371–380 of 622 posts
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Universities help I think. Stanford, Berkeley &c. Many great public universities and many great universities!
The east coast has entire Ivy League and yet no Silicon Valley. Also, how do you explain Seattle?
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Walmart has contributed to the decline of small businesses in rural areas[0] and they compensate their employees so little that they officially encourage their employees to take advantage of the social safety net[1] despite ever increasing annual net income[2] captured largely by the non-productive latter-generation Waltons. [0] https://money.com/walmart-stores-closing-small-towns [1] https://www.forbes.com/sites/cla…
Not to go too off the rails, but they only “contributed to the decline” by being a better option for customers that switched from small businesses in rural areas to Walmart. A lot of small businesses are bad. Bad hours, bad selection of products, bad customer service, bad prices. They’re often held up in some idyllic form, but it’s clear from the behavior of their own customers that Walmart provides these customers m…
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Sure HP and Oracle are not "sexy" but they do employee massive numbers of tech folks. The impact will be noticed. They hire people who later move to the "sexy" companies a few years into their career.
But moving to Texas frees up real estate in the Bay Area for more productive businesses. And given the transient nature of techies, many of those techies would have moved to California will now move to Texas, putting some relief into the housing market and maybe clearing up traffic a bit. I wouldn’t see these two moving as a negative, they’ve long had reputations as bad places to work.
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There are 28,995,881 people living in Texas vs 39,512,223 in California. There are 151,278 homeless in California vs 25,848 in Texas. Is homelessness a problem in Texas? Yes, but it isn't remotely as bad as California. And of course, then there are states with nearly non existent homelessness.
You still didn't answer why that's the case. If Texas has the answer I'm sure California would love to hear it.
“Haven't left Silicon Valley; they're still continuing to employ people”
There is this general aloofness of the problems. They need to address it head on and make it more hospitable for companies and residents.
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…
Though back then you could get a house in Cupertino for 300k?
It’s now $3M.
This has some effect and makes living here to start a company higher risk.
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Agreed. They're companies trying to avoid taxes or regulation. Only companies on the downslide really consider that as an relevant option.
To be fair, here's the complete list of companies in the known universe that don't try to avoid taxes or regulation: [error data not found] There's a cost of moving. California's taxes and regulations are bad, bad enough to force many out, but not all. If things continue on their present course, even Google and Amazon, who personally like the political climate there, will have to start looking elsewhere.
The real state I wonder about is Illinois. Who the hell wants to live in Illinois? Both the state income tax and property tax is absurd and you can easily cross state lines to somewhere cheaper with pretty much the same scenery.
But I would not move back, the cost of living is expensive, and the state has not been doing well financially. I think if I were to move again it would be to Washington, I love rainy weather.
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…
This sentiment is problematic. Oracle has 130 000 employees and $40B in revenue. That's massive.
They are a tech company, not a media company like FB.
They are a lynchpin, just because 'we don't like them' doesn't make them 'not' that.
It's like Burning Man: everyone has their view on 'what it is' but really they mean to say 'what it ought to be'. What it is ... is more objective.
Oracle and companies like them are a huge part of what the SV is, full stop.
It's 'mostly' bad for SV to be losing Oracle.
The 'Bay Exit' story is probably overblown, but it's also very real, and less to do with 'leavers' than the fact it's just easier to do things elsewhere in the first place, at least for some kind of companies.
One of the things I didn't see mentioned in the comments here is the contribution of immigrants in Bay Area tech scene. And CA, with Bay Area in particular is very friendly to immigrants from all over the world. A very large percentage of those will never move to Texas, well unless this migration over the next few decades causes Texas to change its character.