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Silicon Valley exodus: Bay Area tech companies leaving for Texas

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Re: Silicon Valley exodus: Bay Area tech companies leaving for Texas

#21
post #7

I wonder if the people fleeing California will end up voting for the same bad policies that are the reason they had to leave in the first place. That is, do they connect the bad policies to the bad outcomes, or will they still favor the bad policies? There is one major area for tech people where Texas may prove a nasty surprise to employees: non-compete agreements. For large employers this may be a bonus though as th…

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Re: Silicon Valley exodus: Bay Area tech companies leaving for Texas

#23
post #7

I wonder if the people fleeing California will end up voting for the same bad policies that are the reason they had to leave in the first place. That is, do they connect the bad policies to the bad outcomes, or will they still favor the bad policies? There is one major area for tech people where Texas may prove a nasty surprise to employees: non-compete agreements. For large employers this may be a bonus though as th…

I'd imagine the owners will, but who knows about the employees. Liberalization in general is happening through the government schools. Pull the kids out, teach them at home or put them in a private school you trust.

Re: Silicon Valley exodus: Bay Area tech companies leaving for Texas

#24
This general topic seems to come back into focus on a regular basis on HN (last time, 1 week ago). People have been leaving SV in numbers for the 30 years I've been here, always citing traffic & cost of housing as the primary reasons. Though this time, you could add decriminalization of petty crime. Nonetheless, the population growth remains net positive.

The fundamental design of the Internet was to be robust against various forms of damage to the network. I see Silicon Valley as a similar type of system. It is not difficult to look back 40 years and see how at each inflection point, The Valley's constituent technologies, and the companies they spawned, led the rest of the world and scaled The Valley up.

- In the 1980s, Silicon Valley's Intel lost it's dominance in DRAM production to Japan. The economic impact was dire, and yet

- In the early 1990s, networking and workstations emerged from the likes of SUN and Cisco. They carried through until global competition stole their wind, and it was on to

- The late 90s and the .COM boom. And what a boom it was, Amazon, Google, followed by another death knell for myriad .COM corpses. Promptly engendering

- The 2000s birth of social media. MySpace faltered, then LinkedIn, then Facebook, then Twitter, came up and are still going strong on the foundation of

- 2010s open source platforms. Still mind-blowing: At one point WhatsApp had 40 software engineers and 400,000,000 users. At 3 years old.

I've heard about the exodus from California, usually citing so many thousands or 10s of thousands of people leaving. But looking a the net population changes, Santa Clara County is down 5,000 from 2018-2019. Alameda, San Mateo, San Francisco are all up.

Silicon Valley is a system that regenerates from one generation to the next, and so far, always bigger and more influential than the last.

Re: Silicon Valley exodus: Bay Area tech companies leaving for Texas

#25
post #7

I wonder if the people fleeing California will end up voting for the same bad policies that are the reason they had to leave in the first place. That is, do they connect the bad policies to the bad outcomes, or will they still favor the bad policies? There is one major area for tech people where Texas may prove a nasty surprise to employees: non-compete agreements. For large employers this may be a bonus though as th…

Texas doesn't have a full time legislature so unlike California the amount of damage they can do is limited.

Even better than a part time legislature, in fact. Texas only meets for a few months every other year.

Re: Silicon Valley exodus: Bay Area tech companies leaving for Texas

#26
post #7

I wonder if the people fleeing California will end up voting for the same bad policies that are the reason they had to leave in the first place. That is, do they connect the bad policies to the bad outcomes, or will they still favor the bad policies? There is one major area for tech people where Texas may prove a nasty surprise to employees: non-compete agreements. For large employers this may be a bonus though as th…

What particular policies did people vote for that contributed to their reasons for fleeing?

Re: Silicon Valley exodus: Bay Area tech companies leaving for Texas

#27
post #7

I wonder if the people fleeing California will end up voting for the same bad policies that are the reason they had to leave in the first place. That is, do they connect the bad policies to the bad outcomes, or will they still favor the bad policies? There is one major area for tech people where Texas may prove a nasty surprise to employees: non-compete agreements. For large employers this may be a bonus though as th…

They will probably favor them in the beginning but I think a lot of that comes from the SF bay area echo chamber. Getting exposure to different cultures will probably average things out more politically leading to greater acceptance and diversity of thought.

Re: Silicon Valley exodus: Bay Area tech companies leaving for Texas

#28
post #16

HP and Oracle don’t exactly represent the heart of Silicon Valley today and what makes it special/unique. I actually think zombie corporations like Oracle, companies that haven’t innovated in decades and instead rely on an army of sales people to sell legacy software, are somewhat the antithesis of Silicon Valley which is really about real technological innovation and disruption at it’s core. I know there are lots of…

Agreed. They're companies trying to avoid taxes or regulation. Only companies on the downslide really consider that as an relevant option.

Re: Silicon Valley exodus: Bay Area tech companies leaving for Texas

#29
post #16

HP and Oracle don’t exactly represent the heart of Silicon Valley today and what makes it special/unique. I actually think zombie corporations like Oracle, companies that haven’t innovated in decades and instead rely on an army of sales people to sell legacy software, are somewhat the antithesis of Silicon Valley which is really about real technological innovation and disruption at it’s core. I know there are lots of…

HP moving to Texas is the corporate version of my grandparents retiring to Florida.

Re: Silicon Valley exodus: Bay Area tech companies leaving for Texas

#30
Given that the Texas GOP leadership recently mused publicly about seceding from the United States I wonder how many of the people and companies that left California for Texas would be pleased to wake up one morning and discover they now live in a foreign country? My guess would be: "not so many".
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