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Comment by burtonator2011 | Hacker News Reader

burtonator2011

Thank god for NYC... Poor tiny NYC I'm sure could use the tax revenue.

Why can't they pick some place that could actually use the growth? Boulder?

Boulder has a lot of policies in place that actually prevent growth (height limits, limits on suburban growth, etc.). They seem to literally not want Boulder to grow.

they don't want to become the next Austin!

Google actually recently opened a pretty extensive Boulder office[1]

[1] https://www.bloomberg.com/news/photo-essays/2018-02-23/insid...

Why do you think it's Google's responsibility to aid in the development of one city?

I think everyone could benefit a lot more if Google did what was most optimal for itself to make better products and compete with Apple/Netflix/Amazon/Uber/Comcast/etc.

how confident are we that spending $1B on real estate in a market where you already have a strong footprint is optimal?

I guess at what point does it make more sense to locate to a less pricy metro and pay engineering talent to come (basically pick Amazon's reject list other than the VA and NY winners)?

Having a critical mass of people matters. Large, dense cities have economies of scale.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_JUAx445ReU

I'd assume it's a lot easier to hire 7,000 tech employees in NYC than Boulder and they already have a big presence there.

One day Pittsburgh will get its big hockey-stick shaped break.

Hopefully this time Pittsburgh won’t be the smog poster child.

Pittsburgh and Madison are both low COL cities with great engineering schools where only a small handful of companies are soaking up all the talent. Definitely underrated.

Madison has one good school. How many CS graduates are there that still want to live in Madison after they graduate?

Pittsburgh I can somewhat agree.

Don't know about CS graduates per se, but Madison has the reputation of being a place where people come to attend school, and then don't want to leave. I don't want to leave here either. ;-)

You guys drink/ booze like it's going out of fashion. Must be all those cold long Wisconsin winters. Madison is an OK place in summer, but not a place I would like to live in. And this coming from a guy who grew up in Michigan. I prefer Ann Arbor for that reason.

Wisc-Madison has a great reputation for mech/industrial/ops types of degrees.

To be honest, both suck compared to NYC and SF. There's just no comparison. NYC and SF have high numbers of PhD level tech talent, neither Pittsburgh nor Madison have anywhere near the number of the MIT-Stanford-Caltech PhD crowd. NYC and SF have higher density. And NYC, for example, has far more jobs in industries unrelated to tech. Not only more jobs in other industries, but way more other industries in general. Which is always attractive for the significant other.

The name of the game is to get high end tech talent. So sure, the University of Wisconsin can crank out code monkees for you. That's fine if that's all you need. But all the PhDs from the elite tech schools will sit down with their spouses or significant others to think about where to live and Madison and Pittsburgh just won't be terribly high on those lists. It's not all about the PhD that Google wants to hire, you have to have something for his or her spouse too. It's a lot easier to do that in NYC or SF. Just kind of the reality right now.

We’re not trying to find the next SF/Seattle/NYC here. We’re talking about the next Austin/Portland.

>How many CS graduates are there that still want to live in Madison after they graduate?

Since that was literally the subject of the conversation, the obvious answer is "I hope all of them".

Doesn't Pittsburgh have a google brain office? It's coming, and the only "big break" will be for the people that already own property.

I'm waiting for Minneapolis to get that break. It's happening.. the big techies are coming (Amazon is here), as well as a lot of home grown tech. I think the new 2040 plan will drive a lot of tech growth.

Cultural relevancy.

Companies are building in NYC because the people that make decisions in those companies want to be in NYC.

And not Boulder.

The whole point of Jeff Bezos' fake contest was to make it abundantly clear to the whole country and end this tired trope that Silicon Rockies - or whatever nearby geographical feature sounds catchy - ever had a chance.

Boulder (city limit) housing prices are as bad as the bay area.

Affordable housing isn't far away, but yes, in-Boulder rates are getting much worse. I work out of the Boulder office and have a 4BR house a 25 minute commute away for a lot less than I'd spend in CA.

There is no way that's true. I looked at numbeo.com and it says Sunnyvale rents are 60% higher than boulder. Insert your favourite Silicon Valley suburb in place of Sunnyvale.

When I was there 2 years ago, the cheapest house was $890k. The mean was about $1.3M. These are $200k houses in normal markets.

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