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Landlords are trying not to rent to startups in San Francisco

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Re: Landlords are trying not to rent to startups in San Francisco

#211

Post by mooreds »

czbond wrote: post #134
Osiris wrote: post #64

Earlier quoted context omitted.

ZenPayroll is opening a Denver, CO office, looking to hire 100 people[1]. [1] http://fortune.com/2015/07/28/zenpayroll-jobs-denver-colorad...

Boulder is an incredibly difficult market to hire in. I was talkign to the head of Google Boulder when he mentioned they can't even get engineers hired there.

Interesting. I applied to Google a while back and never got a call back (except someone called me trying to get me to move to Mountain View or NY for a devops team).

I know they are building a bigger campus[0] so maybe they are having a hard time because it is a bigger number of reqs than in the past?

0: http://www.denverpost.com/business/ci_27063628/google-build-...

Re: Landlords are trying not to rent to startups in San Francisco

#212

Post by kspaans »

owyn wrote: post #181
compostor42 wrote: post #96

Earlier quoted context omitted.

>Making $140k per year is the San Fran equivalent of minimum wage Is this really true? Seems far-fetched. Isn't that $20-30k higher than the Google base starting salary?

Well, let's do some calculations... Assume you're making 140k, after 10% retirement contribution and CA taxes leaves about $6400 per month net. With the average 1 bd apartment at $3200 now that's half your take home wage. Leaving $3200 per month is $800 / week. Or $20.00 an hour at 40 hours. Given typical start-up hours and not even counting the typical food/internet/car expenses. So, if you want to look at it as an…

Wowza! So at $140k/year the effective tax rate in CA is around 40%? (Or maybe my math is bad.)

EDIT: And some that may not all be income tax? E.g. in Ontario one pays fed income tax, provincial income tax, Canada Pension Plan, Employment Insurance, and a few other I may have forgotten. In London, UK one pays income tax, national insurance, and council tax (property tax paid by property occupiers).

Re: Landlords are trying not to rent to startups in San Francisco

#213

Post by skuhn »

tzs wrote: post #202
pmorici wrote: post #95

Earlier quoted context omitted.

My bet is that Baltimore is poised to become a big tech hub. There was a ton of money spent in the tech sector after 2001 and that is tapering off now and you have a bunch of engineers with 10 years experience and the low cost of living in Baltimore which makes for a lot of opportunity to try things. The city also has a very Art oriented quirky culture like SF had before it priced out all the creative people and a lo…

Speaking of Baltimore, as someone who knows almost nothing about it other than what I saw watching "Ace of Cakes" and from what I see when the city comes up in the news, I came across this map today [1], which left me wondering what is going on there. It's a map of all murders in Baltimore, filterable by time period, race, gender, district, zip code, age, and cause of death. There are also some yearly charts below on…

Baltimore has very serious and endemic issues with crime, drugs, poverty and government -- all of which combine to result in an extremely high murder rate. The numbers have improved since the historic peak in 1993 (353 murders), and Baltimore is no longer the #1 city in murders per capita in the US, but it's still not good.

If you're interested, there are several excellent explorations of the particulars of Baltimore's problems (which are present, usually to a lesser extent, in many other cities) from David Simon:

  - Homicide: A Year on the Killing Streets (book)
  - Homicide: Life on the Streets (TV series)
  - The Corner: A Year in the Life of an Inner-City Neighborhood (book)
  - The Corner (TV miniseries)
  - The Wire (TV series)

Re: Landlords are trying not to rent to startups in San Francisco

#214

Post by Turing_Machine »

scarmig wrote: post #180
Turing_Machine wrote: post #133

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Sorry, that is not correct. http://tarlton.law.utexas.edu/exhibits/aztec/aztec_property.... I doubt there's ever been an urban culture that didn't have some concept of property ownership, whether by individuals, "nobles", or the state.

Depends on the particular geographic area you're talking about. In the Northeast, for example, land rights were radically different from the Aztecs. That said, it was never as simple as "everyone holds land in common and can do whatever they want with it individually."

Were there urban cultures in the Northeast? The largest I've heard of seem more like "towns" than "cities".

There were full-scale cities in the Midwest and South, of course, but I don't think we know enough about those cultures to say what their property rights were like. I'd bet money they were a lot closer to the Aztecs than to a typical hunter-gatherer band, though.

The Tlingit of the Northwest also had a complicated system of property rights, including something akin to what we call "intellectual property" (though there were significant differences to our system). They also kept large numbers of slaves.

Re: Landlords are trying not to rent to startups in San Francisco

#215

Post by mooreds »

justinator wrote: post #171
czbond wrote: post #134

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Boulder is an incredibly difficult market to hire in. I was talkign to the head of Google Boulder when he mentioned they can't even get engineers hired there.

Living in Boulder, I'm curious as to why? I'm seeing the other side of the coin, where getting hired is proving very difficult. The joke here is even the dirtbag climbers have PHDs.

It might be hard to get hired writing perl in Boulder (I checked out your profile) but if you're interested in other languages, I can do some intros for you.

Or you could always move to Amsterdam: http://blog.booking.com/

Re: Landlords are trying not to rent to startups in San Francisco

#217

Post by mooreds »

davidw wrote: post #156
czbond wrote: post #134

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Boulder is an incredibly difficult market to hire in. I was talkign to the head of Google Boulder when he mentioned they can't even get engineers hired there.

Boulder is weird... I was all set to go there, and got a better offer in Bend, Oregon, which is significantly cheaper in terms of housing. I'm kind of happy about how it turned out. I didn't like the idea of turning over such a large portion of my paycheck to a landlord. Things are not cheap here in Bend, but I have more of a feeling of getting in earlier, while things are still growing.

I loved Bend when I visited a decade ago. It has a lot of the benefits of Boulder plus an ocean not too far away (but further from an airport and major metropolitan area).

Didn't seem like much business was happening when I visited, though (other than tourism).

Is there a tech scene now?

Re: Landlords are trying not to rent to startups in San Francisco

#218

Post by pmichaud »

urda wrote: post #216

Here's a crazy thought: Maybe it's time to consider another location for startups. San Francisco is reaching it's limits, and let's be honest technology can really launch from anywhere. Let's get some other cities moving, San Francisco has enough.

Critical mass is like golden handcuffs here, I think.

Re: Landlords are trying not to rent to startups in San Francisco

#219

Post by mooreds »

chvid wrote: post #194
meatysnapper wrote: post #12

Earlier quoted context omitted.

As much as I'd like the US to crash to reality a bit so we can get our house together... a Chinese slowdown + European clusterfuck makes the US the best place to invest, still. That gives this boom a slightly longer lease on life.

In 2007 a lot of Europeans thought that EU and China would decouple themselves from the emerging debt/housing crisis in the USA.

Ah, decoupling.

I don't think the US is decoupled at all. It's just the least crappy house in the neighborhood.

See Lou Barnes for some interested commentary on this: http://pmglending.com/loubarnes/credit-news/

Re: Landlords are trying not to rent to startups in San Francisco

#220

Post by mooreds »

_delirium wrote: post #196
setpatchaddress wrote: post #162

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This is definitely a thing that happens. Some teams also do a lot of work in hallway conversations, and this sort of accidental interaction is critical. I witness this all the time. I would much prefer that my company let me work remotely. The Bay Area is full, seriously, and I'd be happy to work from many other places. But denying reality doesn't help. I think there are potential technical solutions to this problem…

That kind of smalltalk definitely happens, but where it happens varies a lot. At some places probably 80% of the idle work-related chatter happens on the IRC/Slack, while at others it happens mostly in the coffee area or hallways. Seems to be a company-culture difference in large part. Both are ok for me, but the places that use IRC/Slack a lot are easier to be remote at (or even just on a trip) without being exclude…

Not just easier to be remote at, but easier to remember the smalltalk/'check out this url'/minor decisions.

And easier to disseminate. Searchability is far superior with tools than with voice conversations.

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