
Urban Area Cost-Of-Living as Big Tech Moats and Employee Golden Handcuffs - unimpressive
https://www.reddit.com/r/gwern/comments/9w0yg9/urban_area_costofliving_as_big_tech_moats/
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kartan
> As absurdly high as their salaries become, the cost of living drains it
> away,

This is how it works. The more money people have the more business will charge
you. Real state is the one getting the biggest part as you cannot get more
land that the one that already is.

Now stop a moment and think about all that people that is NOT part of Tech.
That people that has normal salaries but live, or used to live, in that area.

Social democracy, where the well-being of citizens is as important as the
business needs is the way forward. Better public transportation allows people
to live farther away but do not wast more time on commuting. Social housing
helps the people that cannot afford to pay the rent but is needed to run
services, local business, etc.

Citizens should be plan for the citizens not just for Big Tech or the next Big
Whatever.

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meredydd
This narrative resonates personally with me. We bootstrapped Anvil in
Cambridge (UK), and one of the most common reactions to a demo is "wow, this
is actually a real platform, deep enough to have answers to my follow-on
questions". (Which is...kinda important for a programming tool.) Ironically,
this response often comes from Bay Area-based startups with incredibly limited
time/resources to produce a prototype, despite objectively huge amounts of
"seed" or "pre-seed" funding - because prevailing salaries and cost of living
make staying alive long enough to build it, let alone recruiting another
engineer, a real stretch.

No way would we have been able to build anything nearly so complete if we'd
had an SFBA cost-of-living clock ticking behind us.

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sjg007
It use to be what about Microsoft. Now people ask what about
Google/Facebook/Apple etc... Same story. If you get big enough and have
traction there's enough VC money to float you. The larger structural question
is that companies don't IPO for like 10+ years... now that's a real problem.

