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Tech elites leaving San Francisco threaten Silicon Valley's supremacy

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Re: Tech elites leaving San Francisco threaten Silicon Valley's supremacy

#371
post #185
post #67

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

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.

Re: Tech elites leaving San Francisco threaten Silicon Valley's supremacy

#372
post #361

Earlier quoted context omitted.

>> and still come out ahead financially. 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 th…

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.

when the work is remote we don’t need remote-california to save 10% on wages. we will go to remote-ukraine or estonia and hire twice as many engineers

Re: Tech elites leaving San Francisco threaten Silicon Valley's supremacy

#373
post #37

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.

It's not just SF, it's the region and it's inability/refusal to act like a cohesive region. But SF has certainly suffered the most.

5 Bay Area counties coordinated in going into lockdown earlier than the state required. Sometimes we do act like a region.

Re: Tech elites leaving San Francisco threaten Silicon Valley's supremacy

#374

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. A…

what happens if everyone goes back to the office in a year and now you're the only remote employee?

Re: Tech elites leaving San Francisco threaten Silicon Valley's supremacy

#375

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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 late…

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...

Denver, Las Vegas, Reno, Boulder, Albuquerque, Phoenix, Tucson, Santa Fe...

Re: Tech elites leaving San Francisco threaten Silicon Valley's supremacy

#376
post #180

Earlier quoted context omitted.

>"Managers hate it" 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.

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.

Re: Tech elites leaving San Francisco threaten Silicon Valley's supremacy

#377
post #63

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 tha…

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 the…

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.

Re: Tech elites leaving San Francisco threaten Silicon Valley's supremacy

#378
The negative side is that those elites can not wait to make their new home the same as the old home, then they will move to yet another new place.

It's called plague.

As Texan, I dislike any companies who relocated from CA in particular, they're cancerous. Looking at what they did to Denver, Salt Lake etc.

Re: Tech elites leaving San Francisco threaten Silicon Valley's supremacy

#379
post #19
post #9

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

Unless you are a political junky reading news all day - what practically speaking is so intolerable about living there or your neighbors?

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.

Re: Tech elites leaving San Francisco threaten Silicon Valley's supremacy

#380

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 Europ…

>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.

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