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Comment by Vysero | Hacker News Reader

If the company was hemorrhaging money on employee salaries by being based in SF then why wouldn't they simply move the company somewhere else?

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Greater supply of employees, and potentially greater attraction TO employees.

Sure, they have to "import" employees, but importing 10% of the workforce in the Bay Area at X cost is apparently more appealing than importing 98% of employees to Tulsa at Y cost.

(Relatedly; Tulsa's not exactly a small place, but if you think the influence of "big tech" is bad in a larger metro like the Bay Area, I'd HATE to see what it would look like to bring a deluge of 'outsiders' into a much less populous region)

I hear DC/VA/MD with the contractor industrial complex is a good example

Tulsa is not geographically limited and has enough empty space for practically unlimited build out (similar to bay area or LA in 50 years ago). Tech in Tulsa will cause construction boom but not bay area house prices.

The bay area offers a guaranteed supply of qualified employees.

A tech firm in Boise might not be able to hire and Elixir developer at any price.

In SF, there will be employees as long as you have cash. Not so elsewhere.

Also, they might not even want to hire for such a thing.

There are plenty of businesses that don't need to be on fancy infrastructure or use the coolest new language for their backend.

Going old school is hard too. Not many COBOL programmers in New Jearsy.

> A tech firm in Boise might not be able to hire and Elixir developer at any price.

I think the timescale matters. If it became known over a period of years that some company was paying $1mm for Elixir devs in Boise, loads of folks would consider learning Elixir and moving to Boise.

Because the Bay Area is one of the only places where the supply of potential employees is high enough to meet the company's demand.

You mean to tell me that companies in the Bay Area never pull employees from schools outside of the Bay Area? I get the feeling there is a much more valuable reason for being based in the Bay Area than that.

Of course, it's not so cut and dry. It's sort of cyclical IMO:

- There are already a ton of existing technology companies in the Bay Area, and also a ton of employees.

- Students from schools around the country who are interested in tech might plan to move to the Bay Area due to the number of companies there.

- If your company doesn't hire in the Bay Area, it may miss out on the chance to hire the employees in the groups above.

The end result is an abnormally high supply of technology workers in the Bay Area. I'm not saying that's something intrinsic to the location, it seems to me it's more a result of recent circumstances.

So no tax or media related incentives to being in the Bay Area? You don't think it's worth more to Google to say: "Our headquarters are in SF" rather than: "Our headquarters are in podunk MT"?

I wouldn't be surprised to find out that 90% of the reason FANG companies operate in large metropolitan areas has almost nothing to do with employees and everything to do with global image.

Would that image or media related incentive exist without the huge amount of tech work in the Bay Area? My point is that the pull of the Bay Area is cyclical - supply of tech workers fuels the SV image which fuels more supply of tech workers. I think it all started with tech workers though.

If Stanford or another incubator of tech innovators was in podunk MT, then we would be discussing that location instead.

Yes, look at all the AI growth at Carnegie Mellon, University of Waterloo, Tallinn, Estonia - any relatively well-managed metropolitan area can position itself as an "innovation hub", the US West Coast certainly doesn't have a monopoly on it.

I think you're agreeing with my point? Those areas are hubs for hiring too, for the same reason? Albeit not to the same degree as the Bay Area.

That does not make a lot of sense to me. Google did not open a Seattle office because it enhanced their "global image", but because the presence of Microsoft, UW, Amazon, and a generally thriving tech scene meant that they would gain access to lots of experienced engineers who might be unwilling to move to California. Now they employ thousands of people up here. Facebook did the same thing; they also have a large Seattle office, right down the street from Amazon. Apple has a Seattle office too, focusing on machine learning. Not quite up to a thousand people yet, last I heard, but they have plans to grow. Lots of ML going on in Seattle.

When Intel acquired the AI startup I worked for a couple years ago, they built us a downtown office, much bigger than our team currently needed. Why? Because there are lots of AI people in Seattle who will not move to California, and Intel wants a chance to hire them. But it's still a very small office compared to Intel's global footprint; it does not affect their "image" at all. It's just a practical way of gaining access to Seattle's engineering talent.

It is a simple virtuous cycle. The presence of good jobs draws people who want to work in the field, and the presence of people with experience draws the companies who want to hire them. Geographic concentration is efficient.

That's certainly true at my parent company (Accenture) - we're (in a completely neutral way) a completely different animal than "Silicon Valley unicorn", but we still have a huge gleaming building in SF because it projects a particular image.

Ever notice how competing drug stores are frequently on the same intersection? You might think they would try to be far away from each other.

If they did that then they'd have to give everyone at the company a pay cut. They don't want to do that. They'd rather use these pay cuts to bully individual employees. If they went after everyone at once then they'd have a problem.

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