San Diego Struggles to Keep Its Young Tech Talent

I grew up in San Diego before spending 20 years in the Bay Area. While I totally understand why a fresh graduate would want to head north to the bay, I think as a place to CREATE a startup, San Diego has tremendous potential.

The weather is beautiful and actually beats SF. It's close to 70 year round, nice and dry, with great beaches and mountain and desert hiking. As the article notes downtown has been evolving in a really promising direction, to say nothing of classic beach spots like Del Mar, La Jolla, Pacific Beach, etc. For getaways there is LA, Mexico, skiing at Big Bear.

The computer science program at UCSD is typically ranked about 15th globally, CalTech is not terribly far north, nor is UCLA and UC Irvine and UCSB and UC Riverside, and SDSU, though it has a reputation as a party school, is no slouch.

Meanwhile the housing is still affordable compared to the Bay Area, if not cheap on a national basis. And the Valley is an hourlong Southwest flight away.

More important there is a real diversity of industry still in San Diego, with lots of biotech, defense (contracting and the actual Navy), aerospace, and health.

Thirty years ago, the Bay Area/Valley had a very San Diego feel to it. Easy to forget now, but it was a pretty laid back place where an ordinary person could buy a nice spread in the suburbs and where starting a business in your garage was a reasonable thing to attempt in a borderline casual way. You get the impression people smoked a lot of pot and spent a lot of time relaxing, whether in hot tubs or on hiking trails or wherever. It was a California lifestyle. The Bay Area feels like New York now, except with tech and better weather — just very intense. San Diego still feels like California.

I'm not saying it'll ever match the Bay Area/Valley as a tech hub; the lead in Northern California is too great. But San Diego should be at or near the top of the list of secondary hubs, in my biased opinion.

This is why I left in 2009. Ten job leads in mountain view, zero in San Diego County.

Bioengineering. I'll DM you on Twitter :)

[EDIT] Didn't work. Feel free to email me. Address is in my Bio.

> Meanwhile the housing is still affordable compared to the Bay Area, if not cheap on a national basis. And the Valley is an hourlong Southwest flight away.

I see lots of >$1 million homes and >$1500/month rents for apartments, in the suburbs. Do you have any specific areas in mind? I'm thinking about moving.

I lived in San Diego for the last two years and this article doesn't make much sense to me. They say the problem is that Sorento valley is to far from San Diego downtown but downtown is dull and there are plenty of good places to live not far away from Sorento valley (Del Mar, La Jolla, Pacific Beach). I commuted from North Park to the UCSD campus which is close to Sorrento valley and it was no problem at all.