
Seattle, the New Center of a Tech Boom - peterkchen
http://mobile.nytimes.com/blogs/bits/2014/06/11/seattle-the-new-center-of-a-tech-boom/
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quotient
I'm getting so tired of every city claiming a Tech Boom, headlines like "[City
X] is the next Silicon Valley", etc. All these articles are isomorphic ("here,
check out this bunch of hip, trendy developers with an app that you haven't
even heard of who live in our city"). This is insufferable. Here is a short
list of cities on which I have read articles in the past 6 months claiming
that they are the next Silicon Valley or something to that effect:

-NYC

-Berlin

-Ljubljana

-Chicago

-Detroit

-San Diego

-LA

-Toronto

-Dubai

-Tel Aviv

-Nairobi

...

This isn't news. Yes, believe it or not, most cities with a few hundred
thousand people in them have a tech scene! (Especially the ones with a
University housing a major CS department --- like Seattle!) Yes, it is 2014
--- the tech scene is mostly booming wherever you look, especially on a
sufficiently long-term perspective. Really, articles of this sort are usually
just self-serving advertisement for the city in question.

The truth is, of course, that the tech scene in most of these cities is _not
really_ booming in the sense of the word. Developing strongly is often a
better way to put it, and the growth rate is often non-linear (probably more
toward the logarithmic side of things) because founders of successful
companies have a tendency to move to the Bay Area.

~~~
ghc
And then there's poor, neglected Boston. No media coverage about being the
next SV. No Silicon derived nicknames (instead there's Rt. 128, Kendall
Square, and Fort Point). Sometimes, thanks to the lack of media coverage,
Boston/Cambridge gets left off the list of tech scenes altogether, despite
having whole areas dominated by startups and the second largest amount of VC
after SF/SV.

I wonder if Boston is doomed to be a cautionary tale about what happens when a
culture of B2B startups (Digital, Wang, etc.) produces VCs who don't have
enough vision to fund companies like Facebook or TaskRabbit.

~~~
michaelochurch
Boston is a beautiful city with amazing seasons and probably the single
greatest concentration of smart people in the world. It's also, at least
historically, the spiritual capital of Lisp (thanks to MIT). All taken
together, I'm a huge fan of the place.

Unfortunately, my experience with Boston companies (I've interviewed with a
few, and had the misfortune of being reverse-acquired by one) is that they're
not progressive. One hiring manager told me (this was a couple years ago, I
think I was 27 or 28 at the time) that I was too old to be a programmer (wat?)
but too young to be a manager. Another tried to give me a position with
"junior" in the title-- this was in mid-2013, so I had 7 years of experience.
(I know that titles are bullshit, but if they're going to exist, I'll take an
inflated one rather than a deflated one.)

Boston is a beautiful, under-appreciated place. Its climate is ideal (cold,
snowy winters, perfect springs and falls, mild summers). I like the people a
lot. But I see a culture where there is too much deference to authority and
too little "fuck it, let's do it anyway". While the Valley is too youth-
obsessed and flighty and sociopathic, New England seems to take the other
extreme: too seniority-bound and stodgy and prone to following rules. The
ideal, for tech, is somewhere between the two.

~~~
kylequest
I'm curious if there's another Boston and New England :-) The Boston where I
lived 10+ years had a lousy weather where you can't survive without an air
conditioner during summers because it's so humid. Moving to Seattle/Redmond
was a good idea in more than one way :-)

Doing a startup in Boston is definitely no fun. That's true.

~~~
will_work4tears
Everybody has their own preferences and all but I don't personally consider

>(cold, snowy winters,

as an ideal climate. My Dad's side of my family is from Boston, so while I've
never lived there, I have been there from time to time (usually in the summer)
and they didn't seem that mild to me. Must like the Summers I was used to in
the Midwest (which is [just] one reason I left the Midwest).

~~~
kylequest
Even the snow isn't that great :-) You get really nice snow one day. It starts
melting the next day and the day after it gets really cold and everything
turns into ice. Not great conditions for snowboarding/skiing...

------
malandrew

        "Others note that Washington State has tougher noncompete 
        clauses in its labor laws than does California, which can 
        give established firms some peace of mind about setting up 
        shop in Seattle but frustrate venture capitalists by 
        making it harder for people to walk out of one company and 
        start a competitor."
    

That right there is enough to give any engineer pause about going to work for
a company in Seattle.

Anna-Lee Saxenian's work in the dated, but still relevant "Regional Advantage:
Culture and Competition in Silicon Valley and Route 128" goes into a fair
amount of detail how the non-compete environment on Route 128 ended up
undermining the Boston area relative to the Bay area.

99% of companies are simply not set up to allow success of new ideas related
to the core business, but not actually the core business. Non-competes
basically cause ideas to die because most companies are excellent at stifling
execution on non-core projects.

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mrfusion
Is the climate as bad as they say in Seattle? Would living (a few hours?) away
right on the pacific coast be an improvement in climate?

(By the way, what's the best way to compare climates in different US cities
all at once?)

~~~
bentcorner
> _Is the climate as bad as they say in Seattle?_

Seriously, it's really nice here. No mosquitos (I'm from central Canada), no
tornadoes, no hurricanes, no hail, no snow.

The "it always rains" thing is just a seattle meme.

I guess you could say that Seattle doesn't have distinctive weather character,
but that's not really a problem, or a bad thing.

~~~
peterwwillis
How about "you only see the sun for two weeks out of the year"? That's
arguably much more important since it tends to lead to depression in a lot of
people.

~~~
poulsbohemian
As a kid, it never bothered me. When I moved back as an adult though, it was
surprisingly bad - and for my Iowan wife, it was really hard. The trick is the
same one they use in Toronto in the middle of winter - plan a yearly trip
somewhere sunny! There's a reason so many people living in Seattle have
fractional timeshare ownerships in Hawaii.

------
mqsiuser
But what do we do about that...

... things turn out to be not well balanced (a fact... for whatever reason)

You can make millions in a guys only world in SV (doesn't the lack of private
life suck? The lack of a balanced ;) peer group?).

And on the other side (outside SV) startups just do not work out that well
(and in the long run likely bowing to SV). Now IT is an important future
industry... and it's creation is NOT well distributed.

Like the gold rush (which happened for some reason also in California)

------
doxcf434
If you're coming from SF and are used to the quality of the restaurants in a
foodie city, Seattle is mostly just presentation.

------
kylequest
Seattle has a potential, but it's not a boom until we see more VC/angel
activity, which is a good indicator.

It has a pretty good tech scene. Most startups are still consumer oriented
though, so Jared Wray, CTO from CenturyLink, is wrong :-)

------
wil421
The tech boom is everywhere. Some cities have more visibility but I think it's
going in some fashion in most major cities or metro areas.

------
donohoe
"Seattle Freeze" #neverforget

[http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Seattle_Freeze](http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Seattle_Freeze)

[http://qr.ae/sDfQ9](http://qr.ae/sDfQ9)

Its a real thing. All my friends in Seattle ended up being people who moved
there from somewhere else - like myself. I noticed this trend well before I
learned about the mythical term "Seattle freeze". Crazy world.

~~~
poulsbohemian
As a native Washingtonian, born and raised in the Puget Sound region, can I
suggest a theory? The Seattle Freeze was imported in the late 1980s as the
region gentrified. As we moved from a blue collar economy (logging, building
airplanes, etc) to a white collar economy (software, biotech), and especially
as we experienced significant population growth as transplants moved in
rapidly to be part of those new industries, _that_ was when the freeze set in.
Yes, there is a lot to be said for the nordic influence and the fact that
Seattle is isolated culturally from the rest of the country, but it was the
mass influx of cultural outsiders that generated the distrust at the root of
the freeze.

------
nickgrosvenor
Didn't I read about the Tech Boom in Los Angeles last week?

------
michaelochurch
Seattle can definitely do very well. It's one of the most beautiful places on
the planet, it has a lot of talent, and it's still relatively affordable.
Let's hope that, if it grows, it doesn't fuck everything up the way San
Francisco and its progress-hating NIMBYs did.

 _“The galactic players are here, and they are creating lots of little
companies. The only thing driving anyone away from here is the weather.”_

I'm surprised people are saying this. Seattle weather is gloomy by California
standards, but it's actually not that bad. If you're from the northeast, you
won't notice much of a difference, except for the winters being slightly
warmer and the summers being cooler. (Summer is actually a nice season, not a
humid hell, in Seattle.) Sure, it's cloudy a lot (55-60% in the summer, 80-85%
in the winter) and it rains, a little bit, most days. But heavy rain that
prevents you from doing things outside is very rare. If you're into running or
biking, you probably prefer 50- to 70-degree cloudy days anyway, which makes
Seattle ideal.

 _Others note that Washington State has tougher noncompete clauses in its
labor laws than does California, which can give established firms some peace
of mind about setting up shop in Seattle but frustrate venture capitalists by
making it harder for people to walk out of one company and start a
competitor._

This is something it will need to change. Whether you want non-competes and
employer-friendly ownership laws over side projects depends on whether you're
courting hedge funds or tech. (Hedge funds are more of a meritocracy than VC,
which means that it's easier for a guy with no connections to run with a
proven idea and get a hedge fund.) If you're going for the hedge funds, keep
the non-competes in play. If you want tech, then eschew non-competes and give
the benefit of the doubt, on ownership, to the employee. (California gets this
right in a major way.) However, the hedge funds don't want to be in Seattle,
because it's not near any of the major exchanges. Tech loves Seattle. So
Seattle should play for tech and kill the non-competes, because the hedge
funds aren't about to move there no matter what it does.

I'll say one thing, based on very limited data. Seattle's an amazing,
beautiful city and, unconstrained, would be one of the top places I'd choose
to live. What has concerned me is (based on _very_ limited data; it could be
that I just talked to crappy companies) that the creeping non-progressivism of
technology employers (back-channel references, aversion to people with "too
many" jobs, closed allocation) seems to be meeting less resistance there than
I'd like. The sense I got from a recruiter (who may be completely biased) is
that workers don't fight back hard enough to have nice things. I said to him,
"I'm in my 30s now and only want to work on interesting projects, because I'm
old enough to know that I will die someday." He said that if I said something
that direct in an interview, that alone would sink me. (In New York, people
are more accepting of directness. That a smart person will bolt if given
boring work is a given. I like that.) Of course, that can change in a matter
of months. Seattle has an incredible number of smart people, and a beautiful
environment, and I think anything's possible there. But (if I'm right that
Seattle's scene is more conservative and corporate) it's something that will
have to evolve if it wants a leading tech scene.

~~~
Dewie
> It's one of the most beautiful places on the planet,

When people say this, do they literally mean _one of the most beautiful places
on Earth_ , or do they really mean _really beautiful_? This might be an obtuse
question, but the literal interpretation of it feels a bit... well.

~~~
potatolicious
Both? IMO the old-growth forests of the Pacific Northwest (which, granted, is
much larger than just Seattle) is the sort of sight/sound/smell one should
experience in their lifetime.

Having lived in dry, brown California, and now in concrete jungle Manhattan, a
hike in the hills of the PNW sounds positively divine right now.

~~~
Dewie
Such arrogance

------
dschiptsov
What Tech Boom?

