Tech talent doesn't want to live in the sticks. Especially young tech talent.
I understand them because I am one of them. What good is a nice compensation package if I have to live in the middle of nowhere?
Young folks are looking for the fame that’s what it is. The google’s, facebook’s etc. Yes there’s always san francisco but these are just extensions of the headquarters just to make sure they get hold of everyone.
If the fame was in the middle of nowhere people wouldn’t hesitate a second to move to that place. If it’s not you, someone else will.
New York metro area is much more nowhere than Tokyo metro if you want to go buy sheer population in a continuous urban conglomeration.
And to me, personally, NYC is just as nowhere as Boise, Idaho. Just a bunch of people living in groups doing things they find interesting, or can't leave due to financial/family/personal reasons. You can do lots of stuff in and around Boise that the same people can't do in NYC and visa versa, depending on individual preferences.
Many folks I know get bored quickly in NYC and SF. I do. I still love NYC and SF, though. I suffer from a bit of Stockholm Syndrome ;)
I am having difficulty thinking of any group of humans living anywhere that doesn't meet this definition. The same could be said for a mining town in Siberia, or an uncontacted tribe living in the Amazon, or prisoners in a prison.
> You can do lots of stuff in and around Boise that the same people can't do in NYC and [vice] versa, depending on individual preferences.
The list of things you can do in Boise that you can't do in NYC is effectively zero if you exclude "the outdoors" as a category. For people who don't prioritize the outdoors as highly as other things in life, this makes Boise effectively nowhere by comparison.
I completely agree that SV isn't a very attractive place nowadays, especially not for young talent.
SF is not a normal city anymore. Oakland isn't much of a city.
I'd focus elsewhere.
Young talented folks came en mass. It does work to open a campus in the middle of nowhere. Why Tech giants still go to large and expensive cities? It doesn't make any sense but to satisfy a few folks who for the most part share an apartment with roommates or rent a studio in downtowns making 6 figures.
Facebook now has an NYC office too. My uneducated guess is that their candidates now have far more options than they did 10 years ago, and more people would rather not live in SV.
My comment referred to the first proper Facebook campus was going to be very close to Palo Alto since that's where their first offices were. Just like has been the case for Google and a bunch of other SV employers.
Technology wise I have heard of decent activity (including in a few of these cities some startup ventures) in places like Austin, the North Carolina research triangle, Miami, Boulder, Phoenix, Portland, Boston, etc. (Internationally, I'm sure there's some other markets people can add.) I have heard of housing costs creeping up in a few of these locations, but as far as I know, most of these still have pretty affordable housing compared to the Silicon Valley as a whole currently. Yes, the culture varies considerably between all these cities, but none of them I would describe as "middle of nowhere".
The latter have varying degrees of "melting pot"-ness.
I'd suspect the parts of LA you'd like to live in - Santa Monica, for example - are far more expensive than the livable parts of San Diego.
I live in SF but was down in SJ recently and honestly... it's just nice suburbia with the same strip malls and everything that's copy-pasted across the US?
Am I missing something there that makes it... unique?
I also dislike the strip malls everywhere; I was serious about the orchards part too. I wish that I could rewind to having fewer houses and strip malls and more orchards.
But for people who like suburbia but also want to work for technology companies, it works out pretty nicely. If you take the "everything that's copy pasted across the US" and splash in world class semiconductor company HQs (in San Jose and surrounding areas, like Sunnyvale, Santa Clara, etc), you get San Jose. Seems sorta unique to me, but I won't try too hard to sell it to anyone else who disagrees.
Less sarcastically, how is that an advantage?
I would almost live in San Jose for La Victoria Taqueria... almost. Their orange burritos are so damn good.
Apricots are simply divine. For this alone, bulldozing would be justified.
I guess if you move to SJ from some hamlet 3 hours outside of Cheyenne, it's probably exciting. When I got there from Chicago, I couldn't believe that people actually might think it is a great place to live. Other than some career considerations, it's really a bland suburbia with nothing exciting about it.
[1] https://www.zillow.com/homes/for_rent/san-jose,ca_rb/ [2] https://www.zillow.com/homes/San-Jose-CA_rb/