Almost nothing about the climate (I like winter) or culture appeals to me, yet I'm pulled towards there to succeed in a tech career. This is simply network effects in action, except that unfortunately this network has been built in one of the locales in the US with some of the most aggressively anti-growth policies possible. Things would be much better if tech was centered around somewhere like Chicago or even New York.
I promise it is very possible to have a successful career in technology without being anywhere close to California.
That's neither pedantic, nor a correction. That's exactly what I've been saying all along. Career success isn't a 0/1 boolean, and no matter how successful someone currently is, there's always the potential for even greater career success. Optimizing for career success includes optimizing your chances for career progression.
Semantics aside, I think we're in agreement.
At least it keeps the area where I live free of that sort of toxic culture!
In particular, outside of SV it's substantially harder to:
1) Break into the top ranks of tech compensation. The companies and roles paying >200k/yr are heavily concentrated in SV.
2) Found a successful startup. The concentration of capital and connections in SV remains unparalleled elsewhere.
I don't think it's really that different from finance. You can have find finance jobs throughout the country and you can even build a successful career in most places. But if you want to succeed at the highest level, you'd be well-advised to move to NYC.
> 2) Found a successful startup. The concentration of capital and connections in SV remains unparalleled elsewhere.
From my perspective, your definition of a "successful software career" is rather narrow. Where else can you make 6-figures your whole life and be considered a failure?
Like I said, it's perfectly possible to have a nominally successful career in software elsewhere. It's just that if you want to reach even higher levels of success in software, you're encouraged to move to SV.
I'll take the 130k.
That is, would a guy like me (or you) be able to pull in multi-six-figures a year to telecommute to the Bay Area from out in the sticks if there weren't so many poor souls physically there keeping rates up for the rest of us?
What would things look like if the tech hub were in Ft. Worth TX instead (or Scott's Bluff, Nebraska), with hundreds of miles of flat empty cheap land in all directions to keep housing prices down near zero.
Even the tech hub was not on a peninsula, you'd still have an expensive center and poor people would have to suffer a long commute like East Bay people do in the Bay Area.
Just look at London or Paris: it's not cheap despite not having the same geographical problem. It's not as expensive as the Bay Area because there are many people with various jobs, not just highly paid tech workers.
Good governance matters. It makes a huge difference in cost-of-living. The way SF is run, it's almost as though people want the cost-of-living to be as high as possible.
Surely you're joking? Of course that's what they want. SF people, home owners, are voting on SF policy. Do you want to lose half the value of your house?
Its more complex than that, as SF people voting on policy also include renters, and even if rent control insulates them from directly paying for price increases, market price declines save them money (and both increases and declines affect local costs of other goods, so they affect CoL even if they don't directly affect existing renters rent payments.) But, renters are largely people who have decided the trade-off of quality for cost at the current price does make sense, so they are less likely than outsiders who might want to move to SF if it was more affordable to make trade-offs that impact the qualities that they prefer in SF for lower prices, even if it would reduce their cost of living.
For example, you can get to midtown manhattan in half an hour on NJTransit from East Orange, NJ, a very cheap place to live. The NYC metro area is chock full of affordable neighborhoods where the tradeoff is merely having a commute, not a LOOONG commute.
Ideally, you have your infrastructure scale as the city grows, to maintain constant commute times for workers even as they move further out.
In most other developed countries, developer salaries are about the same as physical engineering salaries and other highly skilled jobs.
Hasn't helped Austin
I can assure you that housing prices in that area are not near zero, even with all that land that is not necessarily available for development.
Salaries are a function of supply and demand. In that way, it wouldn't matter if the companies are in SV or in Kansas: they're still shooting themselves in the foot. Every company wants to hire the best, the top 10% of developers, when in actuality they probably only need to avoid the bottom 25% (assuming tech talent follows a bell curve). By setting up the ridiculous filters to hiring, they're artificially limiting the supply of developers on the market by 65%. In doing so, they keep the salaries of developers artificially high.
> As a west coaster, I can't stand Chicago or New York. The weather sucks, the topology is boring, the people are either boring Midwesterners, or crass north easterners. I'm happy the west coast gets more play, though I would probably not want to live in SF.
While the stereotypes exist for a reason (and anybody who's lived in NYC or Chi-town testify to these particular ones), have to disagree with you on the being able to put up with "those" people. It's the west coast that is the outlier here as a (stereotypical) bunch of pansies who can't (again stereotypically) deal with rawness of reality.
There is nothing wrong with the other areas of the US, and Americans are mostly the same, but I find the laid back style of the left west coast just to be the most suited. Well, Californians can take that a bit too far...
My problem is that a lot of people seem to be pretending that the only reason there's so much demand for housing in California is due to the favorable weather/people, when in reality a huge proportion of the people there wouldn't be there if it weren't economically beneficial.
It is nice that the economics and the nice weather coincide. It probably isn't a coincidence either, as tech is primarily limited by human resources.