I feel this way. However, living in the Bay Area carries a certain weight as a systems architect which allows me to charge more for consulting fees and ask for higher raises from my full time employer. Also, most of my professional network is here. I don't see myself leaving any time soon.
This is funny, because based on engineering interview challenge quality, we found that everywhere else in North America has better comp arbitrage to talent. "Bay Area" means you pay more for the same quality that exists all over.
Interested in learning more about this, if you can point me to the source data somewhere online. Unless you meant your particular company found this in which case I’m guessing you can’t go much further into it.
I don’t do technical interviews for roles anymore, and I would probably do poorly on the board. However, I have a lot of experience leading engineering teams at startups and I have designed and built the underlying systems for a handful of successful businesses; one of them just grew to over $100M/yr revenue in the past year. The individuals in my professional network value that, and that is how I keep myself employed.
I agree with you on being able to find the same quality of talent outside of the Bay Area. When I hire, I don’t even restrict myself to the same timezone. Some of the best people I have worked with live in Europe.
Much of my professional network moved during covid. I keep an address in the bay area to keep up appearances with clients. I fly into town when nessary. Life is cheaper and better.
If you have a non-negligible amount of money on the line, you'll want to leave sooner than later and plan very carefully.
California is aggressive in going after people who leave the state, even years later, especially if you have a liquidity event shortly thereafter and/or plan to maintain ties to California. Keeping an address, coming back regularly to meet clients, etc. are all precisely the things the FTB uses to argue that people are still California residents.
You know you're failing politically when you start resorting to punitive measures to keep people from leaving.
During the cold war, Ronald Reagan correctly pointed out that one of the clearest indicators the Soviet Union and their allies were in the clutches of a failing ethos, was that they had to build walls to keep their own people in rather than to keep their enemies out.
While California absolutely is overzealous in looking at people who leave the state, it's also reality that plenty of people don't really leave or blur the lines to the point where there's a legitimate question as to their residency.
If you're going to leave California, leave. Don't keep a California address, tell clients you're based in California, come back all the time to do business, etc.
I have been studying the law and will consult with tax professionals soon. Starting next year I will not need to do business in California anymore; my next full time employer is not CA based and none of my current clients are either.
I just feel uneasy leaving most of my professional network behind. Sometimes even the most trivial social interactions end up turning into very lucrative opportunities.
> I keep an address in the bay area to keep up appearances with clients.
If you have to be deceptive about where you are living because you think it's the only or primary validator of your value to clients (in terms of $ rate), it's not a good thing.
I know multiple freelancers and consultants who left places like the Bay Area and NY and their clients didn't suddenly seek to reduce their rates because they went to lower COL locations.
It's a dangerous thing for your rate to be based on your location and not the value you provide.
There's nothing dubious about this. Companies and individuals frequently have an address in high-profile locations while most of the work gets down elsewhere. You're forgetting that a lot of clients want to tell their clients that they have a NY or SF based team working on such and such. Marketing is, always has been, about image and spin.
> Companies and individuals frequently have an address in high-profile locations while most of the work gets down elsewhere. You're forgetting that a lot of clients want to tell their clients that they have a NY or SF based team working on such and such.
Renting a virtual address in NY or SF is not the same thing as telling your clients you're based in those locations or have teams there.
Pretending you're based in a place you're not is not only deceptive, it's a great way to find yourself dealing with painful tax and legal issues you don't want.
Seconded, I don’t know a single engineering colleague who has left the Bay Area. I maintain communication with dozens of my current and former colleagues. Maybe I am just in some weird bubble, but I am about as average as they come so I have a hard time believing that.
It's strange to me to see variations of "I moved there, lived there for decades, made my millions, _now_ it's bad and I'm leaving!". A bit like complaining about mosquitos in the jungle after you've mined all the gold.
I've been living & working here for 13 years. Moving out in December. Had enough. Between schools considering cancelling advanced math[1] while mandating ethnic studies[2] (guess which one is more marketable, geniuses?); schoolboards being more worried about school names (while doing no research) [3] than curricula; housing costing an arm, a leg, and a thigh (I do own my home, but it is not big enough for a family, and I have no chances to ever afford one here that is); insane & rising taxes [4][5], especially now with SALT deduction limits; and police not investigating car break ins [6] "because the homeless have it hard enough," I am done with this place. So long and good luck!
> Between schools considering cancelling advanced math[1] while mandating ethnic studies[2] (guess which one is more marketable, geniuses?)
The math thing sounds like a bad idea but high school's job isn't to make you "marketable". Also you're implying that it's a tradeoff when it isn't. The suggested change would not affect how much math a student would take.
Ethnic studies sounds like a valuable thing to add to baseline education. And if their history curriculum is anywhere near as repetitive as the one I went through, it could easily replace one of those courses without issue.
> Ethnic studies sounds like a valuable thing to add to baseline education
As far as I can tell, it’s just a thinly disguised effort to socialize brown kids into identity politics. It’s an experiment that risks derailing the economic convergence that’s we’re seeing with Latinos and could cut the legs out from under Asian upward mobility.
I was seething when I got an email from my school saying they’d be teaching my (brown) kids to develop their “identity” around “skin color” but hey what can you do. The liberals get what the liberals want.
Conservatives don’t have the weight of the NEA and AFT behind them, not to mention the country’s teacher’s colleges and EdD-granting institutions. I’m in a purple county (+38 for Larry Hogan) and it’s an uphill battle against identity politics even here.
Moreover, conservatives support the educational status quo, which is at least a known quantity. America of the few countries in the world where minority immigrants have similar upward mobility to natives of the majority ethnic group. The changes liberals are trying to impose on our education risk socializing minority children into the ethnic identity ghettos you see in nearly every other multi-ethnic society. Liberals are going to get the change they want, and we’ll just have to cross our fingers and hope it doesn’t derail the American assimilation engine.
> Conservatives don’t have the weight of the NEA and AFT behind them, not to mention the country’s teacher’s colleges and EdD-granting institutions.
Yes, practices based in tradition and not evidence have that problem.
> Moreover, conservatives support the educational status quo, which is at least a know quantity.
Yes, a known to be quite bad quantity, especially by cost effectiveness, in the US.
> America of the few countries in the world where minority immigrants have similar upward mobility to natives of the majority ethnic group. America of the few countries in the world where minority immigrants have similar upward mobility to natives of the majority ethnic group.
Minorities (especially blacks and American Indians) are ghettoized by the status quo system, in which they do not have equal upward mobility. [0] You play a nice trick talking about immigrants (a small minority of racial and ethnic minorities) and the pretending that covers the bulk of the minority experience, but it does not.
> Yes, practices based in tradition and not evidence have that problem.
Let’s not pretend that education is a practice based in “evidence.” America has among the most professionalized schools systems in the developed world, and also among the worst. My cousin in Sacramento was complaining the other day about how far behind her kid’s school is in math compared to what she learned in Bangladesh in the 1990s. You think we have EdDs? No, just tradition (i.e. practices with a track record of working).
> Minorities (especially blacks and American Indians) are ghettoized by the status quo system, in which they do not have equal upward mobility.
And ethnic identity politics is part of the status quo system for those groups. At least in the last 30 years, that seems to have hurt more than it’s helped.
> You play a nice trick talking about immigrants (a small minority of racial and ethnic minorities) and the pretending that covers the bulk of the minority experience, but it does not.
Hispanics and Asians, the vast majority of whom have immigrant backgrounds within the last few generations, comprise 25% of the country, while Black and native Americans comprise 15%. By 2060, the Black and native population share will be about the same, while Asians and Hispanics will be nearly 40% of the population. The liberal approach of projecting the Black and indigenous experience onto all “people of color” is innumerate.
Hispanics and Asians are economically converging with whites over time: https://academic.oup.com/qje/article/135/2/711/5687353. Possibly derailing that convergence (which is pretty much unprecedented in the world) is something everyone should be scared of.
The TV show White Lotus had a tremendous illustration of the problem. One of the characters, Paula, is a minority who is college friends with a white girl and comes to Hawaii with the girl’s family. Paula falsely convinces herself that her white friends don’t really care about her. She persuades a (reluctant) native Hawaiian worker at the hotel to steal from her friend’s family, giving some speech she learned at school about stolen land, but he gets caught and arrested. Liberal identity education hurts the affluent “brown” girl by driving an artificial racial wedge between her and her friend who genuinely cares about her, and destroys the life of the working class “brown” boy, by corrupting his traditional morality. I’m not sure it was supposed to be a conservative polemic but it succinctly illustrated exactly what I’m afraid of happening to my own kids as they’re taught to develop an “identity” around their “skin color” in elementary school (according to the email I received recently).
Just to be clear: the white friend in White Lotus does not in fact genuinely care about her minority friend Paula. The series sets up the falsity and creepiness of their relationship over multiple episodes.
That doesn't refute any point you're trying to make here, but I'm pretty confident the show doesn't want you to see the white family as the "good guys" in the story.
For this thread, I'd just leave it at: White Lotus is an absurdist work of fiction. Excepting the BLM guy and maybe Belinda the wellness spa worker, if anything anybody on that show says really resonates with you, you should double-check yourself. The point of the show is that most of the characters are in their own ways odious.
Olivia’s slights against Paula—like stealing boyfriends—are typical of a vapid and self absorbed young person, which both are. But she appears to care for her friend as much as it’s possible for self absorbed young people to care for others. More to the point, there is no racial wedge between the two, but Paula perceived one because she has been socialized to do so. Whether this is intentional or not, that’s the exact sort of harm I think liberal identity education causes minority kids. (Although Sweeney has stated that Olivia is supposed to be a stereotype of a “woke white Gen Z Twitter girl.” I suspect Paula’s character is also supposed to be a critique of certain woke non-white Gen Z Twitter people.)
I'm just saying, you had an interesting thing to say, and you spent one of your most valuable sentences asking me to weigh liberal irrationality against conservative irrationality. I immediately blanked on what it was you were trying to say and had to go read it again. It's just bad writing. I'm not asking you to like liberals. I'm one of them, and I find them frustrating too.
:(, so much truth in this post. I really don't understand the math situation -- my fear is that the students in CA public schools will have harder time getting into top colleges because they will lack the opportunity to take more advanced coursework. This is likely going to push more parents to put their kids in private school (if they have the means).
I don't think this a real concern. Frankly, most top colleges prefer to have students re-learn those courses in college, so they won't miss much. Plus, those schools have other metrics to determine "good" high schools besides just the classes taken. The rigor and distribution of students, the quality of essays, the breakdown of standardized tests etc.
All that is being missed is students having a harder time in high school.
What nonsense is that? I went to UIUC (one of the best for CS) and they were happy to give me credit for all AP classes, and then allowed me to test out of further 2xx and 3xx classes as I chose...
Yes, progressives really have their collective heads up their asses on SALT. AOC and Liz Warren loving a Republican tax scheme designed to punish blue states is something to behold.
I don't have a crystal ball, but there is nothing written in stone that says the Bay Area will retain its desirability or economic weight.
I think of New Jersey which not that long ago used to have an amazingly robust economy - plenty of manufacturing, high tech (most pharmaceutical companies were HQ there). Now NJ is known for its bloated, inefficient government, crazy high taxes (including property taxes) and isn't really much of a desirable destination anymore.
Not saying that will happen to the Bay Area, but it's not impossible either. The more dysfunctional the government becomes and quality of life suffers, the less people will be willing to accept them just for a chance at a high salary and Google on their resume. Especially when other offices open up.
Why nice weather? Tech used to be based in Boston before SF.
I'm pretty sure it'll be based somewhere that has a population of accepting and curious people. People (and government) that are open to the latest startup idea, people that don't laugh at you but instead think it could be cool, and importantly enough people to hire at said startup to build a team that can actually succeed. Oh and a place without non-competes of course :)
Thats why the old east coast cities lost tech - the startup scene didn't like the stodgy traditional mindset and the employee protections (like banning non-competes) were lacking, so starting a business was more lively in SF.
Could be Florida if they court people a little more with employee protections.
To those who are thinking about it, I say: just do it like Nike.
I left to live abroad and it was the best decision of my life. Interestingly, leaving made me appreciate certain things about the Bay Area more, just not enough to move back.
The good thing is that if you leave and don't find you're happier wherever you go, you can always go back.
Yes the weather is one (I've spent most of my time since in really humid places). The hiking. The proximity to both mountains and sea. Restaurants and bars I had gone to for years. And of course friends.
But the upside is that coming back to visit is really great. I get to enjoy the things I miss and leave before all the things I hated come to the fore.
Agree. I left California for Taiwan on Christmas (time flies!) and have zero regrets.
I’ve doubled my life style and halved my costs. If you’re even remotely thinking about moving abroad remember: you’ll never have MORE time and LESS responsiblity than _right now_.
That's great. Taiwan hadn't closed its borders due to COVID by then?
I lived in the Taipei area for three years and it was one of the best times of my life, looking to return but the visa situation has been so dicey lately...
As someone who was raised in the Bay Area and had 3 decades of tech career in SV, and left forever in 2016, I'm still surprised at how thick those remaining are to not see the reality. I assume they don't get out much so they've never seen the contrast with reality to see how bad it is!
56% is merely those who have short term plans to leave. With up to 77% not liking things, they are on the edge of deciding to leave. It only takes a nudge! It's what pushed me and I still have family and >30 years of inertia keeping me there - I reached that point and have never looked back.
I was in the Bay Area a few weeks ago and I am SO GLAD I don't live there anymore! What a shit hole it is! It's far worse than 2016.
> 56% is merely those who have short term plans to leave
No, plans to leave are a much stronger claim that what the poll asks (the article suggests that it is the weakest of the questions polls typically ask of this issue, “considering leaving in the next five years”, but the poll [0] actually asked the second weakest form, “likely to leave in the next five years”, and 56% is the sum of “somewhat agree” and “strongly agree”.)
> With up to 77% not liking things, they are on the edge of deciding to leave
None of the reported numbers in the article are of “not liking things”, and the figure that is closest “not liking things” that is reported (“worse than five years ago”) is 71%, not 77%. 77% is what the article says is the percentage of those who agreed (at least somewhat) with the likely to move question that cited housing costs as a major reason (major reasons were not exclusive.)
The people “on the edge” are the 25% who only ”somewhat agree” that they are likely leave, already counted as part of the 56%.
It's true that life in the bay area is getting worse, but afaict it is getting worse everywhere. So wanting to leave sounds like a grass is greener effect.
It's getting better in a lot of smaller cities. In the 80's and 90's, that were a lot of things you could only get in the biggest metros. Access to things like niche books, the latest fashions, great restaurants, etc. could only be found in larger cities.
Growing prosperity and the ability to get practically anything delivered has changed that. This means you can now live in a smaller town or city and get practically all of the material benefits of living somewhere like NYC or SF.
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[ 1.2 ms ] story [ 129 ms ] threadI agree with you on being able to find the same quality of talent outside of the Bay Area. When I hire, I don’t even restrict myself to the same timezone. Some of the best people I have worked with live in Europe.
California is aggressive in going after people who leave the state, even years later, especially if you have a liquidity event shortly thereafter and/or plan to maintain ties to California. Keeping an address, coming back regularly to meet clients, etc. are all precisely the things the FTB uses to argue that people are still California residents.
During the cold war, Ronald Reagan correctly pointed out that one of the clearest indicators the Soviet Union and their allies were in the clutches of a failing ethos, was that they had to build walls to keep their own people in rather than to keep their enemies out.
If you're going to leave California, leave. Don't keep a California address, tell clients you're based in California, come back all the time to do business, etc.
I just feel uneasy leaving most of my professional network behind. Sometimes even the most trivial social interactions end up turning into very lucrative opportunities.
If you have to be deceptive about where you are living because you think it's the only or primary validator of your value to clients (in terms of $ rate), it's not a good thing.
I know multiple freelancers and consultants who left places like the Bay Area and NY and their clients didn't suddenly seek to reduce their rates because they went to lower COL locations.
It's a dangerous thing for your rate to be based on your location and not the value you provide.
Renting a virtual address in NY or SF is not the same thing as telling your clients you're based in those locations or have teams there.
Pretending you're based in a place you're not is not only deceptive, it's a great way to find yourself dealing with painful tax and legal issues you don't want.
He was being facetious. The lot was completely packed. He was annoyed he had to move a panel truck so I could get a truck (always the last row) out.
A lot of these things work with weird time lags, tipping points, and inversions. The dynamics are... complex.
Plenty of people leaving but plenty of people with gold fever willing to take their place.
[1] https://www.latimes.com/california/story/2021-05-20/californ...
[2] https://thehill.com/homenews/state-watch/576071-california-b...
[3] https://www.sfgate.com/education/article/San-Francisco-to-re...
[4] https://www.forbes.com/sites/robertwood/2021/05/01/californi...
[5] https://www.cbs8.com/article/traffic/gas-prices/californias-...
[6] https://twitter.com/sfcarbreakins
The math thing sounds like a bad idea but high school's job isn't to make you "marketable". Also you're implying that it's a tradeoff when it isn't. The suggested change would not affect how much math a student would take.
Ethnic studies sounds like a valuable thing to add to baseline education. And if their history curriculum is anywhere near as repetitive as the one I went through, it could easily replace one of those courses without issue.
As far as I can tell, it’s just a thinly disguised effort to socialize brown kids into identity politics. It’s an experiment that risks derailing the economic convergence that’s we’re seeing with Latinos and could cut the legs out from under Asian upward mobility.
I was seething when I got an email from my school saying they’d be teaching my (brown) kids to develop their “identity” around “skin color” but hey what can you do. The liberals get what the liberals want.
Moreover, conservatives support the educational status quo, which is at least a known quantity. America of the few countries in the world where minority immigrants have similar upward mobility to natives of the majority ethnic group. The changes liberals are trying to impose on our education risk socializing minority children into the ethnic identity ghettos you see in nearly every other multi-ethnic society. Liberals are going to get the change they want, and we’ll just have to cross our fingers and hope it doesn’t derail the American assimilation engine.
Yes, practices based in tradition and not evidence have that problem.
> Moreover, conservatives support the educational status quo, which is at least a know quantity.
Yes, a known to be quite bad quantity, especially by cost effectiveness, in the US.
> America of the few countries in the world where minority immigrants have similar upward mobility to natives of the majority ethnic group. America of the few countries in the world where minority immigrants have similar upward mobility to natives of the majority ethnic group.
Minorities (especially blacks and American Indians) are ghettoized by the status quo system, in which they do not have equal upward mobility. [0] You play a nice trick talking about immigrants (a small minority of racial and ethnic minorities) and the pretending that covers the bulk of the minority experience, but it does not.
[0] https://www.vox.com/policy-and-politics/2018/3/21/17139300/e...
Let’s not pretend that education is a practice based in “evidence.” America has among the most professionalized schools systems in the developed world, and also among the worst. My cousin in Sacramento was complaining the other day about how far behind her kid’s school is in math compared to what she learned in Bangladesh in the 1990s. You think we have EdDs? No, just tradition (i.e. practices with a track record of working).
> Minorities (especially blacks and American Indians) are ghettoized by the status quo system, in which they do not have equal upward mobility.
And ethnic identity politics is part of the status quo system for those groups. At least in the last 30 years, that seems to have hurt more than it’s helped.
> You play a nice trick talking about immigrants (a small minority of racial and ethnic minorities) and the pretending that covers the bulk of the minority experience, but it does not.
Hispanics and Asians, the vast majority of whom have immigrant backgrounds within the last few generations, comprise 25% of the country, while Black and native Americans comprise 15%. By 2060, the Black and native population share will be about the same, while Asians and Hispanics will be nearly 40% of the population. The liberal approach of projecting the Black and indigenous experience onto all “people of color” is innumerate.
Hispanics and Asians are economically converging with whites over time: https://academic.oup.com/qje/article/135/2/711/5687353. Possibly derailing that convergence (which is pretty much unprecedented in the world) is something everyone should be scared of.
The TV show White Lotus had a tremendous illustration of the problem. One of the characters, Paula, is a minority who is college friends with a white girl and comes to Hawaii with the girl’s family. Paula falsely convinces herself that her white friends don’t really care about her. She persuades a (reluctant) native Hawaiian worker at the hotel to steal from her friend’s family, giving some speech she learned at school about stolen land, but he gets caught and arrested. Liberal identity education hurts the affluent “brown” girl by driving an artificial racial wedge between her and her friend who genuinely cares about her, and destroys the life of the working class “brown” boy, by corrupting his traditional morality. I’m not sure it was supposed to be a conservative polemic but it succinctly illustrated exactly what I’m afraid of happening to my own kids as they’re taught to develop an “identity” around their “skin color” in elementary school (according to the email I received recently).
That doesn't refute any point you're trying to make here, but I'm pretty confident the show doesn't want you to see the white family as the "good guys" in the story.
For this thread, I'd just leave it at: White Lotus is an absurdist work of fiction. Excepting the BLM guy and maybe Belinda the wellness spa worker, if anything anybody on that show says really resonates with you, you should double-check yourself. The point of the show is that most of the characters are in their own ways odious.
All that is being missed is students having a harder time in high school.
I think of New Jersey which not that long ago used to have an amazingly robust economy - plenty of manufacturing, high tech (most pharmaceutical companies were HQ there). Now NJ is known for its bloated, inefficient government, crazy high taxes (including property taxes) and isn't really much of a desirable destination anymore.
Not saying that will happen to the Bay Area, but it's not impossible either. The more dysfunctional the government becomes and quality of life suffers, the less people will be willing to accept them just for a chance at a high salary and Google on their resume. Especially when other offices open up.
I'm pretty sure it'll be based somewhere that has a population of accepting and curious people. People (and government) that are open to the latest startup idea, people that don't laugh at you but instead think it could be cool, and importantly enough people to hire at said startup to build a team that can actually succeed. Oh and a place without non-competes of course :)
Thats why the old east coast cities lost tech - the startup scene didn't like the stodgy traditional mindset and the employee protections (like banning non-competes) were lacking, so starting a business was more lively in SF.
Could be Florida if they court people a little more with employee protections.
I left to live abroad and it was the best decision of my life. Interestingly, leaving made me appreciate certain things about the Bay Area more, just not enough to move back.
The good thing is that if you leave and don't find you're happier wherever you go, you can always go back.
What did you miss? The weather?
But the upside is that coming back to visit is really great. I get to enjoy the things I miss and leave before all the things I hated come to the fore.
I’ve doubled my life style and halved my costs. If you’re even remotely thinking about moving abroad remember: you’ll never have MORE time and LESS responsiblity than _right now_.
Cheers!
I lived in the Taipei area for three years and it was one of the best times of my life, looking to return but the visa situation has been so dicey lately...
Headline is dishonest clickbait. 56%—which is not a “vast majority”— are “considering leaving in the next 5 years”,
56% is merely those who have short term plans to leave. With up to 77% not liking things, they are on the edge of deciding to leave. It only takes a nudge! It's what pushed me and I still have family and >30 years of inertia keeping me there - I reached that point and have never looked back.
I was in the Bay Area a few weeks ago and I am SO GLAD I don't live there anymore! What a shit hole it is! It's far worse than 2016.
No, plans to leave are a much stronger claim that what the poll asks (the article suggests that it is the weakest of the questions polls typically ask of this issue, “considering leaving in the next five years”, but the poll [0] actually asked the second weakest form, “likely to leave in the next five years”, and 56% is the sum of “somewhat agree” and “strongly agree”.)
> With up to 77% not liking things, they are on the edge of deciding to leave
None of the reported numbers in the article are of “not liking things”, and the figure that is closest “not liking things” that is reported (“worse than five years ago”) is 71%, not 77%. 77% is what the article says is the percentage of those who agreed (at least somewhat) with the likely to move question that cited housing costs as a major reason (major reasons were not exclusive.)
The people “on the edge” are the 25% who only ”somewhat agree” that they are likely leave, already counted as part of the 56%.
[0] https://jointventure.org/images/stories/pdf/sv-poll-2021-rep...
Like, what is that percentage usually?
Ok now compare that to other major cities.
How do they compare?
Ok now you might have something to talk about
Like 'homelessness is so bad here zomg and getting so much worse'
Uhhh compared to where?
Inquiring minds want to know about these paradises of socialism
Growing prosperity and the ability to get practically anything delivered has changed that. This means you can now live in a smaller town or city and get practically all of the material benefits of living somewhere like NYC or SF.