Comment by charlesju | Hacker News Reader

Comment by charlesju | Hacker News Reader

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1. San Francisco is really nice. It's 87 degrees today at the end of October. There is good food, decent public transportation, culture, ocean, forests, etc. It doesn't snow here or get blistering hot, so productivity is very steady year round.

2. Because San Francisco is very nice (perhaps) and we have good schools around here. A lot of hires come from UCB, Stanford, UCLA, USC, and other UCs. Those account for several of the top engineering schools in the country/world.

3. Silicon Valley has hit an inflection point where we're now the best place in the world to find TOP talent in tech. It's not a great place for mid and junior level talent, but if you need top talent for an opportunity that is high growth and high per employee leverage, there is no place better in the world.

Ultimately, the main issue is that everything is too nice and worked too well so the cost of living has sky rocketed. And that is driving out everyone that isn't a top tier talent (engineering and opts). It's really sad, to be honest, I love San Francisco and Silicon Valley, and I wish we could find a way to solve the living cost issue and continue to grow as a hub for innovation.

SF has always been expensive. When I moved here, my grandfather who was an actuary for an insurance company (i.e. walking financial database) told me that back in the 1930s, they had to pay 2-3x salary for people based there due to the high cost of living. If you read old issues of the SF Chronicle, you'll find the same story repeated across generations.

The only time SF was every really cheap was during the 70s into the late 80s, which was due to a combination of white flight, the Loma Prieta earthquake, and the AIDS plague depopulating the city. Apart from that anomaly, it has been super pricey ever since the Gold Rush.

And the Bay Area as a whole wasn't cheap in the late 80s. (SF may have been cheaper because, as you suggest, upper middle class people weren't rushing to move to SF or most other cities in that period.) But I turned down recruiting from the Bay Area during that period in part because the cost of living was too high relative to where I lived on the East Coast.

It's not hard - just build more housing. Prop 13 and local politics make this so much harder than necessary.

i often wonder to what extent these are rationalizations about the apparently unbeatable availability of capital

> decent public transportation

Nope

It's better than LA's, although that's not saying much. And it's better than most US metro areas.

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