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convinced themselves that stuff only happens in the valley and if they hadn't seen it they wouldn't have believed it was possible outside (and some did not, oh the excuses)....

Isn't this bigotry?

I remember watching all of these shows on PBS as a kid, where one of the major themes was how people would judge other people by class or other surface signals, and how this could obscure the truth or leave good people unappreciated on their merits. Did people learn the lesson? I guess some people did, and some people didn't.

Here's my experience coming to the Bay Area, looking up from the bottom: There's more bigotry here. People judge you more quickly and more absolutely on a more shallow basis here than anywhere else I've lived. (With the exception of the Norwood neighborhood in Cincinnati.)

Oh, it certainly is bigotry, and it isn't even isolated to the bay area. When I moved to Wyoming, there were a lot of people in Colorado that thought I was literally dropping off the face of the planet, and that I would be unemployable the rest of my life. Sure, the density of tech jobs here is ludicrously low, and I can't job hop like I could in the bay area, but quality of life is important as well, and I don't like living in any size city. There is no way I could afford 40 acres of rural property anywhere within a reasonable commute of the bay area.

How does one reasonably have a need for 40 acres of property? I could see a few acres as being the max needed for reasonable privacy. Are you doing something commercial with the acreage?

I think I did a calculation a few years ago that there is only an acre or two of land on Earth for every single person. When you factor in the acreage that is currently liveable and is actually purchasable, you get a number close to 1/16th acre I imagine.

I have a friend who was in tech for many years and purchased a 25 acre property. Half of it is a small homestead with animals and crops, the other half is to be used as a protected woodlands. It's not tight but I could reasonably see wanting something more like 40 or 50 acres.

Having that amount of land allows one to have a ton of different hobbies and activities available that are really not possible in an urban environment. Want to go shoot guns or fireworks? No problem. Want a huge dirt trail with jumps for an ATV or dirt bike? Go ahead! Having that amount of land can also be great if you have a large family with many children as it acts as a safe-place for outdoor play. Although I didn't grow up on that much land, I grew up in a remote area with a ton of forests and being able to freely play tag or go hiking in the woods with my friends were some of greatest times in my entire life. Bow living in the city for work, I dream of the day that I can retire onto a property with a large acreage, I get the rationality.

I've got a house on about 8 acres. I can still hear my neighbors ocassionally (power tools and vacuum cleaners mostly), and their headlights shine into my house when they're coming down their driveway. If I had 5x the area, I'd have a lot more buffer. Bigger would be a lot more grounds work though, so I doubt I'd move somewhere bigger.

I don't think universalism necessarily applies to lot sizes. Different people are willing/able to take different trade-offs. In exchange for a large lot, in a tranquil environment, I get few job opportunities without a long commute, poor telecoms coverage, a 30-45 minute drive to big box stores, limited diversity, people complaing about all the new residents moving from where I moved, etc. I don't think most people would make these choices, which is fine -- if more people chose to live here, maybe I'd want to live somewhere else.

The idea of calculating the amount of acreage per person doesn't really make sense to me due to our ability to construct buildings. Manhattan has less than 15,000 acres but a whole lot more people than that live there.

As another poster mentioned, it's about the trade-offs. Cities have a lot of advantages that, for most, make it the ideal place to live.

> There was this idea that support just had to be in the valley because straight up the managers and folks working there didn't know there were technical people... anywhere else (this was before we had other islands of tech in the US).

I saw a friend from the Midwest was on the board of a non-profit group. The headquarters was in the DC suburbs, but did no lobbying, mostly verifying credentials and conducting training for professional organizations. The work could be done anywhere.

The other board members were from big cities and openly wondered if anyone "qualified" to run such an organization could be found in a state like Missouri, Iowa, or Nebraska. The concept that there was any skilled professional labor outside of the coasts and large metropolitan areas had to be explained to them.

[Because we're all hicks who just got indoor plumbing at the turn of the century. /s]

By relocating to the Midwest, their rent plummeted, they were able to pay people less while providing the same or better quality of life, upgrade their IT infrastructure and business processes to get away from paper documentation, hired an additional person, and still came out ahead financially.

They were a small organization with less than 10 employees, so adding an additional person was a big proportional gain in productivity.

I saw this happen in reverse. I was buying servers from Rackable in orders of several millions of dollars. They bought SGI. Fired their Bay Area support staff, moved support to Ohio which was a huge short term gain. But support became so bad it was literally worth less than nothing. They would take in a machine with a known fault (raid controller let’s say) fail to replace the card, ship back a machine that didn’t boot.

After the fifth failure in a row I had enough. It was easier to learn how to repair my own servers and do the work in-house. I bought parts instead of support, qualified a new server provider and shifted the next six million in orders to them.

No offense against the guys in Ohio, but due to unfamiliarity with the tech, structural and leadership shortcomings etc. they were simply unable to do the job so the work shifted back to the Bay Area anyway.

I’m sure I was one customer among hundreds if not thousands who experienced this change.

One of the downsides of my support example is that there is a lot of outsourcing and cost cutting in that area of work (one of the reasons I left).

So there will be tons of stories like yours that I don't doubt are true.... it's just location probabbly had less to do with it as just a general desire to cut costs at any cost...

>it's just location probabbly had less to do with it as just a general desire to cut costs at any cost...

Exactly this. In a previous role at an Enterprise software company I watched customer satisfaction take a dive after cost cutting measures and support and escalations paths and metrics were changed. The same customer support people who had really happy customers started to have unhappy customers. It had very little to do with the people or location and everything to do with what options the customer services people had to help a customer.

I guess as with everything - context matters.

Their overall goal was to be as effective as they could be. The cost savings went along with operational improvements. It was also a non-profit, which has an entirely different dynamic compared to a for-profit customer relationship.

I'm totally on-board with there being region-specific niches where it simply works better to have support in that area.

Farmers from the Midwest get pretty annoyed when Congress passes laws which cannot, in any practical/economically feasible way, be followed. The laws may be perfectly reasonable when looking at factories, but make little sense applied to farmers

I kind of agree with the people above if you take an experienced team then replace it with another team(with cost cutting added in), it could be a block down the road and your going to run into problems.

Personally I think ego is part of the issue - VCs don't want to admit they don't always need "the best of the best talent" for their application.

Especially if their actual product would still be a turd no matter how polished like Juicero - there is no real sophistication needed there, they just wanted to copy Keurig to get rich.

> Personally I think ego is part of the issue - VCs don't want to admit they don't always need "the best of the best talent" for their application.

I'm sorry, but isn't that the same bigoted mindset?

Unless there's real evidence that the valley actually has "the best of the best talent". Every time I see that claim, though, it boils down to some kind of circular logic.

I would definitely agree SV folks think they're the best, but real evidence is lacking.

I did put it in quotes to point out that it was considered an opinion. The real point was that they were doing routine work and paying like they are doing something new while working on a rehash.

There is some evidence that they are in fact above average given repeated failures to outsource to lower cost locales. From many corporations who tend to be ruthless about cutting costs even at the risk of long term problems that stands out as /something/. There are also incompetents everywhere as demonstrated by some major and avoidable blunders.

They may in fact be overpriced and there are people with said capabilities elsewhere. Mobility isn't perfect, one would expect there to be a talent concentration there based upon wages - even if they don't stick around the feather in their cap helps with future job seeking and wages. I am also aware not all sufficent talent is capable or wishes to of head there.

However prejudicing in talent pools does no favors eithe. To take an absurd example recruiting for people who are Olympic body builder and Java developers when you really just need Java developers would pass up vast pools of talent and raise expenses for essentially no reason. That is an extreme case of pointless overspecification.

The multitude of world changing organizations, especially by market cap, that have come out of SV is some evidence. Not that that means “best of the best”, but if I were to bet on where something transformative will come from, SV would still be on my short list.

It’s all about playing the odds, not necessarily being absolute about statements like best of the best.

There aren't many "world changing" organizations coming out of SV lately, and I'm not sure that claim holds in any case: http://fortune.com/fortune500/visualizations/

Even narrowing down to "tech" companies, there are enough outliers that I don't buy it.

Change it to "SV has the best developers searching for VC funding," and I believe it, but I'd still question the cause and effect of the situation...

Hard agree. IMO the best tech talent in the US is in finance, telecom and oil, none of which are Valley based. Most of what comes out of the Valley these days is mountebanks with software written by overambitious undereducated kids.

Older companies like Google, Oracle and so on still contain pockets of tech excellence, but you can't buy those guys with your startup idea.

Personally I think money is part of the issue. It always seemed like an obvious move for wealthy investors to buy properties and area infrastructure, then turn around and rent/sell it to the firms their companies are funding. This is a tried and true model, as recently discussed with WeWork, but only really works if they convince entrepreneurs to stay in one area like the Bay Area

There have been islands of tech outside the valley for longer than the valley has been an island of tech. ENIAC as developed in Pennsylvania (Iowa claims they had one before then).

The valley is much larger, but it was never the only location.