Comment by lefstathiou | Hacker News Reader

Comment by lefstathiou | Hacker News Reader

Taking a macro view on it and ignoring individual circumstances, I believe San Francisco is slowly bleeding itself out which may be a net positive for society (and I would apply this to my home NYC as well).

I don’t believe it’s a good idea for our society long term to have ALL of the nation’s leading X (technologists, bankers, engineers) in one city or state. As painful as it is to see your community leave, taking a perhaps heartless view on this, these talented people are going to other places and will revitalize communities.

I live in NYC and it pains me to bump into people who are enslaved by their paycheck commuting 3 hours (no exaggeration) a day. Moms and dads never seeing their kids dealing with crumbling infrastructure. I believe they could cut that paycheck in half, live in Charlotte or any number of good cities and lead a much happier life.

I guess I’m saying that while I wouldn’t wish being priced out of your community to anyone, for people on the trajectory of being priced out, the sooner perhaps the better to a happier life somewhere else.

We will still have ALL of the nation's leading engineers in one city / area, but no one else will be able to afford to live there. Even non-leading engineers will be forced to move out, and will no longer be able to learn from the leading engineers, lowering national productivity.

I don't know why you assume the leading engineers will move. As a "leading engineer", I don't see why I would take a $200-300k/year paycut and a less interesting job just to leave San Francisco, even though it pains me to see what the local politicians here are doing to their people.

I know of a few unicorns that have already started moving their interesting jobs to other cities when a few of their leading engineers express interest in moving out of the SF Bay Area. When I told my boss I was planning on moving, he and my director offered to let me start a satellite team in the office I'm transferring too.

I wouldn't be surprised if some tech companies start creating "moving charters" where a team gets slated to move to another satellite office and engineers interested in that satellite office transfer into that team and then the team is moved after like 1-year.

The SF Bay Area still leads in interesting jobs, but I increasingly see interesting jobs with leading engineers in other cities and that trend will only continue over time. In my company, I can think of four satellite offices that I know has strong engineers with interesting projects in low cost of living cities that I'd consider moving to.

We should be densifying the towns and cities we have, not spreading out further.

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