There was no inherent "supremacy", just one created by a bunch of companies being together.
Did SV municipalities do anything else to deserve it?
There are better places, with more rental space, more resources, better weather, and so on, plus WFH is here to stay...
I can only speak for myself but I'll never live in a red state again. Not even Texas, it's not worth it. Even where I grew up (the purple midwest) is too socially conservative for me after living in California.
It's like how for most of my life I barely understood the mitigating measures women take in many situations where I don't even notice the situation.
And another was in sales in industrial manufacturing and there was a lot of misogyny and low-grade racism there.
They're in WA now so and much happier.
¹ the "isn't happening to me" thing is sort of analogous to "works on my machine". Because of the range of stuff, things usually do "work on my machine".
It's fine to prefer living in one culture over another, which is exactly what both your friend and the people they complained about are doing.
And to be clear, I did not mean illegal immigration. I meant legal immigration.
Many immigrants are even more religious and/or convervative than "White and American".
Just of a different culture.
I was born in the US but my ethnicity is visually ambiguous and people assume I'm Mexican, Filipino, or Indian (in that order) based on the type of brown person they grew up with. In CA, no one particularly cares what type of brown person I am. But when I lived in Ohio, I was told that I should "go back home where [I] came from", that I'm one of the good ones and should bring more of my family over, or that I'm "stealing jobs from honest Americans," based on whether the redneck in question thought I was Mexican, Filipino, or Indian. My cousin and his wife, in Indiana, used to experience the same harassment regularly until they started wearing their scrubs everywhere so people would know that they're doctors.
I turned down a very well-paying job in Ohio (and came back to CA) because the people there were so vile.
This was on top of another layer of class conflict between the middle class teachers/administration and lower class/trailer park kids, who mostly dropped out at 16 which was fine with the admin. Lots of additional pressure on other students who didn't conform for various race/gender/etc. reasons. And then completely bizarre stuff like, though the official reason for not having a soccer team was that it would detract from the sacrosanct football program, many of the teachers were clear that believed soccer to be a Communist sport (this was in the 90s when the cold war was long over).
Many of the perpetrators here are very nice people and fine neighbors, but if you aren't an evangelical Christian it can be a challenge. Especially if you're not white: the KKK is still a well known presence just down the road in Harrison, AR, so it's not just woke fearmongering.
It's one thing to live in these environments as an adult and be able to blow a lot of it off, but it's another thing completely to have kids there, which really detracts from the 'leave California to raise kids' motivation.
And it would be better at a larger city like St. Louis or Indianapolis but some fraction of the population of those places are from towns like mine and don't find these beliefs and practices to be particularly problematic.
Intolerable is an ironic word because my personal choices cut right to the paradox of tolerance.
Things have a way of flipping during times of significance. California's entertainment industry was formed by a bunch of young, driven people who wanted to escape paying IP royalties to the Edison company. Now, they're doing everything in their legal power to pursue their own IP infringement cases, taking on the form and function of their reason for leaving NY in the first place.
That NIMBY thing has been boiling over for decades now. There will be new stakeholders in that battle attaching themselves to conservative and far-right movements. Get ready!
- WFH or in-office 2-3 days per week
- Office every Wednesday
- Team get-together once a month
- Remote in the same/adjacent time zone
- Remote anywhere you want that we can legally hire you (seems unlikely)
- Remote pay-adjusted (or not)
- Whether there is an office or not
In general, I expect the extreme cases will be fairly rare but pretty much every one of the scenarios (as well as whether they're mandatory or optional) will drive different decisions relative to 5-days a week in the office.
Could be age / career related - VPs of big companies are usually experienced professionals, so they have strong(er) roots in the Bay Area, with kids in school.
But the number of management moving out is ZERO - at least anecdotally. Once we're allowed to go back to the office and they all go, how long until tech leads and architects also follow? Then "interns and junior employees should be at the office so it's easier to mentor", and then remote becomes something mid-level and seniors-who-plateaued or a CLM position. Which is fine, if you know the tradeoffs...
I've had months and months of continuous rain in the Bay, something I never witnessed when living down South. It's cheaper too. Much much much MUCH more diverse. And food's better as is the landscape.
But I've had my fair share of multi-month El Ninos.
Never did I say one should move to LA and never ever leave town. One can go skiing (nearby even!) or enjoy any kind of weather elsewhere.
Mid 70s and sunny is hard to beat. It's like an eternal spring.
When you have to shovel the drive way twice a day and five minutes later the city snow plow throws half frozen slush on your drive way, you start to crave a warmer climate.
Maybe that's just an effect of getting older. I just moved away to a place with four seasons again, so we'll see!
(Updated: I just read all the sibling comments. We are nearly all from other states and have now all become huge weather weaklings from living in CA!)
And almost everywhere else has large numbers of days where one of the above is true.
Sure, it would be neat if we could have one snowy day a year and a summer thunderstorm or two, too.
Comparing that to not being able to work outside because the state is on fire and the air quality has been before recommended levels for a week is not my favorite tradeoff.
I generally hate most warm climates because they tend to be humid. LA was very nice. The nicest climate I've experienced so far. Haven't been to Northern California though (I imagine it's roughly the same but cooler, so may like it more).
[0] seems like the problem there is it gets much cooler at night, more intraday variation.
Jesus, bro, why'd you throw this in?
This is sort of the argument that management gives to having people in the office.
People need to be at a physical location together for cross-pollination and idea growth.
> anything grows
I'm a gardener. Wherever I go I grow a garden. When I lived in the South Bay the soil in our backyard was AMAZING. Never seen soil like that anywhere else. You didn't have to do much of anything to grow stuff. It was easy to dig. It was like it was loam all the way down. So yes, the climate plays a big part of that 'anything grows', but so does the soil there which is exceptional.
You've just described why I don't like Silicon Valley weather, though indeed the easy and plentiful agriculture is a nice aspect aside from the scarcity of water which often ends up prioritizing farmers of things like almonds over actual residents. Where I live now, I get to enjoy all four seasons and don't have to consider water as a locally scarce resource.
I think this somewhat understates the strength of acquired advantages in agglomeration economies. Particularly in an economy of ideas it seems to me that acquired advantages account for most of the benefit; beyond "cheap rent" there's not much "inherent" advantage to be had.
Even in traditional industry many of the advantages are acquired (i.e. not geographic, which is what I think you're getting at with "inherent supremacy"), the textbook example being Lancashire's dominance in textiles in the 19th century (https://voxeu.org/article/agglomeration-explains-lancashire-...).
I think it's a reasonable point to suggest that the exodus from SV could accelerate the development of other startup/tech hubs, and weaken the comparative advantage of SV, but I think you may be understating the current strengths of SV by focusing on "original advantages" like rent and other environmental/geographic attributes.
That is why they have supremacy, though. Agglomeration effects are a big deal. Its why New York has remained a center of trade and finance for centuries, and why Detroit remains a hub for the automotive industry despite the city's bankruptcy.
No matter what brought the companies there in the first place, just "being together" is a huge deal and is hard to replicate elsewhere. We will see if tech will be an exception, but my prior is that proximity is important, even with WFH, and that Silicon Valley will remain the national center of tech companies.