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Comment by beager | Hacker News Reader

The implication from this litter of thinkpieces on HN is that proximity to a tech hub (SV/NY) is your only competitive advantage as a knowledge worker—your butt is close to their chair. This runs counter to the other prevailing wisdom about SV/NY, which is that those areas are hubs—and essential to the tech industry—because the world's top talent is drawn to it.

So which is it?

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Both?

As someone who is unable to move to California due to family, I've always seen the biggest benefit I am missing to be not applying to jobs close by, but being the proximity to people I can connect with who can help me (and my ideas) grow.

It's an old cliche, but true, that if you surround yourself with people smarter/better than yourself then you will likely get better yourself; conversely, if you are the smartest person in the room on X (no one is the smartest in the room on everything), then there is no forcing function driving you to get better other than one you artificially create for yourself.

"The room" has lost most of its meaning, hasn't it? You're no longer limited to working with people who live within driving distance of yourself, you can now meet super smart people from all over the world on lots of websites, talk to them, work with them, learn from them, get inspired by them.

> "The room" has lost most of its meaning, hasn't it?

I don't think so. Trust and sense of shared purpose and ability are still largely built in person. The continued productivity people claim during the pandemic lockdown is mostly coasting off what was largely established in person before.

Websites, chat-rooms, and video calls are no substitute for the environment created by the physical agglomerations of people found in industry hubs.

That's not specific to the tech industry, either. It's true for any industry whose progress is dictated by hubs of creativity, including health, energy, entertainment, and transportation.

Oh sure, for networking and contacts etc, in person is still the thing. I meant for the "being the smartest person in the room" thing.

Before the internet, you had to go live in a metropolis to even know of these other people that were also interested in what you like, much less talk to or work with them. That has changed dramatically, and you absolutely can work with very bright people on very advanced things while you live somewhere in the middle of nowhere.

Don't get me wrong, it's still nice to meet people in person, but if you can't find a community online where people are smarter than you and/or better than you in whatever you do, you're either a super genius or you're not looking.

> I meant for the "being the smartest person in the room" thing.

I find the preoccupation over chasing the vaguely defined, but often bandied definition of "smart" a bit dull.

What matters more in my opinion is being in an intellectually stimulating and also psychologically safe environment. Other "smarter" people than me have made this observation too.

I'm not saying it has to be SF, NYC, or London, but the environment matters immensely, and it can turn a motivated person who might not appear "smart" in another context into a much more creative person.

> Oh sure, for networking and contacts etc, in person is still the thing.

It's for far more important things than just yukking it up with people and trading business cards.

> if you can't find a community online where people are smarter than you and/or better than you in whatever you do, you're either a super genius or you're not looking.

I personally have yet to see an purely online community that fosters creativity without some fundamental anchoring in creative communities in the real world. The only exception I can think of are online game-building communities and competitions (i.e. Ludum Dare), but that's an unusual case. Is it impossible to find more example that? No. But I'd argue that strictly or even primarily online creative communities are unusual, and the online part is more about networking and cross-pollinating between in-person creative communities.

So you think every node.js / rails developer that happens to live in SV and work in a startup is the next Linus? Of course they're lots of ordinary developers working and living there. And yes, being born American / European is a huge advantage over 80% of the rest of humanity.

Seriously. There are a ton of wannabes up there (entrepreneurial and technical) just like there are wannabe actors in LA. A lot of incredible talent missing at those companies because people simply have zero desire to live there. I can appreciate the Bay Area but it's just not my style (weather, culture, lack of diversity in industry, etc). I'd bounce to wine country or the forests up north if I lived up there now.

Additinally, Linus created Linux while still living in Finland. He only emigrated to the US after Linux was alteady successful.

Things that don't make sense tend to get adjusted during bad economic times. I've worked with alot of companies as a customer, and at end of the day, none of the stakeholders are getting bang for the buck. Companies set money on fire, employees are mostly living a middle class lifestyle at an insane level of compensation.

I live out in the provinces, and we pay 20-30% of the rate for SV talent. My lifestyle in SV would require 7x the compensation without me being any smarter or skilled than I am. NYC is more of a real place and is probably less inflated, alot of the premium there is really about domain expertise.

> NYC is more of a real place and is probably less inflated, alot of the premium there is really about domain expertise.

We'll see. I'm betting you're wrong - NYC has nothing on SF in tech expertise and the rest of the country (especially outside of the West coast) doesn't have much on it either.

If by tech expertise you mean knowledge of cloud and large scale web applications, then yes. For security though, and I'm sure this is true for other industries, the Bay Area has very little on the defense industry in Maryland.

Security is a small part of the overall tech industry. I live near Bethesda and I would hardly call the region a tech hub on par with any of the ones in the West coast.

While I agree that DC is not on the standard with SF or Seattle (what are the other West Coast tech hubs), DC is definitely a tech hub in it's own right.

The problem with DC is that the talent pool is extremely diluted by disillusioned, rent-seeking government contractors who get a certification, claim a bunch of stuff on their resume, and get bid as part of a 20-person team on a contract that really only requires 5-6 committed (for the sake of argument, "SV caliber") people.

The problem is, hardly anyone that is "SV caliber" wants to work on pokey gov't contracts, but enough people on that team care enough about the mission, the project, or their company to allow the freeloaders to get away with it.

There's no incentive to firing them because a) the client understands that govt work is extremely inefficient so they tolerate it b) the freeloaders are very good at not pissing anyone off (they are very friendly and dress well, etc) and c) their employer literally loses money if they are removed.

So the cycle continues.

Having said all that, in amongst the chaff there is a significant kernel of wheat in the DC area, both in the contracting as well as private sector space.

Capital One has a really good engineering culture and hires a lot of very smart kids straight out of school and trains them very well. Many of them don't stay in DC, however, and go on to work at GOOG, MSFT, AMZN, etc for big salaries after their 2-year stint at COF is over.

Great comment.

NoVa definitely has some strong talent and you're correct in highlighting Capital One specifically (they recruit heavily at my alma mater and I know a number of talented people who work there). You're also correct about talent dilution - I worked for a brief stint at a government agency doing tech work and I would say the majority of contractors are unfortunately, quite untalented and love to hide behind buzzwords.

> what are the other West Coast tech hubs

I would say the Bay is several different tech hubs rolled into one, Portland has a fair bit of tech work, and LA is overlooked but increasingly becoming a big one.

Thanks for your reply.

In terms of getting work, I would say there are fewer security research jobs available in the Bay Area than scattered around the beltway. My last search, there were a ton of jobs asking how to authenticate servers to each other when what I want to talk about is how to fuzz or instrument code.

The same set of people aren't saying both things. The people who believe SV and NY have top talent are exactly the ones who think remote work is great. I'm excited about the trend; a bigger pool of talented engineers for me to work with means I'll be able to accomplish more and have to compromise less on my career goals.

The people who worry that remote work will be a disaster are the ones who never believed SV engineers were more talented in the first place.

> The people who worry that remote work will be a disaster are the ones who never believed SV engineers were more talented in the first place.

Or that technical talent does not really contribute to success as much as the prevailing theories believe?

If someone says SV engineers are talented, but only in some technical way that doesn't really matter, I'd classify that as a claim that they're not really talented.

There are multiple layers. I think SV will remain a hub from a commercial standpoint, so if you're fishing for VC money that's still where you want to be.

From a purely technical standpoint, we'll see, but tbh, as others have said, outsourcing has been happening for decades now and if anything the wave is currently retreating.

I can count three VCs in my immediate circle of contacts that are expanding up and down the West Coast at least.

The NIMBYs in SF are going to get their wish: shrinking the city and collapsing its major industry. As another poster stated: things that don't make sense get adjusted in bad economic times. Things like paying 7-10X for real estate when you're in a digital industry...

I was just reading another piece that suggested the current crisis is likely to accelerate a number of trends that were already happening to some degree. I certainly don't expect the Bay Area to empty out or for Google to move their HQ to Omaha. But a lot of big tech companies were already shifting more of their hiring to new offices in areas removed from their HQ even if they don't make a big deal of it like Amazon did. And, anecdotally, I hear of a lot more people in my circles leaving the Bay Area than moving to it.

VC money being geographically concentrated in SV seems like the kind of ingrained inefficiency that VCs themselves clamor on about disrupting excessively. Dealflow is a solvable problem for distributed futures.

It can be both. Prior to the current situation, many/most companies preferred people who could/would commute to a company office. Which gives more options to people willing to work near one of those hubs and mostly work in an office.

At the same time, many people prefer to live near one of those hubs whether because they just like NYC, Boston, Austin, Bay Area, Seattle, etc. or because they believe it gives them more flexibility in changing employers. (And/or being in proximity to many like-minded individuals.)

Why can't it be both? Companies locate where the talent is; the talent goes where the companies are. Your standard positive feedback loop.

immigration doesn't select for the most talented, it selects for the younger, the male, the willing, the otherwise unburdened etc. The intellectual bar to enter SV is not that high. The willingness to relocate, assimilate to the culture etc, is.

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