Sillicon Valley pulls you in because the amazing career opportunities you have there, and pushes you out because of the insane land/housing situation, and how everyone around you who's not IT is miserable.
It's "funny" to see how many places that deem themselves a progressive yet they fail so hard to tackle the very basics of poverty.
Living in a place where I can get 200k as a white collar while many others have to live in tents because despite being workers can't afford more, it's my idea of dystopia.
An average blue collar should be able to afford rent or buy a small place. If that's not possible in the place you live in, then you're living in a dystopian place.
I have had a number of discussions from long time Mountain View homeowners who lived there from before Google and LinkedIn. Although the value of their real estate has exploded, they all said that quality of life has gone way down. It was a nicer place to just live when most people worked at Moffett Field or the associated aerospace and defense contractors.
Decentralization of the tech industry (particularly software) is a great trend so that young people who want to build a career won't be forced to move to Silicon Valley. Unless someone has strong personal ties there or gets a really lucrative job offer they should look to other regions.
> young people who want to build a career won't be forced to move to Silicon Valley
RO recent-college grads are highly constrained in terms of upward mobility. You don’t get the network. You don’t get the camaraderie. It’s great for employers but bad for the ambitious.
This requires a revamping of property rights as popularly conceived across many countries (which is not a bad thing, just takes time). In general I can buy just about anything you legally own without going through extra red tape. But now we'd need laws saying that even if I offer you $1M for a home you can only take $500k, because that's one of the reasons why you can be priced out of an area. We also can't allow cash transactions for many things because then we wouldn't know how much you paid.
And we'd need to extend this beyond housing. Just because I'm willing to pay $12 for eggs doesn't mean you should be able to charge or receive that much as the supermarket.
Perhaps when businesses raise prices they have to write an essay about the legitimate justifications for such increases.
SF literally has a homeless industrial complex. There's a network of non-profits that siphons billions of tax payer dollars to "fix homelessness".
If they really cared about preventing homelessness, they would pass rent control legislation. Every other western nation has figured this out, if you provide basic (and relatively cheap) safety nets around housing, you don't have thousands new homeless people a year.
Instead they choose to waste taxpayer money to buy London Breed's donors another house in Sonoma
Broad rent control protections were passed in San Francisco in 1979, and statewide in 2019, and has lead to more misery over housing by slumlords than if there was no rent control. Landlords have zero incentive to improve their properties, so the number of people I know that are living in cheap, but substandard apartments (eg heating is non-functional) is too many. And even if you get rent control so you can continue on affording rent, if the burrito place charges $8 which then increases to $12 with inflation, the budget you have that's counting on $4 burrito means you still have to move away.
San Francisco has tenant rights (rent control included in this). What rights do you think San Francisco tenants are missing?
Inflation in the cost of food has many sources, among them, the cost of the food ingredients, and increase in minimum wage paid to employees to make said food are the two other large ones to factor into the cost of food.
The California Department of Housing and Community Development is beginning to address this problem but it’ll take years until a noticeable difference is made.
The one thing they should have learned post-pandemic is that talent is global.
Tech workers can work their asses off remotely. Figjam is better than a whiteboard. Home offices are less distracting than open offices. If you hire the right people, they'll work even harder from home.
> one thing they should have learned post-pandemic is that talent is global
All business is bundling and unbundling. There are reams of tech workers presently working remote who have proven their work can be done cheaper offshore. On the other hand, there are offshore and remote-only businesses constrained by their model who are advertising opportunity proximate to themselves. Anyone convinced the world will be remote only (or RTO for all) is begging to be disrupted.
I may just be old and jaded but I don't think most people that call themselves progressive are progressive at all. I see two main camps dominating the progressive movement these days and they could broadly be grouped as butthurt marxists and "I support the latest thing (because I am consciously or subconsciously working for my own interests from a libertarian bent)". The butthurt marxists bought the insane idea that critical theory is capable of uncovering any sort of knowledge and applied it outside of class to other groups that might help them tear the whole world down and so like suffering because it creates people with nothing to lose to support their destructive cause. The libertarians just want to keep amassing wealth and don't see the obvious outcome of capitalism is market power exploitation through oligopoly/monopoly because it is in their interest not to see this (because the solution is break up companies with market power so smaller companies can compete vigorously). Both these groups say they care about the median person/family but both of these groups have incentive to make things worse for the median person/family and I see no reason anyone should think being labelled a progressive is a good thing anymore. Instead support individual liberty strongly tempered by market power mitigation more akin to what the USA was doing in the 50's and 60's agressively breaking up larger companies abusing oligopolies/monopolies.
I am definitely not looking for georgism or distriutism because the butthurt marxist camp are definitely marxist in origin because the stuff the espouse is definitely marxist in origin, just generalized to other arbitrary dichotomies (race,sex, gender, etc) and put through a critical theory lense to come to the same incorrect conclusiin they always come to, destroy the current system because it is oppressing the utopia. The libertarians are definitely libertarian by their own profession as well.
I am also not advicating for either of thise systems because i do t care how concentrated capital gets except for the situation where the accumulation gets to be so much that it allows the holder to exercise market power to exclude competition among other negative things that push prices above marginal cost. It is very market specific.
Until "everywhere else" bans non-competes, like California does, California is unlikely to lose its position as the leader site and state for innovation: https://techcrunch.com/2016/02/18/silicon-valley-keeps-winni..., despite California's many policy missteps from housing restrictions to failure to enforce basic law and order.
I live in a European country, and while non-competes are legal, if a company chooses to exercise them, they are also forced to continue to pay you for the duration, and you can still take a non-competing job in the mean time.
Non-competes are also judged rather narrowly: they can't ban you from working for any tech company, they need to operate in the same space as the one you worked in before.
It came down to one person’s signature. If the industry had that much control, it would have stalled in the legislature. Seems pretty risky to let it come down to one person.
Edit: If anything, the big tech companies did a better job in Washington by allowing the non compete ban to pass for only jobs under $100k per year salaries. That way, political support is neutered in the future for any broad non compete ban that would actually affect them. For context, the legal minimum annual salary in Washington will be $90k in a few years.
New York is 1990s Indiana with NYC attached. Industrial powerhouses like Syracuse, Buffalo, etc are rust belt territory now.
With the export of American industry and the consolidation of all things agriculture, the solvency of the entirety of the state budget is almost entirely dependent it just on financial services, but specifically on income tax on Wall St bonuses. No sane governor would sign that bill.
The death spiral of agriculture in particular is incredible. Through incredibly incompetent policy decisions, entire regions of rural America are country ghettos, with our food supply dependent on a depleted aquifer in the Midwest and the fickle Colorado River.
I see non-compete agreements in tech employment all the time in the US.
I also had to push back against an overly broad non-compete when contracting.
When I was leading engineering at an early startup, I had to push back against our lawyer, who drafted an employment agreement that none of us wanted to sign. It included broad non-compete, and a bunch of other grabby clauses.
That startup one was tricky, because we were getting rumors that supposedly investors were demanding non-competes from tech startups. Silicon Valley notwithstanding. (And a bunch of clauses I hadn't seen before, including things like, IIRC, the company has right to do search and seizure in the home of the employee, on IP grounds. This was pre-Covid.)
It's hard to argue, when you're an aspiring actor, fresh off the bus in LA, and a producer is claiming to you that every role starts with the casting couch.
To resolve the argument-from-authority impasses on the startup's employee agreement, the company reimbursed me to hire a lawyer representing me as an employee. Both for my own interests as an employee, and to provide some kind of balance for the interests of employees in general.
There were non-compete clauses in every employment contract I saw when I started my software career (east coast circa 2005). Companies even tried to weasel them into the independent work contracts they signed with me when I did independent contracting for a while.
As someone who's been in tech in Texas for nearly 25 years, I've always had to sign a non-compete as a full time employee. It's all state/locale dependent.
Housing in San Francisco, the Penninsula and Silicon Valley is constrained by the fact that it's rich, already built out and there isn't anywhere else to expand to at the edge of town because of water or hills. People commute from outlying areas such as Tracy and Modesto where there's been massive construction of housing over the last 30 years.
Already built out land should be made denser. I don't want the area to be expanded; that will make the area worse for walkability and bikeability; I don't want to see super commuters commuting from Tracy or Modesto because that's so much pollution, congestion, and misery; I also don't want to see the area's abundance of large open space disappear. We should instead make the current built land denser by strongly encouraging existing single-family homes to have ADUs or be converted into duplexes and fourplexes. We should require all new residential construction to be multi-family units meeting density standards. We should set minimum height rules for new residential buildings to encourage vertical use of space.
The culture this has created and kept going over the last decades is exactly why.
It's not because the laws anymore, it's because the change in the law so many years ago changed the culture, changed the attitude about what was "right" Andover the needle towards favoring innovation and employee talent maximization over their career rather than focus on the profits of individual companies or the output of the company. Its so worker focused, worker aligned - and in an industry that relies heavily on thought leadership type work, that is a very attractive work environment for those types of people.
The press loves a clear winners and losers story. The reality is more complicated. Tech was never zero sum and it turns out the tech population within the Bay Area is growing again [1], while other metro areas also see tech growth.
The only real zero sum game here remains real-estate, the bulk of the people missing out from all this growth are lower middle class non-tech workers getting pushed out of metro cities.
My empirical evidence is young people move here to develop their careers and move away when they start a family. Those who stay make it work because they really enjoy the Bay Area or aren’t interested in having kids.
The article directly addresses this: “A lot of tech innovation still happens in places like the Bay Area—witness the highly concentrated boom of new artificial-intelligence companies there. But as the tech industry as a whole has matured, it is following the pattern of every previous industrial revolution: knowledge, capital and talent is spreading out, across America and the world.”
Headline literally has the word “losing” in it. Hehe. But because the data doesn’t bear that out gotta hedge bets in the article, as long as you’ve got the clicks.
Losing market share threatens “hub” status. That doesn’t mean everyone is miserable. But there is a real story in the data someone who reads the article will glean.
> as long as you’ve got the clicks
The Journal makes money on subscriptions. You’re describing publications that cater to people who don’t pay for news and don’t read articles.
WSJ, like pretty much all media, earns money from both ads and subscriptions. They have ads in the middle of Apple News+ too. And I assume they get paid somehow for “submarine” or PR articles.
> I assume they get paid somehow for “submarine” or PR articles
Submarines aren’t paid for directly, particularly not at reputable publications. They take advantage of journalists’ desire for convenience, not revenue.
It turns out that refusing to build housing to meet demand has serious consequences: homelessness, street crime and filth due to homelessness, inability to hire for any but the highest paid jobs, families leaving because you can’t raise kids, and being passed over for other areas by new talent among others.
I saw a national map recently of places likely to lose congressional representation over the next 5-10 years vs places that will gain. It was almost perfectly a map of places where you can’t build housing vs places where you can.
"To build housing in San Francisco, developers must first receive planning approval, known as entitlement, to ensure the city supports the type, size and design of housing proposed for a site. This part of the process took an average of 450 days over the last 18 months, according to recent data from the state."
Housing in the SF bay area is broken, largely due to the efforts of entrenched interests (developers and people who bought 50 years ago for an inflation-adjusted tiny fraction of current prices).
To put this into perspective, this adds 5% to the cost of a project in financing alone [1]. That’s $70,000 for a median home [2], about half of the city median household income [3]. Half of a household’s production in an entire year, just in delays.
Markets are at best a tiny piece of the question on housing. It has more to do with zoning, infrastructure planning, incentives among the various roles involved in building, the foibles of real estate sales, the voice of incumbent residents who moved there because of the state of affairs that now has insufficient possibility for housing...
At the far end of that you have a market for what is there. It's nearly impossible to buy a well designed, well built house in many places because there aren't any. But the invisible hand of the market largely just skyrockets prices for limited, poor buildings because it doesn't have much real effect on the rest.
Don’t underestimate the gullible economically illiterate who undergird the support for anti-development policies. Without them, the NIMBY bloc wouldn’t have staying power.
"Temporarily embarrassed millionaire"[1] describes this mindset. It is quite prevalent in America's poor. I've seen too many poor Americans exhibit this mentality to not believe it is more or less a truism at this point. The propaganda of the wealthy and connected in this country has been remarkably effective.
This is related, but different. A lot of San Franciscans have been pitched anti-science bogus economics around development causing higher prices. (It’s not true [1].) They vote against more housing not because they think they’ll soon be rich enough to afford it, but because they’re afraid of getting priced out.
I doubt the headline. The type of person attracted to live in the “inexpensive” cultural wasteland of the Midwest or the regressive, racist south is on average less talented than my peers in urban tech centers like the Bay Area. There might be a loss in the “low cost, (relatively) lower skill” sector of the market.
"As the tech industry grows up, talent and funding are spreading out. That's bolstering smaller cities all across the country.
Tech hubs like San Francisco are seeing their share of U.S. tech workers shrink. Photo: Shelby Knowles for The Wall Street Journal
Silicon Valley and other tech hubs are losing the tech talent war.
Metro areas that consistently attracted huge numbers of tech workers have hit a turning point, according to fresh data from labor-market analytics firm Lightcast, crunched by D.C. think tank Brookings. The share of the nation's tech workers who work in places such as Silicon Valley, San Francisco, Boston, New York, Los Angeles and the greater Washington, D.C. area is actually shrinking."
Until i see the data suggesting what the article is saying, i'll assume it's just some journalist intern trying to hit their article quote by taking a 1 sentence they saw on linkedin and blew it up to a full article.
so the largest growth of remote jobs were only included in the data? what about the last year that had the largest tech layoff in 2 decades and RTO mandate?
I don't think it's equivalent to say, because tech is growing, percentage-wise, elsewhere, that tech hubs are "losing the talent war."
I've never worked in the Bay area except for a short stint a while back, but these articles seem to always pop up every couple years, and they're always wrong. All of the top companies and startups have always come from a very small set of cities - the ecosystem effects are just too strong.
Look at the latest big boom in tech, in AI. The "centers of the universe" for AI are still pretty much the same usual suspects.
> don't think it's equivalent to say, because tech is growing, percentage-wise, elsewhere, that tech hubs are "losing the talent war."
Losing market share is losing the recruitment war for a hub. It doesn’t mean everyone will be miserable. But by definition, market share is what defines a hub.
It's "funny" to see how many places that deem themselves a progressive yet they fail so hard to tackle the very basics of poverty.
Living in a place where I can get 200k as a white collar while many others have to live in tents because despite being workers can't afford more, it's my idea of dystopia.
An average blue collar should be able to afford rent or buy a small place. If that's not possible in the place you live in, then you're living in a dystopian place.