
Silicon Valley job seekers are increasingly looking for work elsewhere - Futurebot
http://blog.indeed.com/2017/04/03/silicon-valley-tech-job-migration/
======
ivraatiems
I interviewed out in San Francisco right out of college, and was struck by how
strongly I did not want to move there. The primary drivers were cost -
unsurprising - but also attitude. I don't buy into a lot of the SV culture, I
don't find it encouraging, and I wasn't really willing to tolerate it just to
work for a slightly cooler or higher-paying company than the ones I could find
in the Midwest.

I guess I can't blame SV for that - I am just clearly not a fit for it - but I
can't help but wonder whether there are people out there now who are more like
me than they realize, and might be happier elsewehere (or would go elsewhere
if they reasonably thought they could).

~~~
lsc
San Francisco is not silicon valley.

Culturally, silicon valley is dramatically different from San Francisco;
almost everyone who has experienced both has a strong opinion about which one
they prefer.

~~~
delecti
As far as I can tell, SF is _in_ SV. To someone who has never been/worked
there, everything I've read makes it seem like "Silicon Valley" is often used
interchangeably with the Bay Area in general (though Wikipedia seems to
specify that SV refers to the southern bay area in particular).

~~~
rst
Geographically, Silicon Valley is about an hour south of San Francisco proper
on highways, depending on traffic. The concentration of tech startups there
was seeded by Stanford University (in Palo Alto), and by a lot of defense
contractors who had facilities in the area. Many workers commuted from San
Francisco because they preferred to live in the city (most of the Valley is
very bland suburbia); companies started actually locating in the city maybe
ten or fifteen years ago.

~~~
mirsadm
That was the most surprising thing for me when I went to check out the Silicon
Valley area a couple of years ago. I have no idea why so many people choose to
work there. It looks like suburbia mixed in with a bit of industrial
wasteland. I really enjoyed San Francisco but the commute must be hell every
morning if you choose to live there.

~~~
nostrademons
You choose to work in SV because you get a job at a SV company doing things
that you're interested in, or you're accepted at Stanford. That's basically
it. The first wave of migrants came for transistors
(Shockley/Fairchild/Intel), ballistic missiles (Lockheed), or nuclear weapons
(Lawrence Livermore). The next wave came for personal computers (Apple etc.),
workstations (SGI, Sun, Xerox PARC, Western Digital), databases (Postgres,
Oracle), or networking (Cisco). The wave after that was all Internet, and then
mobile, and now it's started to branch out again.

If you're not working on something that is currently hot in Silicon Valley,
there is little reason to be here. It's not like Portland, where you decide
that you want to live there first and then decide what you'll do for a living.
But if you _do_ want to work in one of those hot sectors, there really is no
place to do so other than Silicon Valley; nowhere else do you get the same
combination of talent, capital, experience, open-mindedness, and risk-taking.

It doesn't surprise me that people are moving out (even beyond personal
experience, where basically all of my friends have remarked that they're
considering moving to Colorado, or Seattle, or Portland, or North Carolina,
and my wife & I are considering it too). We're at the end of a technology
cycle, so nobody really knows what the next one will be or if it's something
that'll interest them. But there are _a lot_ of fascinating things going on
with drones, robotics, self-driving cars, AI, satellites, and hardware, so if
any of them seem interesting, Silicon Valley might be a good place to check
out.

~~~
Apocryphon
Are you considering RTP in North Carolina? How's the software scene in NC?

~~~
nostrademons
Friend of mine is considering the Asheville area - she wants a more rural
setting, and Asheville is a liberal outpost in the middle of what would
otherwise be very conservative country. She's thinking of getting out of
software entirely and becoming a teacher, so the tech scene is irrelevant.

I've considered the RTP area and idly talked it over with my wife. The big
plus is that we could buy a gigantic house on 5 acres of land free-and-clear,
with no mortgage. My brother-in-law's family also lives there, and my mom is
up in New England, so family reunions would become simpler. The big minus is
that I think the work culture in NC is a bit more conservative than I've
gotten used to in the Bay Area; I doubt that they'd appreciate me rolling into
work at 2 PM, or trying out new programming languages, or openly challenging
my VP on product strategy. Plus, my wife works in philanthropy and there are
fewer rich people with money to manage there. So it'd really only be an option
once we cash out & retire.

~~~
madcaptenor
Have you considered Atlanta? It would at least get you closer to family. And
we've got rich people. (We also have poor people.)

------
11thEarlOfMar
Couldn't dig up more recent data[0], but tech job growth in absolute numbers,
from 2014 -> 2015:

San Francisco: +21% 59,600 -> 72,200

Silicon Valley: +7.2% 229,200 -> 245,800

Oakland/East-Bay: +11.8% 50,600 ->56,600

SF Mid-Peninsula: +5.0% 45,600 -> 47,900

Boston: +3.1% 149,700 -> 156,000

Austin: +7.8% 74,400 -> 80,200

[0] page 4: [http://www.us.jll.com/united-states/en-us/Research/US-
Tech-E...](http://www.us.jll.com/united-states/en-us/Research/US-Tech-
Employment-Trends-2016-JLL.pdf)

Edit: Added Mid-Peninsula and East Bay to complete SF Bay Area. Total Bay Area
Tech Jobs in 2015: 444,500

Edit 2: Corrected typo, as pointed out, my bad. SF 72,200

~~~
kyleschiller
Thanks for the hard data.

I'm a bit confused because the study counts SF, Silicon Valley and SF Mid-
Peninsula without defining them well, and there's no mention of South Bay at
all, unless that's what they're referring to as SV.

EDIT: It doesn't seem like SV is being used as an aggregate term, since
there's more absolute growth happening in SF and SF Mid-Peninsula than in SV.

EDIT2: Unless I'm terrible at reading charts and tables, it looks a lot like
San Francisco hit 72,205 in 2015, not 76,200.

~~~
11thEarlOfMar
Typo on my part, thanks for pointing it out, corrected.

------
rdl
I'm still a big fan of "work in Silicon Valley for 1-4 years, once", but there
isn't a day I wake up in the Seattle area not happy to have moved.

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sulam
This should be retitled "Silicon Valley job seekers are increasingly willing
to consider working elsewhere."

There is no data in this post about where people actually end up working.
Given job growth in the major tech hubs, it is implausible and/or
mathematically unlikely that SF is no longer as attractive to job seekers as
places like Austin. Nothing against Austin, but the tech industry there is
still an order of magnitude smaller than SF, and the gap is not shrinking.

------
horsecaptin
Some reasons why you may want to move out of San Francisco:

\- You want to live around real people and not around people who talk to
computers all day, while making up stories about real people in their mind.

\- You don't think that waiting for an hour to get into a restaurant is a good
way to spend your one hour off work.

\- You want a yard.

\- You're tired of people constantly being offended by everything.

\- You like commitment and people who can make up their mind.

~~~
MegaButts
\- You're tired of people constantly being offended by everything.

\- You like commitment and people who can make up their mind.

I hear these a lot, but this hasn't been my experience at all. The people I
meet are rarely offended and don't flake out on me.

~~~
maerF0x0
Anecdata: I've noticed both of these pervasively across circles of people I've
met. My guess is that for 1) There is a strong group think culture here that
expects everyone to conform to their definition of "normal" and if you dont,
then you'll get shamed and 2) Most people dont notice how flakey/late they are
because most people are flakey and late and just assume they're "normal". But
for those of us who are comitted and on time, its mind boggling and drives one
mad.

~~~
MegaButts
Regarding 1, I guess that is true about politics. Regarding 2, I just don't
see it except for a few asshat VC's I've only dealt with once (after the first
meeting I had no interest in working with them).

------
jacques_chester
What I tell folk about NYC is that unlike SF, we techies can't be blamed for
ruining the city.

Finance folk got in first and have ruined New York about a dozen times at this
point. There's relatively little left to ruin.

~~~
JimboOmega
How does one measure the ruination of a city? Or know if it is ruined?

~~~
bunderbunder
This seems semi-related:

[http://journal.burningman.org/2016/10/philosophical-
center/t...](http://journal.burningman.org/2016/10/philosophical-
center/tenprinciples/a-brief-history-of-who-ruined-burning-man/)

------
BadassFractal
Hard to ask someone to sell their house, move their employed spouse and
children to the most expensive patch of land in the country and also hire-
fast-fire-fast. Seems like moving to the Bay optimizes for people with no
relationships or dependents, generally keeping the age range pretty low. Not
saying it should change, SV can't be everything for everybody, but that's the
current state.

~~~
Apocryphon
SV might fire fast, but it doesn't seem to hire fast.

------
Apocryphon
Having visited Austin, I almost feel like a huge amount of the population is
made of transplants, whether tech or not. Plenty of UT students, as well. That
could explain lack of outbound searches, since many of the techies only
recently moved to there.

~~~
donretag
That is true of almost anywhere. In the US, overseas, big cities, small
cities. At least in the US, the current migration pattern is back toward
cities, after the move to the suburbs of the past couple of generations.

~~~
Spooky23
That's 100% nonsense. Some urban cores are seeing gentrification. Inner
suburbs are going ghetto, and people with kids are moving further out.

Until you start hearing about urban schools doing great, anything you hear
about the resurgence of the city is due to your personal overexposure to dink
couples and gay people without families.

~~~
DiNovi
this is extremely wrong. I watched the city I grew up rapidly gentrify, and I
have seen my new city(nyc) rapidly gentrify over the past decade. I think your
opinion is due to personal underexposure and perhaps some bias toward urban
lifestyles.

~~~
Spooky23
Actually, I live in the middle of my city. I grew up in NYC and a rural town
and settled in a mid sized city.

The pattern is pretty clear, people stick around until kindergarten or middle
school. At that point, 50% leave, 25% catholic school, 25% stick around.

------
dmode
I don't know anyone in the Bay Area that uses Indeed for Job Search. So this
survey may be a little skewed

~~~
ap3
What do you/they use?

~~~
dmode
LinkedIn, Glassdoor, AngelList, HN, referrals, recruiters, Hired etc

~~~
dmode
Also, companies like Google, Apple, Facebook have thousands of job openings
which mostly can be found only in their career pages

------
rattray
Perhaps worth noting that Indeed is based in Austin and may have a bias.

------
tryitnow
What's really interesting is comparing the outbound job search percentages of
various cities. I'm surprised SF/SJ were at 44% versus only 2% for NYC and
Seattle.

I have no idea how real estate can maintain its value, clearly a lot of people
are considering moving.

BTW, The data in this article could have been presented a lot more
effectively.

------
rattray
There may be a skew in the data on the pure basis of "who's using Indeed for
their job hunt".

For example – it's not a popular job-search platform amongst SF startups, as
far as I'm aware.

(I personally still buy the overall conclusion, fwiw).

------
esturk
I'm actually looking forward to the day when the outflux of workers balances
out the influx. As it is right now, influx > outflux, so the population in SV
is still growing which actually contributes to the housing crisis. Because the
difference, or the growth of population is greater than the growth of housing.
Influx - Outflux > Housing Growth.

Once outflux > influx, we might actually see some sanity to housing prices.

~~~
JimboOmega
Or, you know, we could build housing... maybe at a rate comparable to the rate
we build office space?

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calvinbhai
Could this also be because a huge %age of these job seekers are high skilled
immigrants and they are unable to secure work visas in time?

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Apocryphon
Also, has anyone noticed that the HN "Who is hiring?" threads are
predominantly from outside of SV, these days?

~~~
mylons
i just looked yesterday at the whoishiring thread and SF still had the most
jobs for any particular city. do you have any hard data to back up your claim?

~~~
Apocryphon
No, it just seemed to be that there used to be more SF companies in threads I
saw from months or a year ago.

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jeffbush
This reminds me of the old Yogi Berra quip "Nobody goes there anymore, it's
too crowded."

------
maerF0x0
Ive noticed since moving to SF that it seems that complaining about the city
is one of the city's favorite pastimes.

