
How Silicon Valley's Tech Reign Will End - jseliger
http://www.theatlantic.com/business/archive/2013/06/how-silicon-valleys-tech-reign-will-end/277352/
======
sabbatic13
This fluff piece doesn't quite make sense. The tech sector is and has been for
some time spread across most areas of the greater Bay Area. While nothing
North of Menlo Park or in Alameda county is part of the "Silicon Valley," the
latter is just a PR term. Tech companies are densest from SF down to San Jose.
"Silicon Valley" is neither a distinct geographical nor an economic unit.

There are some "sociological" differences across areas in that range with
respect to the types of the companies and types of employees. Ignoring those
trends to cause staffing problems, e.g. building a new consumer web company in
South is rather hard, while trying to start a new semiconductor company in SF
would be challenging to say the least. Many people immigrate here without
understanding that, and problems ensue.

The "San Francisco Bay Area" is a large and diverse region with a population
of roughly 6 million. About 10% of those people are directly involved at tech
companies, and about 5% are the hard-to-find developers, product managers,
testers, etc. Sadly this one minority sector of the economic absolutely
dominates most sub-regions here, and it's economic power is so much greater
than all the other people together, that a host of problems arise.

The presence of the bay and the surrounding hills also kinds of screws things
up. Space is limited, and travel between certain areas can be time-consuming.
If you consider that roughly 1/3 of the people currently residing in the Bay
Area currently are not from here originally, then throw in the vast economic
changes tech caused over the last 30 years, you can start to appreciate that
maybe long-term planning for the present state wasn't quite manageable.

In any event, the rhetoric about "sovereignty" and its similes is always self-
serving and posturing. Decentralization of tech, or the decentralization of
L.A.'s entertainment industry for that matter, would be a boon to everyone.
Only self-important people who want to believe that their region or state or
country or village is the center of the freaking universe fail to accept that.
It would be better for everyone if the Bay Area were simply one of a set of 20
or so equally large and vibrant centers of tech.

~~~
muzz
Yes, it reads like it could have been a press release for Bruce Katz's new
book.

------
bhauer
I apologize for this low-value comment, but I got hung up on "most smartest."
I suppose it won't be long before that is considered acceptable.

~~~
mtp0101
Yeah, I did too. I wanted to leave a comment along the lines of "Most
smartest? I thought this was the Atlantic..."

------
steven777400
It seems that the ever-improving remote collaboration capabilities should
enable tech employees to spread out of these isolated, high-rent silos and
base themselves where-ever is convenient.

If I wanted to live in Ohio on a farm and work at Google or Facebook or some
startup, why should that be a problem? Assuming a fast and reliable internet
link (a big assumption for some areas, I understand), combined with video
chat, real-time document tools, and even those new remote-worker collaboration
robots (I forget what they are called), it seems like the benefit outweighs
the cost in almost every way.

I understand that founders need to network with VCs and Angels, and so that
drives centralized locations, but even so, if I had a good pitch, why couldn't
I just travel to meet them and then return to base my startup in Ohio (or
wherever), hiring top tech workers remotely, be they in the vallery, SF, NY,
or the Yukon Territory (again, that thing about the internet connection...)

~~~
mtp0101
1\. The VCs don't want to drive to Ohio when something comes up 2\. It's
important for teams to be physically together to facilitate better
communication and forge a sense of community and solidarity. Without actually
knowing their coworkers and managers, your employees may not develop loyalty
to your company and are unable to benefit from workplace social life.

------
muzz
It is very misleading, if not downright dishonest, to claim that Silicon
Valley cities "aren't having a construction "boom," when actual construction
tells us otherwise.

[http://www.mercurynews.com/business/ci_21274644/rents-
rise-s...](http://www.mercurynews.com/business/ci_21274644/rents-rise-so-does-
silicon-valley-apartment-construction)

[http://sanfrancisco.cbslocal.com/video/8986205-construction-...](http://sanfrancisco.cbslocal.com/video/8986205-construction-
workers-in-demand-amid-silicon-valley-building-boom/)

------
mtp0101
The article title is kind of misleading. When I see "Silicon Valley" in a
headline, I interpret it as metonymy. So I thought the article was predicting
the doom of the internet startup industry, not the valley as a hot location
for startups. Such a "so what?" article.

