Comment by bpicolo | Hacker News Reader

Comment by bpicolo | Hacker News Reader

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There are certainly a lot of factors. People want to live in trendy cities. There's a lot to consider besides rent - culture, nightlife, etc. San Francisco sure does have some of the best food in the country (and with tech consuming most of spare time the way it is, eating out is really a huge part of culture). Rent definitely ends up being the deal breaker for many, but for others isn't.

It's a lot harder for a company to hire top tech talent if they're in Miami / Des Moines, because the Bay Area has a much higher concentration of tech workers. Convincing people to move is hard, especially so for more experienced tech workers who have a life/family somewhere. You need to be getting an insane deal for it to be worth abandoning your friends and family/forcing your partner to find a new job (and I've yet to see tech companies trying to compete on comp vs SF/SV outside of them). Can't run off middle-road new grads alone (Edit: Good point below that top grad talent wants to hit the big cities too).

> People want to live in trendy cities. There's a lot to consider besides rent - culture, nightlife, etc. San Francisco sure does have some of the best food in the country

We're talking about tech workers though. I don't know about you, but my whole life as a tech worker, I've gotten up at the crack of dawn, worked all day, come home late at night exhausted and passed out sleeping until the next day. I don't even know what city I live in because I NEVER SEE IT. Culture? Nightlife? What the hell are they? It doesn't make sense that tech workers would care about these things because we never get to take advantage of them.

You should get a better job if you spend all your waking hours working. "Better than 16 hours a day" isn't a high bar.

> It doesn't make sense that tech workers would care about these things because we never get to take advantage of them.

Not all tech workers are 12-hour-a-day workaholics.

Why are you killing yourself at work?

Why would you get paid six figures as a tech worker unless you're a workaholic? If you're not putting those hours in at work, surely you're putting in those hours in for both fun and personal growth at home, right? You're passionate about code, aren't you?

...no, I'm not honestly asking that, but those are the questions I'd expect to fend off.

> ...no, I'm not honestly asking that, but those are the questions I'd expect to fend off.

I've literally never run into anything of the sort in my life, and I'm making a six figure salary.

But then again, HN is a startup crowd. Things might be different when you're obligated to keep flapping or die(1).

1: http://i.imgur.com/aNTvfaE.jpg

> Why would you get paid six figures as a tech worker unless you're a workaholic?

Because a tech worker can easily create $300-500+K per year in economic value for the company. Taking home 1/3 of that value seems perfectly reasonable.

Nothing in the above says anything about hours-in-seat.

Because I legitimately find work more stimulating and enjoyable than most other things. Which isn't to say I don't do other things I find enjoyable, but I have no qualms about working 10+ hours a day.

See, here's the thing about coastal types: they are obsessed with getting the "top" talent, as if every project or startup requires it.

What if most startups only need "good" developers to develop their mostly CRUD apps and don't need "the best" developers?

I mean sure, if you want to build a lifestyle company, and by the way there's no shame in that.

But the dream, and the reason all the coastal co's are in it, is to be the next Google or Facebook, or Twitter or Snapchat.

You could say an app to get people to come over to your house won't change the world, but people think hey maybe it will grow, or we'll just pivot, and wind up with the next Flickr or Slack, and that's certainly good enough.

Why does every company in this industry need to be either a "lifestyle business" or a Google wannabe? What ever happened to growing a business organically over time, or with non-VC investments?

Because if you're growing organically some VC funded competitor is going to try to grow exponentially, and swallow you up or put you out of business. There's no middle ground because all that looks like to people trying to get a return on their investment is that you aren't trying hard enough. That either means they push you harder, or they fund a competitor if you aren't beholden to them.

Not all niches will attract VC funded competitors. There are plenty tech companies that are profitable, well-capitalized, have moderate organic growth, and compete with similarly sized companies. There certainly is a middle ground.

> There are plenty tech companies that are profitable, well-capitalized, have moderate organic growth, and compete with similarly sized companies.

Sure, but that just means that they and their competitors have already grown to the point where the market is saturated, and any further growth they are experiencing is because the market is growing or to the detriment to their competitors. They probably already had an exponential growth period, although it could have been short-lived if the market is small (and if the market is really small, may not have looked like exponential growth at all, and may have just looked like becoming profitable and leveling out).

You're right that not all niches will attract VC funded competitors, but I think the number niches that meet that criteria are actually very small, in this industry. There's always someone that thinks they can disrupt it somehow, or market it better to show people the market is actually much bigger than it appears. Keep in mind, the VC funded competitor doesn't have to succeed in it's task of taking over or changing the market to have extremely detrimental effects on companies that aren't working with the same paradigm.

Having a market large enough to support a few small companies but not large enough to warrant VC funded competitors that stays that way seems a rarity.

Theory says you'll be run over by the next VC-funded Facebook in your market, and will have to subsist by being a niche business (better service or catering to certain segments).

So, either the next Facebook or lifestyle. Of course, real world is not perfect so there's space for medium-sized businesses, but they're not an economic optimum (they're leaving money on the table either way).

There are plenty of those. The media just doesn't report on them.

> What if most startups only need "good" developers to develop their mostly CRUD apps and don't need "the best" developers?

There are some exceptions, but most any successful technology product needs at least a few great technical leaders, if only to say no to net-negative ideas, provide mentoring to those who need it, and to make strategic technical decisions (architecture, tech stack, technical hiring strategy, etc.).

It doesn't require being in the top 10% of a top 10 school to be able to recognize bad ideas though. The standard you are describing is what I would call "qualified" or "competent" not "elite" or "top".

There are highly competent people in both the lower 90% of the top 10 schools as well as in non-top tier schools

I didn't say anything about schools.

And as for competence, there's an order or two difference between a developer that can add some more CRUD to a service and one that can say no to doing the exact same thing when it is a net negative to the system and/or organization. It's one of those things that sounds simple, but it takes a lot to even know which technical battles are the top priority.

What they say they're getting ("the top talent") and what they actually get are two separate things.

Hey, the worst graduate from Stanford is better than the best graduate of Ohio State, right?

Sarcasm?

Yup.

It's true that not everybody needs it, that's a separate argument probably. Companies that feel they don't are often outsourcing though, no? There's definitely the argument of "talent pays for itself (in multiples)" to think about.

They must have a different definition of "top" talent. I'm thinking of people like Daniel Bernstein and Fabrice Bellard. The list is really very short.

But of course that definition is useless to a VC fueled, exponentially growing trainwreck/unicorn that wants to hire hundreds or thousands of "engineers".

Top talent includes good, too. Leaving only mediocre to bad for everyone else.

We're on the smaller side in SF, and I'm having a terrible time finding good ops people.

You could always do what the founders of TI did: start your own university and grow your own talent.

The University of Texas at Dallas, established explicitly for this reason, is probably the reason why Dallas is a tech hub.

Every large city has some schools.

Why is it that Austin is a tech hub (UT) but Houston is not (U of H, Rice)?

One theory: it is not the school, but the kinds of jobs people get after. Austinites went to work for Dell, and Houstonians went to work for Exxon.

Houston is, for some definition of "tech". It's just more focused on petroleum and ocean engineering, which don't get a lot of play I'm these circles.

Exactly, people in certain circles have this somewhat self-referential definition of tech that means "what they do a lot of in Silicon Valley." And ignore things like the oil industry or pharma/biotech which are very much tech but just don't happen to have much presence in SV.

This whole thread, unfortunately, is conflating "tech" with "information tech". When talking about "big picture" stuff like national real estate trends and macro-economics, the HN bubble is limiting.

There are a ton of even pretty straight-up tech jobs in those industries, e.g. ExxonMobil's Houston office has a large machine learning group.

Exactly. As I watch Downtown Brooklyn seemingly magically transform itself overnight from a collection of third-tier forgotten university offerings to a genuine nexus of tech and engineering education[0] I'm reminded that this dynamic does indeed work in both directions.

[0] https://thebridgebk.com/engineering-hub-downtown-brooklyn/

The Dallas area had several universities before UTD was founded: the University of North Texas, Southern Methodist University, and the University of Texas at Arlington (though UNT had a different name at that time). These existing universities were not STEM schools.

What made UTD different was that it was founded by the same people who founded the largest technology company in the area, and they specifically founded it in order to do something about the low number of STEM graduates in the Dallas area. The TI founders went out of their way to engineer a STEM culture in a city that didn't have one just to grow some more talent for their company.

From Wikipedia [0]:

> Qualified personnel required by TI were not readily available in the Dallas-Fort Worth area because the region's universities did not provide enough graduates with advanced training in engineering and physical sciences. TI was forced to recruit talent from other states during its expansion and the founders observed in 1959 that "To grow industrially, the region must grow academically; it must provide the intellectual atmosphere, which will allow it to compete in the new industries dependent on highly trained and creative minds".[12] To compensate for this shortage they established the Graduate Research Center of the Southwest in 1961. The institute initially was housed in the Fondren Science Library at Southern Methodist University. Land for the center was acquired by Jonsson, McDermott, and Green in Richardson in 1962 and the first facility, the Laboratory of Earth and Planetary Science (later named the Founders Building), opened on the grounds of the present-day UTD campus in 1964. The Graduate Research Center of the Southwest was renamed the Southwest Center for Advanced Studies (SCAS) in 1967 and in 1969 the founders transferred the land and assets of SCAS to the State of Texas. On June 13, 1969 Governor Preston Smith signed the bill adding the institution to the University of Texas System and creating the University of Texas at Dallas.

[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/University_of_Texas_at_Dallas

Exactly right. Young people today would rather be poor in a "trendy" city, than rich in a not so trendy one. It has almost become a badge of honor of how much you can rough it to stay afloat in X trendy city. I am guessing it was not like this for previous generations, and I think it leads to too much homogeneity of culture. I think we should start to encouraging people to go to a uncool city and help build it up and make it cool.

> I think we should start to encouraging people to go to a uncool city and help build it up and make it cool.

While this is a laudable project and it works in some places, many rural citys are very conservative and against anything new the youth might be interested in.

This is the issue I face in the area where I grew up and still reside in rural New York. If you read the newspaper editorials it's a constant string of racist and homophobic garbage. I'm approaching 30 and it's very hard to find like minded people here, much less single women with ambitions and who aren't just looking for a baby daddy.

So why haven't I moved? Frankly I'm scared that I can't cut it elsewhere. My job is secure and pays very well for the area (as a single person I make about 160% of the median family income). I could move and work remotely for the same amount which would result in a drastic decrease in quality of life, or try to get another job that I'm probably not qualified for. I've been trying to figure it out for the better part of a decade now.

Where in upstate? You should look up Duncan Crary, who lives in Troy, NY. He did a ton of podcasts with James Howard Kunstler, and has a newer one called a Small American City. It is about this very topic of revitalizing small American cities. There is also Ithaca, NY.

A few days late but I'm way farther north than Troy -- St. Lawrence county. I can check out the podcast, though.

Interview and see what happens. What do you have to lose?

I was speaking with a friend about this recently. I do think we'll see growth in smaller cities, kind of like how Austin exploded. I think an interesting aspect of this is the job problem. Jobs are getting more scarce outside cities as industries change it seems, and I wonder how that might affect population movement.

"I think we should start to encouraging people to go to a uncool city and help build it up and make it cool." -

This basically describes the prevailing attitude in Minneapolis. Minneapolis is super cheap and has all the fancy cocktail bars you will ever need.

It was definitely like this for previous generations. Young people have been moving to big cities they could barely afford for at least 100 years, and probably since Roman times.

It wasn't really that true in the US for about the 50 years after WW II. Yes, NYC and maybe a few other places. My cohort from undergrad and grad school in the 80s or so did not widely live in cities (again, with the totable exception of people I knew in finance many of whom lived in Manhattan). And, at least in Boston/Cambridge, there was very little "tech" in the city. After Teradyne moved out, there may have still been some consulting but not a single product company of any size.

That's somewhat different today but it's really a very recent change.

My counter-anecdote - it seems to have been very hard to hire a Consulting Engineer in the Bay Area for my team. We've had plenty of candidates (some very good) from other cities, but haven't yet found anyone in SF or the surrounding areas.

Could be issues with our sourcing, perhaps, but it seems surprisingly difficult.

(PM me if you'd like to be a counter-example)

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