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Tech elites leaving San Francisco threaten Silicon Valley's supremacy

businessinsider.com

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

#481

Post by carapace »

San Fransisco isn't part of Silicon Valley. You have to drive for, like, an hour to get to SV from here.

SF isn't a nice town. It has nice aspects and places, sure, but it's always been pretty rough here just under the surface. The initial Mission was like a concentration camp for Indians. I just found out that SF State University is built on an Ohlone graveyard. Chinatown was harsh, the population was almost entirely male, except for prostitutes who were often enslaved[1]. There were gangs of bandits living under the piers.

What I'm saying is, folks moving here with their great tech jobs and expectations of picket fences and rose gardens are a little naive. You moved to a freak down and then got freaked out by the freaks.

It's always been a weird place to go to start a software business. E.g. Twitter moving into the center of skid row was bizarre. They're not Mother Teresa?

[1] "The White Devil's Daughters: The Fight Against Slavery in San Francisco's Chinatown" https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/41181183-the-white-devil...

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

#482

Post by ericmay »

gabereiser wrote: post #462
ericmay wrote: post #240

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Who is experiencing the decrease in wages? For many Americans the distribution of these jobs to other locations would result in an increase in wages. Not to mention, the top companies would still hire top talent in a competitive market.

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 o…

Thanks, Gabe.

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.

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

#483

Post by mywittyname »

tschwimmer wrote: post #389
munificent wrote: post #221

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…

I agree, this describes most metro areas over 100k people in the US I feel.

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.

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

#484

Post by pbuzbee »

inerte wrote: post #147
solumos wrote: post #30

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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).

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…

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.

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

#485

Post by tzs »

gumby wrote: post #152
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…

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 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.

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

#486

Post by shuckles »

throwaway0a5e wrote: post #419
shuckles wrote: post #401

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

Comments like this make me wonder if the end of SV meme is some kind of psyops campaign.

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

#487

Post by abeppu »

pmalynin wrote: post #474
abeppu wrote: post #373

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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

Yea....except for how many decades have we struggled to build Bart into Menlo Park and south?

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.

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

#488

Post by pbuzbee »

burntoutfire wrote: post #232
Xcelerate wrote: post #204

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 b…

> wildfire smoke was getting pretty bad 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.

This site offers visualizations of air quality over time: https://www.epa.gov/outdoor-air-quality-data/air-data-multiy...

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

#490

Post by Apocryphon »

apta wrote: post #213
camjohnson26 wrote: post #193

Earlier quoted context omitted.

As if every Californian is the same politically.

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.

Conservative-voting transplants in Texas helped Ted Cruz beat Beto:

https://www.dallasnews.com/news/politics/2018/11/09/native-t...

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