
Tech workers think Silicon Valley and startups are losing their luster - prostoalex
http://qz.com/727855/silicon-valley-tech-workers-see-startups-and-silicon-valley-losing-their-luster/
======
johan_larson
I spent seven years in the Bay area, and found it quite a questionable deal.
Not that it was a bad place per se, but it was expensive and the stuff I was
doing just wasn't very special.

My sense is that if you are going to go to the Bay area, and put up with those
high high costs for everything, you need to make it pay. Spend your weekends
doing unusual stuff that you can't do elsewhere. Take jobs that don't exist
elsewhere. And if that doesn't sound like your thing, don't go there in the
first place.

~~~
seanp2k2
Good advice IMO. I personally love camping within a few hours drive on the
weekends, kiteboarding (SF Bay and the Delta have world-class kiteboarding
conditions), sailing, mountain biking, hiking, and some rock climbing. The
weather is my idea of perfect with sun almost every day and no snow ever (I
grew up with snow about 6 months of the year, and I'd personally find it hard
to ever go back to that).

Lake Tahoe is also great for skiing compared to where I grew up, which had
almost no hills and no ocean.

SF is great for clubbing and bars etc. I love that the people here are
generally very chill and loving. The outdoor music festivals in CA are also
fantastic if you're into that sort of thing.

For me at least, the rent is kind of just the cost of having an enjoyable life
in the US. San Jose is crazy expensive for a suburb, but it's worth it for me
because of all there is to do out here. The Valley is where tech happens, and
as long as I'm in it as a career and as an interest, I'm happy to be at the
epicenter. That it's in California, the place I grew up dreaming about, is the
icing on the cake for me.

~~~
jandrewrogers
To provide a counterpoint, as someone who lived in Silicon Valley forever and
still owns a place there, one of the reasons I moved away is that it is too
far from good outdoor activities. Good mountains are 3-4 hours away, and while
I made that trek on hundreds of weekends, it was far from optimal; I also
hiked the hills around the Bay Area frequently but that isn't even close to
the same. Similarly, the ocean around the Bay Area is okay but not great; no
one would ever confuse it with Southern California, it has more in common with
the Oregon coast.

By contrast, where I currently live (Seattle) is 45 minutes from the Cascades
which has fantastic hiking, backpacking, etc (better than the Sierra Nevada in
some ways) and a much more pervasive boating culture than exists in the Bay
Area thanks to the history and geography of the region. Living here has made a
high-quality outdoor lifestyle much more viable than it ever was in the Bay
Area because the logistics are so much easier.

The tech scene in the Bay Area is unparalleled, but if you removed that
aspect, there isn't that much to recommend a suburb like San Jose from a
lifestyle standpoint. The South Bay in particular also doesn't have the mild
weather of the peninsula and San Francisco -- it is more Fresno than San
Diego.

~~~
bogomipz
Where does the peninsula end and the south bay begin? This has always been a
bit blurry to me.

~~~
largote
It's generally considered to be where San Mateo county ends and Santa Clara
county begins, in other words, between Palo Alto and Mountain View.

~~~
ScottBurson
Palo Alto is in Santa Clara County.

Any line is somewhat arbitrary, of course, but I would put it between Mountain
View and Sunnyvale.

------
zallarak
A huge problem in my opinion, is employee equity and compensation. No doubt,
VCs are risking their money. But when you look at the system taking a few
steps back, you see tons of VCs have made insane mounts of money in the last
decade. Enough to buy castles, sports teams, and their own private islands.

Then you look at the swaths of tech workers who were there at the early stage.
I've seen multiple large exits in startups. Places I've worked at or have had
close friends. People who were there at the seed stage with barely a MVP, who
built products, pulled all-nighters, and worked 7 days a week. Upon
acquisition, the VCs made 10s of millions, the founders made 10s of millions
and the employees got new car money (for 2 years of intense work getting paid
_well_ below market).

EDIT: Another interesting point that is a bit too off-topic and lengthy for
this comment is that most startups simply don't realize the value of (5+)x
engineers. I've worked with people that are astronomically more efficient than
entry or mid-level engineers who make 100-130K, yet they make around the same
amount. Its _very_ worth it to find these people and pay them 2-3x market and
retain them. I'm not talking about algorithms wizards (although these people
tend to be decent algorists too), I'm speaking of engineers who can work on
all levels of the stack and ship code that is simple and works. They
understand business needs and don't get caught up in self-gratifying projects.
They use a mix of new and old tools, selecting them for reliability and
efficiency.

~~~
StevePerkins
The problem with the "10X" hypothesis is that I have NEVER met an engineer in
my life who believes they are a mere "X" (let alone sub-X). And quite frankly,
I find the overwhelming majority of self-professed 10X'ers to be delusional
assholes.

How do you measure "X", anyway? During the whiteboard interview process? We
all regularly discuss how subjective and broken that process is. Do you
measure it after the hire, by tracking the number of story and task tickets
closed? Now you just have people gaming the system, with a sprint board full
of bullshit.

Everyone wants more money. No one wants to work for less than a certain
baseline. Everyone's pissed when they find out what their peers make. So if
you're an employee who thinks you're underpaid, then test the market. And
you're an employer who routinely offers great candidates many multiples of the
market rate, then please let me know where I can send my resume.

~~~
msdos
You measure "X" with data.

Like revenue generated, or cost saved, or lines of code saved, or time needed
to deliver work, based on current or previous work.

Is this bullshit for you?

~~~
StevePerkins
> Is this bullshit for you?

Honestly? Yes.

I have no idea how many dollars of "revenue generated" or "cost saved" are
attributable to me as individual. Or anyone else.

Using lines of code as a performance metric? Get ready to see a multi-line
Javadoc on every local variable, or get ready to see some insane Perl-style
one-liners, depending on how you're using the LOC number.

"Time needed to deliver work"? Again, what is "work"? If your data consists of
JIRA tickets, then get ready for a culture of writing JIRA tickets at a
contrived (and inefficient) micro level of granularity.

There's no good way to objectively measure your "value" at your CURRENT
company. And what do I do when interviewing you to come here for your next
job... just take your word for your measurements at the previous gig?

Out of curiosity, are you a programmer? Because subjectively making stuff up,
while under the honest delusion that you're guided by objective numbers, is
the single most "MBA" trait there is.

~~~
msdos
That you have no idea how much revenue is attributable to you as an individual
doesn't mean revenue in general can't be measured and attributed.

Hypothetical example. Your employer has 1 billion users. You create
compression that cuts down storage costs by 4%. Run the math and you see how
much you saved.

If you saved $0.01 per user, you saved $10m. If the average salary is 100K and
you saved $10m, you performed at 100x.

I agree the potential for "X" performance is hard to spot or measure when one
isn't in proximity to big problems.

~~~
twright0
Except no matter what, no engineer functions in a vacuum. In your compression
hypothetical, how do you measure the contribution of the engineers who did the
code reviews? Who maintain the build environment and test suite that let the
"100X" engineer quickly and confidently develop? Who wrote the initial code
such that it was possible to add this compression after the fact at all? Who
spend their time fixing bugs so the "100X" engineer had bandwidth for this
compression project at all? Without those people, the "100X" engineer would
have taken longer and made more mistakes, or never even attempted it at all.
So it seems unreasonable (and even potentially demoralizing to the rest of the
eng team) to call that one engineer a "100X engineer".

Things are accomplished by teams, not individuals.

~~~
hiram112
That's true, but what about the sales guy that takes 5% of a $10 million deal
as commission? Or the exec team that gets a 10% cut of the increased profits
this year?

There was always a huge amount of players at work helping the upper execs and
sales teams, from the devs to HR.

I guess OP's post was and the article itself are noting that working your ass
off and making a big contribution in SV as an engineer can sometimes be a bad
deal, especially when the engineer in question really is talented.

------
Noseshine

        > “There is more opportunity for tech professionals in more places than ever before,”
        >  wrote Terence Chiu, vice president of Indeed Prime by email, citing cities such as
        > Austin, Boston, Seattle, and New York City.
    

Or simply from home. I've been working from home the last year, doing coding
for a startup idea (for others, not my own project).

Seriously, in the age of the Internet, and of looong traffic jams on 101 and
on the various Bay bridges, if an employer insists every programmer has to
hang around in that area something is off in their thinking. As someone who
_did_ hang around there (during the dot com boom), at several companies and
visiting many more as part of the job, it is overrated, especially for
programmers. Sure it's better to be around the coworkers everything else being
equal - but everything else _is not_ equal. The costs of doing so (not just
monetary) is very high.

It's a beautiful area alright, I lived in the Presidio at the end (that's the
huge park right next to the Golden Gate bridge), perfect. But not all people
can live in the same place... (PS: By the way, the East Bay has _great_ places
too! The Oakland hills near the top, for tens of miles, have some of the most
beautifully located properties in the entire Bay Area. Plus endless parks and
trails and horse riding, etc., not to mention the incredible views. And in
Oakland visit Jack London Square and then walk downtown.)

~~~
etangent
There's a common attitude that goes something like, "It's the Internet age!
What in the world could be stopping X from employing Y who lives in a place
Z?!"

Well, I worked at a place where most of the team was remote. It _absolutely
sucked_. I barely knew what the coworkers were doing (sure, my boss had a
better idea than I did, but I am certain even he would have preferred to have
employees physically around him for routine interaction), what kind of people
they were, and the reverse was true with respect to their knowledge of myself.
The time zone difference only exacerbated the problem. This "lack of people
knowledge" problem at remote workplaces causes everyone to under-invest in
building long-term relationships with everyone else (because nobody really
knows what everyone else is really like), and the culture nosedives. [1]

Now, clearly, remote employment can be necessary (consulting offers a typical
pattern), but the common attitude that there's no reason at all for not just
having everyone work remotely is incredibly annoying.

[1] Speaking of culture, remote workplaces offer a clear explanation via
counterpoint of the vaunted but often misunderstood term "company
culture"\---culture is what you don't have when everyone is working remotely.

~~~
Noseshine
My experience is that you can easily just as well not know what your coworkers
are doing when they sit right next to you. I don't think it has much of
anything to do with if they are onsite or not, but with other factors in your
organization.

For example, I found it very valuable to already have a great relationship
with everyone else. We kept the conferencing software going all day, the boss
in it too, and it never felt like being watched, instead it felt like being
connected to people I like. Whenever we had an issue we talked, voice or chat
depending on the issue, just like in the office.

When you try the same in an environment where you already don't care much for
one another - I'm not even talking about negative feelings! - the the same
setup will only make it worse and lead to even less cooperation. When I'm not
sure of someone then of course I use remote work as an excuse to interact with
them even less.

But that's not a question of working remote or not - only that "remote"
enhances dysfunction that's already there. Yes, when it doesn't work it works
better on-site, which is not an argument against remote, but to fix the
atmosphere and the relationships.

~~~
etangent
> My experience is that you can easily just as well not know what your
> coworkers are doing when they sit right next to you

That's typical of situations when you aren't really collaborating with those
people, and that's fine. In my case, I _ought to have been_ collaborating, but
the remoteness plus time difference (plus language difference!) exacerbated
the communication problem.

IRL communication is incredibly high-bandwidth. If a person sits next to you
and doesn't communicate with you much, you _already know something_ about that
person: that he or she does not enjoy chatting. When the absence of
communication is due to remote location, you don't even know that.

The communication problem at remote workplaces causes everyone to underinvest
in building long-term relationships with everyone else (because nobody really
knows what everyone else is really like), and the culture nosedives.

~~~
Noseshine
> That's typical of situations when you aren't really collaborating with those
> people

You disregard the rest that I wrote, probably because of an unfortunate habit
of mine to edit my initial two sentences again and again until I end up with
20 more sentences half an hour later... my commenting habits are more
appropriate for chat.

In any case, my point is collaboration is not a question of distance. A lot of
highly successful projects by distributed teams not least in the open source
scene show that too. Even in my current pre-startup project I'm working with
another programmer whom I only met once long after we had already done a lot
of work together, very successfully and requiring a lot of cooperation. It is
a people/personality issue though, thinking of all the programmers I can think
of it's true the same thing would definitely not work with all of them. It's
good you bring that issue up.

------
mevile
I don't know what's meant by "tech workers" but as a programmer I can't really
think of a better place with more jobs, more events, more everything that
matters. All my former coworkers and friends live here. There are meetups all
the time. I don't see how it's losing its luster. Yes it's expensive, but I
BART in from a place with cheaper housing costs. I don't have to live in
downtown SF to work there.

~~~
codingdave
"everything that matters" is quite subjective. I live in the mountains, with
endless outdoor activity within minutes of my place. I can drive to 8 national
parks and monuments in half a day. I have a great place to raise my kids, and
I am NOT surrounded by tech events and meetups... I am surrounded by people
who like to spend our free time outside. All of those things matter to me.

So whether or not Silicon Valley is important to you has everything to do with
what you value in life. As the article said, there is a big generation gap
here. I'm an older coder who doesn't give a crap how many opportunities are
around because I only need one at a time. And with remote work becoming ever
more prevalent, I just don't foresee ever having a desire to move to SV.

I live where I can lead the life I want, not work the job I want.

~~~
srbloom
You can drive to 8 national parks and monuments in half a day from SF.

~~~
LoSboccacc
I live in northern Italy, half a day trip include most of the peninsula and
southern France.

Sure job opportunityes are few, especially of the interesting kind, and pay is
awful, but overall it's very hard to beat.

I don't really get the point of people pretending it's for the entartainment,
especially if whatever you do starts with a three hours drove to get out of
the urban area.

That doesn't really sound a high quality lifestyle, but to each their own.

~~~
eru
> to get out of the urban area.

To get out of the suburban sprawl..

------
Olscore
Silicon Valley hasn't released a blockbuster app, website or company in a
while. Particularly social media companies that upend the rest of the world
and the way it functions. The directly consumer facing / social companies
really move perception versus other companies that don't interact with the
general public. There was also the iPhone 2007 which changed the way the
entire world used their phones, and a lot of fallout change with it. I think
the media attention seems to have lulled a bit since there haven't been what
I'll call blockbuster techs in a while; e.g., some large consumer facing
company that changes people's lifestyles. So maybe the glamour is missing. The
amount of attention SV received a few years ago seemed to be bigger, with
everyone eagerly awaiting new life changing tech that is as obvious as the
iPhone, FB, Instagram, YouTube or other very consumer facing and widely used
consumer companies.

Seems like Uber and Snapchat were the last game changing companies for how
people interact with the world via tech on a large scale. IMO it's lack of
media attention, excitement and companies that are very obvious lifestyle
changers.

~~~
onewaystreet
What's a recent blockbuster app that wasn't released by a Silicon Valley
company?

~~~
niftich
Not to be pedantic but Snapchat is actually from LA and they're very proud of
this fact. In the VC context, they did take money from (Silicon Valley) VCs,
but their origins and workforce isn't from SV.

~~~
onewaystreet
You're right about that, I forgot that they were LA based. Still, Olscore
lumped them in with Silicon Valley companies so the question still stands.

~~~
Olscore
One of the last consumer-facing, blockbuster level startups outside of SV (or
California) that comes to mind was Groupon. But I don't consider them to be
that great; kind of a fad that took off for a while and is now lingering. When
I say blockbuster level startup I mean something that becomes a household name
used by mostly consumers. Highly visible companies mostly. I lump LA/SV
together because they're in the same state, and there seems to be a lot of
inter-funding between the two areas. But I'm also from Chicago so maybe it's
just me. Hah.

------
rattray
Note that there may be a strong selection bias here, as not many "top
engineers" in the Bay Area use Indeed.

Indeed, Indeed seems to attract the kind of engineers most likely to give the
kinds of responses seen in their survey, like preferring large established
brands over startups.

This is less likely (in my opinion) to indicate a shift in engineer
preferences than it is to reveal the skew of Indeed's userbase.

Disclaimer: I work at Hired, a direct competitor to Indeed Prime, and
live/work in SF. (Also note that although our customers often use competitors,
they typically cite Indeed Prime as less effective for startup talent than
much smaller competitors).

~~~
autotune
"Top engineers" are probably not using job sites at all, but using their
reputations in the tech community to find jobs. Also, I'd say AngelList is by
far the best job site out there for the startup scene. Best thing Hired has
going for it right now is the customer service on the recruiting side and the
sign on bonus, but purely anecdotally, AngelList and HackerNews own monthly
job board was far more effective during my own job search.

~~~
rattray
I'd agree with that (though I think Hired has a little more going for it as
well, especially from the epmployer's perspective).

I might add StackOverflow Careers to the list of effective job boards,
especially outside SV. It was the only place I could find decent senior talent
when I was hiring in Bangalore.

------
kristopolous
My problems of lonliness and depression went away after I left the bay. It's
important that I'm not there. I've seen this happen to others as well.

~~~
ipsin
Please finish your anecdote. What's different about the Bay Area that made
your life worse? What improved when you left it?

~~~
kristopolous
I'm sorry but this is a personal health thing and I don't want it to erupt as
a fiery debate where people gang up on me like it's the Lord of the flies.

I'm so deeply uninterested in that

~~~
z0ltan
Sounds like you're still in shell shock!

~~~
kristopolous
Where someone lives is as personal a decision as who they marry or what career
they pursuit.

------
mmmBacon
These articles seem to be a dime a dozen; always predicting the demise of SV.
But SV is to tech as Wall St is to finance and that's not going to change for
either of these places anytime soon. A key advantage of SV for me has been
great career mobility while being able to set down roots. I've been able to
push my career forward by working at different industry leading companies
without having to move. This allows my family life to be really stable which
is the most important thing to me. I really believe I probably could not have
a acheived that anywhere else.

~~~
muzz
Exactly, yet for some reason we never see articles about finance leaving Wall
St in search of lower costs, or entertainment leaving Hollywood, etc.

~~~
telotortium
Has the American auto industry moved out of Detroit?

A more accurate way of stating your point is to say these industries haven't
moved their headquarters en masse out of those cities. Lots of financial firms
in New York have moved their back office operations to New Jersey, and there
are probably a fair number of firms in NJ too, to say nothing of the other
locations where they run their more quotidian operations. A lot of firms have
also moved to Midtown, since the original reason firms were based in Wall
Street was due to the need to minimize the time needed to trade in person.
Similarly , it's old news by now that Hollywood has taken advantage of tax
credits in many states as well as Canada to film and even do production for
many movies outside of the Los Angeles area. Even in Silicon Valley, lots of
the old-school hardware, networking, and enterprise software companies have
moved many of their operations to cheaper areas once profit margins fell. If
Google and Facebook start seeing margins fall significantly, they can do the
same. The strength of tech in Silicon Valley is dependent on a continued
supply of high-margin businesses. Even if tech loses its luster, many
companies will continue to be headquartered in Silicon Valley, simply because
few new tech companies will be founded at all. They'll probably move most of
their operations to other areas though.

~~~
RhodesianHunter
You're already seeing this with FB and Google leasing several floors in
downtown Austin and Oracle building out a campus on the east side.

~~~
muzz
Yes these are the non-critical back office operations, not the core business
and innovation.

------
kilroy123
I couldn't be more happy working remote and living abroad now. I have zero
desire to go to the bay area. I earn as much as I would back there. But I live
in a WAY cheaper city.

~~~
bruxis
How did you find that opportunity?

~~~
kilroy123
I found a remote job back in the US. Then I moved abroad.

------
gorkemyurt
What people seem to miss when they project about Silicon Valley's future is
that how existing tech monopolies are becoming increasingly profitable.
Amazon, Facebook, Google, Microsoft and Netflix are all literally killing it!
If you want to grow your career in any of these big tech companies you have to
be in the Bay Area (Seattle for Microsoft or Amazon depending on what part of
the company).

~~~
somethingsimple
You can work for Google and Facebook in Seattle too, and they keep expanding.

~~~
enra
I think the commenter meant that while you can work at those companies in many
places, if you want to be on the major projects and advance your career, you
will have to be in the Bay Area. Google even has a fairly large office in SF,
but usually people can't work on major projects there. You have to be at the
HQ

~~~
boulos
As a happy resident in the San Francisco office, this is not quite true. To
wit, there are major Cloud products in San Francisco, as well as Chrome,
Android, and now a small VR presence. Also, Compute Engine started in, and
mostly still remains fully based in, Seattle (the waterside Fremont office).
Folks in the non-Mountain View offices may grumble about visibility,
promotions, etc. but if you're just looking to work on something interesting
in Google San Francisco (or Seattle, New York, etc.) they certainly exist.

------
pmorici
I love visiting the bay area and there there is no disputing there are a lot
of engineering jobs there and probably always will be but for a lot of people
the cost of living and in particular housing makes working there a raw deal.
It really only makes sense if you are just out of school and can move up the
ranks quickly or if you have notoriety and can command salary over $200k per
year. For the average mid to late career engineer who is going to get an offer
in the $130k - $150k range it doesn't make financial sense.

~~~
argonaut
You need to adjust your numbers. Fresh grads at Google/Facebook make >160k per
year, total compensation.

~~~
pmorici
No doubt that is the upper end of the market though.

~~~
argonaut
_Fresh grads._ Entry-level SWE.

------
eva1984
My thought exactly.Silicon Valley is still top spots for tech hunter, but it
is not irreplaceable.

As to the startup thing. The tech bubble hasn't burst, yet. But valuation of
startups, big or small, are already taking hits, which means a large chuck of
employees' potential salary have evaporated. I would predict that startups are
going to have a hard time attracting the best talents out there, on the other
hand, they might retreat their appetite for expansion since the growth is
slowing.

------
dkarapetyan
Wait, since when have technology workers thought that Silicon Valley was
lustrous? The media certainly paints things that way but anyone on the ground
floor knows it is anything but. Legacy technology stacks, a revolving door of
programmers and managers, incoherent product roadmaps, long hours, shady
backroom no-poaching deals, etc.

I mean what sane person thinks any of that is good?

~~~
engizeer
Any sane person that uses CircleCI thinks its good.

------
swsieber
With what demographic? They mention ages, but I can think of other things as
well.

Maybe its because I have a good job that affords me some freedom, but as a
married man soon welcoming a baby, Silicon Valley holds no appeal for me - but
then again, tech isn't my life, it's only a portion.

Factors in that statement include cost of living and commute times - both low
for me in the Utah Valley.

It probably really does matter that I hate commuting and I'd like a yard.

~~~
dgacmu
I've spent the last 10 months living in SV under similar circumstances. (one
kid, preschool age). Working at Google has been absolutely fantastic. Amazing
company and colleagues. Living in SV... Kinda ugh. I'm looking forward to
getting back to Pittsburgh. But Salt Lake would do too. :)

~~~
Hydraulix989
I grew up in Pittsburgh. I'm looking forward to getting back there as well.
Maybe you can transfer to their Pittsburgh office? The city has gotten a lot
nicer over the past four or so years, it's incredible.

~~~
dgacmu
I'm returning to my day job in Pittsburgh in a month. Spent the year on
sabbatical. (And yes, it really has! I moved there a decade ago, and it just
keeps improving. )

------
ashwinaj
To each their own. When I read such articles I wonder what the motivation is?

Clearly the Bay area, whether you like it or not, is a phenomenal place which
has stayed at the top of the tech pyramid since it's inception as "Silicon
Valley". It's expensive, people work crazy hours, tech bubble, housing bubble,
traffic, bad infrastructure etc. But there's a reason why most major
technological developments happen here and not elsewhere.

I'm not advocating that this is a place that everyone would enjoy living, but
bashing it for it's negatives and completely ignoring the obvious positives,
is IMO disingenuous.

------
pducks32
I recently moved to the Bay from Chicago and work at a startup. I had always
dreamed about moving to SV and I love working for a startup and seeing
startups and famous tech companies emblazoned on buildings around me; but,
sometimes I feel like everything is dead. Like am I missing something in the
south bay? It seems like not much is happening. Maybe I'm just not used to
suburban living but it doesn't feel like the buzzing place I imagined.

------
superdupermanhe
Most of these tech companies are derivative, there are only a few that are
truly innovative that actually results in productivity gains. Most of these
derivative tech companies look for incremental improvements for some minor
gain in efficiency or effectiveness for the frivolous chase of increasing
their total equity value with an entire industry that supports and feeds off
this drivel.

------
20years
I think a lot of mid-level to senior-level developers are starting to realize
you can net a lot more and have a better quality of life outside of the bay
area.

The low interest in working for startups is also telling imo. Could that be
because there isn't a lot of exciting startups currently or is it that
developers are looking for more stability?

------
freestockoption
I feel if you haven't figured out where "home" is, you would be a lot more
open to the idea of moving. But as soon as you add family to the mix, "home"
becomes more defined.

When you're younger, you switch jobs a lot more often to figure out what you
want to do and to try something new. I wouldn't be surprised if that extended
into moving more often. E.g. I want to try city living, then suburb living,
etc.

Funny thing about the Bay Area, though, is that it can get hard to move around
because if you've lived here for more than a couple years, you are now renting
or owning a place so cheap (in comparison to market prices) that you can't
justify moving.

------
mathattack
Silicon Valley is great for growing tech. If you want stability, may as well
work for a large tech company somewhere cheaper. (Though IBM has proven than
stability is illusory) It's also getting to be very expensive for "2 people in
a garage". Where Silicon Valley excels is hyper growth.

Try scaling to 100+ engineers in Pittsburgh or Chicago. Try meeting VCs daily
I between Series B and C. It's harder everywhere else than in Silicon Valley.

The area also has an energy that comes from high energy educated transplants
that is hard to replicate. I've seen it in New York but not as much elsewhere
in the US.

------
beatpanda
I've always wanted to live in the Bay Area, I moved here without any plans to
work in tech, and only ended up doing it because it's the best deal being
offered.

If you live here and you're anywhere in this thread complaining about how it's
overrated and you hate having to be here for work, please, get out. Now. My
friends and neighbors are struggling to be in this place for lots of reasons
you're oblivious to, precisely because there are so many people who actually
hate it here but feel they have to be here for work.

You're not doing yourself or anyone else any favors by staying here. Move.
Please.

------
mshenfield
The survey findings have to be taken with a grain of salt - one year of data
from one site, and no mention of trying to find a representative sample.

------
bane
San Francisco is beautiful except for the city.

More seriously, I've half-thought about moving to the West Coast from the East
Coast a number of times. For jobs, the Bay Area takes the cake...but for
remote work, there's other places along the coast that aren't cities and are
delightfully pleasant -- nobody ever seems to talk about Monterrey for
example.

------
curiouscat321
For those of you in Seattle, what are your thoughts on the Seattle Freeze?

~~~
RickS
Smallest possible data point, but here:

I'm moving to Seattle in 2 weeks and was recently there for a few days
interviewing and whatnot. I read extensively about the Seattle Freeze and
nonetheless tried to strike up conversations every chance I could.

Everyone was awesome. Every single person. Had a great uberpool where the two
people I was riding with told me about neighborhoods, then had the same convo
with the driver when they got out. Ate lunch with a waitress who, because it
was so slow, hung around for a long time giving me her take on the city as
somebody that'd been there for a bunch of years. Various other people (hotel
clerks, etc) were all great.

I know that's somewhat different than breaking into friend groups long-term,
which is where I think the freeze might really lurk, but in the short term it
seems any kind of freeze can be overcome by east coast peppyness. And I'm not
an extrovert by any stretch, just a "how do you like seattle" is enough to get
the ball rolling every time.

For me, the freeze is a complete non-fear in moving. Far more scary to me is
that downtown seattle is so blindingly obviously sick with the same ails as
SF, just 3 - 5 years earlier. The city is building much more aggressively than
SF, which is great, but I hope they learn from our mistakes here in the bay
and invest 3x more than they think they need to in mental health and shelter
facilities, or their already nationally known homeless problem is going to
catalyze.

------
cloudjacker
a) San Francisco would look like Detroit if it wasn't for the tech industry.
Still is the peninsula's largest camping ground.

b) The idea that "tech" is the pinnacle of social status and the industry to
disdain over inequality is laughable at best, even if it is true in that area.
Being "in tech" flies so far under the radar in New York City and people in
that industry earn the same amounts as in SF.

c) The infrastructure in Silicon Valley is laughable. Many startups trying to
"change the world" look at the world through a lens of what doesn't function
well in Silicon Valley. When the rest of the world, or the addressable market,
already has an adequate solution to a problem the Stanford Grad and their Sand
Hill neighbors thinks exists. (Random example: Many gas stations on the
peninsula don't take credit cards, for reference. Cellular internet speeds on
Verizon, T-Mobile, At&t, and Google Fi are pretty slow, startups are still
working on clever WIFI solutions not realizing that the rest of the country
has cellular data faster than Silicon Valley's wifi)

~~~
bbcbasic
Yes I get about 10mbyte/s on 4g ;-). Sometimes use it in preference to wired
internet

------
adomanico
As someone who loves living in SF, this is a promising trend!

------
superdupermanhe
f

------
somenomadicguy
I spent 15 years in the bay area, and finally burned out on it and moved
abroad for a happier, less stressful life. My experience with the complaints
of the bay differ a lot, primarily because of a difference of interests.

Dating is actually pretty wonderful in the bay area, with a few caveats:

1\. For the most part, you must develop a non-aspy style of communication.
Understanding how to read body language, knowing when to ask questions/follow-
up questions, being an honest, authentic listener.

2\. Have interests outside of work. It's great that you love your job, but if
that's all you have, a partner will have doubts that you have room for them in
your life. It shows both a lack of well-roundedness, and in the case of the
start-up obsessed, a hyperfocus on money. Many techies also come off quite
arrogant, failing to value non-engineering talents and methods of thinking.

3\. Find your sub-culture. My love-life/dating life was always very
successful, but that's because I had specific demographics based on common
interests and activities. Mine were (I use past-tense as I'm quite happily
married and in love to a woman I met after moving abroad) music
(punk/ska/folk/world). I didn't just listen, but became part of the music
scene, met everybody within it, helped promote shows, chipped in on
kickstarter projects. This helped my geekiness move away from my own hyper-
interest in pointless start-ups, and lose my interest in financial success,
finding expression to be infinitely more satisfying.

4\. Also, kink. The bay area has the best recreational sex scene in the world.
If you're sexually intelligent, seduction and love will follow.

5\. Leave the bay area. I'm not saying hop in the SUV and go crush some sweet
slopes. Just leave. The next time you quit your job, stick your thumb-out and
hitchhike around the world, or at least fly/bus/train there. The bay area is
beautiful, but it's really small and myopic. I noticed on OKCupid that the
women I was interested in were very passionate about music, literature, dance,
and travel, so I decided to explore these and found myself incredible excited
by them. I decided to forgo tropical/mountain vacations instead to explore the
world, because national geographic just wasn't enough.

\---

Still, love and sex weren't enough. I loved San Francisco for the first 6
years, then moved to Oakland, where I should have been all along, for the next
6, after certain traumatic life events made me care more about myself than my
career, and found myself wanting to live more and work less. It didn't last
long, because before I knew it, techies turned into brogrammers, and I had to
listen to them speak about VC and apps all of the time. The final straw was
when a semi-well-known east-coast fratbro type messaged me on couchsurfing
asking if I wanted to be his wing-man. Later that day, a co-worker was
bragging to me about hiring a security firm to spray down homeless people who
dared sleep in front of his condo building. He was the kind of bro who liked
to make racial and homophobic statements under his breath when he was
frustrated with his work. Unprofessionally I rm -rf'd my laptop (nuking
several large projects which I had in flight), told HR where to send my last
paycheck, and told my boss where to stick it. I've been very happy ever since.

In the end, if your goal is greed, or you care about nothing else than work,
then the bay area is for you.

Everything else can be found in greener pasteurs.

------
fleitz
Some seriously bad analysis in the article

'About _half_ of millennial tech workers say it’s important (26.5%)'

~~~
pflats
Analysis generally suffers when you stop reading a third of the way into a
sentence.

'About half of millennial tech workers say it’s important (26.5%) or very
important (19%), but the number declined to 10.2% among the Boomer
generation.'

~~~
nostrademons
Still doesn't support the title. If something is popular among the younger
crowd but unpopular among older people, it usually indicates that it's
_gaining_ luster.

A better title might be "Experienced tech workers looking outside of the
Valley for next opportunity."

~~~
yladiz
What do you mean by, "If something is popular among the younger crowd but
unpopular among older people, it usually indicates that it's gaining luster?"

~~~
nostrademons
Young people are often early indicators for where the trends are going next.
This is because of two main reasons:

1.) Young people now become old people later. The whole population ages, so
(as long as young people keep adopting a technology/belief/product/location)
the demographics of the population later will naturally reflect the
demographics of the youth population now.

2.) Young people tend to be less set in their ways than older people. People
build a mental model of reality as they become adults, which usually reflects
reality as it existed in their late teens and 20s. When the world changes,
young people have no investment in the old world, and so they make choices
based on how it exists now rather than how a few new facts fit into their
existing mental model.

Note that I'm arguing for the general principle of "young people today become
most people tomorrow." On the specific question of "Are tech workers leaving
Silicon Valley?" \- I can see the other side's point. I'm 35, many of my
friends are thinking of leaving, and I have that discussion regularly with my
wife.

But I think that's actually not the trend, but it's a reflection of another
dynamic: Silicon Valley is a pyramid scheme. It's an example of tournament
economics: a small number of people get fabulously wealthy, and the majority
work their butt off for relatively average returns. I knew this when I came
here (there were 40-something Silicon Valley residents on HN even in 2008
:-)), and I've done reasonably well in the tournament, but the consequence is
that everyone who doesn't win eventually leaves, to be replaced by fresh blood
willing to try their hand.

(On a meta-point, I think this is actually a good example of the youth trends
today becoming the new normal tomorrow. I think the whole rest of the world is
_also_ turning into tournament economics, and it's just less obvious outside
of Silicon Valley and the developing world. Millenials know this - they have
no expectation of employer loyalty or that anyone besides themselves will
advocate for their career - but it's a very foreign and repugnant mental model
for many baby boomers.)

~~~
untog
I disagree, I think it's a reflection of young people having different
priorities to older ones. As you age you start caring about having space for
children, good schools, etc etc. Life priorities change, and that's nothing
new.

I remember laughing when I read an article stating that famously car-rejecting
millennials have started buying cars. Yeah, no shit, they're having kids and
moving to the suburbs.

