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Comment by josephjrobison | Hacker News Reader

Austin is great, lived there for 4 years, and I think it's healthy to have alternatives to Silicon Valley - both geographically and taxation-wise.

My observation is that while there are plenty of startups - helped by Joshua Baer's Capital Factory and Techstars - it seems that most of the big tech companies are more taking advantage of the state's business-friendly tax laws and cheaper labor force than anything.

A lot of companies - Apple, Oracle, etc - are more using it as a customer service and sales team base than for engineering, R&D, etc.

Of course there will be plenty of counter-examples (HomeAway, Dell, BazaarVoice, RetailMeNot, Indeed), but that's just a macro observation to keep in mind.

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I lived in Austin for the past two years and was quite disappointed by the people, the city, and the schools. Glad to be out of there and I have no interest in moving back despite it being my hometown.

Number one complaint, the city has feeble public offerings (no zoo, no aquarium, no subway or light rail, small museums).

Number two complaint, the schools are overrated (and Texas math is one grade year behind most other states).

Number three complaint, I encountered a lot of people with a remarkable lack of integrity. Sorry to say that as it was the most surprising and disappointing.

Could you elaborate on the integrity bit? Shady people exist everywhere,why expect Austin to be better?

True, shady people do exist everywhere but I expected more of Austin due to it being in a part of the country where someone's word is supposed to, or at least used to, mean something. Maybe I'm old-fashioned that way.

To elaborate on the integrity bit, ... over-promising to the point of creating an expectation that would not be met or acknowledged at any point in the future. Some people might refer to that behavior as being 'flaky'. And I should note that most people in Austin are not like that, but that I encountered a lot more flakiness there than in other cities.

Having grown up in the South, I think I understand what you experienced.

Yeah, someone's word seems to count a bit more in smaller towns from my own experience too. I grew up in nothern GA and between the methheads and bill o'reilly fans, there's a lot of goodhearted, honest people there with old-school values. If you break down on the side of the road, you'll certainly have a couple people stop to help you in a bit. I never got that in LA. I have done my part though. :)

You would really like Minneapolis/St Paul or Madison.

Do you have anything to back up your claim about math?

I see here: https://www.usatoday.com/story/money/economy/2018/02/08/geog... -- that Texas ranks pretty low in math. But it's hard to say what that really means.

I've been under the impression that Texas's k-12 education is much better than California's and on par with New York and Illinois.

Texas has something crazy like 1/5th of all k-12 students in the country. That number has shot up faster than any other state, so I think it's reasonable if they're having some "growing pains" so to speak.

==I've been under the impression that Texas's k-12 education is much better than California's and on par with New York and Illinois.==

Your own source disagrees:

9. New York

16. Illinois

35. California

40. Texas

==Texas has something crazy like 1/5th of all k-12 students in the country.==

It's more like 1/10th. Texas has 5.4 million in public k-12 [1] and there are 50.7 million in the US public k-12 [2].

==That number has shot up faster than any other state, so I think it's reasonable if they're having some "growing pains" so to speak.==

A good way to get past those growing pains would be to invest in education. Again, from your source on Texas "Public school spending: $8,485 per pupil (4th lowest)".

[1] https://tea.texas.gov/Reports_and_Data/School_Performance/Ac...

[2] https://nces.ed.gov/fastfacts/display.asp?id=372

Personal experience and greatschools.org used to have a math comparison by state but I think they have changed their site since I last saw it.

Parents that can afford to move into the city send their children to private schools, so if you are looking at moving there and your children don't play football then I would recommend considering private school as an option.

> A lot of companies - Apple, Oracle, etc - are more using it as a customer service and sales team base than for engineering, R&D, etc.

Cloudflare have an office in Austin, and it is majority engineering and mostly the R&D new experiment teams and some core security at that (first class engineering teams)

> A lot of companies - Apple, Oracle, etc - are more using it as a customer service and sales team base than for engineering, R&D, etc.

That may be how it was, but recently (especially in the last year), I've heard tons of anecdotes, in addition to my own experience, that engineering teams are slowly being moved (or started) out here.

To add to your counter-examples, Apple is spending $1 billion to build a gigantic campus in NW Austin. Also, PayPal and eBay have been here since at least 2008 and various PayPal pivotal technical teams were evenly or majorly present in Austin. Google is buying more property here for additional technical teams and Amazon has a fairly large technical presence (e.g. PrimeNow) in N. Austin. Edit: $1 billion, not $5 .

Great to hear - will be good for the city (depending on who you ask). That's a positive trend.

Still think Austin needs more homegrown startups to be in the same sentence as Silicon Valley.

This is what I noticed and reasons I left after living their for 3 years.

I lived downtown proper and had no interest in moving out in the suburb areas where these bigger tech opportunities were. The appeal of Austin is downtown to me. The areas in which these larger companies and opportunities are in Austin (or Round Rock actually?) is a rather time consuming commute. I also didn't want to have a car and the transit system is... there isn't one. There are some smaller well established and known startups closer in downtown. I applied to a few, but I guess I'm just not what they were looking for because I didn't get offers. I guess I'm not the super rockstar they want.

On the suburbs - the funny thing is, besides a few wealthier suburbs to the west of downtown, if you drive 15 minutes outside of downtown, it feels almost no different than the suburbs of Waco, Houston, Dallas, etc.

Google has an office downtown. They've got a growing engineering team too, mostly in Cloud.

So funny to see you mention Joshua Baer's Capital Factory. I've done some work for them in the past.

he's probably a top 5 figure in the austin tech community

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