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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

#491

Post by gonehome »

raldi wrote: post #451
gonehome wrote: post #376

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I’ve seen comments about the “end of Silicon Valley” as early as 1993. 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.

The 1993 post you refer to: https://groups.google.com/forum/#!original/alt.folklore.comp...

Yep, that was the one.

It’s nearly the exact same conversation you see today. It’s a little wild to me that they thought housing prices were high then.

It makes me wonder if in 2047 I’ll look back at this thread and think “only $2M - what were they complaining about? Can’t find a place today for less than $18M”

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

#492

Post by thorwasdfasdf »

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…

All it takes is for some other area to reach some critical mass, to gain a reputation for tech and reach a certain tech size. Once that happens, all that pent up CA move out demand will start prevail.

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

#493

Post by jelliclesfarm »

lern_too_spel wrote: post #479
jelliclesfarm wrote: post #468

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Unintended consequences don’t matter. The intended purpose was to keep seniors and retirees in their homes without the danger of them being made homeless due to the speculative nature of California housing market whose instability is largely contributed to the said feted ‘new comers’. What you type are talking points that make no sense. Ask anyone who had lived and paid taxes and mortgages in California before 1980,…

> The intended purpose was to keep seniors and retirees in their homes without the danger of them being made homeless due to the speculative nature of California housing market whose instability is largely contributed to the said feted ‘new comers’. That was the stated objective given to economically illiterate voters but not the intended purpose. Those property owners can be targeted with tax exemptions without the…

what exactly is 'economically illiterate'. i cant take anything you wrote seriously until you explain this made up word wrt this talking point.

if you are talking about the exemption given to the children who inherit property and the prop 13 benefits along with it, i am in agreement.

i am also in cautious agreement with prop 13 being amended when it comes to commercial properties.

any prop 13 amendment that adversely affects tax paying citizens or senior citizens who own property is the untouchable third rail.

any increase in taxes will result in higher cost of living. just like the myth that high density living is sustainable (because a cluster of high density homes within feet of each other is not high density but just over crowded. high density is only sustainable if it spares sprawl and lives within allocated available resources), the notion that high taxes will somehow benefit the state is a very ill thought out plan.

there are a million ways to raise taxes. but following that dollar isnt as easy. every single tax dollar misappropriated by our politicians is a travesty. we are already a highly taxed state. before demanding to tax others on our behalf, perhaps we should first ask WHERE the tax dollars are going right NOW. it's not like we are a tax free state. anyone paying taxes and making a paycheck in california is just an ambulatory ATM for sacramento. tits to balls, we are taxed to death.

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

#494

Post by p_j_w »

cloverich wrote: post #187
jonathanyc wrote: post #154

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Hey! Thanks for replying, good to hear from another resident :D Yea, I certainly don’t agree entirely with CA’s gun laws. I also definitely don’t believe CA is perfect. But I agree that the state seems unfairly demonized, I’ve been trying for a bit now to try dig into why. Agree 100% about loving the diversity in this state.

As a Texan that hears that frequently among my right winger friends / family, I think its mostly (plain old) ignorance and indifference. When I talk about liking California I get -- effectively -- dirty looks. But concomitantly, if I press for details there are none. So I think it is just one of those talking points that's taken on a life of its own, probably exacerbated by the housing prices that also get blamed on…

As a Californian who lived in Texas for 2 years, I'm surprised the lack of really great BBQ here isn't what your friends and family bring up.

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

#495

Post by giantg2 »

gangstead wrote: post #438
lukeramsden wrote: post #410

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Couldn't you give property tax breaks to retirees, or to people temporarily out of work?

Seniors do get a slight property tax discount here in Texas. Still I suppose it does encourage people to downsize when they are empty nesters and no longer need to house a big family. In California you get the opposite problem where people can't afford to move as their needs change since their property tax would no longer be kept low.

Yeah, PA gives a small discount too.

It depends on how far someone is willing to downsize. Many 1500sqft single homes in that region are paying about $8k-9k per year in property tax. I guess you could cut that in half if you live in a row home of about 900 sqft. That can be a big lifestyle change depending on one's hobbies (gardening, keeping a classic car, beekeeping, etc may require more space). Not to mention $4k-5k could still be around or over 10% of a retired persons income, or even working families too (Philadelphia has the highest rate of extreme poverty of any city in the US measured as families of 4 making <$12k per year).

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

#496

Post by MikeTheGreat »

prostoalex wrote: post #415
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…

A large company like that fertilizes the employment landscape - they hire in large numbers, conduct university recruiting, file H1B paperwork, bring Canadian students and accommodate their co-op schedules, pay relocation, etc. Rarely an expense that a small or medium startup is willing to undertake. I remember seeing a recruiting report for Yahoo! when I worked there a decade and a half ago. Recruiting kept track of…

My understanding is that California has pretty good laws for allowing employees to move on to other companies (specifically, I think non-competes are illegal there).

It'll be really interesting to see if the fertilization still works as well in a state like Texas that's ok with things like non-competes, etc, being used to limit employee mobility.

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

#497

Post by giantg2 »

Domenic_S wrote: post #462
gangstead wrote: post #438

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Seniors do get a slight property tax discount here in Texas. Still I suppose it does encourage people to downsize when they are empty nesters and no longer need to house a big family. In California you get the opposite problem where people can't afford to move as their needs change since their property tax would no longer be kept low.

There is an exception in CA (it's complicated and only good in some counties) where an older person can transfer their tax basis, once, to a new house for precisely this situation. Once again young people get the shaft in CA though.

Seems like a convoluted system to tax people based on property while still making it means based. What was the reasoning they gave for not just using an income based system, which should more implicitly align with one's means?

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

#498

Post by abernard1 »

nostrademons wrote: post #402
SmokeyHamster wrote: post #289

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

Most startups don't care about taxes or regulations. Taxes are a rounding error (or literally zero) when you're small and not making any money, which will be the first several years of a startup's life. When you get big you can hire an army of lawyers and accountants to keep all your money in Ireland and avoid them. Regulations just get ignored. When you're small, you're too little a fish to go after; the regulators…

> Most startups don't care about taxes or regulations.

Yes, but they care about cost. And the reason that everything is so expensive in California is regulation and taxes. Acting like these are separate things is not a valid assumption.

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

#499

Post by bordercases »

jonathanyc wrote: post #152
bordercases wrote: post #143

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Are you openly any of these things? Do you espouse your Christianity or commitment to proactive self-defense publicly or professionally? What sort of company do you work for and do you self-select for a certain kind of person in your friendships?

Before I answer, could you please give concrete examples of what you mean by intolerance? I’m genuinely curious and trying to be open minded, I hope I’m not coming across as confrontational. At my last job I was open about my Christianity. I haven’t really had a chance to do that at my current job because of COVID. At my current job though I do talk about the fact that I own a gun in the context of recreation, and at…

The reason why I'm surprised is because a lot of what counts for political commentary within Silicon Valley circles has emphasized stances in cultural issues which seem opposed to either the Christian attitude or second amendment rights or other views that get broadly tagged as "conservative" or "unkind".

It's definitely possible to be tasteful and silent when sitting on a Zoom call as people voice strong views in support of XYZ, but it's another thing to wonder if your working relationships are at risk if you voice the opposite, and the majority of media sponsored by SV money sets up the discourse to make that view look foolish which triplicates the amount of work you need to do to defend it.

At the same time it's possible that this is just an issue of a vocal minority of companies controlling the majority of impressions. Since you seem to have had more positive experiences (which I wouldn't expect), I should let you have the floor.

(Last question, if you don't mind: what denomination?)

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

#500

Post by golergka »

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 is one of the most hated companies on HN, and for years, I assumed that it's a backwards corporate behemoth. Of course, as I work with startups and not huge enterprises, I have actual experience only with Postgresq, MySQL and MongoDB, and not Oracle, but that video about anthropomorphisizing Larry Ellison is so funny.

However, I started going through CMU intro to databases course (btw, it's amazing) and one advanced database feature or optimization after another, I hear "only MSSQL or Oracle do that". Which strated me thinking: is Oracle really that stupid and backwards? Or is it just folklore?

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