As half of a thirty somethings couple that wants children but can’t afford the financial implications in the Bay Area, it seems pretty clear to me why fertility is down.
If a couple wants kids, and they can't pull it off in the Bay Area and it's a high priority item, you can bet they are on the way out.
It's not as if SV is the only place in the world with a job market. Though if you're early 20's and have nothing to lose in the world then it might be a good spot to start simply because what you make there in a couple of years can buy you a home cash somewhere else if you play it smart and keep your costs way down.
The trick is that reestablishing an entire friend network and getting comfortable in an area takes time. The first year or two in a place is usually more difficult and I suspect this gets even harder as you get older and people are paired off.
If you live in the bay area in your 20s with roommates and then pick up and move to Austin or Boulder at 30 it's probably hard to make friends (though I'd guess dating is probably a lot easier).
There are jobs in other cities. The idea that there is "little or no job market" outside of NYC and San Francisco is -- I'm sorry, there's no other way to say it -- absurd. The fact that you forward this claim with such smugness -- "rrrright" -- makes it all the more baffling.
Where are you getting these ideas? Click-bait articles about the Rust Belt?
A few figures on median income. These cities were chosen at random:
- Cincinnati-Middletown Ohio metro area was $60,260
- Indianapolis-Carmel Indiana metro area was $56,750
- Nashville-Davidson--Murfreesboro-Franklin Tennessee metro area was $60,030
Compare to:
- Seattle-Tacoma-Bellevue Washington metro area was $78,612
- San Francisco-Oakland-Hayward, CA Metro Area was $96,677
- New York-Newark-Jersey City, NY-NJ-PA Metro Area was $71,897
So, look, San Francisco is an outlier, even by the standards of big, growing cities with lots of jobs. But look at those others. The median income in Cincinnati is about $10k less than in New York City.
Do you think the cost of living in New York City is only about $10k more per year than in Cincinnati? Of course not.
The cost of living differences between the cities in that first group and the cities in the second group far, far, far outpace those earnings differences. So, you're wrong on both counts. The cheaper cities aren't "slightly less expensive;" they are vastly less expensive.
But that's never what these guys mean.
It's always casually advanced as a blanket statement about the hopelessness of living somewhere that you can't smell the ocean. I don't know why it became popular to demonstrate such obvious ignorance about the job markets of inland cities, but here we are.
I, for example, know precisely nothing about the job market in, say, Salt Lake City, but that's why I don't make statements on the internet about the job market in Salt Lake City.
Technology is everywhere, it is almost impossible to find a place where there are no tech jobs. But the bigger cities tend to have more of them and for better pay and Silicon Valley, New York, DC, Amsterdam, Berlin, London, and so on will have the best paid jobs but also the highest cost of living.
Silicon Valley is an outlier in many respects, you should not calibrate your worldview by it. If you mean by tech job: a place where I can sit in a chair and make 7 figures easily then indeed, there are no tech jobs outside of SV and Seattle.
It makes the people who claim it look ridiculous, but they seem to think it makes them look — I don’t know what — something not ridiculous. They don’t merely say it; they say it with aplomb and even contempt. (Maybe because they get universal agreement every time they bring this up with people in their real life?)
The person we’re responding to in this thread is an almost archetypical example. Is this some sort of “winner take all” bias? It’s very weird.
Programmers in the most expensive cities are doing fine. But this cultural wisdom is doing very real harm to people who would be much better off in cheaper cities. They think, “well, sheesh, it’s hard here, but I probably couldn’t even find a job in Pittsburgh.”
And that’s factually, dangerously wrong.
Part of this could be a need to feel that one's own choice was rational or ideal. People make decisions based on emotion, and then invent reasons to justify the decisions.
A related factor could be the fact that a person could be compelled to move if they knew of a better place, but moving is a pain.
Another possibility is being unreasonably picky. Maybe somebody feels they need to be near all of the big internet giants, not that they can simultaneously work at them all.
A failure to consider cost-of-living may lead one to an unreasonable cut-off point. If a person does normal software development and sets a minimum salary of $300,000 then yes, there are "no jobs" in nearly every location.
If you accept that the South and the Midwest are legitimate places to live, then you're forced to really consider it, which is difficult -- moving long distances is hard! It's much easier to conclude that those places aren't real options.
If you want to talk about quality of life, that's another issue.
If you're not a gun-loving church-going conservative, you're not going to be very happy relocating to the South. It's already horribly hard to make friends over the age of 30 (this comes up here on HN often), and moving someplace where the locals are diametrically opposed to your worldview is not going to help with that.
This response isn’t like a little wrong, or a bit of hyperbole — it’s egregiously and embarrassingly wrong. It’s not just, like, your opinion, man. It’s a factually absurd, untravelled, ignorant comparison.
For my specialty, there's lots of places where I could go to get a job. But it might be the only job there. I had some silly company try to recruit me to La Crosse, Wisconsin not long ago. The work sounded really interesting and was a good fit for me, but it's most likely the only company in that town that would have such a job for me. That town isn't near anything. So if I were to relocate there, and the job didn't work out, I'd be screwed: I'd be forced to relocate again (at my own expense most likely) to someplace else. I've seen quite a few jobs like this: these jobs try hard to recruit people like me, thinking that because I'm older and experienced that surely I have a family (nope) and want to "settle down" in some nice small town (nope) and will be happy to take a low salary because the cost of living is supposedly so low (it really isn't, only housing prices are low in places like that, and they're not that much lower).
You forgot many options, such as slightly less expensive area with good job market. Or much less expensive area with reasonable job market. I'm not even sure I know of a place that's only slightly less expensive but has little to no job market.
That is, uh, about 10% of the San Francisco cost or 20% of the general Bay Area cost. Salaries are more like 50%, and of course that also means a lower income tax bracket. Other stuff is cheaper too, like food and gasoline. Last I checked, the price of gasoline was about 50% of what you have to pay.
The finances work out fine. I have 11 kids.
At age 35, probably 2/3 of the childbearing years are gone. (could be all gone, could have another dozen years) You'd better hurry.
This is a 4-bedroom house, supposedly for $275,000 but likely to go cheaper:
https://www.trulia.com/p/fl/indialantic/421-e-riviera-blvd-i...
There are a couple smaller places, a tad cheaper, on neighboring streets.
One can work for Raytheon, Northrop Grummen, Harris, Lockheed Martin, Thales, GE (trains), and several cybersecurity startups. All of those are doing well. Doing less well I think, there is also: Intersil (a wireless chip company), DRS (a military optics company), NASA contractors, etc.
I don't believe this place is particularly special. All across America, there are smallish cities in which the finances work out for tech professionals.