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Comment by dkobran | Hacker News Reader

HP and Oracle don’t exactly represent the heart of Silicon Valley today and what makes it special/unique. I actually think zombie corporations like Oracle, companies that haven’t innovated in decades and instead rely on an army of sales people to sell legacy software, are somewhat the antithesis of Silicon Valley which is really about real technological innovation and disruption at it’s core. I know there are lots of exceptions to this somewhat idyllic version of Silicon Valley but at the same time, you can’t really argue that there is a place in the US (or the rest of the world for that matter) that produces more technological advancements than Silicon Valley. I’m not a believer in American Exceptionalism — just stating facts. This is a long winded way of saying who cares if those companies leave, the Bay Area is probably better off.

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HP moving to Texas is the corporate version of my grandparents retiring to Florida.

Except HP is not retiring and no-ones grandparent.

Sure HP and Oracle are not "sexy" but they do employee massive numbers of tech folks. The impact will be noticed. They hire people who later move to the "sexy" companies a few years into their career.

>> Sure HP and Oracle are not "sexy" but they do employee massive numbers of tech folks.

It's a much different type of employee than you'd have at somewhere like Netflix or Google, though.

But moving to Texas frees up real estate in the Bay Area for more productive businesses. And given the transient nature of techies, many of those techies would have moved to California will now move to Texas, putting some relief into the housing market and maybe clearing up traffic a bit. I wouldn’t see these two moving as a negative, they’ve long had reputations as bad places to work.

The biggest hit will be on tax revenue, new "sexy" businesses dont tend to make as much money as the zombie companies that seem to print money

California makes money on cap gains taxes as well as corporate income taxes. And likely the personal income taxes won't change.

Complaining about dev teams moving to texas is like complaining about goods being manufactured in China. It's a net positive for the whole world, plus competition will improve the Vally and SF just as much as it improves individual companies and products.

Net positive only if your measure for success is “able to buy more widgets for less money”

Plenty of other criteria on which it is a positive. Raising millions out of poverty. More people working on hard problems.

As to the latter criterion: consider the symbolism of Aricebo collapsing in an uncontrolled fashion on the same day a Chinese spacecraft departed te moon (and a Japanese one prepared to deliver its second sample of an extraterrestrial sample). When the Bush administration restricted stem cell research, China and Singapore picked up the slack. Etc.

In this case exporting technical work to states like Texas not only may open up opportunities for more people to do technical work but can help them as oil related revenues decline.

The world is not zero sum and to me exporting a job to China, India, Romania or Texas as are equivalently positive.

He’ll do you object to Apple building a chip development team in San Diego?

I think that them being equivalently positive is a weird way of looking at it? It ignores what the poster you're replying to is probably referring towards. If you value Romanian ideals over Texan ideals then you'd prefer Romania to get a lucrative economic position of power through trade over Texas as the Romanian government provides more utility to you due to more favorable (to you) ideals.

Though, I personally don't think these companies moving to Texas matters that much, but if there was a mass migration it could certainly shake things up in ways that some may appreciate and some dislike.

Just to note here, the dev teams aren't moving to Texas, management is moving to Texas. The dev teams are more likely to be moving to India where costs are lower (especially if we are talking about Oracle and HPE).

Especially in this "everyone works from home" world that COVID's delivered us. Even after COVID's over, a lot of employers are going to be much more open to permanent work-from-home.

California already has plenty of that, and if it ever becomes a problem, that means there is underused capacity that will attract more people (with their income taxes) in again.

Oracle, HPE, and (not moving, but might as well add) IBM have long made their money with legal and financial shenanigans anyways, they are exactly what we should call zombie companies.

They are only moving Head Offices - not closing down campuses; most likely, it's a subset of the bean counters and admin stuff who may be asked to move. If you're cynical, you could argue they are only shipping the "HQ" signage from their Bay Area buildings to Texas.

What about Tesla and Palantir?

Palantir has always been creepy and isolated, and Tesla is led by a super-villain who is moving to a state where he can legally force people into offices during a pandemic.

Plus his rockets are there, so that's a perk.

What about Charles Schwab? What about co-founders like the Reddit dude ditching CA?

Alexis Ohanian has lived in Florida since 2017 and it might be because his wife Serena Williams had lived in Florida when she was a child.

I partially agree. However, Elon Musk has personally moved to Texas, and he's begun moving some operations of his companies there as well, like SpaceX and Tesla. And those are certainly disruptors.

You're underestimating just how toxic California's political climate has become towards business. Democrats see them as bottomless pits of money to be abused and extorted, while giving them nothing back in return. Some companies are still willing to put up with it, but many, both companies and individuals, are getting out. Already, California has a net immigration deficit. The only reason California's population isn't shrinking is due to its local birth rate.

The political climate in California is astonishingly toxic and disconnected from the realities of the market. I for one cannot wait to leave this place for greener pastures. California's answer to everything is raise taxes. And everyone cheers. And nothing gets fixed.

The trick is, will those voting for taxes to be raised do the same when they relocate elsewhere? California is not a dictatorship. The people of the state have voted for this situation.

I realize that not everyone in California votes and thinks the same. Those leaving the state might not be reflective of the voting patterns of the state as a whole but doubt this migration out of California is impactless on the places those leaving go to.

Yes, that is a big problem. People don't seem to learn their lesson. CA peoples leave CA and go to austin and we're already seeing some of the same things happening there as in CA, where housing supply is restricted and of course, at that point housing prices go up again.

People just never learn the fundamentals of economics and how those decisions lead to economic hardship for so many, that's the real problem.

By people, do you mean policymakers that disincentivize building more housing in order to prop up property values?

both the policy makers, and the masses of voters that support them.

> People just never learn the fundamentals of economics

Maybe. Or they know if they buy today and make it hard to build, they can go somewhere new with a big pile of money later. They got theirs, and they don't care about the others.

In actually, it's a big and heterogeneous group of people. I expect some never learned, as you say. Some are jerks, as I described. Some just don't think deeply enough about their policy choices, and some think there are post-Econ 101 reasons why the Econ 101 dynamics (while important) aren't what dominate.

And of course there are some of us Californians, staying and leaving, who do think it should be easier to build.

It's the latter that really bugs me.

I'm willing and even happy to pay taxes for commensurate benefits. I don't really feel like I get that in CA. It's like an extremely inefficient engine.

Ironically there is one way in which the tax benefits are ABSURDLY generous - unemployment. When I saw how much that returned I was staggered. Perhaps I'm in an income sweet spot, but when I calculated it, it was far more assistance than I would have expected from a non-French government.

I'm aware of course that state tax sits on top of Federal tax, but when you factor into the equation what responsibilities are Federal and not state, it looks astonishingly poorly distributed.

I'm not really sure how the high cost of living is anything other than a milestone around the area's neck. I've lived in v-high COL areas, but that has always gone hand in hand with extreme density, which could easily be viewed at as a simple tax for the provision of world-class services. Somehow I'm out here in suburbia paying Megacity rates.

> California's answer to everything is raise taxes.

Really? It's almost the end of 2020 and California hasn't passed a single tax increase. Let's look at 2020 ballot measures:

* Requires commercial and industrial properties to be taxed based on market value and dedicates revenue? REJECTED

Source: https://ballotpedia.org/California_2020_ballot_propositions

And legislation?

* AB 2088 - Wealth Tax? REJECTED

* AB 1253 - Tax rate increase on taxpayers making over $1M? REJECTED

* AB 398 - Headcount tax on businesses with 500+ employees? REJECTED

Source: https://blog.armaninollp.com/tax/2020/09/08/ca-legislative-s...

FWIW, Democrats have held a supermajority (>= 2/3) in both the House and Senate all year long.

> It's almost the end of 2020 and California hasn't passed a single tax increase.

Prop 19 involves both additional exemptions and limitations on existing exemptions from full-value assessment, but is projected on balance to be a net increase, and is definitely an increase for some taxpayers, and it passed. So, while I agree with your general point, this claim is technically overstated.

This leaves out key context: Prop 19 is designed to rollback some of Prop 13, which has been a financial disaster for CA since the voters passed it, many decades ago. You can trace a lot of California's "let's raise taxes" issues to the lack of revenue caused by Prop 13.

SpaceX moving specifically to Brownsville, which is the point closest to the equator in the USA other than Florida. The spaceport will be closer to the equator than Kennedy Space Center.

Oracle leaving for Texas reminded me of this person: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=18442941

People getting excited for Texas seems a bit silly! Real tech hub but... this is Oracle. C'mon.

The damage to CA's economy won't come from the has-beens leaving, but the never-will-be's that never happen.

It's hard to have a ramen startup when your garage costs a million dollars.

SF has been operating on the "Get Big Quick" financial injection model for a while now, so it probably won't stop those types of companies. But we shouldn't pretend that there's been a good environment for the idyllic startup in at least 20 years in the Bay Area.

> It's hard to have a ramen startup when your garage costs a million dollars.

Word.

Peter Thiel had something to say about this - basically, he said that so much of the VC money that a start up would raise would go to rent that it no longer makes sense to start a company in the Bay Area.

And those garages in Austin, Nashville, Charlotte, Railegh-Durham, and basically every where else are starting to look very attractive to savvy start up founders. Especially under the WFH circumstances bc of covid.

Austin's been on the tech radar for a while, but I've seen a lot of my friends from the DC area head down to Raleigh-Durham, easily 5+, and a couple who headed to Nashville.

Raleigh is where we’re headed in January, California has been great for the past 20 years or so but now with full WFH we don’t need to stay.

But I dont want to live in any of those places. Too hot.

The rise of remote work has been pushed forward hard by the pandemic which means that new companies with a modern and enlightened structure will have minimal need for facilities and offices. The servers are in the cloud and employees can sublet rooms to keep rent minimal.

The resource metric that really counts is talent. That probably means there will be more of NorCal, BosWash, Texas, and Rust Belt all getting involved and contributing whenever there is a truly significant effort.

> I actually think zombie corporations like Oracle, companies that haven’t innovated in decades and instead rely on an army of sales people to sell legacy software.

Those army of sales people are probably now selling you the latest and greatest in vendor lock-in on behalf of AWS [0] and GCP [1]. There is no escaping the sales army :)

[0] https://www.crn.com/news/cloud/aws-takes-aim-at-oracle-by-hi...

[1] https://www.bizjournals.com/sanjose/news/2019/04/09/google-c...

Are you suggesting Oracle wasn't a vendor lock in ploy from the start? I feel like they've just gone from one vendor lock-in to another.

I was suggesting that AWS is probably the new Oracle.

Agreed. They're companies trying to avoid taxes or regulation. Only companies on the downslide really consider that as an relevant option.

Some folks in my network are ex-Oracle and my understanding is that the company is run by the CFO and a huge group of MBAs. Any company where the bean counters are at the helm are optimizing for things like quarterly earnings, tax savings like you said, etc. This is the stage where they milk whatever they can out of a dying cash cow. There’s nothing interesting to me about this flavor of capitalism and I don’t think it’s something America should be proud of producing. Conversely, technology innovation and the entire ecosystem in Silicon Valley is really special and almost irreplicable.

Note: I have nothing against MBAs, I just don’t think it’s appropriate for them to have the loudest voice at a non-financial institution. They serve a critical role but it’s a supporting one and not suitable to leadership / company direction.

Growth at geriatric tech companies like IBM, HP, Oracle, etc. is largely inorganic, driven by well-negotiated acquisitions of smaller B2B software companies.

It takes MBAs to do this sort of work, and while it isn't for me, I don't think it's the worst business model out there.

it doesn't take an MBA to do that work

Why does it take an MBA to do that work?

You don't need an MBA for the financial/high level business knowledge requirements (though many people involved in this have one), but the people networks that MBA programs provide are very beneficial in getting connected to the right person at the right company.

So MBA actually means MBA from top 10, maybe top 15 school? I can’t imagine the network being too useful for the 25th best MBA program.

My friends have only recently graduated from their MBAs. Will be interesting to see if their networks help.

The main value of an MBA is the network. I think lower tier schools can work well if they are tight knit and the graduates tend to stay local to the school. The top tier schools will just have people making more money at more "prestigious" companies.

I've seen a lot of tech companies with CFOs as leaders and you're 100% right. They have a certain set of tools and fix those types of problems, which usually aren't the ways to lead tech companies. I think every company should be lead by a person who has a strong background in the company's main role. I have seen finance background CEOs get replaced and the Company began to thrive again. Its not a bad investing idea!

Like TSLA?

Correct me if I'm wrong but I believe only Musk is moving to Texas, not Telsa. Thought at this point they are basically one in the same.

Tesla is building factories in Texas. Long term Texas makes more sense for manufacturing as there are established supply chains there.

You also probably have tons of cheap flat land that is ideal for manufacturing? So that would seem to make sense.

The Midwest has that too. But it also has unions. :)

It's also a lot further away from the Mexico border, where an awful lot of car parts are manufactured. A whole lot of those parts are already flowing through TX as it is, easier to dip into the existing streams than build new supply chains.

Also a lot of bigger, tech friendly cities -- Dallas, Austin, and Houston is poised to overtake Chicago as the 3rd largest city in the US within a decade or two.

Kanasas may be similar in terms of taxes and political climate (unions) but all its really got going for it is empty space. Ditto for much of the rest of the Midwest.

He's opening new Tesla facilities in Texas, but currently he hasn't formally announced he's completely pulling operations out of Texas, although he's threatened to in the past.

He made some very suggestive comments last week about Tesla being the last manufacturer of cars in CA.

I might add, the size of the Austin gigafactory is larger than the size of all Tesla factories in the world combined [1].

I will leave you to do the math if Tesla leaving CA isn't a possibility.

[1] https://electrek.co/2020/07/30/tesla-gigafactory-texas-crazy...

That size comparison doesn't actually show a comparison. It only has the footprints for the other factories, and the entirety of the land purchase for the texas factory. What a bizarre thing!

If you look at the planning documents you'll see that the planned footprint for the texas factory is probably a similar size to the plans for the rest of their "giga" factories. https://electrek.co/wp-content/uploads/sites/3/2020/09/Tesla...

It explains the footprints in the article. They're largely not usable, whereas the Austin one is.

These are manufacturing jobs. It is not exactly like California has a better environment for that than Texas.

Your second statement struck me, and I was curious how the manufacturing sectors compare for California vs Texas.

Numbers from the National Association of Manufacturers:

California: $316.7b manufacturing output, 10.67% of state product, 7.72% of employment. [1]

Texas: $230.45b manufacturing output, 12.98% of state product, 7.04% of employment. [2]

So really, it doesn't seem like one state is particularly better than the other for manufacturing by the numbers.

1: https://www.nam.org/state-manufacturing-data/2019-california...

2: https://www.nam.org/state-manufacturing-data/2019-texas-manu...

> Your second statement struck me, and I was curious how the manufacturing sectors compare for California vs Texas.

And Wall Street was great in New York until they moved to Florida, North Carolina, and Hawaii... and Oil headquarters were huge in California until they moved to Texas... and Big Auto was big in Michigan until they moved to the South and on and on.

What is so mind-boggling about all these people not seeing the trends is acting like what is is what has to be. There's no divine right for these companies to remain in California. It has a terrible business climate. Were it not for oil, agriculture, and defense in parts of CA the Bay Area loathes, there would be very little actual "stuff" produced in California. Software has no geographic attachment to the land like ag or oil, so there's no reason they have to be forced to the Central Valley. They can just leave.

Going to Mars? Or running to Mars?

To be fair, here's the complete list of companies in the known universe that don't try to avoid taxes or regulation:

[error data not found]

There's a cost of moving. California's taxes and regulations are bad, bad enough to force many out, but not all. If things continue on their present course, even Google and Amazon, who personally like the political climate there, will have to start looking elsewhere.

> Amazon

Headquartered in Seattle, Washington. Not California.

Which also does not have state income tax.

nah, we got some of the highest sales tax in the country instead.

Sure, but California has similar levels of sales tax to Washington and the highest state income taxes in addition.

Yea, the stats always say Washington has some of the highest sales tax, but i am shocked at how much i pay when in SF/LA/NYC.

My tax burden has certainly lowered since moving from CA to WA, kinda miss the weather though.

Funny to point this out. Bezos literally packed up his car and drove from NYC to Seattle in order to avoid Internet commerce taxes.

Plenty of company CEO’s know little to nothing about taxes and simply hand relevant details to a different firm. Growth gives exponential returns, taxes give linear returns which is why they can be ignored for years. Regulations are similarly irrelevant for most companies, as long as the competition needs to play by the same rules they tend to zero out as just a cost of doing business.

> taxes give linear returns which is why they can be ignored for years

This isn't true at all. The effect of taxes compound just like anything else. E.g. if Warren Buffet had originally incorporated Berkshire as a Bermuda-based reinsurer, he'd be worth over $400 billion today. If he didn't structure it as an insurer at all he'd only be worth $20 billion.

Tax savings compound at whatever the long-term ROE of the corporate entity. Therefore tax arbitrage is most important for hyper growth companies.

When you’re growing at even 10% per month the difference between 50Billion and 400 billion in 50 years is a rounding error on a rounding error. Further, diminishing returns means your stuck investing in ever less profitable operations as you grow. These will often lose money, just look at say Microsoft or Google to see how little an extra 100 billion 10 years ago would give them now.

Nobody is saying they don’t have any upside, but as always it’s the opportunity cost that kills you.

Corporate entities have to make quarterly payments. Let's assume you're a $10 million company with 10% monthly ROE/growth. Paying an additional 9% in California corporate tax rates will result in the loss of a billion in market cap within five years. Literally a third of the terminal value of the startup.

Point taken about diminishing marginal returns. But you can see that even taking that into account, the impact of lax tax planning for shareholders is humongous. (Plus many startups are in winner-take-all markets, and effectively have increasing returns to scale.)

The opportunity cost is real. Tax arbitrage will take some amount of bandwidth. But it often takes much less effort to raise cash by minimizing taxes than it does to raise additional equity funding. The former can mostly be done by the CFO in the background, whereas the latter requires the attention of the founders.

That a 9% income tax in California corporate tax rates are on profit. A profitable startup has unlimited runway so the classic X month of runway company is facing ~0 income taxes.

Further it assumes your capital constrained, which might apply to some fast growing business but if your the magical unicorn of a profitable fast growing growing company then capital is the easiest problem to solve. Worst case you might trade a little extra equity, but again that’s linear dilution often based on growth at the current rate.

PS: If your growing 10% per month it takes 6 years to go from 1 million per year in revenue to 1 billion per year in revenue. It’s very fast, but hardly instantaneous. Keeping that up for 12 years means 1 trillion in revenue per year which is extremely rare. Growth will slow eventually, and when it does there are a huge number of things to optimize.

Most startups don't care about taxes or regulations. Taxes are a rounding error (or literally zero) when you're small and not making any money, which will be the first several years of a startup's life. When you get big you can hire an army of lawyers and accountants to keep all your money in Ireland and avoid them. Regulations just get ignored. When you're small, you're too little a fish to go after; the regulators are busy suing Uber and Lyft and Facebook and Google. When you get big, you can hire an army of lobbyists and PR people to change the regulation, just like Uber and Lyft did.

> Most startups don't care about taxes or regulations.

Yes, but they care about cost. And the reason that everything is so expensive in California is regulation and taxes. Acting like these are separate things is not a valid assumption.

I don't believe that the reason everything is so expensive in California is regulation and taxes. Here's why:

The North Coast (Eureka, Crescent City) and Central Valley (Chico, Fresno, Modesto, Bakersfield) are under the same regulatory and tax regime as the rest of California. How expensive is Eureka? Houses average $300K [1]. Restaurant meals are about $10-12. [2][3] How expensive is Bakersfield? Houses are about $250K [4], meals are about $11 [5]. In other words, they're not much different from the rest of America.

I think that much of the contemporary political narrative gets the causality wrong. The Bay Area and LA are expensive because they are home to global monopolies that funnel cash from all over the world into a small region. There's not much land available in these metros, there's a lot of money floating around, there are a lot of people who want to move in to get a piece of this money, and so they bid up the prices of scarce goods. Regulation comes later, to curb the power imbalances from having corporations with more resources than many nation-states, and taxes come so that the state can get a piece of the huge cash flows coming in.

But the primary driver of cost-of-living is being the sink for the disposable income of 7B consumers. Eureka's primary industry is timber, and Bakersfield's is oil. Both of these are commodity markets where the money goes elsewhere in the value chain. Not so with tech and entertainment.

[1] https://www.zillow.com/homes/Eureka,-CA_rb/

[2] http://www.brickandfirebistro.com/menu-.html

[3] https://www.humboldtsmokehouse.com/menu

[4] https://www.zillow.com/homes/Bakersfield,-CA_rb/

[5] https://www.yelp.com/menu/locale-farm-to-table-eatery-bakers...

I lived in Bakersfield for a long time.

You know what they don't have, insane zoning restrictions that prevent housing. For example, the Houston MSA, which has almost no zoning restrictions is within 90% of the population (and 80% population density) of the Bay Area 9 county MSA with an average house price of... $249K at 2,000 sq ft.

And there's a reason I left Bakersfield and moved to Austin. It's because PG&E energy prices are benchmarked at Bay Area temperatures, and they have progressive pricing. Because I had a server rack in a garage in super hot (110+ F) summers, I was paying over $600 a month in energy bills in a tiny 1000 sq foot house in a ghetto. If I had lived in a 4 bedroom house, I would have paid less in energy.

And just on a secondary, personal note. Houses in Houston are way, way nicer than houses in San Jose, Oakland, San Francisco etc. This is one of those things where I know that people have just not experienced living in other places when I hear quality arguments around housing, food, or amenities.

It's just not that nice in San Francisco. Seriously. The food is just downright bad in quality and variety compared to even Austin, much less Houston. The housing stock is dreadful. Service is slow. The quality of things in Houston is better than the Bay Area, irrespective of cost.

I'll grant you that Bay Area zoning is fucked up. That's under local jurisdiction, though: the state keeps trying to override local zoning requirements to build more housing and keeps getting shot down at the ballot box.

My sister lives in Houston (well, Sugarland technically), so I'm well acquainted with the metro area. It's a very different lifestyle. The housing stock in the Bay Area is uniquely terrible - most of it is 3BR Eichlers that were mass-produced in the 60s. But people don't spend all that much time indoors. Pre-COVID, my wife and I were out every weekend to museums, hiking, the beach, picnics, restaurants, etc. There are 4 parks within walking distance of my home, 2 commercial downtowns, then the mountains are 5 minutes away, the beach 20, SF 30, SJC 30, the Bay 5, etc. And the weather cooperates - it's a consistent 70 and sunny for 8 months out of the year. Meanwhile, my sister's place is 50% larger for a quarter of the price - but it better be, because it's 100 degrees with sweltering humidity for 8 months out of the year. They need to take a highway onramp to get anywhere. They have no friends, because everyone they meet is so far away. Downtown Houston is a little different (my sister went to Rice, Rice Village is pretty nice), but also a completely different story in terms of housing prices - you start seeing million dollar homes once you get to the downtown areas of Houston.

Different strokes for different folks. We could've purchased my sister's house for cash at the time they bought it. I floated the idea by my wife, and she was like "But then we'd have to live in Houston!"

> They're companies trying to avoid taxes or regulation. Only companies on the downslide really consider that as an relevant option.

Which is why continental Europe has so many fast-growing tech companies.

I think that the work culture in Europe is also a factor. Europeans are much less willing to work the way a lot of the startups expect.

Good for them. American work culture is...well, retarded (I couldn't think of a less offensive term that also describes it well).

Have you visited Asia?

Not as an adult, no.

Like Tesla.

A large company like that fertilizes the employment landscape - they hire in large numbers, conduct university recruiting, file H1B paperwork, bring Canadian students and accommodate their co-op schedules, pay relocation, etc. Rarely an expense that a small or medium startup is willing to undertake.

I remember seeing a recruiting report for Yahoo! when I worked there a decade and a half ago. Recruiting kept track of employees' previous work history as well as longevity of such employees within Yahoo! Turns out the top feeder company for them (easy to recruit people, and those recruits tend to linger on) was Oracle.

My understanding is that California has pretty good laws for allowing employees to move on to other companies (specifically, I think non-competes are illegal there).

It'll be really interesting to see if the fertilization still works as well in a state like Texas that's ok with things like non-competes, etc, being used to limit employee mobility.

"HP and Oracle don’t exactly represent the heart of Silicon Valley today and what makes it special/unique. I actually think zombie corporations like Oracle,"

This sentiment is problematic. Oracle has 130 000 employees and $40B in revenue. That's massive.

They are a tech company, not a media company like FB.

They are a lynchpin, just because 'we don't like them' doesn't make them 'not' that.

It's like Burning Man: everyone has their view on 'what it is' but really they mean to say 'what it ought to be'. What it is ... is more objective.

Oracle and companies like them are a huge part of what the SV is, full stop.

It's 'mostly' bad for SV to be losing Oracle.

The 'Bay Exit' story is probably overblown, but it's also very real, and less to do with 'leavers' than the fact it's just easier to do things elsewhere in the first place, at least for some kind of companies.

I agree with everyone's sentiment that Oracle and HP are dinosaurs lead by people in the finance department, but I also agree with yours. These companies are also canaries. We've crossed the tax and bureaucracy threshold that companies are willing to deal with.

I predict that it will continue to be a slow transition until a tax friendly state with a decent tech hub joins California, Montana, North Dakota, and Oklahoma in banning non-competes. If that ever happens, California is in deeper trouble.

The AB5 mess is just emblematic. I'm a "big goverment" supporter, but not so into the totally incompetent govt. The number of loopholes that had to be carved out of this law was ridiculous.

What happened to good infrastructure, education, safety, health care, raise the federal minimum wage etc?

https://www.graalvm.org/ seems like a great innovation to me, not sure if there are other examples.

Yeah literally nothing about Oracle is useful or innovative. It’s like the WalMart of tech companies; just kind of exists and has rested on its laurels for a decade+.

Idk if that's fair to Walmart, they are definitely trying to compete with Amazon via new efforts.

You are correct; Walmart actually does have some nice innovation labs around the country doing some great work.

Forgot about that and Walmart is an easy target for a lot of things :)

I don’t disagree that Walmart is making strides on the online shopping front but I also think they are only fighting for survival/relevance and would not produce anything new or interesting without this pressure. In contrast, companies like Amazon relentlessly develop new products and new technologies (see AWS). It’s not a response to external pressure — they don’t need to innovate to stay alive. They really embody the disruptive ambition / anything is possible mentality that fuels Silicon Valley. I sound like an Amazon fan boy but I’m the opposite haha just pointing out a difference in the DNA of these two companies.

I didn’t know about Walmart’s innovation labs til recently. Might not be as innovative as I think, but it certainly changed the way I view them.

Walmart had the largest corporate database in the world at one point in time (about a decade and a half ago), and used it to build a brutally efficient supply chain.

Innovation in process engineering and operations isn't really discussed much here, but it's almost assuredly had a much greater impact on keeping inflation at bay (helping the median American's salary stretch a little farther) than anything Amazon has ever done.

Before Amazon took the crown of using technology for ruthless efficiency, Walmart was king.

I remember reading articles 10-15 years ago about how the minute someone scanned an item at the cash register, Walmart's inventory systems, which knew what product was on what shelf and in what quantity, would automatically order refills from the supplier.

They have always been highly innovative and tech savvy when it comes to the supply chain, at least for physical retail.

>the minute someone scanned an item at the cash register, Walmart's inventory systems, which knew what product was on what shelf and in what quantity

I wish this were the case, but anyone thats tried to do online grocery shopping at walmart knows that a lot of stuff shows out of stock, but is actually there in real life.

The online ordering is not tied into the realtime supplychain. The inventory mgmt that walmart developed is now ubiquitous among the largest retailers. Walmart is mow on or behind the innovation curve.

Walmart Labs is a really solid workplace from everything I've heard about it.

They did develop GraalVM, which is quite a technical achievement, or so I've heard (not a user).

That got started under Sun, not Oracle.

And absolutely nothing good happened in 12 years, right?

Well, Oracle bought Sun, and the team behind it.

I would be more in the mood to praise Oracle for this development, had they not shown how far they could go to hurt Java's community/ecosystem just to squeeze a penny out of it.

Don't give Oracle too much credit, Walmart is far more innovative then Oracle.

Oracle has been a good steward of MySQL. I thought it was over when they acquired Sun, but the performance and features have really improved since then.

Oracle is creating innovative new legal theories in Oracle v Google. Not that I'd consider that a positive thing.

Kind of a strange analogy. Walmart provides immense value to millions of people. They've developed an infrastructure that delivers cheap products to areas that otherwise would have few other options.

Oracle is the antithesis of Walmart. They provide insanely expensive options to corporations who are already locked in to their products.

One of the saddest days was when Oracle bought Sun and effectively killed all their open source projects overnight, like OpenOffice and MySQL. Yes, those things are still technically around, but they're not getting any serious development, and all the core developers of those projects have forked them into new open source projects.

Walmart has contributed to the decline of small businesses in rural areas[0] and they compensate their employees so little that they officially encourage their employees to take advantage of the social safety net[1] despite ever increasing annual net income[2] captured largely by the non-productive latter-generation Waltons.

[0]https://money.com/walmart-stores-closing-small-towns

[1]https://www.forbes.com/sites/clareoconnor/2014/04/15/report-...

[2]https://www.macrotrends.net/stocks/charts/WMT/walmart/net-in...

Not to go too off the rails, but they only “contributed to the decline” by being a better option for customers that switched from small businesses in rural areas to Walmart.

A lot of small businesses are bad. Bad hours, bad selection of products, bad customer service, bad prices.

They’re often held up in some idyllic form, but it’s clear from the behavior of their own customers that Walmart provides these customers more value.

And then they leave the area after a while leaving nothing for anyone. I posted the links for a reason and that's because they support my claims. People like to ignore the facts in favor of their feelings and emotions.

My wife teaches in a small, poor town that is off the beaten path. It is just outside of what most would consider the suburbs (we live on the edge of a suburb and she commutes through rural area to get there). The only grocery store in town is what used to be a locally owned and supplied store, and is now under the branding of a "Piggly Wiggly Xpress." The options are to go there, Dollar General, or drive almost 30 minutes to another option, one of which is a Walmart. Everyone who can just drives to the Walmart.

The local grocery store is the worst excuse for a grocery store I've ever seen. There are only a handful of fresh vegetable options, including $1/lb bananas and $5/head iceberg lettuce. Everything is overpriced and there are very few healthy food options. Apparently a lot of people due to transportation limitations can ONLY shop at this store (or Dollar General), which is expensive and mostly has unhealthy options. There are talks of a Walmart coming in, and I have no doubt it would be a huge quality of life improvements for folks in the town.

They're held up in some idyllic form because while they're worse for customers, they're on average much better for employees. 'Small business' isn't just meant to be heartwarming when talked about as important - small businesses also spend a much larger percentage of their money on wages.

This feels like a false dichotomy to me (if it’s true which I’m not certain of).

It’s not very good for employees if your small business customers don’t like you and as a result you have to close.

A local car dealership may be great for its employees by ripping off customers and generally being a terrible experience, but I won’t have much sympathy when direct to consumer sales come and wipe them out.

Small businesses need to offer something of value to customers that’s real and differentiated as opposed to a narrative of their own self interest. In short - they have to be competitive. There’s no reason they can’t do this while also being good to employees.

A lot of the complaints I see come across as sour grapes and trying to legislate their existence rather than just being better and caring about what customers want.

At its best capitalism is a force for aligning value and interests between provider and customer. On net this leads to more efficient distribution and better outcomes for the most people.

At its worst it’s rent seeking and leveraging local power over people without choice. Small businesses often fall on that side of the spectrum to me.

It's not that simple. Small businesses, like small anything, are less efficient than larger versions. The inefficiencies inevitably bother customers.

It just so happens that in business, much of that inefficiency is the number of employees required per unit of economic activity. Ultimately all employees are an unwanted cost to the consumer. Small businesses have fewer options to avoid that cost, so they account for more employment.

I don't think Oracle is a innovation focused company but its a bit naive to think they are just resting on laurels. They bring in nearly 40 billion a year in revenue and this year tried to buy tiktok. It's not like people are twiddling their thumbs over there just because the software they make is typically used by enterprise companies in unsexy ways.

Jdk?

Oracle is one of the most hated companies on HN, and for years, I assumed that it's a backwards corporate behemoth. Of course, as I work with startups and not huge enterprises, I have actual experience only with Postgresq, MySQL and MongoDB, and not Oracle, but that video about anthropomorphisizing Larry Ellison is so funny.

However, I started going through CMU intro to databases course (btw, it's amazing) and one advanced database feature or optimization after another, I hear "only MSSQL or Oracle do that". Which strated me thinking: is Oracle really that stupid and backwards? Or is it just folklore?

It's not that their tech is bad, it's that the company is evil. Stuff like this, for instance: https://old.reddit.com/r/programming/comments/950n15/amazon_...

It may have more to do with cost structure. FAANGs have a willingness to pay much higher salaries, even if they could've hired for less than half the cost elsewhere so it makes more sense for them to be in the bay area, especially since those are super high margin businesses. YOu'll notice that Amazon, a business where margins are important is notably absent from the bay area.

HP ate Compaq, whose HQ was in TX right? That move is unsurprising to say the least.

Yeah they kept the Compaq HQ as a giant HP office in Houston, but it flooded like 2 years ago so HPE was building a replacement office anyways.

What?? HP is THE center of Silicon Valley. Ok it used to be, but so many things came from HP and the whole culture.

> produces more technological advancements than Silicon Valley

Boston would say otherwise.

You prefer skinny jeans and beards, I gotcha!

A tech company, leaving the Bay Area? Don’t make me laugh!

Tesla’s leaving? Good riddance to Musk.

HP and Oracle are leaving? Good riddance to zombie tech companies! <- You are here

Uber is leaving? Well they’re slave drivers anyway, good riddance.

...

Parable of the Fox and the Grapes.

The sarcasm seems lost on people.

Don't forget Charles Schwab leaving to Texas from CA as well. Lefty's will try to justify this all day long. California is bad for business. Period.

If "California is bad for business. Period", then how come it has the 7th largest economy in the world? Seems like business has been thriving there for decades.

(Reducing a complex ecosystem to a pithy statement usually reveals more of your own personal projection, rather than positively contribute to conversations.)

I noticed this as well: the 'exodus' is comprised (so far) of companies which haven't innovated in a long time.

At least according to the linked article, three companies so far have moved to Texas. The word 'exodus' seems to be doing a lot of heavy lifting.

The bigger 'exodus' might be the glut of folks who temporarily moved away from the Bay Area at the start of the pandemic and have made those moves permanent. I don't have hard data to back up whether that would qualify as an exodus (and not sure what number is required for that classification either - just that it's greater than three), other than anecdotal evidence and personally knowing a few folks who moved back to their hometowns permanently from that area.

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