

In Los Angeles Coders Are Too Scared To Take Risks - barce
http://www.codebelay.com/blog/2011/07/17/in-la-coders-are-scared-to-take-risks/

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nhashem
As an LA resident engineer myself, my theory (backed by an extensive amount of
no facts whatsoever), is that engineers are more likely to "end up" in LA than
to deliberately move there.

Almost every coworker I have had is in LA because they needed to move closer
to family due to illness, they moved there because their girlfriend/wife is in
some grad school program at UCLA, their girlfriend/wife is trying the
acting/performing thing for awhile, etc. Engineers in situations like those
don't have much flexibility in taking much under market rates and basic perks
(namely health insurance).

Also, as Paul Graham said in one of his essays, Los Angeles' identity is "you
should be famous," and unfortunately, software engineering isn't known for
breeding famous people outside of our TechCrunch echo chamber. In the Bay
Area, founding a successful startup makes you a rock star. In Los Angeles,
just about the only thing you can do to be a rock star is to be a rock star.

~~~
bengl3rt
Interesting that you should mention that. I've been thinking about ways lately
to make software developers more famous - as I think the work that we do is as
creative and difficult as the work done by actors, musicians, etc.

Most of my thinking has focused on how to get the general public to actually
think about the developers behind all of the software they already use. This
may not work for something massive like Google search, but for applications
developed by small teams (mobile ones especially), I believe there's a lot of
opportunity to grant the individual some notoriety (if they want it, of
course).

I would want to start with influencers - existing celebrities. Celebrities
often tweet when they love (or don't love) an app that they just started using
on their mobile phones. I wonder how hard it would be to enable them (and more
importantly incentivize them) to shout out to the individual developers of the
app in these tweets.

Note that all this takes place in an optimistic framework where Hollywood is
meritocratic and fame is earned. I know it's not so in a lot of cases, but I
still think an opportunity exists for developers who create compelling,
popular apps to receive some personal recognition.

~~~
jamesteow
I've been trying to do good photographs of startup entrepreneurs in their
environments (office, walking in the Bay Area, etc.) The purpose is to have a
story that's more focused on the person rather than strictly the business. I
kind of thought about this after meeting the guys at Bump many many months ago
and thinking how cool they were but no one who ever used the application would
ever really know.

Candid photos like this one I took:
[http://www.flickr.com/photos/love_in_a_trashcan/5236986603/i...](http://www.flickr.com/photos/love_in_a_trashcan/5236986603/in/photostream/lightbox/)

The only thing that's stopping me is the fact I don't personally know that
many devs doing startups in SV because I'm usually holed up designing and
developing.

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Lukeas14
One theory is that coders from L.A., such as myself, who want to work for a
startup move to the Bay Area. This would inflate the number of risk takers in
the Bay Area and deflating that number in L.A.

Another point to look at is that while many companies in the Bay Area are
'engineer-driven' many of the tech jobs in L.A. simply exist within other
industries such as entertainment.

~~~
metageek
Sorry, I fat-thumbed and downvoted you instead of upvoting.

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thadeus_venture
This article is so full of such silly generalizations I'm not even sure where
to begin, or whether i should.

"I did an informal survey of different Los Angeles based Information
technology companies. One common theme: although espousing a culture of
innovation, and although some are very profitable, most are simply not cutting
edge, and some are very behind the times."

An informal survey of LA start ups.. awesome. Any word on how exactly you went
about conducting said survey? My guess is it was based on recalling random
techcrunch articles read over the past couple years, but please correct if I'm
wrong. LA has a ton of start ups that have all kinds of products, working
environments and compensation levels, most of which I would guess the author
never heard of.

"In most Silicon Valley Startups, coders know SQL, a major scripting language
as well as HTML and CSS. However MySpace had positions solely for just
HTML/CSS, a trend that harkened back to the 90s when web pages were manually
created."

So basically, no one needs to know js and css/html anymore because they are
all magically generated by some server side fairies. So facebook, twitter and
google do not have people who specialize in js or css/html because that's just
way too simple. Totally. For a product the size of what MySpace had, I think
it would be shockingly incompetent to not have people who would specialize in
that tech.

"Another Los Angeles great, eHarmony.com, uses 40 to 50 engineers for its
matchmaking algorithm and servers, whereas OKCupid.com uses only 10."

In your survey, did you happen to ask them why they had such a discrepancy?
Because i'm pretty sure it's not because eHarmony's employees are 5 times
dumber than okCupid's. There could be a ton of reasons why these numbers are
what they are besides lack of skill.

Anyway, I think this is an attempt to rationalize some failure the author has
experienced at his previous job. But frankly I think this was a pretty bad
attempt at generalizing something as big as the LA and SF job markets. Start
ups exist everywhere and come in all shapes forms and sizes, LA has lots of
them. To say that an entire city's worth of start ups is one way or another
because of myspace, eharmony and your last work place is just way too simple.
Anecdotally, I have friends in several LA start ups that are doing just fine,
have working environments as good as their peers in SF, if not better, and are
using the same range of technology people in SF use.

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jbarham
I worked in the LA area (aka "Southern California") for 4.5 years in three
different companies in three different industries--image restoration/movie
post production, network test and measurement, and finance. FWIW during that
time I also interviewed in Silicon Valley and got job offers in the Bay Area,
but elected to stay in SoCal. I recently left the US primarily for family
reasons and the farcical US immigration system.

It's true that there isn't the same concentration of high-tech companies in
SoCal compared to Silicon Valley, but then it's a much bigger place in terms
of population. In the Hollywood area (e.g., Burbank, Glendale, Studio City
etc.) there's a ton of animation and post-production shops that develop a lot
of software. If you're a system administrator you can run some of the largest
render farms in the world.

If you're into computer graphics, whether it's image processing for post-
production or 3D for animations and games, SoCal is probably the center of
your universe. E.g., the technology to shoot 3D movies like Avatar was largely
developed in SoCal.

Further west in the San Fernando valley and Calabasas there's a healthy
cluster of mid-sized world-class companies like DataDirect Networks, Ixia, DTS
and Fulcrum Microsystems.

Further south in Orange County and San Diego there's a bunch of companies like
RED, Blizzard, Broadcom and Qualcomm.

Suffice it to say that there's a lot of very good high-tech work being done in
Southern California!

------
brown9-2
_Silicon Valley Information Technology Workers (excludes hardware, e.g. Apple,
Intel, financial software which would total 387,000): 49,900

Los Angeles Information Technology Workers (excludes hardware, financial
software which would total 758,000): 106,100

Despite having a smaller pool of talent, Silicon Valley tech workers’
companies are able to produce 1% of the GDP of the United States or $174
billion annually._

I don't understand this analysis.

1) why exclude a large portion of the Silicon Valley workforce - because their
hardware/financial jobs aren't "startup-y" enough?

2) Where does this GDP/earnings estimate come from, and if it is for SV
companies as a whole, isn't it likely to include a whole heck of a lot of
employees at these companies that do not work in SV? Apple, Google, etc employ
lots of people across the globe.

 _In most Silicon Valley Startups, coders know SQL, a major scripting language
as well as HTML and CSS. However MySpace had positions solely for just
HTML/CSS, a trend that harkened back to the 90s when web pages were manually
created._

What is the point being made here? That MySpace was not as advanced because
some of their job listings did not include SQL? Or because they have some job
listings for front-end web work? It takes a huge jump in logic to assume that
a job listing for "HTML/CSS" means web pages are "manually created". And since
when is an entire city defined by a single company's job listings?

This entire post is full of shoddy analysis and conjecture. I don't understand
people that think you can sum up all of the people within a given geographic
area with a few words ("scared", "not taking advantage of innovations in
automation").

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wyclif
This kind of post has been covered here on HN many times before. There isn't
any coder shortage anywhere that increasing pay scale can't solve. LA startups
don't pay what SV companies do. Until that changes, they will always be
second-tier (actually third-tier, if you count NYC).

~~~
silencio
I live in LA, and I wholeheartedly agree. The compensation and offerings of
many LA-area startups leave much to be desired and is the only reason why I'd
be more than glad to look at SF/SV-area startups over LA-based ones. If I'm
going to take a risk at a startup and I'm not even going to be compensated
well for it, I may as well do my own thing. Which is exactly what I'm doing
right now.

The cultural issues LA has is a whole different matter, but I think it's one
that's easily solved if you just know your way around the small pockets and
niche communities in the area. I think it's mostly the size and travel
inconvenience that makes LA a different beast from SV. The better part of the
greater LA area encompasses land mass that is far larger than the SF Bay Area
in its entirety.

------
gyardley
Coders in LA might not join startups to the same extent they do in SF, but you
can't get to 'scared' from that.

I've talked to a number of developers here in NYC, primarily in the finance
industry, who have no interest in joining a startup. It's not because they're
scared - they simply aren't interested.

Perhaps developers in LA are the same way. Not everyone wants to be an
entrepreneur, and that's absolutely fine.

~~~
drgath
Having lived in both LA & SF, and been involved with the dev communities in
each, I'd agree with you. The original article just assumes that the goal of
every developer is to work for a startup.

You move to SF/SV to work for either a startup or one of the web giants.
That's our dream. It's our Hollywood. Those are the types of people you want
working on startups.

Developers who don't have this mindset are much more likely to just be cozy
with their well-paying 9-5 gigs working for one of the many
media/entertainment companies in LA. There's nothing wrong with that, it's
good that they have priorities in life other than work. Those aren't the types
that you want running your startup though, and they aren't the people who are
attracted to the startup-life. It's not that they are scared, it just isn't
appealing.

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geebee
LA coders may actually be taking on a greater risk when they join a startup.
SV programmers (even "old" one with families) see so much opportunity in the
startup scene that they aren't concerned about the availability of jobs should
the startup tank. In many ways, they gain career stability through cutting
edge work and the wide network they can build through startups. In LA, maybe
the critical mass just isn't there (or at least not to the same degree)? LA
coders may just be reponding to different risk/rewards.

~~~
JoelPM
Yes! As an 'old' programmer with a family, I thought long and hard before
leaving a stable job and joining a startup. In the end I decided that it was
worth it even if I had to find a new job in two years and ended up somewhere
that just 'paid the bills'.

In my limited experience, it seems like finding a good startup job in LA
depends a lot on your network - e.g. you worked with so-and-so here and
they're doing something new and think of you, where my perception of SF/SV is
that awesome startup jobs are so plentiful you can't help but have one.

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kia
"In most Silicon Valley Startups, coders know SQL, a major scripting language
as well as HTML and CSS. However MySpace had positions solely for just
HTML/CSS, a trend that harkened back to the 90s when web pages were manually
created."

I hope, "SQL" is a typo here.

~~~
pagekalisedown
I hope "a major scripting language" is part of the enumeration of technologies
that "coders know". Not a description of SQL.

~~~
kia
Yes. Thanks. My fault.

------
athst
Could it be more of a community or environmental thing than some inherent
quality of the coders in LA? For example, up here in SV startups are
everywhere, and you can't go anywhere without bumping into someone who works
at a startup or major tech company. It's in the air. So it's a lot more likely
that an engineer has a friend who sold their company for millions of dollars
or who made a bunch of money working for a company like Google. Or maybe all
of their friends are working at startups right now. This kind of stuff makes
startup life seem a lot more viable, like "yeah, I'm just as good as them - I
could do that." I imagine this concentration is much harder to come by in LA.

I think Mark Suster is on the right track with a program like Launchpad LA -
bring a bunch of entrepreneurs in together and create that community around
startups and risk-taking.

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scottshea
LA is a rough place to do start-ups but thankfully better than Phoenix where I
am now. After the bubble burst the heart kind of went out of LA. Also some
companies sucked so much life out of people that they stopped trying.

~~~
jamesteow
Could you elaborate on why it's a rough place to do start-ups?

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gcb
la doesn't have much startups

in silicon valley, if you wet your feets in startups and it fail, you go to
another.

in la you go back to a huge corp. with a tainted resume for leaving previous
huge corp in the past for a startup.

