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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

#291

Post by vmchale »

dkobran wrote: 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…

Oracle leaving for Texas reminded me of this person: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=18442941

People getting excited for Texas seems a bit silly! Real tech hub but... this is Oracle. C'mon.

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

#292

Post by SmokeyHamster »

_fat_santa wrote: post #271
0x445442 wrote: post #252

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Like TSLA?

Correct me if I'm wrong but I believe only Musk is moving to Texas, not Telsa. Thought at this point they are basically one in the same.

He's opening new Tesla facilities in Texas, but currently he hasn't formally announced he's completely pulling operations out of Texas, although he's threatened to in the past.

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

#293

Post by vmchale »

11thEarlOfMar wrote: post #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 agains…

Universities help I think. Stanford, Berkeley &c. Many great public universities and many great universities!

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

#294

Post by vmchale »

api wrote: post #246
cameldrv wrote: post #236

Earlier quoted context omitted.

CA still has the advantage of no noncompetes. It's fairly standard for Texas companies to require an enforceable noncompete. These companies are sort of like mules -- born from perhaps many fertile companies, but produce no offspring.

I've heard this and the general borderline unenforceability of "we own all your work, even during off hours" clauses in employment contracts as a major reason that the center of innovation shifted from Boston and the East Coast to Silicon Valley and California. Boston should have been Silicon Valley. It had all the education and a much deeper history of innovation. It also could have been down in New Jersey where Bel…

> Boston should have been Silicon Valley. It had all the education

Boston is a tech hub, just smaller.

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

#295

Post by jcranmer »

dannyincolor wrote: post #39
dkobran wrote: 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…

Yeah literally nothing about Oracle is useful or innovative. It’s like the WalMart of tech companies; just kind of exists and has rested on its laurels for a decade+.

Oracle is creating innovative new legal theories in Oracle v Google. Not that I'd consider that a positive thing.

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

#296

Post by ajmurmann »

refurb wrote: post #267
11thEarlOfMar wrote: post #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 agains…

I don’t disagree, but no doubt Detroit felt the same way at one time.

I wonder if Detroit's economy was more fragile because everything built on a handful of enormous corporations. I don't think there was much of a scene of small, innovative companies that didn't depend on the enormous corporations to be in business. Silicon Valley is full of start ups that can be successful on their own. What's really at the heart of SV is the system that makes startups. That's the universities, VCs and incubators.

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

#297

Post by SmokeyHamster »

dannyincolor wrote: post #39
dkobran wrote: 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…

Yeah literally nothing about Oracle is useful or innovative. It’s like the WalMart of tech companies; just kind of exists and has rested on its laurels for a decade+.

Kind of a strange analogy. Walmart provides immense value to millions of people. They've developed an infrastructure that delivers cheap products to areas that otherwise would have few other options.

Oracle is the antithesis of Walmart. They provide insanely expensive options to corporations who are already locked in to their products.

One of the saddest days was when Oracle bought Sun and effectively killed all their open source projects overnight, like OpenOffice and MySQL. Yes, those things are still technically around, but they're not getting any serious development, and all the core developers of those projects have forked them into new open source projects.

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

#298

Post by vmchale »

type_enthusiast wrote: post #204
pb7 wrote: post #18

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Is there any evidence that the people moving are responsible for the bad policies? Something tells me the NIMBYs that bought their homes decades ago and pay $3.50 in annual property taxes aren't going anywhere.

I guess you're implying that old people are the reason for high housing prices in SV. Respectfully, what are the bad policies my parents are responsible for, besides pioneering the technology that makes you want to live in SV? And buying a house for 85k in a nice neighborhood in order to do so, without forseeing that Facebook and friends were going to move in and make their house unaffordable were it not for the prot…

Prop 13 is all of California, right?

> make their house unaffordable were it not for the protections

FB isn't the problem, the problem is zoning... Artificially cutting off supply to the benefit of landowners and capital.

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

#299

Post by barnesto »

rrrrrrrrrrrryan wrote: post #208
dkobran wrote: post #79

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Some folks in my network are ex-Oracle and my understanding is that the company is run by the CFO and a huge group of MBAs. Any company where the bean counters are at the helm are optimizing for things like quarterly earnings, tax savings like you said, etc. This is the stage where they milk whatever they can out of a dying cash cow. There’s nothing interesting to me about this flavor of capitalism and I don’t think…

Growth at geriatric tech companies like IBM, HP, Oracle, etc. is largely inorganic, driven by well-negotiated acquisitions of smaller B2B software companies. It takes MBAs to do this sort of work, and while it isn't for me, I don't think it's the worst business model out there.

it doesn't take an MBA to do that work

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

#300

Post by pb7 »

fortran77 wrote: post #269
pb7 wrote: post #18

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Is there any evidence that the people moving are responsible for the bad policies? Something tells me the NIMBYs that bought their homes decades ago and pay $3.50 in annual property taxes aren't going anywhere.

I bought my Sunnyvale CA house in 1991. I pay $6,000 in property tax. The tax goes up 2%/year. I do not pay $3.50 in taxes. You are, quite frankly, a liar. The median property tax paid by homeowners in NY State -- a state with no "Prop 13" is $5,865 (according to facts I just googled). What, exactly, am I getting away with? How will increasing property taxes in a state with the highest income and sales tax solve the…

How much would you be paying if you bought that same house right now?

How will increasing it help? For one, it would have forced you to sell and move since you have limited interest in living there. You’re not entitled to live where you want just because you were born first. Property taxes specifically exist so that there isn’t a perpetual inheritance of land with no incentive to relinquish it.

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