporate America has told to keep people in the office.
The truth is, no matter where you are, talent knows what talent is worth. We price accordingly and in the end the market is stable at a certain price level.
We’ve been seeing this over the last decade in major US cities competing for SF-level talent. Tech is one of the highest paid professions. Remote or otherwise. To say companies will just go hire someone cheaper assumes they can find someone cheaper.
In the end I think the real winners are rural America (or Europe or where ever you live). Having a lifeblood of capital come back to small towns and the like will decentralize our cities, improve our quality of life, reinforce the need for infrastructure, and allow innovation to solve those problems.
And I don't think it's SV -> Rural America exclusively. Many of these jobs will filter back into medium to large sized metros across the country. Places like Columbus, Indianapolis, St Louis, Atlanta, Nashville, etc. . There are scores of talented developers in these areas that would be open to remote work, but not relocation to the major metro areas.
Is this what is actually happening? We should look at the statistics as to where people move to.
From what I can tell, people are actually mostly moving to other tech hubs (but lower priced) and to high end vacation areas. Think Austin, Denver, Park City Utah, Lake Tahoe, etc... The underlying dynamics are still at play (even tech but to a lesser extent).
200 acre tech village clusters in the mid west that are modern and sustainable islands. They can bring in capital and still not step on the toes of rural America if they don’t want to change the fabric of their society.
It makes me uncomfortable to think tech population from Ca descending onto unsuspecting laid back mid western towns. Integration should be gentle and respectful and with consent.
This is a pipe dream and quite conceited. Talent is worth what the market will pay for it. No escaping supply and demand. If you no longer need to be in the office, the labor pool is immensely expanded. Unless you think that all the smart people in the world were already working for SF employers.
my fear is that an influx of zoom professionals to places in the desirable parts of 'flyover country' will cause us to repeat the mistakes of sf and seattle in hundreds of times over across the country. most people here were still barely hanging from the recession and now the combination of rapid expansion and quickly rising prices on top of shutdowns is not giving lifeblood to the people who need it, they're being pushed out and the californians are moving in along with big box stores and sodosopa
Yup, you’re right, we have an existential crisis brewing in rural America with remote work and the influx of residents driving cost of housing up when residents who were there already are still struggling from the recession of 2008.
I don’t have a comment or solution to this problem (is it even a problem?) otherwise I’d suggest something. I’m just observing like others, but I will admit to browsing Zillow for a farm if remote work has staying power. I think being able to provide some stimulus economically from this will help those smaller rural businesses. I don’t know. I’m not qualified in economics to predict the outcome, only some hope and some fear of possibilities.
Aggregate price for talent probably doesn't change. Demand for talent in key markets goes down (as companies in those markets start looking for non-local talent[1]), but demand for talent in any market goes up (as non-local companies seek local talent).
So it would follow that overpriced talent in high-demand markets would see a decrease, where underpriced talent in low-demand markets would see an increase.
This would be the same concerns with offshoring as well, but that hasn't led to massive salary drops. Because there's still a big cost to switching people. If you could fire all your SF SWEs today and replace them with identical, knowledgable, fully-ramped, culture-carried SWEs in $secondary_market for half price, you would. You can't, so you threaten and you try to convince your SF SWE that you could just enough to keep their expectations low, but not so much that they actually quit.
I see a lot of companies still trying the "CoLA trick" on employees moving to secondary markets. "We can hire your position in $market for cheaper," so the argument goes. The best move there is to call their bluff: "go do it then". Most people won't do it because a) conflict is hard and b) finding a new job on top of moving is annoying. So they'll take it on the chin and just resign 6-12 months later after they're settled.
[1] In the old world, there's still a premium to convince talent to relocate. So companies in high-demand markets (e.g., SF) either have to pay +x% to tap non-local talent and get them to move to the high-demand market (where they become local talent).
Even in the new world, non-local talent isn't going to sit by and let themselves be underpaid. "I'm doing the exact same thing, delivering the exact same value, but someone is getting paid 30% more to sit in the office? Oh, and you don't even pay for my home office?"
I do wonder why people assume that the beneficiaries will be American.
You can hire competent Thai or Vietnamese programmers for $20K/year on Upwork, which is a princely sum in their countries. If all you want is someone to implement a spec, they'll do the job just as good or better than any American. Why would you pay $100K/year?
Most markets bifurcate into a commoditized low-end that makes all the volume and a differentiated high-end that makes all the profits. Think Android/iPhone, Windows/Mac, TSMC/Intel, Volkswagon/Porsche, etc. The commodity low-end programmer isn't the guy in Missouri, it's the guy in Minsk or Bangkok. You're either the one making up the specs (which will probably still be in Silicon Valley, because that requires communication and trust more than coding ability), or the one implementing the specs (which can be anywhere, with commensurate wages).
Depending on your definition of wealthy, "anyone working" full stop. A large number of americans do not work (too young/old etc). Others are sick. Many at the top of society don't earn much income (tax voodoo). And automation is coming. If we define "wealthy" as the top 25/15/10% of wage earners, how soon before that is basically just anyone with a fulltime job?
Wealthy is about how much wealth you have, not your income.
In 2020, $121,411 was the median household net worth in the United States. This is up from $97,225.55 in 2017.
The average household net worth in 2020 was $746,821. It was $692,100 in 2017.
The disparity between these two numbers is itself a major problem, but not the point. If you have a net work of $120k you aren't wealthy, even if you earnt that all in the last month.
The way you get from having no wealth to having an average amount is by working harder and earning more. However the tax system is built to punish people who earn more money from work, and reward people who gain more wealth through things like capital gains -- you pay more tax if you increase your wealth by a dollar from working than from the side-effect of being already wealthy and seeing your assets gain value. You're also far more likely to have higher outgoings if you're working (higher cost to live near a high paying job, commuting costs etc)
If you are on the median ohio wage on 37k a year, so $30,427.47 net, and spending 37k to live, your wealth doesn't increase.
If you work an extra 1k, you take home $31,202.47 -- $775, 22.5% tax.
If you make 1k in capital gains, you keep $971, 3% tax.
Look at twice median wage of 74k a year. Take home 57,439.49. Extra $1k will give you 58,109.69, an extra $670 - 33% tax.
Make 1k in capital gains and you pay 18% tax.
Earn 10 times the median wage at $370k and you keep 239,713.20, 42% tax.
Get 1k in capital gains and you keep $764, 24% tax.
You have an interesting thesis here but I think there are some logical consequences you aren’t considering. Prior to COVID the US personal savings rate was under 10%, lower than that of countries like China and India, both of which are materially poorer than the US on a per-capita basis. Relatedly, Americans also have extremely high levels of consumer debt.
When you consider just how low US individual income tax rates are by global standards, it’s obvious that disparities in net worth have a lot to do with the fact that a large share of Americans, regardless of their income, effectively choose to live from paycheck to paycheck on the brink of personal insolvency.
This must be, partially, why the Mennonites and Amish are the wealthiest and fastest growing demographic in the USA.
No real income to speak of just immense capital gains. Must be nice.
I often hear arguments about capital gains taxes being an unfair advantage, and that it should be taxed the same as income.
But often these arguments don't present a full picture - because it only discusses the end result of the dollar received and compare the tax rates.
What about the risk? A job-income is 100% guaranteed to be received if one worked. Even if the business paying the said wage doesn't make a profit, they still have to pay the wage. The owner cops the loss.
Therefore, to encourage investments, the taxes are lowered on the profits of such type of investment (which is what capital gains are). The person trying to make capital gains income has to take on a risk that a wage earner doesn't, because the capital gains aren't guaranteed.
If capital gains are taxed the same, you will find that there will be less investments, which leads to less jobs and less wealth overall.
from a financial perspective, the job comes with zero (or near zero) monetary risk.
The person risking "billions" in capital is taking "billions" in monetary risk (the weighting depending on what the investment is - bonds are less risky than shares, for example).
And they stand to gain far more than someone working for $20 an hour.
Over the last 50 years the values of investments have far far outpaced growth in earnings. If a millionaire doesn't invest and make captial gains, what does he do with his money? Keep it in a box under the bed?
> And they stand to gain far more than someone working for $20 an hour.
And a lawyer gets paid $200/hr. What are you comparing? I'm not talking about whether it's "fair" that someone can be earning so little when there exists billionairs. That's for the philosophers and social commentators to endless debate.
But someone working for $20/hr earns that money, with zero risk of not receiving it after services rendered. Someone investing money is not guaranteed a return.
> If a millionaire doesn't invest and make captial gains, what does he do with his money?
So you're saying that because said millionaire has "no choice", he would be forced to invest and thus, society could leech more off him?
well, you can interpret my words in a wrong way to try to make a point, or you can admit that taxation discourages the thing being taxed.
Higher capital gains tax discourages investment. If income tax is higher, it indeed does stop people from working (as much). But we are talking about raising capital gains tax, not raising income tax.
> 1. Americans need to buy and hold equities. Period. When Google cuts costs or makes more money, I benefit as a shareholder (or you can hold total market indexes and the like).
Yes, but it is not good that your "compensation" will be coming from something that isn't tied to your job performance. Wages at least have some tenuous connection to how well you perform at work.
> 2. Maybe the money will go to new hires, capabilities, expenditures, etc. ?
Based on recent trends, this will not happen.
> 3. Sure, but this is certainly a good arguing point against immigration, population growth and H1-B visa programs and the like.
> Yes, but it is not good that your "compensation" will be coming from something that isn't tied to your job performance. Wages at least have some tenuous connection to how well you perform at work.
It also doesn't account for the fact that these equities can lose substantial value, or may be over-valued.
> Yes, or nationalize the banks.
Re-implement the Glass-Steagall Act, or similar. Nationalization leaves the levers of power in the hands of the wrong people. Keeping commercial and investment banking separate while implementing strong consumer protections was shown to work well in the past. Also, it has shown that the repeal massively reduced the amount of banks (killing competition) so it stands to reason that trend could be reversed and improve the consumer banking experience over time.
This won’t work. When the tech exodus begins, it’s going to cause CA to buckle at its knees because the wealthy has been subsidizing more than 80% of the population. It is not sustainable or healthy at all to suckle at the teat of the wealthy.
We should abolish all taxes and only retain taxes based on consumption. And a flat modest capital gains tax. With dedications gone, this might actually bring in more public money.
Public spending will also decrease if we figure a way out of unfunded pension liabilities. This is huge. Don’t know how it can be resolved.
> the wealthy has been subsidizing more than 80% of the population
CA does not tax wealth, they tax (predominately) income, and I wouldn't be so quick to equate the 2. Prop 13, for example, can mean that wealthy land owners pay almost nothing in tax if they've owned their property for a long time.
Maybe? But as things are, most of those generous employee salaries are parasitized by NIMBY landlords and property owners in SFBA who have selfishly engineered SF's horrendous housing supply shortage.
If that value is going to be captured by anyone, I would much MUCH rather it be captured by Google shareholders, many of whom are employees and are at least partly responsible for the company's incredible success, than lazy and parasitic SFBA landlords who profit from their own NIMBYism and regulatory predation.
Not maybe, it is supply and demand. IF the supply of remote labor does increase then the share of economic profit going to capital also increases. (i.e. Employers keep more of the profits as opposed to sharing)
This is true both ways though. If you're getting paid 140k, but your rent is 5k a month, you're only capturing 80k of wages, and the landlords are capturing 60k in rent.
If you're working remotely for 100k, and paying 1.7k a month in rent, you're capturing ~80k as well. That means more capital is going to the employers(who saves 40k) at the expense of the landlords (who lose out on that 40k).
I honestly think I'd rather have the capital go to the employers because a) it improves my value in relation to them (I now can argue that I should get paid more, because I bring in 40k a year more value than I did in SV) AND I have a financial interest in the company doing well (with options/RSUs/bonuses/etc).
The money going to the landlords starts to become very literally "rent seeking" where they will capture the capital without providing any productivity gains in return. You could argue that their value in "provide a location for people to live so they can collaborate more effectively" is decreasing with remote work, and they will have to charge less because the value they provide is decreasing.
The bay area is one of the worse places to have rental properties in the country though in terms of ratio of rental income to mortgage costs. If it wasn't for appreciation most would sell instead of try to rent out homes. Landlords aren't making their money from the rents, they are making it from the appreciation.
If a landowner is having trouble making a profit on rent due to high mortgage costs, that just means that the wealth was captured by the previous owner via a high sale price. So the point still stands that a disproportionate amount of wealth is flowing to land instead of capital or labor.
It most certainly is, if at the same time you're hanging out at city council meetings protesting construction and housing development. The cost of housing in SFBA isn't really the cost of land - its the cost of regulation. It's the marginal cost of building new housing.
Yes, in a competitive market, rent is your cash flow. It pays recurring property taxes, maintenance, and interest. It's a cliche but you really have two opportunities to make money in rental property: when you buy, and when you sell.
The formula is different if you are a home owner, at least it was when there was more appreciation. You don't mind paying a higher mortgage as much if you are capturing a huge chunk of your current salary in home equity each year. Bay area home ownership is where a lot of people made their money.
That's in an academically perfect economic system, and labor is not that. People have been able to get cheap engineering labor from India for decades and wages have still been climbing. Businesses choose who they hire for a variety of reasons and price is only a single factor.
Additionally, labor has a say in what they're paid as well and knowledge of what the average pay is for a given job in their country, region, or city. They can also talk to their fellow employees when they're hired and then push for a hire wage when they find out they're making less then everyone else doing the same job. Just because someone lives in Wisconsin doesn't mean they just accept any offer at a discount simply because HR has a bar chart says they should be paid 35% less then someone else.
The one thing people seem to keep forgetting about when talking about this race to the bottom is how hard it is to find good software authors. My company is fully remote and global and it is still really hard to find good people. I really don't see much of a change given the current unmet, and rising, demand.
Agree with this. If a purely cost driven race to the bottom is inevitable, it already would have happened. I think what’s going on right now increases the competition for roles that some people may have previously had a geographic advantage over others in obtaining, but I don’t think this means that advantage is gone, nor do I think it’s a zero sum game. There may be some downward wage pressure, but if cost was your only motivator as an employer, you were probably already hiring remote teams in low cost markets.
I hear this a lot from employers, but more often than not, they are not willing to offer competitive compensation for the level of talent they wish to attract.
> The bottom is still decently high even in Midwest cities
Yes, and I also see the push for remote work also affecting the demand side of the software labor market as well as the supply. There will be even more push for good collaboration/communication work process software. It's still a fast growing market.
Former Texan here! You will not get RSU's or bonuses as an engineer in Texas. You will get cash and insurance. If you doubt me, feel free to go on an interview and ask about those things!
I can tell you there's a reason I left Texas and it's because cash doesn't do to your savings what RSU's and bonuses will.
As an employer I am looking for an expert who does excellent work. I don't care where he is located and I am willing to pay good money for good work. Experts are a rare resource which will always be expensive no matter where they are located. My 2 ct.
Agreed. Unless the long-term need for software begins to decline, if you are skilled, hard-working, and able to communicate and work well with others, a lot of people will hire you.
It will just continue to bifurcate more. Highly skilled people will still kill. People that mostly benefitted from being in the Bay are fucked. High-end positions outside the Bay pay Bay salaries.
You are spot on and I am surprised that this is often overlooked. The industry is either on the the track to the massive shift how it operates, or, after COVID it comes back to the traditional in office MO.
I'm not sure it's relevant. It's not as if remote options haven't been available for a long time. The wages in San Francisco aren't determined explicitly by cost-of-living, they are determined by the scarcity of availability of the right resources.
Businesses found it necessary to exist in Silicon Valley because it provided certain benefits, and businesses found it necessary to have on-premises employees because it provided certain benefits. Since California won't allow any on-premises anything, the cost-benefit of being in the Valley and having people in the office is being reset. But if your skills and aptitude are scarce, there's no reason to believe wages won't continue to reflect that. And if your skills and aptitude aren't scarce, you were overpaid in the first place.
The support for remote has expanded greatly. Zoom isn't perfect, but it's a lot better than a group of people sitting around a speakerphone or a glitchy skype or WebX call trying to work with a remote person. And if everyone was remote, forget about it it was like getting the planets to align for everyone to be in productive remote communication. Remember spending the first 15 minutes of every conference call just getting everyone online and tech issues settled?
I agree, and frankly, at this point, I think the changes did not pass the point of no return. But this depends on whether the vaccines eventually work and for how long, will the virus mutates etc. What I know is that never before the industry had this global "remote operation" training on such a global scale and who knows will it result in changes or it was decided that it's unsustainable and everyone wants to be back to normal asap.
The SF-based company I work for has already announced wage adjustments for employees who relocate out of the region. They haven't happened yet, but the company has given everyone a "heads up; it's on the table."
Would be odd to expect otherwise. In general, companies are going to pay market rate a.k.a. what they must to attract talent. Someone who has a much lower cost of living may be willing to accept much lower compensation to work for the same company. If you expect the company to continue paying you that much despite a change in your situation you're doomed to disappointment.
My company of about 4000 people ran the numbers after the dust settled from transitioning to remote work, and determined that we're about 30% less productive. This was deemed acceptable, and we've been hiring to close that gap.
It would not surprise me at all if companies became more open to hiring remote employees, but started paying them 20% - 30% less, and extended the offer to transition to WFH (with a salary adjustment) for existing employees as well.
I've worked for several and relocated, nobody ever tried this. I can't imagine a company being so attractive that it would make sense to stay in such a role under the circumstances.
Having had a fairly long tech career working in small, non-SF cities, even getting paid 70-80% of a Bay area salary, I can tell you that this allows you to live very, very well.
Bay area salaries are much larger than most other jobs (tech or not) in small cities. I recall local tech companies offering 1/2 to 1/3 of what you would get paid for average (non-FAANG) work in the Bay. In most smaller cities in the US > $100k is still quite a lot for a household, let alone a single income. If take that income outside of even small towns to more rural areas, $100k can allow you to live very, very well.
Sure eventually we'll see salaries reach an equilibrium, where local tech companies have to offer more and big tech companies will offer less. However, for the next few years, if you're coming from a Bay Area company, you can take a pretty major cut to TC and still live extremely well. You don't have to move to the middle of nowhere for this to be the case either.
Depends on how much you value housing size / quality. You can't get a big house in the Bay Area but if you opt for something smaller you get a lot more disposable income to spend on other luxuries.
Uh...not really. Tiny piece of shit houses built in the 60s still go for a million plus in much of the SFBA. The problem is there's a real housing shortage so there's untenable minimum prices for houses.
At a million dollars you need a fairly large household income to afford luxuries beyond your house. Even putting down 25% on the house with a good 30 year fixed rate loan you'd be looking at just under $4k a month for your mortgage. After utilities you're easily over $4k a month. If you scrimped you could maybe keep your other household costs under $500 a month (realistically you're looking at $1k). So you're looking at a take-home of $4.5-5k to just stay afloat.
That's all for a shitty house that needs work, doesn't have great insulation, and doesn't have a lot of usable space. If you're 30 when you buy they place you only have to keep that income until you're 60 or hope that you build a ton of equity in the meantime and cash out.
That's the minimum for most of the SFBA. There's plenty of places with even more outrageous prices for shitty houses. To buy a house for not completely outrageous prices you need to go pretty far afield with hour plus commutes.
Treating yourself to ramen once a week is not a luxury.
> After utilities you're easily over $4k a month. If you scrimped you could maybe keep your other household costs under $500 a month (realistically you're looking at $1k). So you're looking at a take-home of $4.5-5k to just stay afloat
This is more than accessible to tech workers at public companies. A 150k income is going to be ~7k a month after taxes. Tier one employers pay significantly more than that to new grads, and pretty much everyone reputable in the bay pays more than that to experienced people. So yeah, single income can absolutely afford a home.
Obviously someone with student loans can't do that as quickly, but otoh a dual income family could put $2M down in cash before they turn 30 given moderate success. (Or another way of looking at this is a moderately successful mid-20s SWE can bank 100k/yr after all expenses and retirement savings, without budgeting strictly. That's ridiculous)
Who is offering new grads $150k regularly? What new grad making $150k is going to qualify for a loan on a million dollar house? Where are they getting a down payment? Where are they saving up hundreds of thousands with $3-4K rents before other expenses? How the shit is a dual engineer income saving up $2m in cash by the time they're 30 even with no student loans?
A SWE in their 20s banking $100k a year? Must be nice.
Google, Amazon (and subsidiaries like Twitch), Microsoft (and subsidiaries like Github), Facebook, Linkedin, Stripe, Square, Lyft, Uber, Snap, Oracle, Apple, Dropbox, Box, Nvidia, Twitter, Slack, Salesforce, ByteDance and a slew of others. And I'm including only companies that pay out 150K in cash equivalents (cash + annual bonus + liquid stock) in that list.
After a promotion, that list probably doubles in size.
> What new grad making $150k is going to qualify for a loan on a million dollar house?
I don't think I ever suggested this. What I did suggest is that someone who graduates at 22 or 23 (and, with the big caveat that they do so with little to no existing debt), gets a 150K starting comp, and has even a modest amount of career growth will be able to save a whole bunch of money in their late twenties.
> A SWE in their 20s banking $100k a year? Must be nice.
I doubt it, software is eating the world, there aren't enough engineers and we see productivity gains like the cloud where you can basically run a global scale business with just a handful of people. We will probably see more of those companies than less.
As talented as the Ukrainian or Estonian engineers might be you're unlikely to see any real savings over time. Just scheduling things a full work day apart in time zones is really difficult. Effectively communicating is even more difficult. Then there's stupid little shit like one machine in a remote office set to a different locale than the main office that breaks things in stupid ways.
Engineering throughput definitely doesn't scale linearly with the size of the engineering team. Good on you for never having managed to have heard of Fred Brooks though.
It becomes a lot easier as an office becomes remote-first, and adopts the changes necessary to make that work well. There's no longer that barrier between the in-person and remote teams.
It is an option and they will, it will start slowly though. First offering a job to someone out of state. Maybe they save some money and the next hire, they look à little further and they pick up an employee from another English speaking country, they save even more salary. The more these tests work out the more companies will expirement. Eventually hiring an American will seem unnecessary and costly if you're distributed anyways.
It's great news for non-Americans though, USD goes a long way in a lot of the world.
Last time I was at a company that tried that, the (US-based) management would fight over making sure their projects went to the US-based devs (even if not in the same office) vs the overseas devs because the communication gap - timezones and physical distance both - was that bad.
They’ve tried countless times for the last 30+ years. It has not ended well.
Maybe this time is different with the advent of better online collaboration tools. But these tools do little to help with real-time communication across time zones and language barriers.
I've seen a lot of predictions for "races for the bottom" over the years, and yet it's hard to remember one that actually happened.
Economies usually don't work like that.
Even if some version of that happens, it will still pay off to move out of SF.
I think one of the big problems in the US is that growth and wealth are concentrated to a few hyper rich coastal cities, where most people can't afford to move. While large parts of the country is relatively impoverished.
If that ends up being spread around more evenly, I think that's only good. Even if I personally might get a pay cut.
>I think one of the big problems in the US is that growth and wealth are concentrated to a few hyper rich coastal cities, where most people can't afford to move. While large parts of the country is relatively impoverished.
This statement can be generalized to:
"I think one of the big problems in the world is that growth and wealth are concentrated to a few hyper rich countries, where most people can't afford to move. While large parts of the world are relatively impoverished."
It has already happened for manufacturing. Now US still is home to lot of high end manufacturing. But the point it no longer offers middle class living to millions of Americans.
Now I do understand that of software people believe that programing is somehow special and can't be done in effective manner remotely or third world site at far lower cost.
I have few observations here:
1) With massive proliferation of frameworks the creative/ intellectual input is increasing minimal for most of commercial work. And that's where most of the software devs are employed.
2) A lot of work is low quality that companies do not care because same mentality of cheap use and throw stuff is prevailing now for enterprise apps as it is for consumer stuff.
3) Looking at lot of software produced by top valley companies is buggy, bloated and feels generally crappy. I do not believe all of it is just due to companies' strategy of being first to market. A lot of it seems because of same low quality CRUD peddlers who fill office floors of fortune 500 companies.
> Now I do understand that of software people believe that programing is somehow special and can't be done in effective manner remotely or third world site at far lower cost.
I've spent decades among software people and never heard this said.
The outsourcing to India etc is 2+ decades old already FFS! What impact it's had on US wages is hard to say, but it's been very good for a lot of third world engineers!
>They will soon realize they don't need to pay SF wages.
The reason they pay “SF wages” is because they can’t hire talent at other prices, not because of some goodness of the heart. While total talent pool might be slightly expanded with people who didn’t want to move to SF previously, overall it’s not going to be a big shift.
Yeah, that's my concern. It would be different if I was wanting to buy a house. I actually like my apartment in the bay area, but when the office did shut down I looked at what it would cost. I wouldn't save much money because I wanted to stay in California.
My employer is becoming more WFH friendly. But they are explicitly saying post-covid fulltime remote will require an adjustment for base salary and future equity grants. I don't think that would be a good financial decision for me. Even if my compensation didn't get cut I would probably end up needing to take a pay cut or move if I wanted to change jobs.
>require an adjustment for base salary and future equity grants
Base salaries are pretty sticky downwards. It wouldn't be surprising to see modest formal geo-based adjustments of base salaries and much larger quiet adjustments of equity grants--which tend to be much less transparent. It will obviously vary by company but, to the degree in-office becomes largely optional, it's reasonable to expect comp tends towards something more equalized--at least within the US.
Most CS graduates and interns I have hired and worked with I have been pretty happy with. Granted I'm disappointed CS is turning more into programming as a craft and less on the mathematical thinking necessary for true innovation to happen, but from an economics perspective it makes sense to hire programmers over theoreticians.
There are many immigrants in US getting paid US wages who graduated from non-US colleges. Companies in other countries need to start paying US wages and stop exploiting developers.
> They will soon realize they don't need to pay SF wages . . . I predict a race for the bottom.
Remote companies that attempt to race for the bottom will be at a huge competitive disadvantage against remote companies that don't. Over time, they'll learn and adapt (or they'll die).
The biggest misconception about remote work is that remote work is good because don't have to pay bay area salaries. When you do that, you're broadening your talent pool, and you're then limiting yourself to the bottom half of it.
When you pay Silicon Valley salaries (or higher) for remote work, you broaden your talent pool to the entire world, and then you get to select from the very top tier. We've been doing this for years, now, and it still feels like an undiscovered gold mine hiding in plain sight.
If that is truly the result then I what comes from this will be a lot more young companies and competition at the startup level- if you can't pull in a reasonable tech salary why bother making someone else rich?
Agreed, people are way overestimating the impact of this. Most people I know can't wait for life to go back to normal.
It's easy to move away when everyone is forced to. But when you need that new promotion when office life is back and someone else there is networking...you just gonna stay back in Tulsa? Doubtful.
This is indeed what will likely happen given how many people actually don't love working full time remote. So all these media stories will swing the other way afterwards. Also way easier to cut people when you don't have to see them in the office every day.
> There just aren’t good reasons to live here anymore for so many of us
The majority of people that say this are also the exact reason why the city is blackhole of culture and fun. You aren't in traffic, you are the traffic.
Tech in SFBA reminds me of the Resource curse (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Resource_curse). SFBA did nothing special to attract the wealth of technology companies, they effectively got lucky with Shockley/Fairchild/Traitorous 8 and the boom in technology that followed. It seems the local gov't have squandered an opportunity to truly capitalize on the gift they were given, and perhaps even done their best to jeopardize these resources.
This is ridiculous. The Bay Area, specifically Stanford and Berkeley, contributed to the WWII tech research initiative and then afterwards, Terman made Stanford Research Park which led to Silicon Valley.
That's a counterfactual. Yeah, maybe Shockley's project happened elsewhere it Silicon Elsewhere could have happened somewhere else. But it didn't happen elsewhere. But you are assuming that it would have catalyzed elsewhere. For example, it could have catalyzed in Murray Hill, New Jersey after the transistor but it didn't.
Anyways, people are always leaving the Bay Area. If you came here five years ago, first you were new here and second, you've known people who have left.
So Keith Rabois left for Miami. Great for him. The question is whether the next Keith Rabois will spring forth from Miami. Unlikely.
It is interesting how you can gloss over the signifcance of the inventor of the transistor moving to the bay area, and then use the example how his former laboratory in New Jersey failed to commercialize the transistor as an example of how Silicon Valley is uniquely situated to allow innovation to happen.
A much more reasonable interpretation is that Shockley was going succeed no matter where he went, not that Silicon Valley is uniquely situated, especially with the dominance of east coast companies in defense contracting.
When Shockley moved west in 1956, Stanford Research Park was already 3 years old. Its defense roots predate even that. Shockley wasn't moving to a technological wasteland.
William Shockley graduated from CalTech, and his connections from CalTech, more specifically Arnold Beckman, funded his new venture in silicon transistors.
It's true that Shockley picked Palo Alto because of his mother, but it would be unfair to not also credit Stanford who had an outsized role in helping solidify the Bay Area as the hub for "Silicon Valley".
Many many many companies tried to move the industry away from California since the 50s, and every time, those companies star players ended up relocating to the bay area.
California's free-wheeling culture permeates at all levels, from investors all the way down to the individual contributors. It just wasn't an accident that Silicon Valley happened the way it did.
Okay, so if California's "free-wheeling culture" caused SV to be where it is, what factored into CA's cultural development? Why the lack of free-wheeling culture elsewhere?
While I don't fully agree with the parent, there was a long tradition of "Go west young man" for people who wanted to make their fortunates far from eastern bankers and other conservative industries. Very broad brush, but also not wholly inaccurate.
Ahh, sorry. I think I mis-read your comment. I thought you were questioning the existence of free-wheeling culture in CA.
As to why CA, I don't think there is any one reason. The weather and geography are huge. It was a lightly populated state in the 1950s, so real estate was much cheaper than on the heavily populated east coast (big for both start ups and 'artistic' types). And the gold rush mentality is/was pervasive, which I personally think leads to a government and culture that is generally supportive of start ups and small businesses. While CA has a reputation for being unfriendly to businesses, the taxes and regulations are largely targeting big businesses. So that leaves more room for small start ups to compete.
I mean, just look at California's history. If people were willing to upend their lives since the 1800s to move their families to the other side of the country on vague things like the promise of striking it rich somehow, those people probably had distinct personalities. Every one of California's strongest industries have been because people escaped where they were to go strike it rich (in money or fame).
Wine, Movies, Farming, Banking, Education, Tech.
California is just a state with a long history with a weird mixture of entrepreneurs you won't find elsewhere.
At the same time, a significant portion of the computer industry (HP, which is moving its--well HPE's--HQ to Houston, notwithstanding) was in the East through about the 90s. Boston in the case of the Route 128 companies, etc. But also others like IBM. So a large chunk of the industry was away from California.
local govts did a few things to enable this. They created a welcoming business environment that allowed for rapid expansion. For example, Stanford Research Park was a joint venture of Stanford, and Palo Alto. I am not sure there is any good writeup on the contribution of local governments to silicon valley.
If you say so. As an outsider (although I used to work close, in Sacramento, for 5 years), I only can say that I did not hear anything about substantial govt participation, similar to post-war infrastructure projects, or recent push for green energy.
But, of course, I will be glad to find out that the Valley is the coproduct of some govt program, not only a lucky star alignment.
Yeah, I thought it was somewhat due to Stanford's handling of IP. The argument I heard was that if you're researching at Stanford and make a productizable discovery you can spin off a company no strings. I was at Cornell when I heard this, where any company built off on-campus research had to sign over 20% of the company up front. Makes those initial pitches to VC that much harder.
it was a lot more. they built an incubator called Stanford Research Park as a joint venture with Palo Alto. It gave access to students (key to any tech company, getting fresh students with new ideas and up to date knowledge), access to VC, and nice facilities for tech startups.
I don't know the exact terms of universities when it comes to founding companies but I don't see how the university can prevent you from founding a company, or demand a percentage.
I don't think that's the case. I've anecdotally heard that Stanford does take some (possibly small) amount of equity. From the first paragraph of Stanford's patent policy[0]:
> All potentially patentable inventions conceived or first reduced to practice in whole or in part by members of the faculty or staff (including student employees) of the University in the course of their University responsibilities or with more than incidental use of University resources, shall be disclosed on a timely basis to the University. Title to such inventions shall be assigned to the University, regardless of the source of funding, if any.
For an example of an institution with the kind of IP policy you're describing, the University of Waterloo in Canada has a policy[1] that by default assigns IP to creators rather than the institution:
> Except as stipulated below, it is University policy that ownership of rights in IP created in the course of teaching and research activities belong to the creator(s).
That's interesting. Maybe it's the amount of equity that matters so much - it's been years since I heard this and it was an off-hand comment in a talk.
Yeah, the important part about this is "with more than incidental use of University resources," which, for software, is almost nonexistent. (Even internet usage doesn't count as more than "incidental," which I know is a point that many places use to "suggest" they had a part in the creation.)
Otoh, they are extremely supportive of professors and PhDs (and undergrads, though those are often more software) starting companies based on research, and have very good policies regarding this. Most people end up generally happy on all sides.
Might be different in upper levels, but this wasn't the case from my experience as an undergrad at Stanford.
Wanted to mess around with programming drones for a prototype delivery system (I think in 2015), submitted my proposal for a 2k grant to buy a drone, but I dropped the idea when the committee that manages it said they would make decisions about IP. Maybe my proposal wasn't important enough to warrant an actual negotiation? I suspect that at upper levels of development/research this process is handled differently.
undergraduates aren't employees and have total freedom to do what they want with their intellectual output. However, they can just decide not to give you any money if you make trouble.
No one disputes that those events you cite happened. However, those events were essentially random, not caused by local efforts to stimulate industry. Because of them, the area was blessed/cursed with an excess of productivity that it didn't know how to cause.
Now it's just coasting downhill, unable to maintain the altitude that it once had because it never knew how to (was never possible to?) build that altitude without a big dose of random luck.
Lots of failed research parks, oil wells, railroads, gold mining operations.
The thing with oil wells, railroads, and gold mining, is that geography/geology matters more than path dependence.
Silicon Valley and Hollywood, and to a lesser extent NYC and London, are more about path dependence. Their dominance in their sectors seem more resulting from, if anything specific to point to, legal factors, than geography or any particular natural resource/phenomenon.
Why make movies and software in California, one in the south and the other a bit more north?
The founding of Hollywood was just as random as the events that "caused" the rise of the Valley. What if Griffith had gone elsewhere? What if Edison hadn't enforced his patents, causing the exodus across the country to make movies out of his purview? Similar climate/environs/affordability elsewhere, why not AZ, NM, TX, GA, FL?
This is a lot different than, say, the reasons for North Carolina to eventually beat New England in textile production, or why the Rust Belt is where it is, or why rail and shipbuilding was big in the Northeast but not so much space and auto manufacturing. It's more like why the appliances that are made in the U.S. are mostly made in the south.
Hollywood is what Hollywood is largely due to its geography. Within a ~4 hour drive of Hollywood its possible to get to an area of california that looks at least passingly (for the purpose of movie making at least) similar to more or less anywhere in the world.
This isn't the map i was looking for, but gives you the basic idea https://brilliantmaps.com/california-filming-map/. The Geographic diversity around Hollywood is absolutely responsible for its initial success.
But what were the first two movies made in Hollywood? Griffith's Western and DeMille's Western. If another genre had been preferred in the 1910s, seems like a movie hub could've landed elsewhere. (Or maybe Westerns were actually made more due to budgetary constraints than preferences.)
They were most certainly caused by local efforts in the 1950s. The reason the Silicon revolution happened in Silicon Valley had everything to do with Cold War radar systems. I suggest watching Steve Blank's Secret History of Silicon Valley to get a better historical perspective:
The "silicon revolution" happened at Bell Labs, rising out of their need to replace vacuum tubes. Shockley only moved to SV because his mother lived there, and she was sick. And it just so happened that Terman invested heavily in making Stanford into a college with heavy links to industry. It is true that military research was a factor in this process (again, semi-coincidentally...Bell Labs invested heavily in military research because they believed, correctly at first, that this would protect them from being broken up...radar was invented, in its modern form, in the UK and developed heavily by Bell Labs/MIT) but there were other factors. SV's pre-eminence looked at from the 1950s was extremely non-obvious however (Boston was the centre of the VC world, MIT and Bell Labs led in research).
Agree, and a lot of those events were 60-80 years ago. I doubt that the amazing innovation and clever governance that allowed these events to happen (or cultivated them) would be possible today
Lots of places contributed to WWII research initiatives. Why not Chicago, where the first nuclear reactor was built? Or Boston, with MIT whose research labs churned out fire control systems and computers? Or Los Angeles, with its defense powerhouses and UCLA/Cal-Tech? Or Detroit? Or anywhere else in the US with given the wartime mobilization?
Because Shockley moved here. Fairchild was founded here, and the Fairchildren built Silicon Valley and its venture capitalism.
What about other municipalities/areas who have great universities and contributed to WW2? There are many examples of areas with similar initiatives and prestigious universities but have not reaped the same outsized rewards over the past 60-80 years as SFBA. So I would posit that it is more luck than execution, and thus qualifies as a resource curse
The lack of non compete bans anywhere else in the country is not luck though, and other worker protections that prevent legal liability for stuff you work on outside of work.
"Detroit" moved to the suburbs. Check out the statistics for Oakland county (and possibly macomb county for the blue collar workers).
Toyota, GM, Ford, Chrysler, Nissan, VW, and all their parts suppliers(and the supplier parts suppliers) have at minimum a white collar office in south east Michigan.
The event that caused the Exodus from Detroit was the Race Riots. You can Google that because I'm not touching that topic.(and it doesn't help Detroit has a 1% tax)
Most people I know would choose to live in a temperate climate with low humidity if they had the option. Detroit might have been economically useful due to certain modes of travel and location of population at the time, but that may not be relevant anymore.
don't forget non-competes and moonlighting. As the rest the world has proven there is [comparatively] no innovation and startups without these two. The things like for example Traitorous 8 can never happen.
Wrt. people leaving because of WFH - anecdotally people leave for other place where there are campuses of their companies. That suggests that there is not much trust in WFH. Once WFH subsides many of those people will still continue their comfortable work and life in those places. Those "stale blood" people - the highly paid employees of those large corps - aren't really drivers of innovation (making $0.5M+ at say Google as a programming drone one isn't going to drop it and make a startup - that is one of the points why Google is paying well :), and by leaving SFBA they provide the chance (by for example relieving real estate pressure a bit) for the "new blood" to come in.
Come on: there’s a beautiful A/B test you can consult: in the 50s, 60s, and 70s, Boston’s route 128 was the “Silicon Valley” of its time. The US poured even more money into it than they did the Bay Area. Yet which grew and which stagnated?
I think THE major difference was enforcement of noncompetes (as well as those as a proxy for a slew of similar regulatory differences).
Financial resources went to route 128 because of a more corporate-friendly regulatory climate. Innovation came from Silicon Valley because of a more innovation-friendly regulatory climate.
Guess which won out?
US reached economic supremacy in part due to a weaker IP scheme than Europe, and China is doing likewise right now. Innovation requires a mixture of economic rewards (which doesn't happen in the absence of any enforcement), and building off of the work of others (which doesn't happen with strict IP laws). Massachusetts went off of the deep end of more is better.
Coincidentally, Boston is doing better for big business, like biotech, in part because there, the balance falls in a different place. It's very tough to start a scrappy biotech, so the number of employee leaving to do a competing startup is pretty darned low in either case. The downsides of strong IP are smaller, and the upsides of weak IP are greater.
For a long time, Route 128 did largely win out, semiconductors in SV notwithstanding. The lead in computer-related technology did tend to shift to California with the shift to microcomputers. Although it's not clear that was in any way inevitable. (After all, Compaq was in Texas.)
.... Which was the exact moment computing stopped looking like biotech. Before microcomputers, starting a computer company required an investment of perhaps a million dollars in today's currency, depending on the type of company.
After microcomputers, anyone could do it out of their home.
If my employer is making a CAD tool and makes a dumb decision, I can make my better CAD tool and put them out of business. Even hardware changed when I no longer needed to buy individual transistors. Things like the Apple could be designed out of a garage, with commercial off-the-shelf parts, perhaps borrowing a little bit of money from friends and family, but without even taking out a second mortgage. From there, things spiraled up, with quick-turn $40 PCBs, fabless IC companies, and so on.
It didn't have to happen in Silicon Valley, but it couldn't happen in Boston, and with Stanford and what not, Silicon Valley was as good a place as any.
This is not an antagonistic comment but do you have any sources to share about this? I've lived in both cities and feel like I should know more about this.
>Boston is doing better for big business, like biotech
There is also a LOT of biotech in sfbay, but it is still in the shadow of internet tech, for various reasons (PhD is minimum cost of entry, longer development times, etc)
Having worked in both fields (computing and pharmaceuticals) and in both areas (Boston/Cambridge and Silicon Valley -- though never in SF) I can tell you the Bay Area is a shadow of the Boston area in this regard. And the VC dollars send the same message. It honestly surprises me that the JP Morgan healthcare conference is still out here -- I imagine it's due to weather: it's a January conference, and a good excuse to get out of NY/BOS at a nasty time of year.
My point in my GGP post was that the opposite is true, first for tech and more recently for internet commerce, in the Bay Area. And I agree that the #1 driver was a healthy attitude to IP laws (which also drove the film industry to California, first to the Bay Area and then to LA).
And the second was an attitude that people don't care so much about your background and what's been done to date, an attitude I believe to be a legacy of the gold rush.
But was that part of brilliant overarching strategy from visionary government leaders to develop and foster the world's tech hub, or an accident of history?
I think the point is that success comes from the accumulation of many factors; the best you can pull from them is a thread of attitude. "Success" is thus really an emergent phenomenon coming from a bunch of independent decisions, sometimes with feedback between them.
This is why efforts to "duplicate Silicon Valley" fail. Also why Europe was unable to move the locus of financial transactions from London even after the Euro. In both cases, there are plenty of things to point to but nobody really knows.
An A/B test requires all other factors to be the same. Can you imagine a bunch of Harvard kids quit school, rent a house in Cambridge and code/party all year round?
I remember reading an article a log time ago, probably in the late '80s or early '90s, in a non-online newspaper or magazine that looked at a dozen or two other places that seemed like they were good candidates for SV-like development but had failed to become such.
My recollection is that the article found that there were several factors that all came out right for SV. The other places fell short on one or more of them.
I don't remember all of the factors they found, but I remember a few.
One was nearby top tier research universities.
Another was ready access to investors willing to invest in new kinds of businesses. This one was a problem in several older places. The investors there just wanted to invest in companies doing old things or in doing things related to the main existing industry of the region.
Tolerance of failure was important. In some places, failure forever taints you. Start a company and it fails? The investment bankers no longer want to talk to you, and you don't get invited anymore to the parties and events where the behind the scenes networking goes on. In SV having a failed startup isn't a big deal.
I think there was an element of hippy culture mixed in there that contributed to success from openness and willingness to experiment on paths not directly connected to profit.
Also, I hardly think the opportunity was squandered - it's paid off for a long run. I do think there are challenges ahead for the model to continue to succeed faster than other areas.
> I think there was an element of hippy culture mixed in there that contributed to success from openness and willingness to experiment on paths not directly connected to profit.
I'd call it counter culture but I otherwise agree with you.
> It seems the local gov't have squandered an opportunity to truly capitalize on the gift they were given, and perhaps even done their best to jeopardize these resources.
Wait, what?
What exactly was local government supposed to do with this, ah gift?
From the perspective of someone who doesn't live in the Bay area, it is a libertarian paradise for the haves, unlivable for the have-nots, and is the pinnacle of American culture, with its focus on individualistic solutions (detached housing, strong zoning laws that protect existing landowners, reliance on personal vehicle ownership, privatization of critical services) to society-scale problems.
Throw in conflicting interests of the residents of the cities that make up the SFBA, and you pretty much get what one would expect.
Before asking why your local government has not fixed <some problem that makes us mildly uncomfortable>, you may want to instead ask 'Why haven't we elected a local government that would fix that problem?' Tech has an outsized amount of political influence on governments and elections in the area. Governments don't exist in a vacuum, completely detached from the desires of their constituents.
What a strange notion. San Francisco has some of the most paternalistic laws in the US, courtesy of its board of supervisors. Some of them even wanted to ban corporate cafeterias, an issue which returned last year:
1. The SFBA does not begin and end with San Francisco. You're free to pick and choose among its many, many neighbouring municipalities, none of which happen to be governed by the San Francisco city council.
2. These are fantastic examples of measures that at worst, mildly inconvenience the most affluent members of its society, and at best are harmless social signaling of issues that don't matter.
It speaks more about your priorities when you point out things like happy meal toy bans, while ignoring the insanity of having an entire city that is completely unaffordable to the people working in that McDonalds, or a healthcare system that completely fails the most regular customers[1] to that McDonalds.
As for zoning laws, they are absolutely libertarian, in the sense that the people who have made it are using them to pull the ladder up behind them. What's the point of owning property, and having wealth and political influence if you then don't spend that influence to protect the value of your property?
Land, in large part, derives its value from how difficult it is to acquire. I could hardly think of a more land-owner friendly system than one with extremely onerous zoning and construction requirements. If you're feeling pressured by this, you are one of the have-nots (whose life in a libertarian-paradise-for-the-haves is not that great - see my original post on what being a have-not gets you in the SFBA.)
1. Many of the links I shared are about the Bay Area as a whole.
2. Here's the definition of zoning:
> Zoning is a method of urban planning in which a municipality or other tier of government divides land into areas called zones, each of which has a set of regulations for new development that differs from other zones.
Here's the definition of libertarianism:
> Libertarianism is a political philosophy and movement that upholds liberty as a core principle Libertarians seek to maximize autonomy and political freedom, emphasizing free association, freedom of choice, individualism and voluntary association.
In what way is government dictating that you can't build more housing on your property "libertarian"? You're pulling some desperate mental gymnastics.
> As for zoning laws, they are absolutely libertarian, in the sense that the people who have made it are using them to pull the ladder up behind them.
Literal nonsense. That's not what "libertarian" means.
> Literal nonsense. That's not what "libertarian" means.
That is exactly what libertarian means in practice. The ideology, when implemented in a democratic society has no mechanism to combat this kind of regulatory capture. It becomes just a shorthand for "People with money get to keep it, people without get to pull themselves up by their bootstraps."
Autonomy from government is only welcome by actual libertarians when it comes to autonomy from obligations towards government - but reliance on government is sought out when it comes to protection of their wealth by government.
Stop looking at symbolic virtue-signaling gestures, and start looking at what policies actually affect real people's lives, and why those policies are in place. The SFBA is a great place to live if you are self-reliant (wealthy), and can afford its smorgasbord of world-class private services, for anything from education to transportation to healthcare, to legal work, to housing. It very quickly becomes a far-from-great place to live if you have to result to public options for any of those things - because they range from either 'on life support' to 'non-existent'.
> What a strange notion. San Francisco has some of the most paternalistic laws in the US
Not sure if you are aware but the Bay area is much bigger than just San Francisco. San Francisco isn't even the biggest city.
There are very libertarian subcultures of the broader Bay Area, including in San Francisco, but most notably among the wealthy and business owners of Silicon Valley.
> I’m sure there are lots of subcultures. What does this have to do with who is actually governing?
A whole lot. Look no further than
the recent ballot initiative won by Uber and Lyft against classifying drivers as full employees, or similarly failed ballot initiative to remove prop 13 from commercial property taxes. The direction of both results was very much in the libertarian direction.
So, since the Bay Area has socialist subcultures [0], and they actually have power [1], will you say it is socialist in governance? Or are you applying a double standard?
> The direction of both results was very much in the libertarian direction.
Those two particular results, sure. What about all the other results and legislation I referenced?
You may be reacting to the buzzwords rather than the broad strokes. While they do have many nanny-esque laws in the area, you'll find European cities do better on the aspects mentioned.
A local government is only as good as its people. It's people squandered it, though forcing egregious zoning regulations that's leading to the exodus. They claimed profits to the point where it damaged their ability to collect further profits.
Assessing through the lens of strictly zoning laws, I don't think they've done anything wrong. If we (as a society) say zoning is controlled by local governments, and not the state government, then they are free to vote in people that pass (what I view) as draconian zoning policy.
My criticism of zoning is, historically, it has been used to keep certain groups of people out of certain geographic areas.
Yes SF is apparently wildly corrupt. There's an ongoing FBI probe which seems to show that a wide swath of top level city public works employees have been involved in some sort of corruption scandal. The latest revelation is about the former mayor Ed Lee who died last year. Follow the links in the article for all the tentacles in this farce.
Okay, I'm going to give you the benefit of the doubt here because you said "reminds [you]", not that it _is_ in fact the Resource curse. However, you must acknowledge that the Resource Curse doesn't describe the SF Bay Area _at all_.
We have the richest real estate in country, some of the highest earning zipcodes in the country, employment rate most of the country would love to have, etc. There's no "curse" here, as defined in the economic sense.
This is what happens when a city neglects basic quality of life issues, and allows petty crime to thrive. It happened to New York in the 1970's and took roughly three decades to recover from. Good luck, San Francisco.
I think many people prefer petty crime to tech elites. With the upward pressure on rents over the last 10 years, even having your bike stolen every few weeks is cheaper than getting evicted and/or having to find a market rate dwelling.
Of course, it's better to have neither exploding costs nor petty crime, but at the end of the day, dealing with petty crime is more affordable.
EDIT: Getting downvoted to oblivion but I'm not wrong.
"In 2010, a two-bedroom SF apartment on Craigslist averaged $2,893 (per historic data compiled in 2016 by Eric Fischer), or $3,396 after inflation. At the end of 2019, similar units on the same site sit at a median of $4,300, up 26.6 percent."
It would have taken a lot of petty crime to amount to that $12K per year in inflation-adjusted (i.e. real) increase.
Rich people don't want to live in your 100 year old apartment with 50 year old finishes. Unfortunately, in San Francisco, they don't have any other choice.
That, I agree with. San Francisco should have built more housing to accommodate the growth. Though if people are leaving already, I can also see why developers might have been reluctant to bet too big on new construction.
Because if "tech elites" actually are leaving, then the increase in demand will have been proven to be transient
Surely many developers would have made the bet anyway, at least in 2010-2019, but going forward it'll be worth considering whether building housing for people who are likely to leave en masse is worth the risk.
You're not wrong that many people do seem to prefer the petty crime to tech.
But you seem to be condoning that preference, and that preference is ridiculous. An economic boom should not be a bad thing. And tech is not raising rents, it is raising housing demand which could easily be met with a corresponding rise in supply that would limit the price increases, but new housing has been being actively blocked for decades.
You also leave out an important factor, most of the city that is supporting the policies that enable petty crime here have no skin in the game. They live in nice neighborhoods where they've owned their houses for decades making them massively wealthy and don't have to interact with the undesirables. It's easy to look the other way and ignore the downtown problems of homelessness and street crime, and to be so woke that you don't want any crime prosecuted, when it doesn't affect you.
You're right, but the reality is it has been a bad thing for many people. As long as they're being outmaneuvered by homeowners and landlords, having the boom simply end would work just as well as winning the housing supply fight. Few people are going to miss tech elites if they leave.
I don't think New York in the 70s can be explained by its own governance alone, so I object to your characterization of New York in the 70s being the result of its own failings. The state and federal governments basically abandoned the place ("Ford to City: Drop Dead"), and something similar is happening to San Francisco as well. What a loss for the country, as the next Silicon Valley, if there is one, likely won't be in the United States.
The urban vs. rural culture war in politics has little to do with inherent value and everything to do with resource allocation in an government system that allocates highly leveraged influence to the individuals on one side.
This isn't about urban vs rural. Thinking SV is such a joke it must be run by clowns is one of the (few, but these kinds of people have more in common than you'd think) things that inner city types and people from the panhandle of any state that has a panhandle have in common.
Silicon Valley has a single major drawback, cost of living, which is downstream of land use and transportation policy that’s virtually identical throughout the country. Basically every large and growing metropolitan area in the nation sees the same relative price trends. Famous low cost alt-SV Austin has seen its Case-Schiller index move within 15% of San Jose. To argue that its governance is especially backwards or selfish and, thus, deserving of failure is to indict the entire nation.
I get it. I would settle for a smooth timed transfer between Bart and Caltrain at Millbrae.
In some ways, the exceptional cases where we do act more like a coordinated unit make the normal cases more exasperating because we know what is possible.
You bring up the perfect example, because in the current lock down San Mateo county refused to participate in the shelter in place mandate that their 2 neighboring counties opted in to.
So, you cannot dine outdoors in Palo Alto, but can walk 1/2 mile north to Menlo Park and dine at a restaurant.
Pretty sure NY had a pretty heinous violent crime streak in the 70s. If memory serves SF was pretty gritty in the 70s/80s as well.
The thing with SF is that the media and a large portion of the US loves to hate it - theres a narrative that keeps getting the replay button. They always will, and it will always die just like Silicon Valley is over and the next Silicon Valley will be in (insert any city, or china). These stories have been around forever, and they will continue forever. Yes SF will go through a down cycle as a result of pressure being taken off of the rental market, and it will fill right back in when people want to live in the city again and the pandemic has passed.
Pretty sure college is going to be in person again (UCB, UCSF, Stanford) as are the National Labs.
The media has overhyped this ... of all sources Business Insider.
I felt the same way about the source. Business Insider is pretty far from a serious news source.
I know a couple of medium sized VC people who are going to start living outside of SF proper (not the Valley), but the people I know who live in the city love being in the city of San Francisco. The people who are leaving the bay area were probably always going to leave some day if they weren't happy there.
And you're dead on about schools and research centers that require in person. Hardware or R&D need a physical space for work and security. And some people do like a cool office experience.
They're not looking so hot at the moment. Huge outflow of people and businesses due to the one-two punch of COVID and rising crime + defund the police.
The recent announcement by Goldman Sachs about moving a large chunk of their operations to Miami is not a good sign for NYC.
It's notable that a lot of people are moving, but I'd wait until at least early 2022 to make judgements about lasting impacts on SV. WFH might not stick widely, and some firms will pick a hybrid model (i.e. partial WFH) over going fully remote.
Not to mention that few places can match all the benefits of SV, i.e. unenforceable non-competes, fantastic weather and surroundings, an educated and diverse population, cultural activities, very high compensation, etc. I don't think it'll be as easy to displace SV as these articles regularly imply, despite the downsides of living here.
Yeah, I've had some friends leave (to CO and DC), but I'm skeptical of companies and VCs leaving.
For a kind of funny example, there was an episode of the all-in podcast (mostly a podcast of successful VCs) where they talked about SV politics and leaving.
The irony was while they talked about CA politics to an absurd degree ("worst run state in US", etc.) when they asked each other if they were planning on leaving all of them said no.
People complain a lot (and there are good reasons to complain!), but people have been complaining since at least 1993 and it's still an economic hub for startups. I'm skeptical of that leaving.
I have seen coworkers and friends leave, but it's mostly a housing issue. As people turn 30 and want to have a family if you haven't cashed out $5M in some exit event then it sucks to live here. $500k can get you a nice place in CO, $750k for outside Seattle.
I have had older friends leave to have a family. They went to Santa Cruz, Seattle, Denver, DC, and Austin. It's a shame. The ones that stayed either are very rich where a $5M house is not an issue, or they still live with three roommates and rent without kids.
Some other reasons to complain about, but that I don't think are usually deciding factors for people to leave:
- Bad policy (AB5), Extra founder Tax, Hostility towards tech in general.
- Political monoculture (I don't mean not enough trump people, I mean it can be controversial to be an obama era moderate/neoliberal and 'woke' politics is hard to avoid).
- High state taxes that harm capital gains and new money. This is related to housing and prop13. Not only do the people that live in housing they bought decades ago pay almost no property tax compared to new buyers, they then push to restrict new supply while also pushing to increase tax on new money. This comes in the form of higher capital gains tax (there's a bill to raise it to 16.3% this year retroactively, by far the highest in the country). They also push legislation to increase tax on the companies excluding homeowners to fund their services (which indirectly affects the employees again). This kind of thing makes it doubly hard to be able to buy in and live here.
>> Yeah, I've had some friends leave (to CO and DC), but I'm skeptical of companies and VCs leaving.
>> I have had older friends leave to have a family. They went to Santa Cruz, Seattle, Denver, DC, and Austin. It's a shame. The ones that stayed either are very rich where a $5M house is not an issue, or they still live with three roommates and rent without kids.
Just wait until they look for interesting jobs and get 100 linked in messages from CA and like 1 or 2 from DC. (note: I live in VA just outside DC, speaking from experience.)
An anecdote: I got an offer to leave my mid-level FAANG job to return to the Midwest for a VP role at a 200+ person company. The compensation was about 35% of my total comp, and it was maybe one of 3 companies in the area I would consider working for. Not to mention going back to cold winters, McMansions, and chain restaurants.
I don't think people fully appreciate the value of unenforceable non-competes + many companies congregated in one area. No where else in the world does the labor have this level of negotiating power and flexibility. Even if it can be replicated (and I hope it is!), it won't be overnight.
Agreed. I think it was all OK when I was single. But the appetite to re-locate a family every 2-3 years with a job change (or employer disappearing) (changing friends, school districts, continuity) is a tall order in my humble opinion.
There is an old Russian saying about how every time you move it is like a fire happened (because you lose things.)
Well, this entire premise is that remote work would make that more possible (I personally don't believe this though).
That said, the people I know that left aren't planning to find new work (for the most part). CO does have a lot of FAANG options though and Slack was also there.
They're not looking for the most interesting work at that point, they're looking to keep their job and raise a family - it's a tradeoff.
Isn't that a risk to move to a place without as many employment options? Yes. The reason for that risk is you can raise kids in a nice house for $500k rather than in a tiny, old, 2 bedroom apartment for 1.5M.
>> They're not looking for the most interesting work at that point, they're looking to keep their job and raise a family - it's a tradeoff.
>> Isn't that a risk to move to a place without as many employment options? Yes. The reason for that risk is you can raise kids in a nice house for $500k rather than in a tiny, old, 2 bedroom apartment for 1.5M.
You exactly summarized my thought process three years ago. To be fair, i'm very happy here. But it is a mixed bag.
Housing is great compared to the bay area, but $500k is a stretch for DC/Virginia (check it out on zillow) though not impossible, there is a ton of inventory if you are willing to drive out a bit. Unlike FAANG folks out-buying houses from you, you have lobbyists and government/intelligence contractors outbidding houses from you. Def better than Bay area though.
Except i'm in one of like five growth startups in the area and there are rarely any senior positions open, and the senior workforce appears larger than the pool of interesting senior jobs. Its a huge bet on your employer in addition to the already huge bet you're making w/ taking, say, illiquid early stage stock. So your career growth is much slower.
OK, so what if you are OK w/o an interesting job? Then you have plenty of options. Also, plenty of options if you're willing to be a consultant and travel, but now you're making a 2nd tradeoff.
All in, very happy but not a panacea and certainly multiple tradeoffs.
Yep, agreed - sounds like we have a similar take :).
In my specific case my SO grew up in Cupertino and her family is here, so that's another element that makes it hard to leave. I'm currently doing the live with roommates bit, but it's a hard tradeoff to make.
Also I saw where you work in your HN bio - do you partner with VRAD (or maybe are considering starting your own)? I've always though leveraging ML imaging software as part of a nighthawk radiology service would be really interesting. Basically hire radiologists to be part of the company (give them some equity) and leverage their readings to train the model. In a bit of a Tesla style self-driving play where you're providing the current capabilities via humans, but the ultimate goal is leveraging that to train and improve the software. My dad does neurorad so seemed like a natural fit for deep learning image recognition to me. If you're writing the reading software then you can tailor it for training too.
Unrelated to that, if you're looking for more options in DC the company I work for has a major office there (feel free to connect, my email is in my profile).
I'm the GP commentor, and in my case, theoretically I can, though in my case I have a wife and two children, so it does get tight.
And while I'm grateful for everything I have in life, and I have been given much more than my grandparents abroad...I do wonder -- after struggling through top colleges and a working hard for over two decades with ever increasing responsibility, whether I really "deserve" a 1br or should I aspire to more for my family and me.
I realize it sounds both selfish but also reasonable based on how one looks at things. For now, we've chosen to live very comfortably in DC.
Maybe if those contractors are VP level or DINK; a senior IC working for a Beltway bandit might possibly, with a tailwind, clear 200k total compensation, but that's very much the high end of their pay scale despite the hourly rates they charge the government.
Yep, I recently got a call from a FB recruiter in Austin. One constraint was: are you willing to move to the Bay Area to work at the FB campus after lockdown ends? Why yes, I already live here.
Your experience may be your own; I live just outside of DC as well (though on the MD side) and get bombarded with DC and MD job offers all the time. Perhaps not to the same extent as CA, but saying only 1 or 2 seems like a personal situation.
One more thing for outsiders: Security Clearances are huge here, which really changes outcomes.
@stryan Would love to chat offline if you're open? Really struggling in deciding whether I can continue to live in the region long term, despite being in love with the area and the people.
Not being bored or underutilized at work. Excitement about career opportunities. Room to move upwards.
Hard-tech job opportunities w/o having to regress to an entry-level or mid-level role.
Senior level job opportunities, w/o having to join a consulting firm (i mean, if i'm potentially traveling 4/5 days, i'm not really 'living' here anymore...) I've rolled the dice on management consulting before in my life and spent almost no time in my home city. That was great when I was 20 and not so great with a family. I do wonder whether it is different w/ DC and local projects or whether it might be different in a partyly-WFH future!
Yeah, the previous poster seems to be completely missing out that Austin and Seattle are major tech hubs, Denver is a secondary hub, and Santa Cruz is within spitting distance to Silicon Valley. Seattle alone is probably the second most significant tech region in the country after SV and Austin is easily third or fourth.
Nobody will deny that Bay Area housing is expensive, but even today, $1.5M will get you a decent single family house with a garden in Santa Clara.
That’s a ridiculous amount of money for most, but it’s not in $5M exit territory, and something that’s relatively easy to manage for a 2 tech income family: $1.25M loan is $5600/m mortgage, $1500/m in real estate taxes.
2900ft houses is a good way to skew the argument in your favor, but it's a bit of a strawman: the vast majority of houses in the Bay Area aren't 2900ft to begin with, yet 2000ft house are plenty, with 4 bedroom, on, say, a 6000ft lot. You can easily find one of those for $2M, and they're not shacks.
If you set a minimum year built to 2000 (so up to 20 years old)
Results: 0
You're right though that there are houses you can find in less desirable areas on the peninsula for around 2 million (and San Jose is cheaper, east bay is cheaper). Usually though there's some tradeoff (bad schools, long commute, house is really old). These tradeoffs don't exist in the other regions where for a a lot less you can live basically anywhere you'd want in a nicer place.
The places I've been looking (Palo Alto, Cupertino, Mountain View) don't really have anything in the price points you're talking about.
I will admit that my general statement about Santa Clara was wrong though (I was thinking mostly about the cities I mentioned as part of Santa Clara county, not the city of Santa Clara).
Wfh will not stick. Managers hate it. If you are really talented you can work anywhere for whatever price you want, however most people are not like that and can only really function meeting often in person.
So if people don't care what managers think why would the owners bother having them? It seems shortsighted to think that management won't have a say, explicitly or implicitly, in guiding these orgs back to an office based workspace.
Managers are nothing but employees. Same as developers and other groups. The owners might consider their opinions along with the opinions of the other groups. There is nothing special about managers. And it is the owners who decide how and what to spend their money on. Not the managers.
>"..won't have a say, explicitly or implicitly..."
Nice try. What are you implying under "implicitely"? If this is what I think it is, the managers are just as replaceable. Often it is actually easier for the owners to replace/get rid of a manager than from good salesperson/developer/etc.
Managers are very often (especially in a bigger organization) is the only channel how information flows to owners.
As a result, managers can paint very different picture of the same situation (as an example, that people working remotely from home are less productive).
May be in some abstract world, "managers are just employees and there is nothing special". In reality they wield a lot of power to sway company in one or another direction.
>"As a result, managers can paint very different picture of the same situation..."
What you describing is a fraud. In a big organization managers are not uniform group, there are multiple levels and factions. They will happily report on each other if the picture is grossly distorted. There are also a lot of metrics and built in controls in big orgs that can and are being used to estimate how particular policy affects the bottom line (profitability).
In reality there are companies whose bottom line did suffer from WFH and there are companies that had actually have profits increased as the result. If you think the latter group will revert because some low level managers feel insecure about their position I have a bridge to sell.
The services and products companies have been delivering during the pandemic were developed largely before the pandemic. Owners can see this. It’s not just low level managers, rather it’s about middle managements perspective in general.
Management and cross organizational relations rely on rapport and relationships amongst baby boomers and Gen X people who greatly prefer in person interaction. Maybe engineers won’t come back to the office, but they sure will be.
I lived in SV for a decade and worked in SF for most of that.
> WFH might not stick widely
If the vast majority of workers demand it, then I don't think employers will have a choice here. Leaving now is a vote with your feet.
> unenforceable non-competes
Very few of my peers have ever cared about this in practice. I don't think this is remotely a major benefit compared to e.g. state taxes.
> fantastic weather and surroundings
The surroundings, I'll give you, but the weather is "fantastic" in a small number of communities only. SF weather is far from fantastic. I don't miss it. Sunnyvale or RWC, on the other hand... But still. The weather is boring.
What I don't miss are the fires and smoke-filled skies, and the drought.
> an educated and diverse population
The "native bay area" population? Or the migrants and immigrants? The vast, vast majority of people I worked with over the years were from elsewhere. We used to joke that it was rare to hear someone was born in the Bay Area. There's not much weighing people from elsewhere down preventing then from leaving, and there is less and less weight each passing month this year.
> cultural activities
I actually cannot think of anything unique to the Bay here...
> very high compensation
True, but I know plenty of people who have moved to Seattle and New York who make just as much. And I know of several fully remote (pre-pandemic) workers who are making 90% of what they would earn in the Bay Area -- I know, this isn't common, but it's possible.
Honestly, SV has done this to themselves. NIMBYism, insane housing, terrible transit, high taxes. I have no doubt SV will recover, but the rest of the world will prosper at the valley's expense.
Employers aren't a monolithic block. Some companies will switch back to in-person, others will continue WFH policies. If more workers depart for the latter, the former will take notice.
> Very few of my peers have ever cared about this in practice. I don't think this is remotely a major benefit compared to e.g. state taxes.
Well, while working in RTP I saw many suits filed for my coworkers for non-compete clauses.
If you're ~director or above, this matters a lot and the bigco's basically auto file the lawsuit in any jurisdiction where enforceable. At least one exec I reported to had to take a year off as a result of these lawsuits.
IMO it's a huge deal for the HQ execs of many companies, similar to how tax benefits are a huge deal to the rank-and-file.
> At least one exec I reported to had to take a year off as a result of these lawsuits.
Yes, it is a bigger issue on both sides of the table when you get to director+ level. The company often has much more to lose, and the employee often has far fewer potential new homes. These things tend to balance out; I've seen contracts with non-compete timeline matched or exceeded by severance timeline for that reason.
I don't know what percentage of the workforce here has both family and enough personal connections to where leaving the area doesn't make sense, regardless of a WFH policy. It may be that they want a better commute but still want to stay in the area for the aforementioned reasons (I am one of these people).
The contrary might also be true: For many companies it's currently impossible (due to COVID) to make the big accomodations required for going comlpetely remote, including moving their HQs to other places for reasons having to do with access to capital or taxation.
Calling SV compensation “very high” seems short-sighted these days if you don’t already own a house here (and assuming you want to own your own house).
The compensation just won’t seem so great when you’re paying off millions on a mortgage and wondering if the industry will still employ you once you’ve got a few gray hairs.
> Not to mention that few places can match all the benefits of SV
The counterpoint would be how many billionaires, besides those in the tech industry, choose to put down roots in the Bay Area? Not many at all. (The only real exceptions I can think of are Napa/Sonoma/Marin, not SV/SF proper.) We're talking about a class of people who are truly unconstrained in terms of location, so that should be pretty indicative of where local amenities really shine.
And it's pretty clear that New York, SoCal, and Southern Florida are the truly attractive locales in America. Many people choose to pay Manhattan, Beverly Hills or Palm Beach prices without a compelling economic draw to those areas. Virtually nobody chooses to pay SF prices just for the lifestyle, amenities and culture.
Without the draw of tech employment and investment, there's no way SV/SF can maintain its current level of economic prosperity.
People with means tend to locate in tax havens, not places that have good amenities. Presumably with sufficient resources, you can produce any sort of amenity you'd like.
No; People with means tend to declare a residence in a Tax Haven. Which they use to observe profits. I.e. Registering their personal corp in WY, NV, or MD. Then recognizing all profits for themselves under a Corp/LLC and being taxed at WY, NV, or MD results.
Then they proceed to live wherever they want and buy items using Corp/LLC Funds. When they need to use personal funds or pay income tax - They minimize their tax impact through various methods.
Point being - The people live where they want regardless of tax haven status. They recognize revenue in a Corp/LLC in a tax haven.
For years, Intel had a ~+20% geographic compensation adjustment for people who lived in the bay area. Not sure if it still exists, but if you were smart about it, and worked in San Jose, you could pocket quite a bit of bonus $$$ that you wouldn't have access to if you worked in, say, Chandler, AZ or Folsom, CA Intel sites.
Weather aside, I really enjoyed living in Amsterdam. It is a crowded and rather small city, but it is a big center for banking and tech. Europe doesn’t really do the sprawling mega cities like the US does, though everything is very well connected. Still though, that headline is a bit overblown.
Amsterdam is a pretty expensive city(for Europe, I know it's cheap compared to Sf but so is everything else out there). Wow are the median tech salaries there?
I suppose the salaries are somewhat comparable if perhaps a little lower, however the cost of living is much less in general compared to SF. The most important thing is that the beer is inexpensive, and the fact that you can spend every weekend in a different city for next to nothing more than makes up for the discrepancy.
I wasn't comparing Amsterdam to SF since nothin in Europe comes close to Bay Area, I was saying Amsterdam is expensive compared to most cities in Europe but when I look t wages I don't see anything special than cities in Europe with a lower CoL.
The walkability of older European cities cannot be overstated as a huge quality-of-life improvement! Bikability too, which is a big feature of many European cities.
The language issue is real, though. It's probably better, I think, to accept that you can't speak the language, and to give yourself a break learning it. If you like it, and want to learn, and want to be able to deal with banks and mobile providers over the phone (extremely difficult without fluency, and computer translation tools won't help you!), then take a class, and take it slowly.
It's stressful enough to move overseas. My advice is not to add language on top of everything else you have to learn - you are lucky to speak English, so lean into that. (Many people will appreciate practicing their English with a native speaker, too - although some small minority will hate you for it.)
But yeah, don't do what I did and try to do everything at once. It's stressful, exhausting, and you never give yourself a chance to recover, mentally or emotionally, from the stress of learning. Be kind to yourself!
The money isn't as good, but the benefits are quite a lot better, especially for families. Universal healthcare is an enormous simplification of life (I really wish Americans who get mad about "socialized medicine = evil!" could experience it first hand; its clear there is no such thing as a free market in healthcare anyway). Universal education, even pre-K, is an enormous benefit if you have kids.
But yeah, total comp for devs seem to top out at around 100k, no matter where you are, and usually is more like 50k. (Evidence is anecdotal). Also, since the epicenter of the internet is still the SFBA they wonder why you are in Europe, when all of them want to move to the SFBA! I suspect this last one will start changing.
Dutch people generally have pretty much perfect english. Scandinavia too. Urban Germany too. I think the only resistance to speaking english would be from the French. That said, it's only polite to try to learn and speak the local language.
It sucks to be locked up in the apartment watching my favorite places die. I grew up with San Francisco in my life, and have lived here myself for 10 years. Just trying to give out some positive energy for this place, but also it deserves all of the negative comments lol. Anyway, I too am moving on, San Francisco (in February), thanks for helping make me who I am today :)
You see the irony right? I'm only mocking the gatekeeping done in SF but they'd say you would have no claim to "watching SF die" if you moved there in the last ten years, because you killed it.
Rents have only dropped to levels seen in the last few years lol, and will just "crater" to 2010 levels once tech and students finish leaving.
“Tech killed SF” is such a tired scapegoat. I also didn’t even work in tech when I first moved here, does that unfairly change your perception of my “killing SF”? Without the tech angle, arguments like this to me are reduced to the weight of “KIDS THESE DAYS DON’T GET IT AND RUIN EVERYTHING THAT I USED TO LIKE”
I don't care I'm mocking the entire sentiment. Every single thing I've ever heard about how "SF used to be" sounds even more unappealing than what it is today.
"Oh wow all the currently nice neighborhoods were sketchy ghettos? How quaint!"
but at least artists could live there!
As soon as you leave SF you will realize how weak and absurd the various generation's arguments about SF are.
Maybe it came across differently but I’m not so emotionally attached to this place that I can’t see past the romance tinted glasses. Any place you spend a good chunk of your life in will have an impact, one of those places was SF for me. I’m not defending anyone, or really standing on a platform of my own even. It was just a nice place to live for a while and it’s also nice to be moving on :)
I've visited San Francisco a few times. It's reasonably nice but it's also one of the smallest cities, population wise, out of cities with similar impact. It's also chock full of building with 1-2-3 floors.
It's absolutely ridiculous, a city of its magnitude should have 2-3 times its current population and 0 housing issues due to higher density housing.
The newcomers aren't to blame, as an outsider I'd blame the locals...
It’s in part old money lobbying to keep their properties out of the shade. Not even joking, I think it’s really that petty. There is a huge negative NIMBY force in this city
There's some of that, but you gotta wonder why the Outer Sunset isn't coated in luxury condos?
I think it's just that SF is very young, as cities go, and it's been the oddball city, you didn't move here in the past for a good job, you came here because you were weird, or queer, and wanted a place to fit in and be welcomed.
All these normal folks with great jobs moving here is very new, 20-25 years at most.
Oh yeah I don’t meant to put finality behind my statement, it’s just one piece of the puzzle that I have put together during my brief time here. I’ve had fun conversations with people that have lived around here for many decades, including my own grandparents who have lived here for even longer. It’s a city that has changed a lot, and meant many different things to many different people.
You hear fun stories from all kinds of characters hanging around dive bars here :) I had some good years hanging out at Lucky 13 and making tons of friends, but alas they are going out of business (for reals) now too :/
There are tons and tons of luxury condos, new and those under construction. A lot of the ones I have seen are in rincon hill (aka east cut after salesforce took over), mission bay, and dogpatch. Can’t speak for SoMa as much as I don’t visit it too often anymore
Instead of trying to help the tech boom and the people who created it, SFBA government and locals grew ever more greedy and entitled, looking to fleece techies at every opportunity.
"Why should we build more affordable housing? We'd rather ban development, and make these 'rich young techies' pay through the nose to landlords who just happened to buy a house here 20 years ago!"
"Who cares about ensuring reasonable quality and cost of living in SF? As the local government, we'd rather just figure out a way to tax the crap out of them!"
I don't understand how the bay area could even handle more people. I think you'd have to increase the number of lanes on the 101, 280, 237, 85 by at least 4 more to make it work with the current population.
Higher density housing. You can turn parts of the bay into a modern city, with highrises. That way folks won't have to commute to work.
Or you can massively increase transportation capacity, not just with roads but (more effectively) with trains and subways and other forms of fast, efficient public transportation.
Of course none of this will ever happen, SFBA residents and government will continue to exclusively focus on slaughtering their golden geese until they all gone.
Mass transit is what enables population growth, but the numbskulls in the Bay Area decided to have a dozen different transit agencies who all fight like mortal enemies when it comes to even simple things like coordination of schedules. Not to mention the complete incompetence in just improving existing infrastructure like Caltrain and various light rail systems.
How many companies recant on the benefits of remote work and return to offices, how much "geo-pay" gets accepted as "well this is how remote work is now", and probably people burning out of working out of their home office are things to watch in the next few years. People might actually want to go back to places like SV when they get bored making 2/3 less in some quiet burg in Indiana.
I'd love to hear from people who want to stay in the Bay area what is unique that you cannot find elsewhere in cheaper locales.
I lived in Mountain View for 3 months during 500 startups and the valley proper was the most garden variety suburban existence you could find anywhere.
I lived in SF proper off and on and can attest that it certainly has (had?) fantastic restaurants/shops and a particular type of culture that many people love. However the basic infrastructure and problems with SF are well known and have been documented.
I can't see at this point how the former plusses of SF outweigh the latter negatives and frankly I see no inherent plusses to the Valley.
It seems that people (technologists mostly) literally only value the valley because of technology companies and even more pointedly - because that's where the big VC money lives.
For me (in SF): climate that matches what I want perfectly. The option for snow or beaches on the same day. The food, the diversity, the grittiness, the jobs, the history. And all my family lives here, too. The biggest one of all: walkability, never having to get in my car unless I want to leave the city.
Where did you end up moving that you found a better fit for yourself?
The only two things you miss in VA on your list is "grittiness" which is a negative for me, and walkability, which you could get if you go closer to DC.
And the family, which is maybe the biggest draw for many of us.
The more I think about it, the more I realize the choice of where you live is barely rational, if at all. Sure we come up with reason about why we are where we are post hoc, but are those the real reasons?
I can almost guarantee I will never move to DC or Virginia. Not because it isn't an amazing place with everything you can want, but because it's just not me for some reason that's hard to articulate. I would guess you would almost guarantee you'd never move to CA, too.
Yeah I think that nails it - in the sense that we both are right.
SF/Bay Area is "Good enough" for your needs and VA is "Good enough" for mine and it's not some optimized process, moreso an artifact of our relative histories.
Same as @AndrewKemendo I re-lo'd to Northern Virginia just outside DC, 3yrs ago in my case. This is my 3rd tour in DC/Va. It has been a fantastic three years, especially w/r/t life, friends, family, society. I bike to work, and every day has been wonderful.
That said -- and I hear pushback on this from other threads -- my job opportunities here for any senior level roles are next to nil. This could be because I do not have a security clearance (a local favorite), or it could be because the job pyramid here in DC/NoVa really is differently shaped than SF/SV, or it could be that i'm an outsider w/o a deep social network, or perhaps I'm not looking at the area correctly.
As an anecdote, I get tons of Linked In messages for opportunities in California. CTO positions, VP positions at venture backed growth startups, all across the board. I get almost no in-bounds from companies in DC except for consulting firms (been there, done that when i was 20-25, not sure if that is a good fit at my current stage in life.)
I'm sure part of it is my profile. I have lots of real-time systems, model, quant, Computer Vision, and tech leadership background. I'm just not sure how much of a market there is for that -- though I'm positive having a security clearance would change things dramatically.
This presents a serious concern for me, and a balancing act for continued happiness in DC/VA.
Yeah I looked into home prices rent/buy. True that you can find something _cheaper_ but not cheap/good enough to justify the lower salary and less tech opportunities. I came to the conclusion that Boston is just as expensive as SF but with less opportunities.
My friends who don't want to leave SV are mostly singles and couples without kids who don't mind living in apartments for rest of their lives. They move to a new apartment/condo every 2-3 years and don't care about schools, community, public transport etc. Another set of friends were lucky enough to be able to purchase million and half dollar homes in Fremont/South San Jose/Milpitas/Campbell and now that they have friends and their kids have friends, they are "settled" and don't mind paying ridiculous mortgage for next 20ish years. They do complaint about having to wfh home from their garage since all rooms in their home are occupied with kids at home. My friends in SFBA who claim that there are many jobs opportunities in tech companies have not changed their jobs in ~5 years.
I grew up in the Southeast and went to college there. I've since lived in Palo Alto and SF, and I'm staying in SF for the long haul. There aren't many things that are truly unique to any one city or region, but the reasons why I loved Palo Alto and currently love SF include:
1. the intelligent, interesting, generally well-mannered, and equally laid-back and hardworking people.
2. the weather (heat and humidity are hell to me) - I'm a runner and a cyclist and I love being able to do those things every day of the year in comfort.
3. beautiful nature in my backyard - Golden Gate Park, the Presidio, Mt. Tam, the Berkeley hills, Ocean Beach, day trips to Sonoma, weekend trips to Tahoe, weekend trips to Big Sur, proximity to Yosemite.
4. the walkability of my neighborhood (I live in a nice neighborhood with clean streets and rarely encounter any homelessness - I've still never actually seen a needle anywhere). My favorite sushi restaurant is one block away, 5 craft coffee shops within 3 blocks, Whole Foods within walking distance, multiple restaurants (all of these I have in mind are still open).
5. Biden/Harris flags and bumper stickers everywhere - maybe I enjoy an echo chamber but after spending considerable time in the Southeast, I love being in a solid blue city.
I have a wife and young child and plan to stay long term. Both my wife and I work in tech, and are not fans of remote work. So for both of us this is the best place career-wise. We own a modest house, with a nice yard, so no complaints there. We love the food, nature, weather, and theatre scene. We're in San Mateo, walking distance from downtown, which means we have access to some of the best ramen outside of Japan.
To be perfectly honest, the only thing missing is our friends and family in Canada. It wasn't so bad when we could visit 2-3 times a year, but the pandemic has put a stop to that.
1) SF & Valley: Education levels of the people here. You can get that in a couple other places--DC, NYC, Boston--but not too many others. Relatedly, two easily accessible world class universities are in the Bay Area: Boston beats us here, but we beat NYC and DC.
2) SF & Valley: Diversity. Bay Area cities top the list of largest number of foreign born residents, with only LA and NYC being competitive.
3) SF & Valley: Weather. LA beats us here, but SF trounces NYC, Boston, DC, and Seattle.
4) Just SF: Walkability and street life. SF is more walkable than most cities (the weather helps with that), and although it has shitty public transit options, it's only shitty in comparison to places with actual good public transit, which more or less don't exist in the US.
5) Just SF: Weirdness. Okay, SF has driven out most of the interesting weirdo and artistic crowds and replaced them with CrossFitting Burners. But there are still remnants of that culture, more so than most places except perhaps NYC.
6) SF & Valley: Food. It's mediocre in comparison to the scenes in LA and NYC. But it's still worlds better than the rest of the country.
7) SF: Arts. Similar to food, it's mediocre compared to LA and NYC. But it's still worlds better than the rest of the country.
8) SF & Valley: Nature. West Coast cities are all competitive here, as is Denver/Boulder (though even they lack the beaches), but this is another place where East Coast cities fall short.
In the end, the only plausibly competitive cities on this scoring matrix are LA and NYC. LA sacrifices a lot of the walkability and weirdness of SF. NYC sacrifices the weather, and moving to NYC from SF isn't going to get you of any the much vaunted coupon-cutting decrease in cost of living that everyone in these comments is so pumped about.
Just to be fair, I'll also list disadvantages of SF:
1) Cost of living. "No one is willing to pay that much to live in SF, it's too expensive."
2) Dating scene for men.
3) Travel. Subjective, but East Coast cities are better situated for international travel than the West Coast.
4) Cleanliness. Yep, SF is an unhygienic shithole in many places.
5) Monoculture. Too many tech folks here, not enough diversity in industry.
Agree with all points except "Dating scene for men"
As somebody who has lived on three continents in major metro area's as well as countryside IMO SFBA has the best dating scene.
I am married now, so I have been out of the single pool for a couple years...but before that I will say that SFBA had the most attractive pool of available woman in the world, if intelligence, creativity, independence, being self starters and physical attractiveness is what you value.
I agree that the SFBA has a very attractive pool of women, I just question whether they're available =) I've lived in a similar variety of metro areas as you, in North America, Europe, and Asia. San Francisco ranks dead last. Pretty much any guy can improve his dating outcomes by moving from SF to NYC, no matter what his standards are and what he's looking for, mostly because you can actually get regular dates with the accomplished, independent women there.
I have one friend who lived at a base in Antarctica for awhile, and he favorably compared the dating scene there to what's in SF.
I have lived in both SF and DC and think a few of your points are maybe a bit unfair to the east coast. I found DC's public transit and walkability to be quite a bit better than SF. True, the weather is less perfect, and maybe I am resistant to humidity and mild cold, but I generally found it pleasant to be outside for 9 months of the year. DC absolutely had a lot of diversity, partially due to immigration, but also because the government pulls in people from all countries and all walks of life. It is really the opposite of a monoculture since there is really a bit of everything under the sun there. The Smithsonian is a worldwide magnet for art and culture. You also trade SF's weirdness for one of the most historically interesting places in the country.
On the nature front, there are really a lot of great public lands on the east coast. They are a bit less iconic than what you can find on the west coast, but you can still hike, camp, climb, ski and beach to your heart's content.
I think comparing SF to DC and Boston makes the most sense just due to similar size. LA and NYC are in a class of their own.
I've spent probably a month total in DC, so I don't fully know its charms. And it's certainly a city that I get the appeal of, and I wouldn't be opposed to moving there if circumstances brought me there. But some thoughts:
Walkability: for pros, DC is flatter and cleaner. The Metro is cleaner and more reliable than Muni. For cons, the city itself is a bit more spread out, and its hinterlands (e.g. Tysons or Silver Spring), although accessible via public transit, are much less walkable than San Francisco's hinterlands (e.g. Berkeley or Palo Alto). But the biggest issue is that D.C. is just not really walkable in either the depths of winter or the heights of summer (although evenings can be pretty pleasant, and you can actually enjoy an evening out on a patio). Maybe I'm a wimp with low tolerances, but that's six months of the year gone right there.
Diversity: SF is around 1/3 foreign born, while DC is like 1/6 or 1/8. Almost half of SF speaks a language other than English at home, while DC is more like a quarter. DC is diverse, just not as diverse as SF.
On the diversity angle, foreign-born is not the only metric. DC proper is about 45% Black which is an important part of its history and identity as a city. DC almost never gets snow so the "depths of winter" is a relative term. I walked and biked 365 days a year and so did most of my co-workers. It was common to not own a car, especially for younger people. In the hotter summer months I adapted by wearing lighter clothes or shoes for my commute and changing at work. I also kept a change of clothes at work in the event of a downpour, which was rare anyway. Everyone else deals with the same thing, so it's not weird to pop into the bathroom to change from shorts to pants on a hot day. Outdoor dining does shut down for a few of the colder months, but then when the first tables go outside again it can be a thrill. I get that the bay area weather is practically perfect every day; maybe I just don't require perfection.
Metro absolutely does not serve many areas. It's a far cry from NYC or European cities, but was totally workable as long as you stuck to the city and certain suburbs.
I live in the Oakland hills. The access to SF via Bart in 30 minutes and the access to completely open space to go running, hiking, biking, etc. is pretty unusual. Look up the EBMUD land east of Oakland for a reference. It's unbelievably large. This connection between nature and city is really unusual.
I'm tied to Stanford (by marriage), so we won't be leaving for decades. If it weren't for the university connection, I would certainly be thinking about different options, even though all of our family is in northern California.
I'm in SF. I think I'll stay for a while longer bc:
- I enjoy not needing a car. Many neighborhoods are walkable.
- I appreciate the mild weather. E.g. I lived in NYC, and though I did not need a car, humid summers and snowy winters made it less pleasant to be outside.
- It's dense but not _too_ dense. NYC felt legitimately claustrophobic sometimes.
- It's still an LGBT mecca. Prior to the pandemic, I could be in queer spaces on a daily basis.
I don't know that I'll be in SF forever. But when I think of moving, I wonder where I would go, and what my life would look like when I get there. I grew up in suburbs and still associate those neighborhoods with isolation. Among US cities, it's hard to meet all of these.
Every city is special in its own way. Very few cities have anything truly irreplaceable, but it's a combination of small differences that make a city special.
My two favorite cities in the US are San Francisco and Philadelphia. Many people hate those places with a passion. To each their own!
Would you mind expanding on what parts you like about Philly and why? I’ve been thinking about moving there but don’t see it mentioned favorably too often.
* Food - an incredible an ever-changing restaurant scene, from cheesesteaks to 10-course tasting menus. And all much more affordable than fine dining in most US cities, plus free BYOB is extremely common.
* Music / Sports - incredible music scene with major and minor venues of all kinds, and a professional sports team in all 4 major leagues with a passionate fanbase.
* Size - neither a very large city (NYC) nor a very small city (Boston). Easy to get around, narrow streets make it very walkable.
* Attitude - Philly people are just different. I'd describe it as a "warm hostility" :) but you'll find Philadelphians are very welcoming while also being brutally honest.
* Diversity - there is no racial majority in Philly. It's about 40% white, 40% black, and 20% other.
* Price - Philly is cheap!
Having read this headline ad infinium over the last 20 years or so, I will believe this when the majority of VCs move out of, and not "keep a place" in, the Bay Area.
Other places have and will continue to develop, and that's great! But the center of gravity is going to remain where you can get face time with investors.
Keen observers will notice a dozen or more US-based tech hubs emerging in those 20 years. Twenty years ago, where else would you go for a promising/lucrative tech career? Today, you can pick a state!
Completely true! But the center of gravity remains unmoved.
For context: I've never lived in the bay area; if anything, I'd benefit from there being more dissipation.
The major obstacle to living in SV is the insane cost of homeownership that puts the (pretty commonplace) aspiration of living in one's own home with a nice yard out of reach of all but the richest (even being in the top 5% of incomes in the nation is no guarantee of being able to own a house in Palo Alto, for example.) With the recent passing of Prop 19, things get even worse: people who are looking to inherit homes from their parents are in for a shock if they have siblings --- they may be forced to pay a much higher property tax if they do not all live in the property! Prop 19 is written to benefit Realtors and Firefighters: realtors get to pry houses out of seniors' hands to sell, and firefighters get to increase their salaries and ranks. Prop 19 will also massively reduce incentives to rent (or alternately, bump up rents to much higher levels to cover the much higher property taxes), leaving housing the same or much worse off (my bet is on the latter.)
Add to this the ridiculously high income tax burden and sales tax burden, and it becomes clear that raising children is also out of reach for most (particularly if you do not want to send your children to the piss-poor public schools in many areas.)
For singles also, particularly men (who comprise the majority of techies), things are pretty bleak: there is too much competition for women, and opportunities to date do not come by easily at all.
If homeownership and family formation are supremely hard, and so is finding a mate, what exactly is the rationale for continuing to live in the Bay Area? It seems to me that the Bay Area will become an in-and-out type of place (like Manhattan or some of the other New York boroughs perhaps), wherein you bust your ass for several years and decamp to a lower-tax (or better still, no-tax) jurisdiction to get on with the next phase of your life.
I don't know exactly, but my experience is that most parents say private schools do a better job (teachers are better engaged and aren't checked out, apathetic pencil pushers). In the areas with good school districts (and there are a handful of those), things swing to another extreme: too much pressure, like Singapore-style schools, which causes children to buckle under the pressure later in their lives.
There are data and experiences available for making these judgments. There might be a class divide underlying it, but to walk away with the assessment that one type of school on average does better than another is not a classist sentiment.
I always went to schools that are considered "bad" (including community college and undergrad!), so I'm genuinely curious as to what goes into these judgements.
It is not. Remember that public schools (they are essentially free for the parents) are competing with private schools that are charging 20k+ per year per pupil. Most people who have to work for a living will not shell out 20k+ or (50-60k if there are siblings involved) simply because they are classist: they see clear advantages in private schools.
This year, most bay area public schools are online. Many private schools are still operating in person. For young children, this makes a world of difference. Just one instance of where private schools come out on top.
> Most people who have to work for a living will not shell out 20k+ or (50-60k if there are siblings involved) simply because they are classist: they see clear advantages in private schools.
Just because they see it doesn't mean it's actually there. Private schools attract the students that would do better in any environment (because of both socioeconomic class factors and involved parents making non-default choices), and measures of student performance reflect this. There's very little evidence that they do anything to actually improve outcomes, but what most people see (aside from marketing, which private schools put plenty of money into as well) is statistics that show correlation without controlling for other variables, from which it is easy to make incorrect inferences about causation.
> Most people who have to work for a living will not shell out 20k+ or (50-60k if there are siblings involved) simply because they are classist: they see clear advantages in private schools.
It's not that the schools are shit. They all have issues. Some get much better funding than others - clearly, but they're all leagues better than what you'd get in many rural parts of America.
The issue is that the kids going to the "poor" schools are poor. Their home life is shit because they're frequently sharing a two bedroom apartment with another family. They're dealing with parents who are unable to afford a better housing situation (not just renting a house - but they can't even afford to rent a place without another family being in it - lots of multigenerational housing happening too, which has pro/con) and who frequently have to work much more than some dual income FAANG tech couple - and they have a much worse quality of life. The parents aren't very involved because they just have other priorities.
This leads to the kids randomly dropping out middle of the year. Every year, the kids I know who went to Santa Clara schools ended up with their class sizes shrinking throughout the year because kids would just disappear middle of the year. That has the pros of less kids per classroom as the schoolyear goes on but it has downsides like... well, you can't make any long term friendships! On top of that, if you are in a family that is doing well - you're gonna be unrelatable to the other kids. And it goes true with the parents too.
One of the reasons my friends have put their kids in private schools is because their kids are around people like themselves, the parents operate under a collective agreement (they are all too involved in their parenting style), and there's just a commonality in background. At the public school, kids of all backgrounds could be interfacing and it just didn't give much social cohesion. Everyone had different goals. Some kids/parents wanted to just get to the next grade along with some babysitting - others wanted much more. Public school mostly is for handling the first people.
> Their home life is shit because they're frequently sharing a two bedroom apartment with another family
This sounds like a spoiled rich person talk: it's unimaginable how people manage to survive without a separate bedroom. And a private gardener, one should add.
A mere hundred years ago having a room per family was considered to be okay.
In USSR two generations living in the same one-bedroom apartment was a usual thing.
Somehow people managed to finish schools, go to universities and just do whatever normal people do.
Once you have a roof above your head, your living conditions are not shit pretty much by definition. We all got a bit too spoiled.
There is a positive (in the control systems sense) feedback loop with school quality. Whenever test scores drop a little, the most affluent and engaged parents tend to panic. They transfer their children to private school, or move to higher rated school districts. The public school they left behind then suffers further declines in test scores and funding, and the downward spiral continues.
To be fair, you'll have a much better time down there if you maintain the fantasy that you were a charming model all along and that American women are cold prudes. Wealthy geeks finding fulfillment of their "so rich that models have to fuck me" dream in the third world is a bit of a trope.
The cost of homeownership is a huge factor for me.
When I started working in 2014, I figured I would need to save around $150k for a down payment because the median home price in Santa Clara county was around $800k. Now the median price is around $1.4M [1], so I'd need around $250k.
The growth in home prices has roughly matched my ability to save for a home, so almost seven years later I'm not any closer than I was in 2014.
I feel like my options are (A) live in an apartment forever, (B) hellish commute, or (C) leave. With starting a family on the horizon, Option C looks better every day.
Hah, I was in your exact same situation a couple of years ago and when my kid was born, I decided to leave Santa Clara for good. I have not regretted the decision yet. Not only was I able to afford a decent home, I am happy that I wont have to pay an insane mortgage for rest of my life. What I definitely miss about SFBA is the weather and diversity of good food.
Not only that, but also consider the fact that you are paying 1.4M for a house that was likely built in the 60s, is not up to date at all, and has a perpetual tax liability of at least 15-18k per year (further raises in taxes are much more likely than not). The mortgage would also not be sustainable if one earner lost their job (or if the high-earner lost theirs), and remember that this high mortgage payment needs to be paid every month for 360 months. All of these are solid arguments against buying even if you did have the down payment.
Yes, exactly. A $1M mortgage is about $5k/month. Paying that means sacrificing other uses of money like retirement, child's college savings, vacations, etc.
And, as you pointed out, we would be in deep trouble if our income took a hit, or if housing prices tumble. If you buy into the high housing costs, you really need them to continue. It's a bad cycle.
For Proposition 19, if the house is in a trust that the beneficiaries can “share and share alike”, then the trustee can give the house to one sibling (the one who will live in the property) and give cash to the other siblings to avoid reassessment.
given how much the locals hate techies, the migration couldn't happen soon enough. I haven't been in SF in 4 years and its been great. I made valuable contacts but beyond that, there isn't much SF offers now that remote work is becoming mainstream
After 10 years in the Bay Area tech scene I'm sitting here at a co-working space in Poulsbo, WA. Home ownership is still a challenge given how crazy the market is for places that are not in a city but close enough to commute if you wanted to. However, many QoL enhancements including views of the mountains every day, close to the Olympics, generally lower taxes/cost of living. I left the Bay in June and don't see going back any time soon.
Rabois is a clown, an arrogant jerk who isn't worth taking seriously. Even if you ignore his multiple sexual harassment scandals, it's very clear that he's a hypocrite on this issue and therefore should not be taken seriously on this or any issue. After all, he claims to want to solve big problems, and ostensibly there is no bigger problem in his world than this. And yet, he wants to cut and run; why?
Well, it starts with the fact that he's only got one hammer, and that hammer is to give the white kid from Stanford $10 million, and then backup that investment by subsidizing losses in a race to monopoly. If and when it works, Rabois then takes the credit. But this is a problem that he can't solve, certainly not in the way he solves things, and even if he did, it would run up against the libertarian fantasies that infuse every tweet he writes. As opposed to admitting failure and admitting that his narrow-range expertise doesn't apply to everything, he runs to Miami instead, proving that he's simply a rent-seeker fraud there to sap the area of its resources until the resources are dry, complaining the entire time about how unfairly he's been treated in that he hasn't been getting his ass kissed in the manner in which he's become familiar.
Note that I have no evidence to support this hypothesis, and I would love if someone would prove me wrong, but I suspect the following:
- The "Tech Elite" who are leaving are, by definition, the ones who have the financial freedom to go pretty much wherever they want. Anyone mentioned in this article could buy a house in Miami/Austin/Denver without worrying about any transaction costs if they turn around and sell it in 6 months.
- SF (and California in general) are being much more aggressive with anti-COVID policies.
- The cities that are being focused on (Miami and Austin) are overall pretending that COVID isn't a thing (I live in Austin, and this is my experience).
- Well-off individuals currently under lock-down are looking at people living "freely" in Florida/Texas and are jealous, because they think that the SF-lockdown rules shouldn't apply to them, because they are less at risk (this is a discussion for another day)
- They've now set themselves up with a plausible "I moved out of California. My reason was COVID." story to try to avoid paying California state taxes in the future, even if they still end up being back in SF the majority of the time for their business.
tldr; the "elites" leaving are moving for short-term quality-of-life improvements due to COVID, and will have no issue turning around and moving back in 6-12 months when SF is "open for business" again.
Update: I have seen the shift in Austin from watching stories/tweets/social-media of people who have been moving from SF -> Austin. I was excited at first of the prospect of Austin become a much larger tech city, but am now noticing that the overwhelming majority of this content (although I could easily be seeing a biased sample, of course) is that the vocal group of "I moved from SF to Austin" is the same group that is extremely excited to go out to restaurants and public events again.
I did not state one way or the other in my comment about whether it was right or wrong, and frankly my opinion on that topic is not of importance to my point here.
I stated that it seems clear that these people are moving way from temporary restrictions (by relocating to places that do not have the same restrictions), and that there is no guarantee that any of these will be 'permanent' moves after those restrictions are no longer applicable.
It's certainly a factor, but "temporary" concerns are probably not significant enough to cause people to move. Moving is a big ordeal unless you are young and can pack everything you own into a car.
This article, and my comment, are discussion insanely wealthy individuals who have co-founded, led, or exited from very large companies (Splunk, Palantir, Opendoor, Dropbox, etc), or run VC firms.
Moving is much less of a big deal when your primary residence is a minuscule portion of your net worth and you are almost definitely paying someone else to handle all of the logistics of a move.
It will be interesting to see what happens. I work at one of FANG and recently relocated to Asheville from the Bay Area (sooner than I expected; we have a newborn and wildfire smoke was getting pretty bad). Compensation adjustment is surprisingly less than I would have expected, although it's hard to say if this trend will hold over the next decade or not.
Our rent is 1/4 of what it was in the Bay Area for one more bedroom now. I do miss California a lot though; the weather, food, and culture are very hard to beat (although Asheville isn't too bad in this regard, but at perhaps 1/20 of the scale). Ironically, with the amount that I am able to save from not living there anymore, I plan to save up and buy a house somewhere in the Bay Area in 15-20 years. But this is assuming my income will remain at Silicon Valley levels. If companies change their mind about embracing remote work, it will drop quite a bit since we are definitely not moving back any time soon. Personally, I feel that I am more productive working remotely than in person, but I do miss all of the office perks.
For reference, can you give some numbers on this situation, such as average/high daily PM25? I've heard multiple people refer to the smoke as bad, but I'm wondering what it means exactly.
I think people in this thread have expressed well that the concern is when you want to change jobs. It's just a lot easier to do when you're in the area.
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[ 4.5 ms ] story [ 313 ms ] threadThere was no inherent "supremacy", just one created by a bunch of companies being together.
Did SV municipalities do anything else to deserve it?
There are better places, with more rental space, more resources, better weather, and so on, plus WFH is here to stay...
I've had months and months of continuous rain in the Bay, something I never witnessed when living down South. It's cheaper too. Much much much MUCH more diverse. And food's better as is the landscape.
But I've had my fair share of multi-month El Ninos.
Never did I say one should move to LA and never ever leave town. One can go skiing (nearby even!) or enjoy any kind of weather elsewhere.
Mid 70s and sunny is hard to beat. It's like an eternal spring.
When you have to shovel the drive way twice a day and five minutes later the city snow plow throws half frozen slush on your drive way, you start to crave a warmer climate.
Maybe that's just an effect of getting older. I just moved away to a place with four seasons again, so we'll see!
(Updated: I just read all the sibling comments. We are nearly all from other states and have now all become huge weather weaklings from living in CA!)
And almost everywhere else has large numbers of days where one of the above is true.
Sure, it would be neat if we could have one snowy day a year and a summer thunderstorm or two, too.
Comparing that to not being able to work outside because the state is on fire and the air quality has been before recommended levels for a week is not my favorite tradeoff.
I generally hate most warm climates because they tend to be humid. LA was very nice. The nicest climate I've experienced so far. Haven't been to Northern California though (I imagine it's roughly the same but cooler, so may like it more).
[0] seems like the problem there is it gets much cooler at night, more intraday variation.
Jesus, bro, why'd you throw this in?
Just imagine the uproar. No one in their right mind would stand behind someone like that, right?
In this particular case, the surrounding white suburbs actually voted in larger percentages for Biden vs last time. The primarily Black urban areas voted similarly as they did last election and the one before.
But those white suburbs are not being accused of cheating.
This is sort of the argument that management gives to having people in the office.
People need to be at a physical location together for cross-pollination and idea growth.
> anything grows
I'm a gardener. Wherever I go I grow a garden. When I lived in the South Bay the soil in our backyard was AMAZING. Never seen soil like that anywhere else. You didn't have to do much of anything to grow stuff. It was easy to dig. It was like it was loam all the way down. So yes, the climate plays a big part of that 'anything grows', but so does the soil there which is exceptional.
You've just described why I don't like Silicon Valley weather, though indeed the easy and plentiful agriculture is a nice aspect aside from the scarcity of water which often ends up prioritizing farmers of things like almonds over actual residents. Where I live now, I get to enjoy all four seasons and don't have to consider water as a locally scarce resource.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mediterranean_climate
I can only speak for myself but I'll never live in a red state again. Not even Texas, it's not worth it. Even where I grew up (the purple midwest) is too socially conservative for me after living in California.
It's like how for most of my life I barely understood the mitigating measures women take in many situations where I don't even notice the situation.
And another was in sales in industrial manufacturing and there was a lot of misogyny and low-grade racism there.
They're in WA now so and much happier.
¹ the "isn't happening to me" thing is sort of analogous to "works on my machine". Because of the range of stuff, things usually do "work on my machine".
It's fine to prefer living in one culture over another, which is exactly what both your friend and the people they complained about are doing.
And to be clear, I did not mean illegal immigration. I meant legal immigration.
Many immigrants are even more religious and/or convervative than "White and American".
Just of a different culture.
I was born in the US but my ethnicity is visually ambiguous and people assume I'm Mexican, Filipino, or Indian (in that order) based on the type of brown person they grew up with. In CA, no one particularly cares what type of brown person I am. But when I lived in Ohio, I was told that I should "go back home where [I] came from", that I'm one of the good ones and should bring more of my family over, or that I'm "stealing jobs from honest Americans," based on whether the redneck in question thought I was Mexican, Filipino, or Indian. My cousin and his wife, in Indiana, used to experience the same harassment regularly until they started wearing their scrubs everywhere so people would know that they're doctors.
I turned down a very well-paying job in Ohio (and came back to CA) because the people there were so vile.
This was on top of another layer of class conflict between the middle class teachers/administration and lower class/trailer park kids, who mostly dropped out at 16 which was fine with the admin. Lots of additional pressure on other students who didn't conform for various race/gender/etc. reasons. And then completely bizarre stuff like, though the official reason for not having a soccer team was that it would detract from the sacrosanct football program, many of the teachers were clear that believed soccer to be a Communist sport (this was in the 90s when the cold war was long over).
Many of the perpetrators here are very nice people and fine neighbors, but if you aren't an evangelical Christian it can be a challenge. Especially if you're not white: the KKK is still a well known presence just down the road in Harrison, AR, so it's not just woke fearmongering.
It's one thing to live in these environments as an adult and be able to blow a lot of it off, but it's another thing completely to have kids there, which really detracts from the 'leave California to raise kids' motivation.
And it would be better at a larger city like St. Louis or Indianapolis but some fraction of the population of those places are from towns like mine and don't find these beliefs and practices to be particularly problematic.
Intolerable is an ironic word because my personal choices cut right to the paradox of tolerance.
Things have a way of flipping during times of significance. California's entertainment industry was formed by a bunch of young, driven people who wanted to escape paying IP royalties to the Edison company. Now, they're doing everything in their legal power to pursue their own IP infringement cases, taking on the form and function of their reason for leaving NY in the first place.
That NIMBY thing has been boiling over for decades now. There will be new stakeholders in that battle attaching themselves to conservative and far-right movements. Get ready!
That is why they have supremacy, though. Agglomeration effects are a big deal. Its why New York has remained a center of trade and finance for centuries, and why Detroit remains a hub for the automotive industry despite the city's bankruptcy.
No matter what brought the companies there in the first place, just "being together" is a huge deal and is hard to replicate elsewhere. We will see if tech will be an exception, but my prior is that proximity is important, even with WFH, and that Silicon Valley will remain the national center of tech companies.
- WFH or in-office 2-3 days per week
- Office every Wednesday
- Team get-together once a month
- Remote in the same/adjacent time zone
- Remote anywhere you want that we can legally hire you (seems unlikely)
- Remote pay-adjusted (or not)
- Whether there is an office or not
In general, I expect the extreme cases will be fairly rare but pretty much every one of the scenarios (as well as whether they're mandatory or optional) will drive different decisions relative to 5-days a week in the office.
Could be age / career related - VPs of big companies are usually experienced professionals, so they have strong(er) roots in the Bay Area, with kids in school.
But the number of management moving out is ZERO - at least anecdotally. Once we're allowed to go back to the office and they all go, how long until tech leads and architects also follow? Then "interns and junior employees should be at the office so it's easier to mentor", and then remote becomes something mid-level and seniors-who-plateaued or a CLM position. Which is fine, if you know the tradeoffs...
I think this somewhat understates the strength of acquired advantages in agglomeration economies. Particularly in an economy of ideas it seems to me that acquired advantages account for most of the benefit; beyond "cheap rent" there's not much "inherent" advantage to be had.
Even in traditional industry many of the advantages are acquired (i.e. not geographic, which is what I think you're getting at with "inherent supremacy"), the textbook example being Lancashire's dominance in textiles in the 19th century (https://voxeu.org/article/agglomeration-explains-lancashire-...).
I think it's a reasonable point to suggest that the exodus from SV could accelerate the development of other startup/tech hubs, and weaken the comparative advantage of SV, but I think you may be understating the current strengths of SV by focusing on "original advantages" like rent and other environmental/geographic attributes.
This is a small shift in the grand scheme.
It might help create new centers. But the gravity is going to be around the universities and infrastructure that is unique to the area.
Shifts like that rarely happen overnight.
Especially not because of something as temporary as a pandemic.
Not sure if there is any reason for sf once most startups moved sonewhere else.
Good luck fitting in for you when you get there!
The not fitting in is a way bigger deal in Switzerland. Germans will never be accepted, no matter what. Eastern Europeans aren't even considered people.
My LinkedIn account is always flooded by recruiters. That gives engineers leverage to seek new and better opportunities all the time.
Plus networking is also a big one.
Unless you get a job at Google/Oracle and planning on retiring there, SV wins hands down.
The language barrier is also a no go along with cost of living.
At this point, Netflix is the only major company I know of that that still locates 100% of software work in the Bay Area.
Infrastructure might be the wrong word.
I was mainly thinking of soft factors that take time to grow following the exodus. As well as geography and demographics.
One could argue that diseases were major contributors to the collapse of the Roman Empire - internal problems didn't allow them to keep the external forces at bay.
Not being tied to the office fundamentally changes the calculus of choosing where to live. There just aren’t good reasons to live here anymore for so many of us.
Even if you enjoy the area, chances are you can get a better deal by moving just a bit further away. Actually, I can pay the 2 months rent in termination fees and move almost literally anywhere else in the state and still come out ahead financially. Since commute time is not a factor, many options have become viable.
I mean, it's not cold once you get outside of SF/San Bruno. If you're in the peninsula or south bay, it's really fucking hot during the summer. Uncomfortably hot because no one has AC and many of the homes don't have insulation still.
I'm sure the renter to owner market in Sacramento is different than the bay area...
EDIT: Here are a few more things to like about Sacramento.
There seems to be a large population of highly educated ex-military types concentrated here. It’s been an unexpected source of high quality hires. I never saw these people in the Bay.
I’m in an international marriage. We were worried we wouldn’t be able to find our people upon moving here. That hasn’t been a problem at all. Fellow expats are everywhere. It’s a fairly diverse area.
You are also close to SF if you like the madness of the city every once in a while.
Other suburby places with nature easily accessible usually have a more spartan retail experience and sometimes the mail/Amazon doesn't work so well.
Maybe I'm missing, but I don't see anything in that list that isn't true of almost every metro area in the US. I think people living in SF notice when new services come out that are only available there, like Uber was at first. But they don't notice when those services later spread to the rest of the country. You can get Amazon Prime shipping and rideshares everywhere now. Other cities may have somewhat less luxury retail, but likely have shorter drives with less traffic to get to nature.
Other than easy access to nature, all of those points are true for major metro areas. But other than say, Salt Lake City, does any other metro area offer such close access to nature? Boston and Seattle are even much farther away...
Define "easy access to nature." Where I live, there's a major state park within the city limits and a very large lake within ~20 minutes drive. In ~2 hours I can be at the beach. In ~3-4 hours I can be in the mountains. And untold amounts of basically empty land just outside the city. If you're going to arbitrarily define "easy access to nature" as "mountains next to ocean right next to me", well OK, not a lot of places fit that bill. But that's a very narrow definition designed to fit basically SV.
I can go see thousands of migratory birds a few miles from my apartment. Half Moon Bay is 30-45 minutes away, depending on road conditions. Fairly strenuous hiking and rock-climbing in the Santa Cruz Mountains is also 30-60 minutes away. Santa Cruz itself is not much farther.
I have lived all over the east coast for most of my life, and this degree of access has made an outdoors person of my notoriously sedentary self.
So can I, as I mentioned there's a major state park within the city limits where I live...
> It means I can see a beautiful view without planning a day trip.
Incredibly vague and subjective. What constitutes a "beautiful view"?
> I can meet with groups of friends of all fitness levels and enjoy a pleasant afternoon outdoors where we all have fun.
Not unique to the SF Bay Area at all.
Again I think this is very much a cherry-picked definition of "easy access to nature" that is designed to preclude any place not named "SF Bay Area." Still, the kinds of things you were describing can be found in metro areas all over the country.
I'll grant you the Santa Cruz Mountains if you're on the southern end of the Bay. You've also got the hills in the East Bay and various options in Marin and points north if you're in Marin.
But Boston, in addition to various coastal walks has a bunch of nearby parks and small mountains/hills to the west and in southern NH. Also tons of sea kayaking/canoeing. Depending upon where you live, bigger peaks in NH are maybe 2-3 hours.The Sierras are further than that from the SFBA.
Don't get me wrong. The Bay Area has great recreational options but so do a lot of other cities depending upon what you're looking for.
I grew up in suburban Boston. It was a very nice town - we lived on an acre of land, with woods behind the house. Drive 30 minutes in any direction, and you got basically - woods. Maybe some ponds and fields, with scattered houses and suburban town centers between. The city (a pretty nice one) was 30 minutes away. You could get to waterfront, in Boston or Salem or Nahant, but there aren't really beaches in most of Massachusetts (outside of Cape Cod). It did have a massive amount of history, though - in that 30 minute drive was basically everywhere significant to the birth of the USA.
I'm on the peninsula now, in the hills. 10 minute walk to a suburban downtown. 3 minute drive (or ~20 minute walk) and we're on some Bay trails. 5 minute drive and we're in the mountains. 5 minute drive to a massive lake over the San Andreas. 20 minute drive and we're on the beach at the Pacific Ocean. 30 minute drive (or 40 minute Caltrain) and we're up in SF. 30 minute drive and we're in downtown San Jose.
Camelback Mountain is half an hour from the center of Phoenix. Virginia Key Beach Park's walking trails are 20 minutes from downtown Miami. Lionel Hampton-Beecher Hills Park is about the same distance from Atlanta. You get the idea.
SF certainly has really nice nature close by, but it's not like other US cities are industrial wastelands.
I am a pretty avid nature enthusiast that spends a lot of time in the outdoors. It isn't even close, whether you are looking for mountains, water, or parks. Seattle's reputation in this regard is well-deserved; I'm not sure if there is another metro of its size that is so embedded in and connected to nature. And if you look at map, it is easy to see why -- the city is essentially surrounded by water that is surrounded by very rugged mountains (which has provided challenges for growth).
FWIW, the other large metros in the Pacific Northwest (definitely Vancouver and to a lesser extent Portland) have similarly exceptional access to nature. Some of the Mountain West cities also have great access to nature, though not as diverse as Seattle.
If you were to take access to nature to mean, being within driving distance of nature sites that people travel across the country to experience, then the number of metro areas drops significantly.
The Appalachian mountain range stretches from GA to Maine, and contains dozens of state and national parks that people travel across the country to see. Nearly the entire eastern seaboard is within range of one of them.
The only part that isn’t is Florida, and they have better beaches than California, swamps, lakes, and massive crystal clear springs.
This is all subjective, of course, but what can I say? I've been in restaurant and bars at the top of tall hotels in Milwaukee, I enjoyed it and the view of the lake and city... and no, I don't think it even remotely measures up to views of the bay from Pacific Heights or another dozen views in San Francisco. Nor does the surrounding countryside in Milwaukee - which I sincerely do like quite a bit - measure up to redwood forests, Pt. Reyes, the headlands, the coastline from SF to Santa Cruz. A little farther afield, Big Sur and the high Sierras, Sonoma and Napa valleys. I'm not really even sure how to debate it with people, it seems so self-evident to me. California and SF have some really bad qualities, but no, it's not all six of one and a half dozen of the other around any randomly selected US city of 100K in the US. The nature around San Francisco is a differentiator and a selling point (though I would tend to agree that it is now officially overpriced).
Puget Sound is remarkable, though, and the forest around Portland is beautiful. As I've mentioned in another thread, though, the coast is far more accessible in San Francisco.
Maybe there’s something you’re not explaining here but there’s plenty of places all over the country that fit this bill. Austin, Atlanta, Charlotte, Raleigh, Denver, etc.
And Amazon 2 day delivery is available all over the place...
Have you been to Atlanta? It doesn't seem like you're familiar.
The Beltline [0,1], a paved multi-use trail converted from old railway, encircles the city's major neighborhoods and connects everything. It's one of the city's major features. Dozens of parks, including some of the largest -- Piedmont [2], Old Forth Ward, Grant Park, and the old Bellwood Quarry [3] where they filmed Walking Dead, It, etc. -- are all immediately accessible.
The Beltine is being connected to the Silver Comet Trail [4,5], which is a paved bike trail stretching all the way to Alabama (the nation's second longest). Light rail is also being added to the Beltline.
Outside the city you've got access to the Chattahoochee River for rafting. The Palisades [6] provide excellent river-adjacent hiking.
Stone Mountain [7], a giant granite mountain, is 30 minutes east of the city and provides excellent hiking and running.
Kennesaw Mountain [8] is 30 minutes northwest of the city and is great for hiking and dog walking.
Red Top Mountain is 40 minutes northwest, and you have a host of lower Appalachian mountains to the north.
Allatoona Lake [9] is 40 minutes northwest, where they filmed Ozark, and provides excellent boating. Lake Lanier is an hour away and is even bigger.
Atlanta isn't called "city in the forest" for nothing. We have so many trees, parks, and outdoor activities.
[0] https://beltline.org/
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/BeltLine
[2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Piedmont_Park
[3] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Westside_Reservoir_Park
[4] https://www.silvercometga.com/
[5] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Silver_Comet_Trail
[6] https://www.atlantatrails.com/hiking-trails/hiking-east-pali...
[7] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Stone_Mountain
[8] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kennesaw_Mountain
[9] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lake_Allatoona
> easily accessible nature
From my office in Palo Alto, I can ride my bicycle up Sand Hill Road, past horse farms, and then up a secluded 2000 ft (~600 meters) mountain with virtually no traffic and return during my lunch break. Or I can take a long lunch and ride out to the coast, through rolling farmlands. And I can do that virtually any day of the year, thanks to the local climate.
Most of the peninsula (which is, arguably, not SV proper) is like this, with tons of hiking within walking distance of where you live or work. The reason is that almost everything west of I-280 is undeveloped. As you ride or drive around that area, it's very easy to find a view where the only sign of humans is the road you're traveling on.
If I want to go skiing, I can leave work an hour early and drive up to Tahoe for the weekend. Or I could drive down to Santa Cruz for the day and go surfing.
Not quite "nature", but many people like to drive up to Napa for a day-trip to visit world-class wineries.
> luxury retail
Then, after work, I can walk over to my choice of Michelin starred restaurants (and I will pass multiple art galleries and branches of private banks). Granted, none of the restaurants in Palo Alto have more than one Michelin star (how gauche!).
If conspicuous consumption is your thing, San Mateo, Palo Alto, and Santa Clara each have high-end malls with practically every luxury brand you can imagine. Want to buy Ferrari or a McLaren? There's a dealer for each one within 10 miles of Mountain View.
> plenty of places all over the country that fit this bill
Many places have some of what SV offers. Very very few have everything, and I would argue that none of the cities you listed fit the bill.
Ah, but all of them have more affordable housing.
I'm the one that started this discussion and it proved controversial. I tried to just talk about like, the amenities of living in the area and tech jobs, but most people replied saying "wait there's two or three of your list of five or six in...".
I may be biased because I'm not a "generalist web developer", I work in either crazy startups or kinda niche embedded/low level roles. I still get two or three really good job offers from big companies per month even when I'm not looking and they are in SV. I was getting one or more per week pre-COVID. Even when actively looking for that type jobs in Colorado and Austin I can't find them.
Colorado would be more interesting for me if I was a citizen and could work the government aerospace and defense jobs but unfortunately I can't.
The premise was that there are lots of other places that have what SV has. And, by implication, that SV's high prices are unjustified.
I was merely pointing out that SV has an array of amenities that are found together in very few other places. And if you want what SV has, there are very few other places you can get it. Supply and demand. It's that simple.
Maybe you don't care about fancy restaurants or art galleries or spending time outdoors. That's totally cool. Maybe all you care about is finding the absolute cheapest apartment on planet earth. Again, knock your socks off.
SV doesn't have cheap housing. If that's all you care about, look someplace else.
Of course, the grass is always greener. But I think natives are entitled to grouse a little bit, given the circumstances. It's just a little scary if this is the best the U.S. has to offer.
"Despising, For you, the city, thus I turn my back: There is a world elsewhere."
Most suburbs of decent sized cities on the east coast have 2 day Amazon shipping, even the ones close to national parks. And the mail works fine in basically any suburban area.
For variety, I actually think the LA area as a whole is better. But it has the same problem.
Looking at air travel - Denver to India or Austin to China - everything is a 1 day+ and over $2000+. SF/LA to these places is about 15 hours and about $1500.
If the business (i.e. Apple/Google making phones) needs to fly execs, production folks as well as if the tech engineers need in person meetings or have family, that's going to be a made much more challenging.
Also from AUS, you have Houston and Dallas as two big airport options to get to China.
But if you start narrowing it to places with pleasant weather, suddenly it starts looking like a smaller picture. The west coast, west of the cascades or central valley in CA. Probably places like the Carolinas, Tennessee. And maybe we'll be nice to Colorado and give them a trophy for at least having sunshine in the winter :)
You don't have to pay SF rents, of course, but you're not buying a $100k mansion and getting all of these things either.
People I know dislike the fact that most of SV is a typical suburb indistinguishable from what you see in any random Florida city. And consider how many busses bring workers from their apartments in SF down to the office in the burbs.
And who’s full? The main thing the flyover states need is more people.
Specifically, the cost of land is what causes the cost to build to be so high. Owning unproductive land is cheap, and incentivizes simply holding onto it until it appreciates sufficiently.
If you're a poor person, you'd (probably) rather have a cheap home in a poor city surrounded by other poor people, than be the poor person stuck in a gentrifying neighborhood which is getting increasingly hostile to your presence.
The flyover states may need more people: nobody needs Bay Area people bringing their "enlightened" ways with them. Tech literate, rich or not. You guys made your paradise - live in it.
https://www.dallasnews.com/news/politics/2018/11/09/native-t...
Maybe there is hope? Not likely but who knows
On a personal note, it's been tons of fun competing with the multiple bids, sight unseen, over asking on 600-700k+ century old homes in need of another 100k worth of rehab.
It's the NIMBY anti-change response to policy.
The people that want a strong economy, incentivize building housing, and adapting lead to positive non-zero-sum outcomes.
The people that say "fuck off we're full" block any policy and create perverse incentives that create a dysfunctional mess.
This is ignoring the selection bias that the people leaving now are probably also the people not interested in CA anti-housing, high-tax policy and would likely be a better fit on these policy issues in Austin than the commenter thinks.
Largely I think comments like the one you replied to are just responding to what they see as the enemy tribe in the political culture war.
Largely I think you're projecting.
The reason California is such absolute shit to live in: people who live in California vote for the policies it has. You can't blame anyone else. I left to get away from you people, and would dearly like for you all to stay in the beautiful little paradise you have created. Bringing California problems, whether it be zoning laws, riots, real estate prices, unbreathable air due to foolish politically driven forestry management, water shortages, tent cities, traffic jams, electrical blackouts, people shitting in the streets or whatever charming advancements you may come up with next to Austin, Montana, Kuala Lumpur or Des Moines: you people should be treated as the pariahs you are.
He's in the set of people he's complaining about.
[Edit: Apparently not Austin, but some other place - point still stands]
Very typical of a Palo Alto resident to think the only problem with California is prop-13 or some obscure housing policy or whatever. You can't even breathe the goddamned air in your utopia, the tax rate makes France look reasonable, the highways are designed for 1/4 the population density, the power outages are Zimbabwe tier, riots over ... people saying things, and you think a housing policy adjustment is gonna make it all better? Maybe you should try leaving your $4m bungalo bubble once in a while? Actually, no, stay right there. Enjoy it; you earned it.
France has taxes around 45% of GDP, California has (including all levels, including federal) around 30%, the US as a whole (again, counting all levels) is around 25%. California is one of the higher overall tax jurisdictions in the US, but unless your argument is that the US as a whole has unreasonably low taxes, I don't get how you can say California makes France look reasonable.
Oh yeah: completely ridiculous criminal things like this basically don't happen as often in France:
https://mobile.twitter.com/SFPDTenderloin/status/13342450627...
Only for a little over 4 decades.
> don't make enough money to pay taxes,
Yeah, let's just say my household income is in the top 10% in the state, so no.
> or are just being cussed.
If by “being cussed” you mean “understand the difference between total tax rates and top end marginal income tax rates in a progressive tax system”, then, yes it must be this one.
If not, you've missed at least one important possibility.
> The US top end tax rate is 37%, plus California is .... what? 13? You're already up to giving away half of what you make in California.
If you make enough in regular income that essentially all of your income is taxed at the maximum marginal federal and state, sure.
But virtually no one does that , one, because, first, you have to make a huge amount of income for that to be the case, and, second, if you make enough income for that to be the case, you probably have plenty of opportunity to structure how you make income so that, again, it's not. (Of course, while France’s top marginal income tax rate is “only” 45%, it makes a lot more of it's revenue from non-regular-income taxes than anyplace in the US, with a 20% standard VAT rate and a 42.2% top tax rate, including surtaxes and social charges, on capital gains.)
> Meanwhile you have to pay taxes on physical property like your house, and your house is valued at 7 figures if you live in the Bay Area
You don't have to pay full-value on the house except in the year you bought it, assuming market appreciation of > 2%/annum because prop 13.
> Finally, there was a VAT the last time I lived there
There has never been a VAT in any part of California. There is a sales tax, which is not a VAT, which is not a VAT, and the maximum sales tax rate in the state is 10.25%.
The rest of it: I'll let you have the fact that the VAT in California is called "sales tax" -it's the highest in the US, FWIIW. And you evidently are incapable of addition and subtraction, so discussing the rest of it is irrelevant.
Which is pretty much why I want you to stay there. Too many like you. Stay there and enjoy your utopia; you deserve it.
No, the sales tax is called sales tax. VAT and sales tax are structurally different.
> it's the highest in the US, FWIIW.
That's true if you talk exclusively of the state-only rate, which makes no sense to use as the basis of comparison; for statewide average combined state and local sales tax rate (the average rate people actually pay for sales tax in the State), California is #9, behind liberal utopias like Tennessee, Arkansas, Louisiana, and Alabama, among others. (Not only is California not the highest for average combined state and local sales tax, it's nowhere close to the highest for peak combined state and local sales tax, that is, the maximum people actually have to pay; the source I have doesn't rank this way, but from inspection it looks like Illinois with a statewide 6.25% and a peak local additional of 10.00% is the top there.)
https://taxfoundation.org/2020-sales-taxes/
There are other HN users with fire-breathing powers and formidable writing skills whom we eventually persuaded not to post in the enemy-incinerating style here. The argument boils down to trying to have a site that remains at least moderately interesting. There exist communities in which members kick the shit out of each other (or let's be nice, out of opposing arguments) and are higher-quality for it. I like to compare this to rugby teams who beat each other up and then go out drinking together: https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=all&page=0&prefix=true&sor....
HN can't work this way because it's much too big and incohesive—the average quality of contribution is much lower, and there are no relational ties to mitigate the downside. If people start posting in that style here, a copycat stampede will result, only without any insight or wit. We'll end up with mass battles on scorched earth, which is interesting to none of the users that we actually want to have here. Trying to stave off that fate for as long as possible is actually the founding idea behind HN:
https://news.ycombinator.com/newswelcome.html, https://news.ycombinator.com/hackernews.html
https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=all&page=0&prefix=false&so...
One guess I'd have is that an influx of new people creates that anti-housing response anywhere which can lead to some of the same problems. I suspect that's less about CA policy and more about bad incentives around housing being an investment in the US.
If you mean that most people from CA don't like Trump (or the Republican support/defense of him), then yeah I think you're probably right about that (but that's not really CA policy). A lot of people I work with are more center or center-right than the general narrative about Californians would have you believe, I'd suspect those leaving to be more from that camp.
What people don't like is that when upper middle class city and inner suburb types move in local ordinances that restrict what you can and can't do on your own land seem to always follow. And given a generation or so of change in that direction, it gets you the same overpriced, impossible to develop hellscape that those people were seeking to flee in the first place. This isn't unique to CA. Their stupidity isn't special. This pattern has played out all over the east coast and midwest.
The real problems I see are more cultural ones. Homelessness is rising (as it is throughout the US). Utah had handled homelessness much better than other places due to a unique balance between the local government, the police, and the LDS church (I'm not a member FYI), but changes in the mayor and chief of police disrupted that balance.
I also perceive an arrogance on the part of some of those moving here. The idea that they can just start changing things without understanding how/why things were the way they were before. I don't think I'm against change--it's impossible to stop it in any case--but I also don't think coastal values are right for every area.
Not exactly a novel proposition. The Europeans who arrived in what is now New England, or the Caribbean or yes, even Utah, felt much the same and acted like it too.
1 - anti-housing like you say. You see lots of signs in my neighborhood wishing against more-dense housing, despite (relatively) astronomical pricing. At least in Seattle, we do have an issue where we're constrained by water so there isn't a lot of places to build that aren't very far out. So density really is the only solution if you're going to keep computes reasonable. The only people who can afford to buy the existing not-dense housing have a ton of money or income (or both). A >$1m SFH is just not affordable in a city where median household income is $100k.
2 - push against increasing property tax. Sort of a corollary to the housing bit. Which gets doubly odd because we have no income tax in WA. Weirdly regressive.
3 - the strange and ineffectual CA-style push against "assault rifles" as the main item of gun control, despite the fact that all rifles nation-wide kill ~300/yr while pistols kill 30,000/yr, 10k of which are homicide. I say ineffectual because Amdahl's law is a thing, so even if you did magically disappear all riles in the country, it would have a ~1% impact on gun violence.
4 - restaurants heating the out of doors. This spiked a lot with coronavirus so it's hard to talk about now. (This might also be me projecting because I myself am an implant from the Midwest (yes I am a hypocrite), and heating the out of doors is just complete insanity to me)
5 - Many more good restaurants in general though. Sadly, still not a lot of good mexican restaurants.
6 - a change in coffee styles. Take from that what you will, people are kinda religious about it here.
It's really hard to pick out what's actually influenced by CA implants, vs what is just homegrown.
But it is crazy inefficient to pump heat into the outdoors. It's not as inefficient in most parts of california, even northern california. But when you move north it gets down under 40... (In the Midwest where it gets below 0, it's complete lunacy)
It's a weird thing to be simultaneously in favor of environmental controls and trying to raise awareness for climate change (and doing things in Seattle like banning the use of natural gas for heating?), while also being totally ok with heating the outside for dining.
Sure everyone's land is worth more (as if selling the home you own or the land your business is on is actually an option when you can't readily replace either) but at the end of the day but everything winds up inflated and your standard of living flat-lines or decreases despite the increased stress.
It's not like most of the SFBA fleeing refugees here were natives. They were kids from schools MI, NY, PA, IL and TX. The Menlo Park, Mountain View equivalents entrenched in West Austin are pretty fed up already so we'll see how it all turns out in 5 -10 years as the nextgen 3.0 descend on Silicon Hills.
The ACT stuff is long-overdue and the new CapMetro Connect project is great. Hopefully it gets funded and built with fewer bumps along the way than Houston's 5-line rail network (which is still sitting at only 3-and-a-half of 5 lines built).
I looked around, I found a place I like, to I settled there and I want it to stay this way.
According to whom? People like you who have unsustainable views about growth and the economy? Hard pass.
Stay in your cesspool please. We don't need you. We don't want you.
I think it's a lot more nuanced than that but the sentiment is at the very least understandable.
Actually being from SF, I have never once given any transplant any shit (mostly because at any given party I am the only local).
It would never occur to me to be nativist in my own country, how does this shit fly elsewhere?
In my estimation, it has the most coolness-per-dollar. What I actually want is to buy a house, and I just can’t do that around here. Austin is comparatively cheaper and has a culture that appeals to me. It feels a lot like California, but without much of the baggage.
Parts of Colorado, Oregon, and Washington are also strong contenders, but I am predisposed to like Texas.
Ya. Earning a SF wage but living elsewhere is great. But there is a flip side to this coin. As employees realize they can work from home, employers also realize they can have employees work from home. They will soon realize they don't need to pay SF wages. Those who convert their in-office jobs into work-from-home are a covid oddity. Those who will be hired in the future on the assumption that they will always work remotely will likely face much lower wages. I predict a race for the bottom.
I think as an industry everyone is pushed towards software engineering and the large clouds have vacuumed up everyone worth their weight for operations. We make it happen but it’s so stressful because our team and workload balance is so far out of whack.
SWE get to work on new products and get career growth towards bigger and more interesting projects as reward for delivery
Of course people focus on where the opportunities are. It's not the fault of an individual company but an overall industry mindset. "Reward it or lose it" should be a mantra of availability in technical industry expertise.
The talent isn't being converted from potential - as was recently said, "You can't be what you can't see".
I was in Kansas City meeting people in Jan and it's pretty clear that there's a lot of talent hiding out there in downtown Missouri.
The talent there tops out at SSE because there's no vertical space without jumping to management & two years down the folks know are "mid-west-nice" managers with an iron fist behind it.
Several people who should've chased down the principal engineer roles have become these sorts of managers who never made it to directors because they're always been better devs than they were managers. And this seemed twice as bad for the young uns to have a dev-heavy manager squash a few of their attempts to actually own decisions, instead of just proposing them & see that role as a way to get that ability.
Most folks though things would be different if they had moved to SFBA, but all of them hit this point when they already had kids in school with stable single-income households (house all paid for).
In fact, I'd be one of those people in Bangalore if I had a bit more skills as a manager (completely sucking at management is a good way to be forced to chase the dev side).
If they could hired as a principal dev via remote out of being promising senior se, then this process would actually convert a lot of the talent into actual productivity in the industry.
Yes, the strong incentive is to stay put, stick to the local employer as long as you can and still get a role that pays more money. The skills you get from sticking around just make it harder to shift as well sometimes. The output gets equated to talent - "built my sixteenth monolith .NET CRUD web app" is not as well respected as it should be.
For example, there's folks in Portland who are looking at the Nike CEO situation with great trepidation - talented people who would do very well in a new job, assuming they don't need to move.
That was my experience at an F500 in the midwest. I wasn't a senior engineer but I was doing the same type of work as the seniors on my team. And I felt like my role could have more ownership. They did have team leads, a few architects, and agile related roles. But there wasn't much else for devs who didn't want to be managers.
My current company in the bay area is a lot better. I feel like I have more ownership, and the IC roles are more granular. I think technically senior can be terminal, and staff/principal roles here require influencing other teams. But my company has thought about promoting ICs, and I clearly see how staff/principals have a more challenging job.
The fact that everyone is remote is actually a great 'leveler', since the company has a 'main office' and a few satellite offices in other cities. I'm not affiliated with the 'main office', but I actually am concerned that I'll suffer career-wise once the company goes back to in-office, since I'll be in a satellite office missing out on casual-but-important lunch/coffee/hallway conversations.
So, from my perspective, it's a great time to change jobs. YMMV.
Or let's flip it around, move the same developer from Chicago to SF and they will suddenly make more money.
I can only imagine that cost of living is the main factor. Naturally there will be a tiny minority of truly brilliant builders and engineers, but we are not talking about them as they are outliers.
One is more likely to have more experience with startups/trendy new tech.
The other could probably work with it, but the other one already has.
The fact that some folks think so highly of themselves that they don't believe this to be true in their case is just hubris.
But I would characterize this as a wealth distribution, and overall net positive for the country. People who don’t have the opportunities to work at the top companies in the Bay Area or NYC or Boston now have better access. And the wages flow to those different areas.
At the moment that may be true but increasing the pool of potential labor rarely results in wealth distribution. I think companies will pay less. That money won't go to other hires as tech companies limit hiring for other reasons than money. The money will go to bottom lines, to stockholders: the opposite of wealth distribution.
1. Americans need to buy and hold equities. Period. When Google cuts costs or makes more money, I benefit as a shareholder (or you can hold total market indexes and the like).
2. Maybe the money will go to new hires, capabilities, expenditures, etc. ?
3. Sure, but this is certainly a good arguing point against immigration, population growth and H1-B visa programs and the like.
4. Increase taxes on the wealthy, etc.
One arguing point I'd like to make though is that if this doesn't result in wealth redistribution (companies will pay less and this is fine) should we all begin moving to a few cities?
Not to mention, the top companies would still hire top talent in a competitive market.
The truth is, no matter where you are, talent knows what talent is worth. We price accordingly and in the end the market is stable at a certain price level.
We’ve been seeing this over the last decade in major US cities competing for SF-level talent. Tech is one of the highest paid professions. Remote or otherwise. To say companies will just go hire someone cheaper assumes they can find someone cheaper.
In the end I think the real winners are rural America (or Europe or where ever you live). Having a lifeblood of capital come back to small towns and the like will decentralize our cities, improve our quality of life, reinforce the need for infrastructure, and allow innovation to solve those problems.
Exciting times.
And I don't think it's SV -> Rural America exclusively. Many of these jobs will filter back into medium to large sized metros across the country. Places like Columbus, Indianapolis, St Louis, Atlanta, Nashville, etc. . There are scores of talented developers in these areas that would be open to remote work, but not relocation to the major metro areas.
From what I can tell, people are actually mostly moving to other tech hubs (but lower priced) and to high end vacation areas. Think Austin, Denver, Park City Utah, Lake Tahoe, etc... The underlying dynamics are still at play (even tech but to a lesser extent).
It makes me uncomfortable to think tech population from Ca descending onto unsuspecting laid back mid western towns. Integration should be gentle and respectful and with consent.
This is a pipe dream and quite conceited. Talent is worth what the market will pay for it. No escaping supply and demand. If you no longer need to be in the office, the labor pool is immensely expanded. Unless you think that all the smart people in the world were already working for SF employers.
>https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=eoUtoqeEw8U
you can excuse the resentment
I don’t have a comment or solution to this problem (is it even a problem?) otherwise I’d suggest something. I’m just observing like others, but I will admit to browsing Zillow for a farm if remote work has staying power. I think being able to provide some stimulus economically from this will help those smaller rural businesses. I don’t know. I’m not qualified in economics to predict the outcome, only some hope and some fear of possibilities.
So it would follow that overpriced talent in high-demand markets would see a decrease, where underpriced talent in low-demand markets would see an increase.
This would be the same concerns with offshoring as well, but that hasn't led to massive salary drops. Because there's still a big cost to switching people. If you could fire all your SF SWEs today and replace them with identical, knowledgable, fully-ramped, culture-carried SWEs in $secondary_market for half price, you would. You can't, so you threaten and you try to convince your SF SWE that you could just enough to keep their expectations low, but not so much that they actually quit.
I see a lot of companies still trying the "CoLA trick" on employees moving to secondary markets. "We can hire your position in $market for cheaper," so the argument goes. The best move there is to call their bluff: "go do it then". Most people won't do it because a) conflict is hard and b) finding a new job on top of moving is annoying. So they'll take it on the chin and just resign 6-12 months later after they're settled.
[1] In the old world, there's still a premium to convince talent to relocate. So companies in high-demand markets (e.g., SF) either have to pay +x% to tap non-local talent and get them to move to the high-demand market (where they become local talent).
Even in the new world, non-local talent isn't going to sit by and let themselves be underpaid. "I'm doing the exact same thing, delivering the exact same value, but someone is getting paid 30% more to sit in the office? Oh, and you don't even pay for my home office?"
You can hire competent Thai or Vietnamese programmers for $20K/year on Upwork, which is a princely sum in their countries. If all you want is someone to implement a spec, they'll do the job just as good or better than any American. Why would you pay $100K/year?
Most markets bifurcate into a commoditized low-end that makes all the volume and a differentiated high-end that makes all the profits. Think Android/iPhone, Windows/Mac, TSMC/Intel, Volkswagon/Porsche, etc. The commodity low-end programmer isn't the guy in Missouri, it's the guy in Minsk or Bangkok. You're either the one making up the specs (which will probably still be in Silicon Valley, because that requires communication and trust more than coding ability), or the one implementing the specs (which can be anywhere, with commensurate wages).
Anyone working for a Silicon Valley company as an engineer is almost certainly considered "the wealthy" by most of America.
Depending on your definition of wealthy, "anyone working" full stop. A large number of americans do not work (too young/old etc). Others are sick. Many at the top of society don't earn much income (tax voodoo). And automation is coming. If we define "wealthy" as the top 25/15/10% of wage earners, how soon before that is basically just anyone with a fulltime job?
In 2020, $121,411 was the median household net worth in the United States. This is up from $97,225.55 in 2017.
The average household net worth in 2020 was $746,821. It was $692,100 in 2017.
The disparity between these two numbers is itself a major problem, but not the point. If you have a net work of $120k you aren't wealthy, even if you earnt that all in the last month.
The way you get from having no wealth to having an average amount is by working harder and earning more. However the tax system is built to punish people who earn more money from work, and reward people who gain more wealth through things like capital gains -- you pay more tax if you increase your wealth by a dollar from working than from the side-effect of being already wealthy and seeing your assets gain value. You're also far more likely to have higher outgoings if you're working (higher cost to live near a high paying job, commuting costs etc)
If you are on the median ohio wage on 37k a year, so $30,427.47 net, and spending 37k to live, your wealth doesn't increase.
If you work an extra 1k, you take home $31,202.47 -- $775, 22.5% tax.
If you make 1k in capital gains, you keep $971, 3% tax.
Look at twice median wage of 74k a year. Take home 57,439.49. Extra $1k will give you 58,109.69, an extra $670 - 33% tax.
Make 1k in capital gains and you pay 18% tax.
Earn 10 times the median wage at $370k and you keep 239,713.20, 42% tax.
Get 1k in capital gains and you keep $764, 24% tax.
https://dqydj.com/average-median-top-net-worth-percentiles/
https://www.thebalance.com/breakdown-of-average-monthly-hous...
https://goodcalculators.com/us-salary-tax-calculator/ohio/
https://smartasset.com/investing/capital-gains-tax-calculato...
When you consider just how low US individual income tax rates are by global standards, it’s obvious that disparities in net worth have a lot to do with the fact that a large share of Americans, regardless of their income, effectively choose to live from paycheck to paycheck on the brink of personal insolvency.
But often these arguments don't present a full picture - because it only discusses the end result of the dollar received and compare the tax rates.
What about the risk? A job-income is 100% guaranteed to be received if one worked. Even if the business paying the said wage doesn't make a profit, they still have to pay the wage. The owner cops the loss.
Therefore, to encourage investments, the taxes are lowered on the profits of such type of investment (which is what capital gains are). The person trying to make capital gains income has to take on a risk that a wage earner doesn't, because the capital gains aren't guaranteed.
If capital gains are taxed the same, you will find that there will be less investments, which leads to less jobs and less wealth overall.
The person risking "billions" in capital is taking "billions" in monetary risk (the weighting depending on what the investment is - bonds are less risky than shares, for example).
Over the last 50 years the values of investments have far far outpaced growth in earnings. If a millionaire doesn't invest and make captial gains, what does he do with his money? Keep it in a box under the bed?
And a lawyer gets paid $200/hr. What are you comparing? I'm not talking about whether it's "fair" that someone can be earning so little when there exists billionairs. That's for the philosophers and social commentators to endless debate.
But someone working for $20/hr earns that money, with zero risk of not receiving it after services rendered. Someone investing money is not guaranteed a return.
> If a millionaire doesn't invest and make captial gains, what does he do with his money?
So you're saying that because said millionaire has "no choice", he would be forced to invest and thus, society could leech more off him?
Same principle with a lawyer being paid $200 an hour, or an actor on $2000 an hour.
Morally I'd say that the millionaire who is rent seeking should be taxed more than those working, but parity would be a start
You make investing seem like gambling. Seems that the IRS treat gambling as earned income, not unearned income.
So you're saying people don't work because they are taxed at a higher rate than capital gains?
Higher capital gains tax discourages investment. If income tax is higher, it indeed does stop people from working (as much). But we are talking about raising capital gains tax, not raising income tax.
Yes, but it is not good that your "compensation" will be coming from something that isn't tied to your job performance. Wages at least have some tenuous connection to how well you perform at work.
> 2. Maybe the money will go to new hires, capabilities, expenditures, etc. ?
Based on recent trends, this will not happen.
> 3. Sure, but this is certainly a good arguing point against immigration, population growth and H1-B visa programs and the like.
Yes, definitely.
> 4. Increase taxes on the wealthy, etc.
Yes, or nationalize the banks.
It also doesn't account for the fact that these equities can lose substantial value, or may be over-valued.
> Yes, or nationalize the banks.
Re-implement the Glass-Steagall Act, or similar. Nationalization leaves the levers of power in the hands of the wrong people. Keeping commercial and investment banking separate while implementing strong consumer protections was shown to work well in the past. Also, it has shown that the repeal massively reduced the amount of banks (killing competition) so it stands to reason that trend could be reversed and improve the consumer banking experience over time.
This won’t work. When the tech exodus begins, it’s going to cause CA to buckle at its knees because the wealthy has been subsidizing more than 80% of the population. It is not sustainable or healthy at all to suckle at the teat of the wealthy.
We should abolish all taxes and only retain taxes based on consumption. And a flat modest capital gains tax. With dedications gone, this might actually bring in more public money.
Public spending will also decrease if we figure a way out of unfunded pension liabilities. This is huge. Don’t know how it can be resolved.
CA does not tax wealth, they tax (predominately) income, and I wouldn't be so quick to equate the 2. Prop 13, for example, can mean that wealthy land owners pay almost nothing in tax if they've owned their property for a long time.
https://www.taxfairnessproject.org/ generally the wealthier you are the bigger your tax cut.
If that value is going to be captured by anyone, I would much MUCH rather it be captured by Google shareholders, many of whom are employees and are at least partly responsible for the company's incredible success, than lazy and parasitic SFBA landlords who profit from their own NIMBYism and regulatory predation.
If you're working remotely for 100k, and paying 1.7k a month in rent, you're capturing ~80k as well. That means more capital is going to the employers(who saves 40k) at the expense of the landlords (who lose out on that 40k).
I honestly think I'd rather have the capital go to the employers because a) it improves my value in relation to them (I now can argue that I should get paid more, because I bring in 40k a year more value than I did in SV) AND I have a financial interest in the company doing well (with options/RSUs/bonuses/etc).
The money going to the landlords starts to become very literally "rent seeking" where they will capture the capital without providing any productivity gains in return. You could argue that their value in "provide a location for people to live so they can collaborate more effectively" is decreasing with remote work, and they will have to charge less because the value they provide is decreasing.
It most certainly is, if at the same time you're hanging out at city council meetings protesting construction and housing development. The cost of housing in SFBA isn't really the cost of land - its the cost of regulation. It's the marginal cost of building new housing.
Additionally, labor has a say in what they're paid as well and knowledge of what the average pay is for a given job in their country, region, or city. They can also talk to their fellow employees when they're hired and then push for a hire wage when they find out they're making less then everyone else doing the same job. Just because someone lives in Wisconsin doesn't mean they just accept any offer at a discount simply because HR has a bar chart says they should be paid 35% less then someone else.
Yes, and I also see the push for remote work also affecting the demand side of the software labor market as well as the supply. There will be even more push for good collaboration/communication work process software. It's still a fast growing market.
I can tell you there's a reason I left Texas and it's because cash doesn't do to your savings what RSU's and bonuses will.
Businesses found it necessary to exist in Silicon Valley because it provided certain benefits, and businesses found it necessary to have on-premises employees because it provided certain benefits. Since California won't allow any on-premises anything, the cost-benefit of being in the Valley and having people in the office is being reset. But if your skills and aptitude are scarce, there's no reason to believe wages won't continue to reflect that. And if your skills and aptitude aren't scarce, you were overpaid in the first place.
I just know that the improved state of affairs has my wife and I dreaming of remote work in a rural area one day soon. Come on Starlink!
This isn't new, it's already been realized long ago. I've been working remote for ~10 years and there is always a location modifier in the salary.
It would not surprise me at all if companies became more open to hiring remote employees, but started paying them 20% - 30% less, and extended the offer to transition to WFH (with a salary adjustment) for existing employees as well.
Bay area salaries are much larger than most other jobs (tech or not) in small cities. I recall local tech companies offering 1/2 to 1/3 of what you would get paid for average (non-FAANG) work in the Bay. In most smaller cities in the US > $100k is still quite a lot for a household, let alone a single income. If take that income outside of even small towns to more rural areas, $100k can allow you to live very, very well.
Sure eventually we'll see salaries reach an equilibrium, where local tech companies have to offer more and big tech companies will offer less. However, for the next few years, if you're coming from a Bay Area company, you can take a pretty major cut to TC and still live extremely well. You don't have to move to the middle of nowhere for this to be the case either.
At a million dollars you need a fairly large household income to afford luxuries beyond your house. Even putting down 25% on the house with a good 30 year fixed rate loan you'd be looking at just under $4k a month for your mortgage. After utilities you're easily over $4k a month. If you scrimped you could maybe keep your other household costs under $500 a month (realistically you're looking at $1k). So you're looking at a take-home of $4.5-5k to just stay afloat.
That's all for a shitty house that needs work, doesn't have great insulation, and doesn't have a lot of usable space. If you're 30 when you buy they place you only have to keep that income until you're 60 or hope that you build a ton of equity in the meantime and cash out.
That's the minimum for most of the SFBA. There's plenty of places with even more outrageous prices for shitty houses. To buy a house for not completely outrageous prices you need to go pretty far afield with hour plus commutes.
Treating yourself to ramen once a week is not a luxury.
This is more than accessible to tech workers at public companies. A 150k income is going to be ~7k a month after taxes. Tier one employers pay significantly more than that to new grads, and pretty much everyone reputable in the bay pays more than that to experienced people. So yeah, single income can absolutely afford a home.
Obviously someone with student loans can't do that as quickly, but otoh a dual income family could put $2M down in cash before they turn 30 given moderate success. (Or another way of looking at this is a moderately successful mid-20s SWE can bank 100k/yr after all expenses and retirement savings, without budgeting strictly. That's ridiculous)
A SWE in their 20s banking $100k a year? Must be nice.
Google, Amazon (and subsidiaries like Twitch), Microsoft (and subsidiaries like Github), Facebook, Linkedin, Stripe, Square, Lyft, Uber, Snap, Oracle, Apple, Dropbox, Box, Nvidia, Twitter, Slack, Salesforce, ByteDance and a slew of others. And I'm including only companies that pay out 150K in cash equivalents (cash + annual bonus + liquid stock) in that list.
After a promotion, that list probably doubles in size.
> What new grad making $150k is going to qualify for a loan on a million dollar house?
I don't think I ever suggested this. What I did suggest is that someone who graduates at 22 or 23 (and, with the big caveat that they do so with little to no existing debt), gets a 150K starting comp, and has even a modest amount of career growth will be able to save a whole bunch of money in their late twenties.
> A SWE in their 20s banking $100k a year? Must be nice.
Like I said, its absolutely ridiculous.
Engineering throughput definitely doesn't scale linearly with the size of the engineering team. Good on you for never having managed to have heard of Fred Brooks though.
I think it's even worse than that. Once they realize that you're working from home, why wouldn't they hire someone much cheaper abroad?
I hope I'm wrong but I think in less than 5 years people will regret this WFH thing.
It's great news for non-Americans though, USD goes a long way in a lot of the world.
Zoom hasn't fixed this.
Maybe this time is different with the advent of better online collaboration tools. But these tools do little to help with real-time communication across time zones and language barriers.
Economies usually don't work like that.
Even if some version of that happens, it will still pay off to move out of SF.
I think one of the big problems in the US is that growth and wealth are concentrated to a few hyper rich coastal cities, where most people can't afford to move. While large parts of the country is relatively impoverished.
If that ends up being spread around more evenly, I think that's only good. Even if I personally might get a pay cut.
This statement can be generalized to:
"I think one of the big problems in the world is that growth and wealth are concentrated to a few hyper rich countries, where most people can't afford to move. While large parts of the world are relatively impoverished."
Now I do understand that of software people believe that programing is somehow special and can't be done in effective manner remotely or third world site at far lower cost.
I have few observations here:
1) With massive proliferation of frameworks the creative/ intellectual input is increasing minimal for most of commercial work. And that's where most of the software devs are employed.
2) A lot of work is low quality that companies do not care because same mentality of cheap use and throw stuff is prevailing now for enterprise apps as it is for consumer stuff.
3) Looking at lot of software produced by top valley companies is buggy, bloated and feels generally crappy. I do not believe all of it is just due to companies' strategy of being first to market. A lot of it seems because of same low quality CRUD peddlers who fill office floors of fortune 500 companies.
I've spent decades among software people and never heard this said.
The outsourcing to India etc is 2+ decades old already FFS! What impact it's had on US wages is hard to say, but it's been very good for a lot of third world engineers!
The reason they pay “SF wages” is because they can’t hire talent at other prices, not because of some goodness of the heart. While total talent pool might be slightly expanded with people who didn’t want to move to SF previously, overall it’s not going to be a big shift.
My employer is becoming more WFH friendly. But they are explicitly saying post-covid fulltime remote will require an adjustment for base salary and future equity grants. I don't think that would be a good financial decision for me. Even if my compensation didn't get cut I would probably end up needing to take a pay cut or move if I wanted to change jobs.
Base salaries are pretty sticky downwards. It wouldn't be surprising to see modest formal geo-based adjustments of base salaries and much larger quiet adjustments of equity grants--which tend to be much less transparent. It will obviously vary by company but, to the degree in-office becomes largely optional, it's reasonable to expect comp tends towards something more equalized--at least within the US.
If only there was some kind of organization in which tech workers could "unify".
Remote companies that attempt to race for the bottom will be at a huge competitive disadvantage against remote companies that don't. Over time, they'll learn and adapt (or they'll die).
The biggest misconception about remote work is that remote work is good because don't have to pay bay area salaries. When you do that, you're broadening your talent pool, and you're then limiting yourself to the bottom half of it.
When you pay Silicon Valley salaries (or higher) for remote work, you broaden your talent pool to the entire world, and then you get to select from the very top tier. We've been doing this for years, now, and it still feels like an undiscovered gold mine hiding in plain sight.
I've been hearing remote work is the future for many years now, but haven't seen much movement toward the goal.
Now, we are in a pandemic and everyone is forced to be at home, not by choice, but by necessity.
Everyone is still saying remote work is now accelerated, but no one had a choice if they wanted to work remotely or not...
Of course there will be some increase in remote working after the pandemic, but I think the vast majority is going to return to the office.
Not because they can't work from home, but just because they don't want to work from home.
It's easy to move away when everyone is forced to. But when you need that new promotion when office life is back and someone else there is networking...you just gonna stay back in Tulsa? Doubtful.
The majority of people that say this are also the exact reason why the city is blackhole of culture and fun. You aren't in traffic, you are the traffic.
Anyways, people are always leaving the Bay Area. If you came here five years ago, first you were new here and second, you've known people who have left.
So Keith Rabois left for Miami. Great for him. The question is whether the next Keith Rabois will spring forth from Miami. Unlikely.
A much more reasonable interpretation is that Shockley was going succeed no matter where he went, not that Silicon Valley is uniquely situated, especially with the dominance of east coast companies in defense contracting.
https://steveblank.com/secret-history/
Ames Research Center dates to 1939.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ames_Research_Center
It's true that Shockley picked Palo Alto because of his mother, but it would be unfair to not also credit Stanford who had an outsized role in helping solidify the Bay Area as the hub for "Silicon Valley".
Many many many companies tried to move the industry away from California since the 50s, and every time, those companies star players ended up relocating to the bay area.
California's free-wheeling culture permeates at all levels, from investors all the way down to the individual contributors. It just wasn't an accident that Silicon Valley happened the way it did.
Only seemingly non-random factor you gave is the Emerald Triangle, which could be the answer.
As to why CA, I don't think there is any one reason. The weather and geography are huge. It was a lightly populated state in the 1950s, so real estate was much cheaper than on the heavily populated east coast (big for both start ups and 'artistic' types). And the gold rush mentality is/was pervasive, which I personally think leads to a government and culture that is generally supportive of start ups and small businesses. While CA has a reputation for being unfriendly to businesses, the taxes and regulations are largely targeting big businesses. So that leaves more room for small start ups to compete.
Wine, Movies, Farming, Banking, Education, Tech.
California is just a state with a long history with a weird mixture of entrepreneurs you won't find elsewhere.
I don't know the exact terms of universities when it comes to founding companies but I don't see how the university can prevent you from founding a company, or demand a percentage.
> All potentially patentable inventions conceived or first reduced to practice in whole or in part by members of the faculty or staff (including student employees) of the University in the course of their University responsibilities or with more than incidental use of University resources, shall be disclosed on a timely basis to the University. Title to such inventions shall be assigned to the University, regardless of the source of funding, if any.
For an example of an institution with the kind of IP policy you're describing, the University of Waterloo in Canada has a policy[1] that by default assigns IP to creators rather than the institution:
> Except as stipulated below, it is University policy that ownership of rights in IP created in the course of teaching and research activities belong to the creator(s).
[0]: https://doresearch.stanford.edu/policies/research-policy-han... [1]: https://uwaterloo.ca/secretariat/policies-procedures-guideli...
Otoh, they are extremely supportive of professors and PhDs (and undergrads, though those are often more software) starting companies based on research, and have very good policies regarding this. Most people end up generally happy on all sides.
It's definitely not "no strings" - otherwise Stanford wouldn't be the actual owners of PageRank (which they licensed to Google).
Now it's just coasting downhill, unable to maintain the altitude that it once had because it never knew how to (was never possible to?) build that altitude without a big dose of random luck.
The thing with oil wells, railroads, and gold mining, is that geography/geology matters more than path dependence.
Silicon Valley and Hollywood, and to a lesser extent NYC and London, are more about path dependence. Their dominance in their sectors seem more resulting from, if anything specific to point to, legal factors, than geography or any particular natural resource/phenomenon.
Why make movies and software in California, one in the south and the other a bit more north?
The founding of Hollywood was just as random as the events that "caused" the rise of the Valley. What if Griffith had gone elsewhere? What if Edison hadn't enforced his patents, causing the exodus across the country to make movies out of his purview? Similar climate/environs/affordability elsewhere, why not AZ, NM, TX, GA, FL?
This is a lot different than, say, the reasons for North Carolina to eventually beat New England in textile production, or why the Rust Belt is where it is, or why rail and shipbuilding was big in the Northeast but not so much space and auto manufacturing. It's more like why the appliances that are made in the U.S. are mostly made in the south.
This isn't the map i was looking for, but gives you the basic idea https://brilliantmaps.com/california-filming-map/. The Geographic diversity around Hollywood is absolutely responsible for its initial success.
http://www.californiaherps.com/images/vegetationmapjeaster.j...
But what were the first two movies made in Hollywood? Griffith's Western and DeMille's Western. If another genre had been preferred in the 1910s, seems like a movie hub could've landed elsewhere. (Or maybe Westerns were actually made more due to budgetary constraints than preferences.)
https://digg.com/2019/movie-genre-popularity-1910-to-2018-da...
Couldn't've be East Coast because Edison.
https://www.mentalfloss.com/article/51722/thomas-edison-drov...
Edit: Was grayed out when first seen.-
https://steveblank.com/secret-history/
Because Shockley moved here. Fairchild was founded here, and the Fairchildren built Silicon Valley and its venture capitalism.
https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=ZTC_RxWN_xo
Toyota, GM, Ford, Chrysler, Nissan, VW, and all their parts suppliers(and the supplier parts suppliers) have at minimum a white collar office in south east Michigan.
The event that caused the Exodus from Detroit was the Race Riots. You can Google that because I'm not touching that topic.(and it doesn't help Detroit has a 1% tax)
Similar thing can happen to SV. People moving to "suburbs" -> other parts of CA.
Wrt. people leaving because of WFH - anecdotally people leave for other place where there are campuses of their companies. That suggests that there is not much trust in WFH. Once WFH subsides many of those people will still continue their comfortable work and life in those places. Those "stale blood" people - the highly paid employees of those large corps - aren't really drivers of innovation (making $0.5M+ at say Google as a programming drone one isn't going to drop it and make a startup - that is one of the points why Google is paying well :), and by leaving SFBA they provide the chance (by for example relieving real estate pressure a bit) for the "new blood" to come in.
Financial resources went to route 128 because of a more corporate-friendly regulatory climate. Innovation came from Silicon Valley because of a more innovation-friendly regulatory climate.
Guess which won out?
US reached economic supremacy in part due to a weaker IP scheme than Europe, and China is doing likewise right now. Innovation requires a mixture of economic rewards (which doesn't happen in the absence of any enforcement), and building off of the work of others (which doesn't happen with strict IP laws). Massachusetts went off of the deep end of more is better.
Coincidentally, Boston is doing better for big business, like biotech, in part because there, the balance falls in a different place. It's very tough to start a scrappy biotech, so the number of employee leaving to do a competing startup is pretty darned low in either case. The downsides of strong IP are smaller, and the upsides of weak IP are greater.
For a long time, Route 128 did largely win out, semiconductors in SV notwithstanding. The lead in computer-related technology did tend to shift to California with the shift to microcomputers. Although it's not clear that was in any way inevitable. (After all, Compaq was in Texas.)
After microcomputers, anyone could do it out of their home.
If my employer is making a CAD tool and makes a dumb decision, I can make my better CAD tool and put them out of business. Even hardware changed when I no longer needed to buy individual transistors. Things like the Apple could be designed out of a garage, with commercial off-the-shelf parts, perhaps borrowing a little bit of money from friends and family, but without even taking out a second mortgage. From there, things spiraled up, with quick-turn $40 PCBs, fabless IC companies, and so on.
It didn't have to happen in Silicon Valley, but it couldn't happen in Boston, and with Stanford and what not, Silicon Valley was as good a place as any.
https://www.confortolaw.com/non-competition-agreements.html
https://www.huffpost.com/entry/understanding-californias-ban...
There is also a LOT of biotech in sfbay, but it is still in the shadow of internet tech, for various reasons (PhD is minimum cost of entry, longer development times, etc)
My point in my GGP post was that the opposite is true, first for tech and more recently for internet commerce, in the Bay Area. And I agree that the #1 driver was a healthy attitude to IP laws (which also drove the film industry to California, first to the Bay Area and then to LA).
And the second was an attitude that people don't care so much about your background and what's been done to date, an attitude I believe to be a legacy of the gold rush.
Exactly
This is why efforts to "duplicate Silicon Valley" fail. Also why Europe was unable to move the locus of financial transactions from London even after the Euro. In both cases, there are plenty of things to point to but nobody really knows.
I’ve lived and worked in both. None of the things I prefer about SF have anything to do with the efforts of local governments.
If anything, I’d agree that the local governments efforts and misguided policies are responsible for most of what I dislike most about living in SF.
So much is handled so incredibly poorly, but everyone’s willing to put up with it for proximity to a giant money-making machine spewing wealth around.
My recollection is that the article found that there were several factors that all came out right for SV. The other places fell short on one or more of them.
I don't remember all of the factors they found, but I remember a few.
One was nearby top tier research universities.
Another was ready access to investors willing to invest in new kinds of businesses. This one was a problem in several older places. The investors there just wanted to invest in companies doing old things or in doing things related to the main existing industry of the region.
Tolerance of failure was important. In some places, failure forever taints you. Start a company and it fails? The investment bankers no longer want to talk to you, and you don't get invited anymore to the parties and events where the behind the scenes networking goes on. In SV having a failed startup isn't a big deal.
Also, I hardly think the opportunity was squandered - it's paid off for a long run. I do think there are challenges ahead for the model to continue to succeed faster than other areas.
I'd call it counter culture but I otherwise agree with you.
Please don't create accounts to break the site guidelines with.
https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html
Wait, what?
What exactly was local government supposed to do with this, ah gift?
From the perspective of someone who doesn't live in the Bay area, it is a libertarian paradise for the haves, unlivable for the have-nots, and is the pinnacle of American culture, with its focus on individualistic solutions (detached housing, strong zoning laws that protect existing landowners, reliance on personal vehicle ownership, privatization of critical services) to society-scale problems.
Throw in conflicting interests of the residents of the cities that make up the SFBA, and you pretty much get what one would expect.
Before asking why your local government has not fixed <some problem that makes us mildly uncomfortable>, you may want to instead ask 'Why haven't we elected a local government that would fix that problem?' Tech has an outsized amount of political influence on governments and elections in the area. Governments don't exist in a vacuum, completely detached from the desires of their constituents.
> libertarian paradise
What a strange notion. San Francisco has some of the most paternalistic laws in the US, courtesy of its board of supervisors. Some of them even wanted to ban corporate cafeterias, an issue which returned last year:
https://sfist.com/2019/07/22/watered-down-version-of-sfs-tec...
To pin the blame for these problems on libertarians, of all people, is the height of absurdity:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Politics_in_the_San_Francisco_...
See also:
https://www.sfgate.com/politics/article/OPINION-San-Francisc...
https://www.sfchronicle.com/business/article/Nanny-state-or-...
https://www.latimes.com/archives/la-xpm-2010-nov-02-la-fi-ha...
https://www.fraserinstitute.org/sites/default/files/economic...
https://reason.org/policy-study/us-metropolitan-area-economi...
> zoning laws
Where did you get the bizarre idea that their zoning laws are in any way “libertarian” or “individualist”?
https://marketurbanismreport.com/blog/san-franciscos-regulat...
2. These are fantastic examples of measures that at worst, mildly inconvenience the most affluent members of its society, and at best are harmless social signaling of issues that don't matter.
It speaks more about your priorities when you point out things like happy meal toy bans, while ignoring the insanity of having an entire city that is completely unaffordable to the people working in that McDonalds, or a healthcare system that completely fails the most regular customers[1] to that McDonalds.
As for zoning laws, they are absolutely libertarian, in the sense that the people who have made it are using them to pull the ladder up behind them. What's the point of owning property, and having wealth and political influence if you then don't spend that influence to protect the value of your property?
Land, in large part, derives its value from how difficult it is to acquire. I could hardly think of a more land-owner friendly system than one with extremely onerous zoning and construction requirements. If you're feeling pressured by this, you are one of the have-nots (whose life in a libertarian-paradise-for-the-haves is not that great - see my original post on what being a have-not gets you in the SFBA.)
[1] I'm referring to, of course, poorer people.
2. Here's the definition of zoning:
> Zoning is a method of urban planning in which a municipality or other tier of government divides land into areas called zones, each of which has a set of regulations for new development that differs from other zones.
Here's the definition of libertarianism:
> Libertarianism is a political philosophy and movement that upholds liberty as a core principle Libertarians seek to maximize autonomy and political freedom, emphasizing free association, freedom of choice, individualism and voluntary association.
In what way is government dictating that you can't build more housing on your property "libertarian"? You're pulling some desperate mental gymnastics.
> As for zoning laws, they are absolutely libertarian, in the sense that the people who have made it are using them to pull the ladder up behind them.
Literal nonsense. That's not what "libertarian" means.
That is exactly what libertarian means in practice. The ideology, when implemented in a democratic society has no mechanism to combat this kind of regulatory capture. It becomes just a shorthand for "People with money get to keep it, people without get to pull themselves up by their bootstraps."
Autonomy from government is only welcome by actual libertarians when it comes to autonomy from obligations towards government - but reliance on government is sought out when it comes to protection of their wealth by government.
Stop looking at symbolic virtue-signaling gestures, and start looking at what policies actually affect real people's lives, and why those policies are in place. The SFBA is a great place to live if you are self-reliant (wealthy), and can afford its smorgasbord of world-class private services, for anything from education to transportation to healthcare, to legal work, to housing. It very quickly becomes a far-from-great place to live if you have to result to public options for any of those things - because they range from either 'on life support' to 'non-existent'.
> What a strange notion. San Francisco has some of the most paternalistic laws in the US
Not sure if you are aware but the Bay area is much bigger than just San Francisco. San Francisco isn't even the biggest city.
There are very libertarian subcultures of the broader Bay Area, including in San Francisco, but most notably among the wealthy and business owners of Silicon Valley.
> libertarian subcultures
I’m sure there are lots of subcultures. What does this have to do with who is actually governing?
A whole lot. Look no further than the recent ballot initiative won by Uber and Lyft against classifying drivers as full employees, or similarly failed ballot initiative to remove prop 13 from commercial property taxes. The direction of both results was very much in the libertarian direction.
So, since the Bay Area has socialist subcultures [0], and they actually have power [1], will you say it is socialist in governance? Or are you applying a double standard?
> The direction of both results was very much in the libertarian direction.
Those two particular results, sure. What about all the other results and legislation I referenced?
[0] https://dsasf.org
[1] https://www.mercurynews.com/2020/11/13/young-democratic-soci...
Huh?
> rather than contemplate what was written
That’s exactly what I did?
Do you actually have anything substantive to say?
My criticism of zoning is, historically, it has been used to keep certain groups of people out of certain geographic areas.
https://www.sfchronicle.com/bayarea/philmatier/article/Forme...
California has laws that make it safe and easy for employees to go form a startup at the drop of a hat.
In California, regardless of their employee contract, employees own the inventions:
- made in their own time
- made without using the employers equipment or technology
Other states (Texas?) give employers an enormous amount of power over their employees, even giving them rights to the ideas in their heads.
Okay, I'm going to give you the benefit of the doubt here because you said "reminds [you]", not that it _is_ in fact the Resource curse. However, you must acknowledge that the Resource Curse doesn't describe the SF Bay Area _at all_.
We have the richest real estate in country, some of the highest earning zipcodes in the country, employment rate most of the country would love to have, etc. There's no "curse" here, as defined in the economic sense.
Of course, it's better to have neither exploding costs nor petty crime, but at the end of the day, dealing with petty crime is more affordable.
EDIT: Getting downvoted to oblivion but I'm not wrong.
https://sf.curbed.com/2019/12/12/21001080/san-francisco-sf-r...
"In 2010, a two-bedroom SF apartment on Craigslist averaged $2,893 (per historic data compiled in 2016 by Eric Fischer), or $3,396 after inflation. At the end of 2019, similar units on the same site sit at a median of $4,300, up 26.6 percent."
It would have taken a lot of petty crime to amount to that $12K per year in inflation-adjusted (i.e. real) increase.
(Technically, they've only enforced price controls which make made profitable renovation illegal, but it has the same effect.)
Why would that be?
Surely many developers would have made the bet anyway, at least in 2010-2019, but going forward it'll be worth considering whether building housing for people who are likely to leave en masse is worth the risk.
People are building houses in countries where they sell at 20x lower prices.
Unless construction workers in SV are paid 1 million $ / year, the reason for not building is not that it's not (hugely) profitable.
But you seem to be condoning that preference, and that preference is ridiculous. An economic boom should not be a bad thing. And tech is not raising rents, it is raising housing demand which could easily be met with a corresponding rise in supply that would limit the price increases, but new housing has been being actively blocked for decades.
You also leave out an important factor, most of the city that is supporting the policies that enable petty crime here have no skin in the game. They live in nice neighborhoods where they've owned their houses for decades making them massively wealthy and don't have to interact with the undesirables. It's easy to look the other way and ignore the downtown problems of homelessness and street crime, and to be so woke that you don't want any crime prosecuted, when it doesn't affect you.
You're right, but the reality is it has been a bad thing for many people. As long as they're being outmaneuvered by homeowners and landlords, having the boom simply end would work just as well as winning the housing supply fight. Few people are going to miss tech elites if they leave.
A minority of people can afford living in an expensive and safe area.
The majority is forced to choose less expensive, even if less safe, areas.
The thing with SF is that the media and a large portion of the US loves to hate it - theres a narrative that keeps getting the replay button. They always will, and it will always die just like Silicon Valley is over and the next Silicon Valley will be in (insert any city, or china). These stories have been around forever, and they will continue forever. Yes SF will go through a down cycle as a result of pressure being taken off of the rental market, and it will fill right back in when people want to live in the city again and the pandemic has passed.
Pretty sure college is going to be in person again (UCB, UCSF, Stanford) as are the National Labs.
The media has overhyped this ... of all sources Business Insider.
I know a couple of medium sized VC people who are going to start living outside of SF proper (not the Valley), but the people I know who live in the city love being in the city of San Francisco. The people who are leaving the bay area were probably always going to leave some day if they weren't happy there.
And you're dead on about schools and research centers that require in person. Hardware or R&D need a physical space for work and security. And some people do like a cool office experience.
Anyway, tl;dr I agree with you, ha ha.
The recent announcement by Goldman Sachs about moving a large chunk of their operations to Miami is not a good sign for NYC.
Not to mention that few places can match all the benefits of SV, i.e. unenforceable non-competes, fantastic weather and surroundings, an educated and diverse population, cultural activities, very high compensation, etc. I don't think it'll be as easy to displace SV as these articles regularly imply, despite the downsides of living here.
For a kind of funny example, there was an episode of the all-in podcast (mostly a podcast of successful VCs) where they talked about SV politics and leaving.
The irony was while they talked about CA politics to an absurd degree ("worst run state in US", etc.) when they asked each other if they were planning on leaving all of them said no.
People complain a lot (and there are good reasons to complain!), but people have been complaining since at least 1993 and it's still an economic hub for startups. I'm skeptical of that leaving.
I have seen coworkers and friends leave, but it's mostly a housing issue. As people turn 30 and want to have a family if you haven't cashed out $5M in some exit event then it sucks to live here. $500k can get you a nice place in CO, $750k for outside Seattle.
I have had older friends leave to have a family. They went to Santa Cruz, Seattle, Denver, DC, and Austin. It's a shame. The ones that stayed either are very rich where a $5M house is not an issue, or they still live with three roommates and rent without kids.
Some other reasons to complain about, but that I don't think are usually deciding factors for people to leave:
- Bad policy (AB5), Extra founder Tax, Hostility towards tech in general.
- Political monoculture (I don't mean not enough trump people, I mean it can be controversial to be an obama era moderate/neoliberal and 'woke' politics is hard to avoid).
- High state taxes that harm capital gains and new money. This is related to housing and prop13. Not only do the people that live in housing they bought decades ago pay almost no property tax compared to new buyers, they then push to restrict new supply while also pushing to increase tax on new money. This comes in the form of higher capital gains tax (there's a bill to raise it to 16.3% this year retroactively, by far the highest in the country). They also push legislation to increase tax on the companies excluding homeowners to fund their services (which indirectly affects the employees again). This kind of thing makes it doubly hard to be able to buy in and live here.
>> I have had older friends leave to have a family. They went to Santa Cruz, Seattle, Denver, DC, and Austin. It's a shame. The ones that stayed either are very rich where a $5M house is not an issue, or they still live with three roommates and rent without kids.
Just wait until they look for interesting jobs and get 100 linked in messages from CA and like 1 or 2 from DC. (note: I live in VA just outside DC, speaking from experience.)
An anecdote: I got an offer to leave my mid-level FAANG job to return to the Midwest for a VP role at a 200+ person company. The compensation was about 35% of my total comp, and it was maybe one of 3 companies in the area I would consider working for. Not to mention going back to cold winters, McMansions, and chain restaurants.
I don't think people fully appreciate the value of unenforceable non-competes + many companies congregated in one area. No where else in the world does the labor have this level of negotiating power and flexibility. Even if it can be replicated (and I hope it is!), it won't be overnight.
There is an old Russian saying about how every time you move it is like a fire happened (because you lose things.)
That said, the people I know that left aren't planning to find new work (for the most part). CO does have a lot of FAANG options though and Slack was also there.
They're not looking for the most interesting work at that point, they're looking to keep their job and raise a family - it's a tradeoff.
Isn't that a risk to move to a place without as many employment options? Yes. The reason for that risk is you can raise kids in a nice house for $500k rather than in a tiny, old, 2 bedroom apartment for 1.5M.
>> Isn't that a risk to move to a place without as many employment options? Yes. The reason for that risk is you can raise kids in a nice house for $500k rather than in a tiny, old, 2 bedroom apartment for 1.5M.
You exactly summarized my thought process three years ago. To be fair, i'm very happy here. But it is a mixed bag.
Housing is great compared to the bay area, but $500k is a stretch for DC/Virginia (check it out on zillow) though not impossible, there is a ton of inventory if you are willing to drive out a bit. Unlike FAANG folks out-buying houses from you, you have lobbyists and government/intelligence contractors outbidding houses from you. Def better than Bay area though.
Except i'm in one of like five growth startups in the area and there are rarely any senior positions open, and the senior workforce appears larger than the pool of interesting senior jobs. Its a huge bet on your employer in addition to the already huge bet you're making w/ taking, say, illiquid early stage stock. So your career growth is much slower.
OK, so what if you are OK w/o an interesting job? Then you have plenty of options. Also, plenty of options if you're willing to be a consultant and travel, but now you're making a 2nd tradeoff.
All in, very happy but not a panacea and certainly multiple tradeoffs.
In my specific case my SO grew up in Cupertino and her family is here, so that's another element that makes it hard to leave. I'm currently doing the live with roommates bit, but it's a hard tradeoff to make.
Also I saw where you work in your HN bio - do you partner with VRAD (or maybe are considering starting your own)? I've always though leveraging ML imaging software as part of a nighthawk radiology service would be really interesting. Basically hire radiologists to be part of the company (give them some equity) and leverage their readings to train the model. In a bit of a Tesla style self-driving play where you're providing the current capabilities via humans, but the ultimate goal is leveraging that to train and improve the software. My dad does neurorad so seemed like a natural fit for deep learning image recognition to me. If you're writing the reading software then you can tailor it for training too.
Unrelated to that, if you're looking for more options in DC the company I work for has a major office there (feel free to connect, my email is in my profile).
Helps to save more to try and buy a place eventually.
And while I'm grateful for everything I have in life, and I have been given much more than my grandparents abroad...I do wonder -- after struggling through top colleges and a working hard for over two decades with ever increasing responsibility, whether I really "deserve" a 1br or should I aspire to more for my family and me.
I realize it sounds both selfish but also reasonable based on how one looks at things. For now, we've chosen to live very comfortably in DC.
@stryan Would love to chat offline if you're open? Really struggling in deciding whether I can continue to live in the region long term, despite being in love with the area and the people.
Hard-tech job opportunities w/o having to regress to an entry-level or mid-level role.
Senior level job opportunities, w/o having to join a consulting firm (i mean, if i'm potentially traveling 4/5 days, i'm not really 'living' here anymore...) I've rolled the dice on management consulting before in my life and spent almost no time in my home city. That was great when I was 20 and not so great with a family. I do wonder whether it is different w/ DC and local projects or whether it might be different in a partyly-WFH future!
You can always move back after you vest and sell.
Nobody will deny that Bay Area housing is expensive, but even today, $1.5M will get you a decent single family house with a garden in Santa Clara.
That’s a ridiculous amount of money for most, but it’s not in $5M exit territory, and something that’s relatively easy to manage for a 2 tech income family: $1.25M loan is $5600/m mortgage, $1500/m in real estate taxes.
$1.5M will get you a shack - really old maybe a little bigger than 1000sqft in Santa Clara if you can find one at that price at all.
$4M gets you a nice, newer 2900sqft house (comparable to what you'd get in the other regions I mentioned).
$1.5M would have been enough in 2012, but it's gotten worse since then.
e: oh whoops, it was edited
This is a $2M house, 2600 sqft, 5BD house on an 11000 sqft lot: https://www.redfin.com/CA/Santa-Clara/2602-Birchtree-Ln-9505....
But going back to my earlier price range. I took me all of 2 minutes, not months of open houses to come up with these:
For $1.6M, you get this 2200 sqft house: https://www.redfin.com/CA/San-Jose/1244-Broadleaf-Ln-95128/h.... Or you get this 2500 sqft house: https://www.redfin.com/CA/Santa-Clara/1453-Franklin-St-95050....
Redfin filters:
- Santa Clara
- Sqft Min: 2000
- Property Type: House
- Price Max: $2M
Results: 9
If you set a minimum year built to 2000 (so up to 20 years old)
Results: 0
You're right though that there are houses you can find in less desirable areas on the peninsula for around 2 million (and San Jose is cheaper, east bay is cheaper). Usually though there's some tradeoff (bad schools, long commute, house is really old). These tradeoffs don't exist in the other regions where for a a lot less you can live basically anywhere you'd want in a nicer place.
The places I've been looking (Palo Alto, Cupertino, Mountain View) don't really have anything in the price points you're talking about.
I will admit that my general statement about Santa Clara was wrong though (I was thinking mostly about the cities I mentioned as part of Santa Clara county, not the city of Santa Clara).
As the County of Santa Clara, you can find a nice 2000 sq. ft. home for $1.2M.
South San Jose, people.
Who ever cares what managers think. It is the owners who matter as they're the ones paying bills.
>"however most people are not like that and can only really function meeting often in person"
Well, when your ability to make a living is at stake your ability to function independent of location might suddenly improve.
>"..won't have a say, explicitly or implicitly..."
Nice try. What are you implying under "implicitely"? If this is what I think it is, the managers are just as replaceable. Often it is actually easier for the owners to replace/get rid of a manager than from good salesperson/developer/etc.
Managers are very often (especially in a bigger organization) is the only channel how information flows to owners.
As a result, managers can paint very different picture of the same situation (as an example, that people working remotely from home are less productive).
May be in some abstract world, "managers are just employees and there is nothing special". In reality they wield a lot of power to sway company in one or another direction.
What you describing is a fraud. In a big organization managers are not uniform group, there are multiple levels and factions. They will happily report on each other if the picture is grossly distorted. There are also a lot of metrics and built in controls in big orgs that can and are being used to estimate how particular policy affects the bottom line (profitability).
In reality there are companies whose bottom line did suffer from WFH and there are companies that had actually have profits increased as the result. If you think the latter group will revert because some low level managers feel insecure about their position I have a bridge to sell.
Management and cross organizational relations rely on rapport and relationships amongst baby boomers and Gen X people who greatly prefer in person interaction. Maybe engineers won’t come back to the office, but they sure will be.
Care to provide evidence for this claim?
> WFH might not stick widely
If the vast majority of workers demand it, then I don't think employers will have a choice here. Leaving now is a vote with your feet.
> unenforceable non-competes
Very few of my peers have ever cared about this in practice. I don't think this is remotely a major benefit compared to e.g. state taxes.
> fantastic weather and surroundings
The surroundings, I'll give you, but the weather is "fantastic" in a small number of communities only. SF weather is far from fantastic. I don't miss it. Sunnyvale or RWC, on the other hand... But still. The weather is boring.
What I don't miss are the fires and smoke-filled skies, and the drought.
> an educated and diverse population
The "native bay area" population? Or the migrants and immigrants? The vast, vast majority of people I worked with over the years were from elsewhere. We used to joke that it was rare to hear someone was born in the Bay Area. There's not much weighing people from elsewhere down preventing then from leaving, and there is less and less weight each passing month this year.
> cultural activities
I actually cannot think of anything unique to the Bay here...
> very high compensation
True, but I know plenty of people who have moved to Seattle and New York who make just as much. And I know of several fully remote (pre-pandemic) workers who are making 90% of what they would earn in the Bay Area -- I know, this isn't common, but it's possible.
Honestly, SV has done this to themselves. NIMBYism, insane housing, terrible transit, high taxes. I have no doubt SV will recover, but the rest of the world will prosper at the valley's expense.
Well, while working in RTP I saw many suits filed for my coworkers for non-compete clauses.
If you're ~director or above, this matters a lot and the bigco's basically auto file the lawsuit in any jurisdiction where enforceable. At least one exec I reported to had to take a year off as a result of these lawsuits.
IMO it's a huge deal for the HQ execs of many companies, similar to how tax benefits are a huge deal to the rank-and-file.
Yes, it is a bigger issue on both sides of the table when you get to director+ level. The company often has much more to lose, and the employee often has far fewer potential new homes. These things tend to balance out; I've seen contracts with non-compete timeline matched or exceeded by severance timeline for that reason.
https://kofytv.com/dance-party/
> I actually cannot think of anything unique to the Bay here...
https://kfjc.org/events/psychotronix
I don't know what percentage of the workforce here has both family and enough personal connections to where leaving the area doesn't make sense, regardless of a WFH policy. It may be that they want a better commute but still want to stay in the area for the aforementioned reasons (I am one of these people).
The contrary might also be true: For many companies it's currently impossible (due to COVID) to make the big accomodations required for going comlpetely remote, including moving their HQs to other places for reasons having to do with access to capital or taxation.
The compensation just won’t seem so great when you’re paying off millions on a mortgage and wondering if the industry will still employ you once you’ve got a few gray hairs.
The counterpoint would be how many billionaires, besides those in the tech industry, choose to put down roots in the Bay Area? Not many at all. (The only real exceptions I can think of are Napa/Sonoma/Marin, not SV/SF proper.) We're talking about a class of people who are truly unconstrained in terms of location, so that should be pretty indicative of where local amenities really shine.
And it's pretty clear that New York, SoCal, and Southern Florida are the truly attractive locales in America. Many people choose to pay Manhattan, Beverly Hills or Palm Beach prices without a compelling economic draw to those areas. Virtually nobody chooses to pay SF prices just for the lifestyle, amenities and culture.
Without the draw of tech employment and investment, there's no way SV/SF can maintain its current level of economic prosperity.
Then they proceed to live wherever they want and buy items using Corp/LLC Funds. When they need to use personal funds or pay income tax - They minimize their tax impact through various methods.
Point being - The people live where they want regardless of tax haven status. They recognize revenue in a Corp/LLC in a tax haven.
If you changed sites you lost this compensation.
The language issue is real, though. It's probably better, I think, to accept that you can't speak the language, and to give yourself a break learning it. If you like it, and want to learn, and want to be able to deal with banks and mobile providers over the phone (extremely difficult without fluency, and computer translation tools won't help you!), then take a class, and take it slowly.
It's stressful enough to move overseas. My advice is not to add language on top of everything else you have to learn - you are lucky to speak English, so lean into that. (Many people will appreciate practicing their English with a native speaker, too - although some small minority will hate you for it.)
But yeah, don't do what I did and try to do everything at once. It's stressful, exhausting, and you never give yourself a chance to recover, mentally or emotionally, from the stress of learning. Be kind to yourself!
But yeah, total comp for devs seem to top out at around 100k, no matter where you are, and usually is more like 50k. (Evidence is anecdotal). Also, since the epicenter of the internet is still the SFBA they wonder why you are in Europe, when all of them want to move to the SFBA! I suspect this last one will start changing.
Rents have only dropped to levels seen in the last few years lol, and will just "crater" to 2010 levels once tech and students finish leaving.
"Oh wow all the currently nice neighborhoods were sketchy ghettos? How quaint!"
but at least artists could live there!
As soon as you leave SF you will realize how weak and absurd the various generation's arguments about SF are.
It's absolutely ridiculous, a city of its magnitude should have 2-3 times its current population and 0 housing issues due to higher density housing.
The newcomers aren't to blame, as an outsider I'd blame the locals...
I think it's just that SF is very young, as cities go, and it's been the oddball city, you didn't move here in the past for a good job, you came here because you were weird, or queer, and wanted a place to fit in and be welcomed.
All these normal folks with great jobs moving here is very new, 20-25 years at most.
You hear fun stories from all kinds of characters hanging around dive bars here :) I had some good years hanging out at Lucky 13 and making tons of friends, but alas they are going out of business (for reals) now too :/
Because the Outer Sunset is cold, foggy and windy a lot of the time? Are the luxury condos are still going up in SOMA? It's definitely warmer there.
"Why should we build more affordable housing? We'd rather ban development, and make these 'rich young techies' pay through the nose to landlords who just happened to buy a house here 20 years ago!"
"Who cares about ensuring reasonable quality and cost of living in SF? As the local government, we'd rather just figure out a way to tax the crap out of them!"
Enjoy the result.
Or you can massively increase transportation capacity, not just with roads but (more effectively) with trains and subways and other forms of fast, efficient public transportation.
Of course none of this will ever happen, SFBA residents and government will continue to exclusively focus on slaughtering their golden geese until they all gone.
I lived in Mountain View for 3 months during 500 startups and the valley proper was the most garden variety suburban existence you could find anywhere.
I lived in SF proper off and on and can attest that it certainly has (had?) fantastic restaurants/shops and a particular type of culture that many people love. However the basic infrastructure and problems with SF are well known and have been documented.
I can't see at this point how the former plusses of SF outweigh the latter negatives and frankly I see no inherent plusses to the Valley.
It seems that people (technologists mostly) literally only value the valley because of technology companies and even more pointedly - because that's where the big VC money lives.
Where did you end up moving that you found a better fit for yourself?
The only two things you miss in VA on your list is "grittiness" which is a negative for me, and walkability, which you could get if you go closer to DC.
The more I think about it, the more I realize the choice of where you live is barely rational, if at all. Sure we come up with reason about why we are where we are post hoc, but are those the real reasons?
I can almost guarantee I will never move to DC or Virginia. Not because it isn't an amazing place with everything you can want, but because it's just not me for some reason that's hard to articulate. I would guess you would almost guarantee you'd never move to CA, too.
SF/Bay Area is "Good enough" for your needs and VA is "Good enough" for mine and it's not some optimized process, moreso an artifact of our relative histories.
Not sure SF's climate can be considered universally better. I think I would get sick of it never actually getting warm.
That said -- and I hear pushback on this from other threads -- my job opportunities here for any senior level roles are next to nil. This could be because I do not have a security clearance (a local favorite), or it could be because the job pyramid here in DC/NoVa really is differently shaped than SF/SV, or it could be that i'm an outsider w/o a deep social network, or perhaps I'm not looking at the area correctly.
As an anecdote, I get tons of Linked In messages for opportunities in California. CTO positions, VP positions at venture backed growth startups, all across the board. I get almost no in-bounds from companies in DC except for consulting firms (been there, done that when i was 20-25, not sure if that is a good fit at my current stage in life.)
I'm sure part of it is my profile. I have lots of real-time systems, model, quant, Computer Vision, and tech leadership background. I'm just not sure how much of a market there is for that -- though I'm positive having a security clearance would change things dramatically.
This presents a serious concern for me, and a balancing act for continued happiness in DC/VA.
My wife works in Biotech and the only other alternative for us would be the Boston area. But, after running some numbers pro/cons, the Bay Area wins.
So we are stuck here ... for now.
To be perfectly honest, the only thing missing is our friends and family in Canada. It wasn't so bad when we could visit 2-3 times a year, but the pandemic has put a stop to that.
2) SF & Valley: Diversity. Bay Area cities top the list of largest number of foreign born residents, with only LA and NYC being competitive.
3) SF & Valley: Weather. LA beats us here, but SF trounces NYC, Boston, DC, and Seattle.
4) Just SF: Walkability and street life. SF is more walkable than most cities (the weather helps with that), and although it has shitty public transit options, it's only shitty in comparison to places with actual good public transit, which more or less don't exist in the US.
5) Just SF: Weirdness. Okay, SF has driven out most of the interesting weirdo and artistic crowds and replaced them with CrossFitting Burners. But there are still remnants of that culture, more so than most places except perhaps NYC.
6) SF & Valley: Food. It's mediocre in comparison to the scenes in LA and NYC. But it's still worlds better than the rest of the country.
7) SF: Arts. Similar to food, it's mediocre compared to LA and NYC. But it's still worlds better than the rest of the country.
8) SF & Valley: Nature. West Coast cities are all competitive here, as is Denver/Boulder (though even they lack the beaches), but this is another place where East Coast cities fall short.
In the end, the only plausibly competitive cities on this scoring matrix are LA and NYC. LA sacrifices a lot of the walkability and weirdness of SF. NYC sacrifices the weather, and moving to NYC from SF isn't going to get you of any the much vaunted coupon-cutting decrease in cost of living that everyone in these comments is so pumped about.
Just to be fair, I'll also list disadvantages of SF:
1) Cost of living. "No one is willing to pay that much to live in SF, it's too expensive."
2) Dating scene for men.
3) Travel. Subjective, but East Coast cities are better situated for international travel than the West Coast.
4) Cleanliness. Yep, SF is an unhygienic shithole in many places.
5) Monoculture. Too many tech folks here, not enough diversity in industry.
As somebody who has lived on three continents in major metro area's as well as countryside IMO SFBA has the best dating scene.
I am married now, so I have been out of the single pool for a couple years...but before that I will say that SFBA had the most attractive pool of available woman in the world, if intelligence, creativity, independence, being self starters and physical attractiveness is what you value.
I sure found the love of my life here.
I have one friend who lived at a base in Antarctica for awhile, and he favorably compared the dating scene there to what's in SF.
But personally I had no game with woman in NYC or LA....in part because what each party wanted from a partner was incompatible.
On the nature front, there are really a lot of great public lands on the east coast. They are a bit less iconic than what you can find on the west coast, but you can still hike, camp, climb, ski and beach to your heart's content.
I think comparing SF to DC and Boston makes the most sense just due to similar size. LA and NYC are in a class of their own.
Walkability: for pros, DC is flatter and cleaner. The Metro is cleaner and more reliable than Muni. For cons, the city itself is a bit more spread out, and its hinterlands (e.g. Tysons or Silver Spring), although accessible via public transit, are much less walkable than San Francisco's hinterlands (e.g. Berkeley or Palo Alto). But the biggest issue is that D.C. is just not really walkable in either the depths of winter or the heights of summer (although evenings can be pretty pleasant, and you can actually enjoy an evening out on a patio). Maybe I'm a wimp with low tolerances, but that's six months of the year gone right there.
Diversity: SF is around 1/3 foreign born, while DC is like 1/6 or 1/8. Almost half of SF speaks a language other than English at home, while DC is more like a quarter. DC is diverse, just not as diverse as SF.
I agree with the rest of what you said.
Metro absolutely does not serve many areas. It's a far cry from NYC or European cities, but was totally workable as long as you stuck to the city and certain suburbs.
- I enjoy not needing a car. Many neighborhoods are walkable.
- I appreciate the mild weather. E.g. I lived in NYC, and though I did not need a car, humid summers and snowy winters made it less pleasant to be outside.
- It's dense but not _too_ dense. NYC felt legitimately claustrophobic sometimes.
- It's still an LGBT mecca. Prior to the pandemic, I could be in queer spaces on a daily basis.
I don't know that I'll be in SF forever. But when I think of moving, I wonder where I would go, and what my life would look like when I get there. I grew up in suburbs and still associate those neighborhoods with isolation. Among US cities, it's hard to meet all of these.
My two favorite cities in the US are San Francisco and Philadelphia. Many people hate those places with a passion. To each their own!
* Food - an incredible an ever-changing restaurant scene, from cheesesteaks to 10-course tasting menus. And all much more affordable than fine dining in most US cities, plus free BYOB is extremely common. * Music / Sports - incredible music scene with major and minor venues of all kinds, and a professional sports team in all 4 major leagues with a passionate fanbase. * Size - neither a very large city (NYC) nor a very small city (Boston). Easy to get around, narrow streets make it very walkable. * Attitude - Philly people are just different. I'd describe it as a "warm hostility" :) but you'll find Philadelphians are very welcoming while also being brutally honest. * Diversity - there is no racial majority in Philly. It's about 40% white, 40% black, and 20% other. * Price - Philly is cheap!
Other places have and will continue to develop, and that's great! But the center of gravity is going to remain where you can get face time with investors.
Add to this the ridiculously high income tax burden and sales tax burden, and it becomes clear that raising children is also out of reach for most (particularly if you do not want to send your children to the piss-poor public schools in many areas.)
For singles also, particularly men (who comprise the majority of techies), things are pretty bleak: there is too much competition for women, and opportunities to date do not come by easily at all.
If homeownership and family formation are supremely hard, and so is finding a mate, what exactly is the rationale for continuing to live in the Bay Area? It seems to me that the Bay Area will become an in-and-out type of place (like Manhattan or some of the other New York boroughs perhaps), wherein you bust your ass for several years and decamp to a lower-tax (or better still, no-tax) jurisdiction to get on with the next phase of your life.
What exactly makes them so bad?
This sounds more like classism to me.
There are data and experiences available for making these judgments. There might be a class divide underlying it, but to walk away with the assessment that one type of school on average does better than another is not a classist sentiment.
This year, most bay area public schools are online. Many private schools are still operating in person. For young children, this makes a world of difference. Just one instance of where private schools come out on top.
Just because they see it doesn't mean it's actually there. Private schools attract the students that would do better in any environment (because of both socioeconomic class factors and involved parents making non-default choices), and measures of student performance reflect this. There's very little evidence that they do anything to actually improve outcomes, but what most people see (aside from marketing, which private schools put plenty of money into as well) is statistics that show correlation without controlling for other variables, from which it is easy to make incorrect inferences about causation.
Im not sure why that would rule out classism.
The issue is that the kids going to the "poor" schools are poor. Their home life is shit because they're frequently sharing a two bedroom apartment with another family. They're dealing with parents who are unable to afford a better housing situation (not just renting a house - but they can't even afford to rent a place without another family being in it - lots of multigenerational housing happening too, which has pro/con) and who frequently have to work much more than some dual income FAANG tech couple - and they have a much worse quality of life. The parents aren't very involved because they just have other priorities.
This leads to the kids randomly dropping out middle of the year. Every year, the kids I know who went to Santa Clara schools ended up with their class sizes shrinking throughout the year because kids would just disappear middle of the year. That has the pros of less kids per classroom as the schoolyear goes on but it has downsides like... well, you can't make any long term friendships! On top of that, if you are in a family that is doing well - you're gonna be unrelatable to the other kids. And it goes true with the parents too.
One of the reasons my friends have put their kids in private schools is because their kids are around people like themselves, the parents operate under a collective agreement (they are all too involved in their parenting style), and there's just a commonality in background. At the public school, kids of all backgrounds could be interfacing and it just didn't give much social cohesion. Everyone had different goals. Some kids/parents wanted to just get to the next grade along with some babysitting - others wanted much more. Public school mostly is for handling the first people.
This sounds like a spoiled rich person talk: it's unimaginable how people manage to survive without a separate bedroom. And a private gardener, one should add.
A mere hundred years ago having a room per family was considered to be okay.
In USSR two generations living in the same one-bedroom apartment was a usual thing.
Somehow people managed to finish schools, go to universities and just do whatever normal people do.
Once you have a roof above your head, your living conditions are not shit pretty much by definition. We all got a bit too spoiled.
It's less of an argument and more of a question: what has changed so that a separate bedroom and PS5 are now deemed basic necessities?
I can't agree more. Spent 5 years in SF single. I went down to Colombia to explore a different culture. I was unsingle in less than a month.
The average "unlovable tech bro" in SF is considered a catch almost anywhere else.
Please see a therapist. whatever is going on in your headspace cannot be healthy
That said, all the best and I hope you find some way to manage your anger. Life is way too short to live like a pressure cooker
When I started working in 2014, I figured I would need to save around $150k for a down payment because the median home price in Santa Clara county was around $800k. Now the median price is around $1.4M [1], so I'd need around $250k.
The growth in home prices has roughly matched my ability to save for a home, so almost seven years later I'm not any closer than I was in 2014.
I feel like my options are (A) live in an apartment forever, (B) hellish commute, or (C) leave. With starting a family on the horizon, Option C looks better every day.
[1] https://www.bayareamarketreports.com/trend/santa-clara-home-...
And, as you pointed out, we would be in deep trouble if our income took a hit, or if housing prices tumble. If you buy into the high housing costs, you really need them to continue. It's a bad cycle.
Or you can transfer the property before February 16, 2021; see https://blog.yonathan.org/posts/2020-11-proposition-19-paren...
Well, it starts with the fact that he's only got one hammer, and that hammer is to give the white kid from Stanford $10 million, and then backup that investment by subsidizing losses in a race to monopoly. If and when it works, Rabois then takes the credit. But this is a problem that he can't solve, certainly not in the way he solves things, and even if he did, it would run up against the libertarian fantasies that infuse every tweet he writes. As opposed to admitting failure and admitting that his narrow-range expertise doesn't apply to everything, he runs to Miami instead, proving that he's simply a rent-seeker fraud there to sap the area of its resources until the resources are dry, complaining the entire time about how unfairly he's been treated in that he hasn't been getting his ass kissed in the manner in which he's become familiar.
- The "Tech Elite" who are leaving are, by definition, the ones who have the financial freedom to go pretty much wherever they want. Anyone mentioned in this article could buy a house in Miami/Austin/Denver without worrying about any transaction costs if they turn around and sell it in 6 months.
- SF (and California in general) are being much more aggressive with anti-COVID policies.
- The cities that are being focused on (Miami and Austin) are overall pretending that COVID isn't a thing (I live in Austin, and this is my experience).
- Well-off individuals currently under lock-down are looking at people living "freely" in Florida/Texas and are jealous, because they think that the SF-lockdown rules shouldn't apply to them, because they are less at risk (this is a discussion for another day)
- They've now set themselves up with a plausible "I moved out of California. My reason was COVID." story to try to avoid paying California state taxes in the future, even if they still end up being back in SF the majority of the time for their business.
tldr; the "elites" leaving are moving for short-term quality-of-life improvements due to COVID, and will have no issue turning around and moving back in 6-12 months when SF is "open for business" again.
Update: I have seen the shift in Austin from watching stories/tweets/social-media of people who have been moving from SF -> Austin. I was excited at first of the prospect of Austin become a much larger tech city, but am now noticing that the overwhelming majority of this content (although I could easily be seeing a biased sample, of course) is that the vocal group of "I moved from SF to Austin" is the same group that is extremely excited to go out to restaurants and public events again.
I stated that it seems clear that these people are moving way from temporary restrictions (by relocating to places that do not have the same restrictions), and that there is no guarantee that any of these will be 'permanent' moves after those restrictions are no longer applicable.
Moving is much less of a big deal when your primary residence is a minuscule portion of your net worth and you are almost definitely paying someone else to handle all of the logistics of a move.
Our rent is 1/4 of what it was in the Bay Area for one more bedroom now. I do miss California a lot though; the weather, food, and culture are very hard to beat (although Asheville isn't too bad in this regard, but at perhaps 1/20 of the scale). Ironically, with the amount that I am able to save from not living there anymore, I plan to save up and buy a house somewhere in the Bay Area in 15-20 years. But this is assuming my income will remain at Silicon Valley levels. If companies change their mind about embracing remote work, it will drop quite a bit since we are definitely not moving back any time soon. Personally, I feel that I am more productive working remotely than in person, but I do miss all of the office perks.
For reference, can you give some numbers on this situation, such as average/high daily PM25? I've heard multiple people refer to the smoke as bad, but I'm wondering what it means exactly.
Working remotely for the same company. Getting 10% more pay just because i vote with my feet.
DemocRATs destroying CA. And NY.