Tech elites leaving San Francisco threaten Silicon Valley's supremacy • Hacker News Board

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

#441

Post by Proziam » Mon, Dec 07, 2020, 8:08 PM UTC

bendbro wrote: post #255

ericmay wrote: post #195

Earlier quoted context omitted.

A few thoughts: 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…

> 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, ca…

> 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.

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

#442

Post by ummonk » Mon, Dec 07, 2020, 8:08 PM UTC

ylhert wrote: post #33

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 jeopa…

The ban on non-competes was pretty instrumental to allowing the startup revolution to occur somewhere in California.

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

#443

Post by mixmastamyk » Mon, Dec 07, 2020, 8:08 PM UTC

birdyrooster wrote: post #107

sandworm101 wrote: post #89

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…

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.

Tech hiring is broken, more than likely they were right under your nose the whole time.

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

#444

Post by gumby » Mon, Dec 07, 2020, 8:09 PM UTC

ip26 wrote: post #386

iancmceachern wrote: post #356

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). Exactly

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.

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

#445

Post by dekhn » Mon, Dec 07, 2020, 8:11 PM UTC

davidajackson wrote: post #413

Cd00d wrote: post #114

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

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…

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.

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

#446

Post by chucky_z » Mon, Dec 07, 2020, 8:11 PM UTC

Fordec wrote: post #425

chucky_z wrote: post #222

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 ev…

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…

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.

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

#447

Post by shuckles » Mon, Dec 07, 2020, 8:11 PM UTC

throwdour wrote: post #437

eeZah7Ux wrote: post #333

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> I can also see why developers might have been reluctant to bet too big on new construction Why would that be?

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.

Rents are still among the highest in the country. There is plenty of demand.

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

#448

Post by carapace » Mon, Dec 07, 2020, 8:12 PM UTC

corytheboyd wrote: post #404

oblio wrote: post #384

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 loca…

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.

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

#449

Post by akhilcacharya » Mon, Dec 07, 2020, 8:12 PM UTC

headsupftw wrote: post #423

gumby wrote: post #152

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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?

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 live in 02142 and I'm under the impression that this is already what they do....

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

#450

Post by freyir » Mon, Dec 07, 2020, 8:12 PM UTC

munaf wrote: post #40

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, cultu…

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.