Airbnb will build a new tech hub in Atlanta | Hacker News Reader

Airbnb will build a new tech hub in Atlanta

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140 points7d7n199 comments

I grew up in metro Atlanta and studied at Georgia Tech. The state government subsidizes college education for grads with a certain GPA (HOPE Scholarship). However, I (and most CS grads I knew) left Atlanta for better paying jobs in NYC/Bay Area/Seattle/Austin. I always wondered why the ATL tech scene was 'underdeveloped' compared to comparable sized cities like Seattle and Austin, despite having major research institutions (Georgia Tech and Emory) to anchor it.

This is what I mean by 'underdeveloped':

- Most software dev job postings (as of May 2018) have SPECIFIC tech stack requirements. This to me is a red flag. Most recruiters in 'developed' tech cities assume that software development skills are transferable and that technology stacks/frameworks/languages can be learned.

- The salaries offered were still very low compared to comparable COL locations like Austin

- No major FAANG presence to put upward pressure on local developer wages

Just out of curiosity, as an Atlanta based dev, what kinds of salaries are common in Austin at various levels?

I hope I don't open a major can of worms by my parent comment. This is based on a sample of my own personal experience of 1 Austin interview and LOTs of Atlanta interviews. As a SDE with 4 YOE, I was offered $110k ish in Austin vs barely scraping 90-100k in Atlanta. I ended up taking an offer in NYC (which was my top choice to begin with).

I live in Atlanta. I get a lot of recruiters pitching me senior SWE jobs from mediocre companies with salary ranges between 115k-130k. I think 130-150 is average for senior roles.

That's definitely lower than other markets, but Atlanta is a much cheaper place to live than most other big cities. Housing is definitely catching up though. The only thing I will say about Atlanta, it gets HUMID for large swathes of the year. The climate is really unpleasant if you're prone to sweating and enjoy being outdoors.

Someone from a more temperate climate asked me about sweating in the South once.

"What do you do when it's 90+ and you need to be outside?"

"You sweat and accept that other people sweat."

If you shower once a day, a little sweat isn't a bit deal. I think of it as making sure my pores are clear.

Out of all of the new-grad GT students I know, the minimum they were offered was 83k in Atlanta.

levels.fyi is a good resource. Those are typically Bay Area salaries so a good rule of thumb is to take the numbers reported there and knock off 10-20% for Austin.

I recently got a new job in a Midwestern city and made extensive use of levels.fyi (and Blind) during the process. It helps a ton with setting expectations and understanding what wages and equity to aim for (or a bit above even).

There’s a feature on the site where you can click a given level for a given company, and filter the individual offer data to a given metro/city. It’s super useful, even if a bit more labor intensive than being able to use the top-of-the-fold summary stats.

Edit: the link to click is “filter locations”, it’s on the top right after clicking/opening a given level’s info card.

I'd say knock off more considerably than 10-20%, at least compared to this cost of living calculator:

https://www.nerdwallet.com/cost-of-living-calculator/compare...

$150k in Austin equates to $236k in Seattle (knock off 35%)

$150k in Austin equates to $296k in SF Bay (knock off 50%)

Cost of living calculations are silly. Nobody earning 236k in seattle is spending their entire paycheck on cost of living. Tell me, does a share of Tesla cost more in Seattle than Austin?

$236k in Columbia, South Carolina is vastly different than $236k in Seattle. Cost of living calculations are not only not silly, they're essential.

Stock market shares are the same, but things like gas prices, groceries, utilities, and rent are vastly different.

And who spends their $236k salary entirely on gas, groceries, utilities, and rent?

cost of living does not scale w/ salary increases. it's a silly calculation. not essential at all.

Making $236k in seattle is going to be much more fruitful than making $115k in whatever flyover place. this argument is always used by people that need to justify living in their boring towns

every cost of living calculator assumes you spend 100% of your paycheck on cost of living.

"And who spends their $236k salary entirely on gas, groceries, utilities, and rent?"

I don't see why the argument is about spending 100% of one's salary. We all spend a percentage of our salaries on things like rent, etc, and that percentage is going to be larger in Seattle than Columbia.

"Making $236k in seattle is going to be much more fruitful than making $115k in whatever flyover place. this argument is always used by people that need to justify living in their boring towns"

Imagine unironically calling towns that aren't Seattle, "boring". Alright, chief. Columbia certainly isn't Chicago (my birthplace), but that doesn't make it boring either. People have their reasons for electing to live in different areas, no need to be condescending about it. Yes, $236k is mathematically higher than $115k, this is no surprise to anyone. However that $115k usually goes a lot further in smaller towns than $236k might in Seattle. ...due to differences in cost of living (and the housing market).

"every cost of living calculator assumes you spend 100% of your paycheck on cost of living. "

Basic googling disproves this. Of the cost of living calculators that I looked at, they just listed basic things like school, transportation, gas, etc, and make comparisons between areas. Nothing saying that you need to spend 100% of your salary.

In case you missed it, we are in a comment chain where a poster is using a cost of living calculator to do exactly this

"$150k in Austin equates to $236k in Seattle (knock off 35%) $150k in Austin equates to $296k in SF Bay (knock off 50%)"

That literally only makes sense if you're using 100% of your salary for cost of living. This is what you're responding to.

What about equity though? It seems like tech companies headquartered SF/Seattle are more likely to give large equity packages. Sure, startups are risky, but equity is liquid if the company is public.

You can narrow it down by city, e.g.

https://www.levels.fyi/Salaries/Software-Engineer/Atlanta-Ar...

https://www.levels.fyi/Salaries/Software-Engineer/Greater-Au...

https://www.levels.fyi/Salaries/Software-Engineer/San-Franci...

That shows Austin median at 62% of SF, FWIW.

I live in Atlanta and grew up in the area. This is my 2021 total comp from workday:

$160k base

$380k equity

$540k total comp

I've been highly compensated in Atlanta for nearly my entire career, except the year when I worked out of ATDC.

edit: I misread that you were looking for Austin figures, not Atlanta. I still think this is valuable for the ATLiens here. We've had tech companies here for over a decade - you just have to know.

So you thought the OP asked "What software engineer salaries are common in Atlanta at various levels?" and you replied, "Here is my $540k salary. (This datapoint should be included in your perception of what is common in Atlanta.)"

Yeah.

You make $540k and still want to live in Atlanta? Out of curiosity, do you really like the area more than other places? Or is it because family is nearby?

The simple answer is that my family is here, but it's honestly more than that.

I've spent time in SF, Portland, various cities in Texas, and a year in Florida. (Never the northeast or Colorado, which are omissions - but I hate snow and cold.)

Spent a year in Japan, and a few months in China. Expat life might have been fun if I was still in my 20's...

Despite all of that, Atlanta has always felt right. It's incredibly diverse - way more than many cities - and full of culture. The music scene is on point, and I used to go to shows at least once a week before the pandemic.

I'm frequently on the Beltline (and used to use it to commute to work pre-Covid). The Hooch, ample outdoors, hiking, lakes.

I also own an amazing condo here. 25'' ceilings, penthouse skyline view with 20'' windows, historic all-brick walls. It's amazing. It'd easily cost millions in another city, yet my mortgage payment is less than $2k/mo here.

I'll probably be able to retire at 40. Or start a company with minimal risk.

Georgia has a ton to do, and the cost of living is still incredibly cheap. I can't imagine leaving, just buying a second home.

any suggestions for new grads looking to move to ATL?

job search, places to live, lowest crime areas, good food, etc

My last job in Atlanta (2011) as a senior linux engineer was paying me around 80k, without equity. When I moved to Denver, my next role, doing the same thing, got me in at 110k with additional performance based bonus of 10%.

Half a mil is not common anywhere, let alone Austin or Atlanta. I get that you wanted to flex though.

Bless your heart. He ain't flexin.

You could say this of most metros. The most glaring is Boston, which is an international hub for tech education but isn't really competitive with the cities you list, at least relative to its educational reputation.

When I think of NYC, SF, Austin, Seattle, I think of cities with robust arts/culture/dining/entertainment, accessibility (public transit) and enough professional basis to allow job mobility. These things entice younger people to congregate.

There are other metros that have great education and in particular tech education (Raleigh/Durham, Pittsburgh, Chicago) but don't tend to build up tech industries.

Thats a really good point. Boston, Chicago, and Pittsburg meet the research university criteria. Perhaps a tech center needs temperate weather (hard to convince a new grad to move to Pittsburg vs moving to Austin of Bay Area)? In that case, Atlanta has the weather going for it.

The humidity knocks it down a few notches though, in my opinion.

Boston is a major tech hub.

I mentioned this in a different comment. Its a major tech hub, but not in a way that would be apparent to your average HN software dev. Boston/Cambridge is THE bioengineering hub of the US.

Yeah. SV gets defined mostly as the hub for the sort of tech that it's the hub for. Which is more than a bit self-referential.

To be fair, SV is also a biotech hub.

As a developer in Chicago, I think it's because the finance sector sucks up a lot of the talent, and it's less known for marquee non-finance companies. The city has struggled to promote our tech scene.

The company I work for participates in UIUC's City Scholars program[0]. If you work for a company in Chicago, push for them to participate. It introduces the students to Chicago's tech scene.

0: https://cityscholars.engineering.illinois.edu/

To add to your point, I was made aware of a tech role at a financial firm in downtown Chicago (dev, infra, and infosec experience required); $300k-$400k total comp. Can't compete against that if you're in Chicago and only sourcing Chicago talent.

Citadel is basically a vacuum cleaner for top-end talent.

google is the same.

we all win with the services and products these companies offer, and that's why they can do that.

I hate weather in the southeast generally. I'll take a northern city hands down.

Pittsburgh has an -h at the end.

Austin doesn’t fill a single one of those criteria for what it’s worth.

I have never lived somewhere with less public transportation, art & culture, dining, and entertainment options than Austin, Texas.

And I’ve spent my entire life in the American south. Houston for example of all places, does twice as much on all of those qualities!

> art & culture, dining, and entertainment options than Austin, Texas.

Buh? I was there less than 2 years but this is a baffling statement to me.

edit: except public transportation point.

Houston is ~5x the size of Austin. Bigger cities have more options.

Houston is also far more diverse, which directly impacts art, culture, and dining specifically.

Much of the same about art, culture, and dining also applies to Dallas.

It’s always surprising to folks, but true, that Houston has a wealth of arts/culture/dining, and even a modicum of public transit (the metro rail, heh). Entertainment could be better, but the rest blow Austin out of the water!

As a transplant to Houston, I will never understand why Austin became a tech center and Houston has not. There is a lot of raw tech talent here, incubators, etc. No matter what policies are in place or what investments are made, it never seems to take hold.

As someone who's spent time in both Austin and Houston, I'd agree with the sentiment that Houston is pretty objectively a much better place to live. These phenomena are probably more driven by superficial appearances, though, and that's where Austin has always had an edge. It's hilly, it's perceived as a college town, and on the surface it has a lot of access to nature. It looks better on the surface than Houston to an observer who hasn't lived in both places. Really, it's just like the Bay Area -- it looks good, but it actually is a very rough and empty place to live for most folks.

A lot of this stuff is just sensitive dependence on initial conditions.

I think a huge element has to be the success of SxSW. That has given a lot of people the personal positive exposure to Austin that makes them think moving there is plausible.

Wouldn't surprise me, only because the Houston metro is >3x bigger than Austin

I'm leaving Austin for the West Coast.

Not enough outdoor activities here. The amount of hiking trails is great for Texas. But not at the national scale or when compared to the West Coast & northern Rockies.

Texas is mostly private land, so there just aren't any greenbelts (that I know of, within 2 hours of Austin) where you can hike for 10-40 miles one way.

I'm strongly leaning towards Washington for that reason-- Huge "parks" (more like "wilderness zones") for hiking, as well as ocean kayaking, ocean sailing, and ocean fishing.

It's a cheap flight to Alaska from there. And WA is the only contiguous west coast state without state income tax.

Washington has a ton of cool outdoors stuff. Just be ready to have maybe max a couple months of great weather per year to enjoy it (unless you don't mind overcast and drizzle, or forest fire smoke in summer). Also competing with the other 4+ million people in Seattle metro to get it in out there. Amazing diversity of things to do though.

Great point. I suppose it depends on the location-- west of the mountains, in the mountains, or east of the mountains.

With remote work, and an off-grid equipped van, I imagine someone who works from a computer can explore a large swath of the state, and nearby states, to find the right mix of weather and activities.

That said, they'd still likely be based in the Seattle area, and would largely remain subject to its weather conditions.

This is somewhat true, but after picking up skiing, I look forward to the winter weather in Seattle more than I ever did before.

It was a huge game changer for me personally - it took a while to pick up, but now I actually look forward to the months of December to March (sometimes April) in Seattle, because it means I'm 45 minutes away from good skiing, and a couple hours away from great skiing.

Of course, it's not a spot for everyone, but even if you just do cross-country skiing or snowshoeing, it's totally possible to get "great" weather in the winter here.

I flew to Austin back in 2013, spent a week looking at places and checking out hiking areas and running. I loved the food/friendly people but that was about all. For me it was a dealbreaker on lack of trails/wilderness, and also the very high humidity there. In addition housing was expensive as I looked at a few condos and they were roughly the same cost as the one I used to own in San Jose.

WA seems very nice, the no state tax thing basically means a free mortgage payment if you are making good money in tech(not paying CA taxes)

I haven't been to Austin but I've only ever heard good things about it's art & culture, dining, and entertainment.

Austin and Seattle are not NYC or SF, and I'm having a hard time seeing how either of them would beat Atlanta for any of those things you mention (I guess they ALL suck at public transit, but I don't see how Seattle sucks less... Austin sucks more!), except they have more first-class tech companies as an accident of history.

I think we're seeing a trickle down from SF -> NYC -> Seattle and now Austin.

I'd expect this to continue under normal conditions. Companies diving into a new city and trying to foster these conditions in the cheaper costs of a new city. But the pandemic really kicked WFH into overdrive and there are just so many companies abandoning the scope of physical presences.

Bostons a life sciences hub and basically the only game in town for serious bioengineering. Different ballgame compared to the kind of tech that gets talked about on HN usually which is basically B2B or B2C SaaS.

There is plenty of biotech HQ'd in the Bay Area to seriously compete with Boston as the #1 spot: 10x Genomics, Guardant Health, Twist, Natera, CareDx, Verily, Invitae, Nevro, Berkeley Lights, Genentech, PacBio, etc.

I also grew up in metro Atlanta and studied at Georgia Tech and was about to post essentially the same comment. All of my friends interested in tech at GT went to the Bay Area as soon as they could once they graduated. The school itself attracts a lot of talent from all around the world, but very few people seem to stay in Atlanta once they graduate.

The city recently made a big push to attract talent in the entertainment and film industries, which appears to have worked pretty well. It would be nice to see them do something similar for tech. It's kind of sad that the state subsidized my education (and many others) but does not have the incentives in place to keep people once they graduate.

Also, the local salaries are a big part of the reason people leave. The low cost of living does not make a difference when you can save more per year in the Bay Area than an entirely yearly salary in Atlanta.

Between this and Microsoft's recent announcement of opening an Atlanta office, I think tech is the next sector the city wants to attract.

And as someone living in ATL and working at one of the few companies to offer competitive salaries for their tech positions, this is only upside in my eyes.

I've sometimes wondered about why GA Tech was an early adopter of online education (at least for comp sci, I don't know if it extended/extends to other programs).

I'm not saying there are any reasons they should not have been an early adopter... but Atlanta definitely has its charms, and allowing people to get a masters from a top-ten program while scarcely ever setting foot on campus seems like it could be a disservice to the state.

I was very surprised Amazon didn’t end up in Atlanta for their 2nd HQ.

Yeah same here. I think their DC location was smarter lobbiest wise and just shows Amazon is digging in for the long haul and saying politics are more important than tech workers.

The state politicians basically torpedoed that by making a big fuss about being anti-gay around that time. Hard to justify moving knowledge workers to Atlanta given a political climate openly hostile to X% of employees.

California has a huge advantage in the form of no non-competes: https://www.vox.com/new-money/2017/2/13/14580874/google-self..., NYC has a huge advantage in the form of the subway and sheer size, and so on. It's surprising to me that more states don't outright ban noncompetes and build out subway networks, but they don't.

DC's non-compete ban should go into effect later this year https://www.jdsupra.com/legalnews/d-c-mayor-signs-bill-to-ba... and they have a subway network. Will be really interesting to see what affect this has (though of course it'll be difficult to tease out).

It's possible most non-competes will be banned nationally (US), see https://news.bloomberglaw.com/us-law-week/biden-can-free-mil... and https://joebiden.com/empowerworkers/#:~:text=Eliminate%20non...

One problem is the dc metro tech industry is, on the balance, in Virginia, some in DC proper and a small amount of non-Federal in Maryland (less probably due to the taxation in MD).

I am not a lawyer but reside in Georgia.

It's doubtful Software Engineers are covered by non-competes in Georgia. You could use one for sales people and possibly an ex-founder or executive.

GA modified their constitution in 2011 in order to make non competes broadly applicable and enforceable. Software engineers probably fall under their "company professionals" category that allows for non-competes. They also removed time limits on the non-compete; non-competes can be valid for as long as the trade secrets you were exposed to are still trade secrets (so can be forever).

> GA modified their constitution in 2011 in order to make non competes broadly applicable and enforceable

How on earth did that ever pass??

GA in general bends over backwards for corporate rights at the expense of the commons. It's probably one of their biggest issues holding them back economically these days IMO as someone who grew up in GA.

that article is outdated. non-compete clauses are unenforceable in california now

I get that Atlanta does not have the tech pull of Bay Area/Seattle/Austin, but it feels like a very well-rounded city overall, without being too expensive. Midtown is already saturated with tech companies and startups because of Georgia Tech but there's a lot of stuff happening in other parts of the city which give it a very unique character.

> I always wondered why the ATL tech scene was 'underdeveloped'

I lived and worked there for a while there.

* Most of the tech jobs are out in burbs like alpharetta ect.

* City is just not great. There isn't much to do.

* Feels a bit old school and traditional.

* No access to snow for skiing , to the ocean for surfing, mountain biking trails are decent but not great.

* Music scene is not good. I don't like to listen to country , rock ect.

* I always feel a little scared to drive outside ATL into GA, Alabama. Confederate flags, churches in the gas stations. I've heard some stories from my friends. I admit that this might be an irrational fear.

From and still live in Atlanta. There's a good music scene if you like electronic actually. Everything else p much true.

> Music scene is not good. I don't like to listen to country , rock ect.

Clearly you don't listen to rap and hip hop either

Right? That is such a weird point. Atlanta has a lot of young people, it's affordable, it's next door to Athens GA which punches way above it's weight for music output and culture... It's very respectable city from a music standpoint. Especially for rap and hip-hop artists, as you mentioned.

Just the fact that R.E.M came from there is enough for me.

Yea correct. I am not an american. I like to listen to electronic, classical, international 'world' music.

The DnB scene in Atlanta is probably the best in the nation and far less gross than the UK's. There's some great Techno clubs too, but some of the better ones are illegal so you have to know someone (this was true pre-covid).

There's tons of world music in Atlanta too, since Atlanta is one of the primary locations new refugees get sent. That's why you can get just about any cuisine on Buford Highway.

Plenty of good house music coming from Atlanta.

Agree with everything except for the music scene. If you are into hip hop and rap, its arguably one of the best music scenes in the country.

This seems to be a post about how Atlanta isn't right for you. The city has plenty to do...multiple sports teams, the beltline is ever expanding, lots of parks, an active population, the weather is proper for at least 80% of the year, the music scene is diverse...the city itself is diverse.

If you want to ski, fly to Colorado and ski...if you want to be a ski bum, yes...Atlanta is not for you.

And yes, it has its downsides...it is sprawling, public transportation is not good, it can get very hot in the summer, crime can be high, and generally many of the problems that large metro areas deal with.

> This seems to be a post about how Atlanta isn't right for you.

Yea definetly. I have friends who love living there and are raising families there.

> lots of parks

I have to disagree, after living in West Midtown Atlanta for the past 3 years. There's one large park (Piedmont) downtown, but beyond that I have to drive 30mins-1hour for any park of comparable size.

You’re wrong, within 15 minutes you have Grant Park, Centennial, Freedom, Candler, Chastain.

If you drive 30-60 minutes you get to dozens of bike and hiking trails in big parks.

Not to mention all the trees everywhere and pocket parks.

The parks aren’t necessarily the best in the world or anything, but there’s lots of space and more than most major cities. One thing is that the parks aren’t built up around very much like other cities.

On the weekend when there's no traffic, it's easy enough to drive to a park, sure. During the week, when I would want to relax outdoors after work, all the parks you mention are a 30+ minute drive in stressful rush hour traffic.

(it's also worth mentioning that for my first 1.5 years in Atlanta, I couldn't even afford a car, so my options were limited to Piedmont Park and the Georgia Tech campus)

In rush hour traffic from the Atlantic Station area, according to Google Maps:

Grant Park: 26min drive Centennial Olympic Park: 15min drive (I did go there all the time but it's not really a park? plus tons of car noise nearby) Freedom Park: 34min drive Candler Park: 28min drive Chastain Park: 28min drive

I'd occasionally go to the park along Collier Road or to Memorial Park (both 15-20min drive in traffic), but both are surrounded by deadlocked rush hour traffic for most of the afternoon.

I think the lesson is maybe that I should've chosen to live in the Little 5 Points area or somewhere east of Piedmont, but that would mean sacrificing my ~5min bicycle commute to the Georgia Tech campus where I was going to school at the time.

In the end Atlanta's car culture really grated on me, so I left.

That said, I think Atlanta is on a positive trajectory. I'm excited to see how the Microsoft campus impacts the western part of the city. I imagine in 15-20 years it could be a really appealing city.

If you have a requirement to get to a park in rush hour then you’re hosed. Those parks are all 5-15 minutes from the midtown during regular times or on the weekend. Trying to get across the connector is particularly horrible and Atlantic Station/Home Park is bad, but there are parks and greenspace to the west. Memorial Park (3 miles) and Westside Resevoir (3 miles) are close and against traffic (sort of) during rush hour.

Traffic is really horrible in Atlanta but I was able to plan around it so that it didn’t bother me much. But I would never think of distance against rush hour unless I had a specific reason. So while it may suck to drive during rush hour to get to a park, just don’t do that. Traffic is dead at 6am and is fine until 330 or after 7. Even a block from Piedmont park, I don’t think I ever went there except mornings, evenings, and weekends. This is different from other cities where there’s just no getting around traffic.

Living in midtown (or anywhere) without a car is hard, but there’s lots of cities that also require cars but don’t have so many parks and outdoor stuff.

There’s definitely a car culture and that’s a downside, but there are lots of parks.

Hard disagree on where tech jobs are. If you want to work in tech for a Fortune 500 company in a non-tech industry, there's plenty in Alpharetta. All of the startups and companies that would attract the HN crowd are in Midtown / Buckhead though.

ATL is also home to the world's busiest airport. If you like to travel, it's a great city. You can fly direct to almost anywhere in the world.

> * Music scene is not good. I don't like to listen to country , rock ect.

You must not have tried very hard. Atlanta is a music hub. It's one of the best features of our city.

For one, we're the hip hop / rap epicenter. But we also cater to indie, alternative, electronic, and punk.

Pre-pandemic you could find shows every night at over three dozen different venues. Tabernacle, Buckhead Theatre, Center Stage, Masquerade, Terminal West, Variety Playhouse, The Loft, The Earl, Aisle 5, Chastain Park, Wonderroot, Smith's Old Bar, The Roxy...

I can't count how many times I was torn between seeing two or three different acts I wanted to see because they all happened on the same night. It's like a curse. That's how much music happens in Atlanta.

Music Midtown, Shaky Knees, Shaky Beats...

I think you forget that Atlanta is home to a burgeoning creative industry. And that's more than just music. In 2017, Georgia films collectively grossed more than films shot and produced anywhere else in the world. And we're still killing it.

Atlanta creatives and our art and culture scene are thriving.

I grew up in the very outer burbs of the Atlanta metro and have kinda been stuck bouncing around the south ever since.

Currently I’m in Florida and I’ve been similarly confused by how underdeveloped tech feels here. I mean this is one of the biggest states with several metropolitan areas and a large economic base, but frankly most of what I’ve seen as far as tech jobs seems mostly underwhelming.

Miami is going to blow up soon. A lot of talent is leaving Silicon Valley for Miami. The weather is great year around, cheap taxes, less restrictive government and cheaper real estate.

Isn’t Miami going to be underwater in a few decades?

This is a common meme, but "a lot of talent is leaving Silicon Valley for Miami" is anecdotal and not backed up by any data I've seen, such as USPS address changes[1]. Other places in California are getting most of the people leaving, with Austin and Portland being the only external metro areas I've seen in the top 20.

Miami isn't even a blip on the "where people are going" radar statistically, but the hype and anecdotes could always make it a reality long-term. I have my doubts, personally.

[1] https://www.sfchronicle.com/bayarea/article/People-are-leavi...

USPS address changes are not a fool proof way of tracking migration.

[1] https://www.forbes.com/sites/jackkelly/2021/01/26/forget-abo...

[2] https://www.nbcnews.com/business/business-news/tech-flight-w...

[3] https://news.crunchbase.com/news/why-miami-is-the-next-hot-t...

[4] https://www.wired.com/story/miami-mayor-woos-techies-what-do...

[5] https://www.foxbusiness.com/technology/miami-mayor-pushes-si...

Further, look at real estate prices for the area. The markers are there, just need to look for it.

Sure, USPS may not be infallible, but it's some objective measure of the reality, and arguably the best (or at least one of the better) tools we have for looking at something like this.

The links you provided are 5 opinion pieces that don't even try to quantify anything (seriously, I don't see any actual data points in any of them), with a few of them seeming to just be blatant PR placements by Suarez. That's not a bad move, to be clear, it's really savvy! Just objectively not proof of anything except exactly what you were replying to: hype and anecdotes.

Again, the Miami migration could totally happen and/or be happening! But I haven't seen any data that currently supports that, and until I do I remain skeptical that it's much more than loud Twitter voices and a shrewd Mayor.

One thing to add to this list, which gets talked less about is : Work Culture and Work Diversity. I work in a major tech firm that has offices in Atlanta. To mildly put it, it isn't friendly. Bay Area, Seattle, and to a certain extent NY and Austin have a certain set of values set in the workplace that simply don't exist everywhere. Your race, gender, nationality, and plenty of other things can invite an unwelcoming vibe towards you. Work life balance are less respected. And the fact that at the end of the day we are just human beings working with other human beings seems to be lost to many.

I recently moved to the bay area, and I've gotten the vibe that work life balance is less respected in the bay area compared to where I came from.

I think we might be the same background. What notable experiences have you had working in Atlanta? I'm curious because I have never worked there professionally, but have heard some stories.

I don;t live in Atlanta. I've just worked in two separate companies that have an office in Atlanta. I've worked with the people in those offices and my experience so far has been, well, not a fun one. Not to say that everyone is bad, just like not to say everyone in the bay area is great, but the number of difficult situations you get put into, rise dramatically when you deal with offices outside the Bay Area.

I have to agree with the other comment. I found the Bay Area to be more hostile and discriminatory than any other work environment I've been in. Specifically if you even slightly disagree with certain social viewpoints. We may have achieved better racial diversity (somewhat) in the Bay but at the expense of minimal ideological diversity.

I've even seen firsthand how racism against asians and Indians is rampant and often conducted by those that supposedly are advocates for minorities.

I'm not trying to be that guy, but have you ever worked for an extended period of time in the American South?

I had a mentor at a college internship request I be transferred to another mentor a couple days after they learned I was atheist. The ~50 person software dev org I was in was 90% male, 90% white in a >60% Black city.

For context, I'm a tall, straight-passing white dude with a slight Southern accent. I'm a guy who has had people tell me racist jokes unprompted because they assume they're in good company, and I could still see this kinda shit around me. Shit's unreal as a woman or person of color.

This was at a Fortune 50 company with a couple thousand IT/engineering employees (and this was <36 months ago).

I get that the Bay Area is not always the progressive paradise it pretends to be, but "California == liberal" in many non-West-Coast eyes for a reason.

My experience is that the Bay Area is a big place with a variety of employers and work cultures. May I ask what kind of social viewpoints you’ve seen causing a hostile workplace for people who disagreed with them?

Yes, racism exists in Bay Area. I doubt any city in America can escape that curse, but to what degree matters.

Altanta has issues but the reason why it hasn't become a tech-hub is external to these factors. It is basically a snowball effect - one major company settles and the rest will come. There is a bit of inertia.

What you're alluding to is simply not true. I worked at several companies and have several friends in Atlanta area that have no such problems. I think you're extending African American population density in Atlanta to fit a narrative that simply has no backing. In fact, companies in Atlanta area are more diverse than Austin or whatever techhub you want to name, except SF Bay Area I would say.

Err, that's not what I meant. Quite the contrary tbh. I don't know about the rest of the population, but majority of employees in tech offices in Atlanta tend not to be African American, so I am not sure if you got my point at all.

I see. You need to also consider the pool of black college graduates with qualifications for the job and what percentage of total pool they represent.

> majority of employees in tech offices in Atlanta tend not to be African American

Genuine question - how does this compare to other industries in the city? If AAs are underrepresented in tech in Atlanta, I imagine that part of this is caused by the same problems faced by AAs in other white-collar jobs. How much of it is a problem with tech specifically?

> how does this compare to other industries in the city?

Tech firms underperform massively on this metric compared to other local industries (law, accounting, general Fortune 500s like Home Depot/Delta/UPS).

That said, tech firms in Atlanta in general have more African Americans than do similar firms in e.g. Austin or SV.

If I'm African American, Atlanta is a better place for me to get hired and promoted in tech than other tech hubs. My suspicion is that the fact that managers live in Atlanta normalizes for them the notion that African Americans can excel at white-collar work, so biases that exist everywhere are somewhat reduced here.

I don’t understand how you think Atlanta workplaces aren’t as diverse as Bay Area or Seattle. I mean Atlanta literally has the highest percentage of middle class African Americans not to mention lots of international people.

Racial diversity and the mixes of culture are one of the big upsides, I think and are pretty rare (compare racial diversity in Bay Area and Seattle and Atlanta).

Also Atlanta has been a hub for lgbtq culture for decades. Not the same as Bay Area or NY but probably #3.

Maybe you had some bad experiences or it’s your company.

Atlanta native & (again) resident. Spent years working in Austin in the years around the .com boom.

Couple of thoughts:

- the tech startup scene is hurting for risk capital. Seed & Series A investors (primarily) come from capital generated at prior exits (e.g. Google millionaires seed the next round of startups, etc.). Atlanta has had some big exits, but not the kind that mint 100s of young millionaires. By contrast, Seattle has had two mega tech exits. Austin had Dell and a few .com hits as accelerants (and their money has had decades to spawn more companies). There are some exciting Atlanta startups that may exit to create the seeds for the next generation of companies.

(Honestly, the aspiring early-stage VCs could do a lot worse than backing companies in the Atlanta area now. Less competition to get in on deals, equity likely cheaper, and the pandemic means that later-stage investors are considering doing deals outside of northern California.)

> Most software dev job postings (as of May 2018) have SPECIFIC tech stack requirements.

Likely an artifact of the diversified economy here. The non-tech Fortune 500s HQ'd in the area hire a lot of tech people. That's going to skew how recruiters operate. For the most part, this is not a factor in the tech metros. Also, I would push back on the premise in general. I have not seen very many job postings of the form "backend dev needed, any stack and database experience are okay." That would seem to be the outlier.

> The salaries offered were still very low compared to comparable COL locations like Austin

Austin is notably more expensive than Atlanta.

> No major FAANG presence to put upward pressure on local developer wages

Obviously TFA is about adding new tech presence to the area. But Microsoft building its East Coast HQ in Atlanta is also a big deal. Anecdotally, I have also seen compensation inflation among F500 companies in the area.

Things are changing.

> I always wondered why the ATL tech scene was 'underdeveloped' compared to comparable sized cities like Seattle and Austin

No insight on Atlanta or Seattle, but Austin has had tech longer than people like to think (IBM/Freescale, UT Austin+TI Partnerships, etc), and also got on the 'hype train' early by rebranding SXSW from pure music/entertainment into 'SXSW Interactive' quite a while back (early 2000s if I'm not mistaken), so you have lots of west coast tech/media/vc 'influencers' heading there on a yearly basis getting schmoozed heavy

They neutered HOPE unfortunately. Used to be you needed a 3.0 high school GPA to qualify, now you need a 3.7 (not counting the GPA boosts you get from Honors and AP), and they don't cover books or fees anymore, and they upped the in college GPA requirements.

It was really unfortunate to see such a blatant money grab.

> now you need a 3.7 (not counting the GPA boosts you get from Honors and AP)

Does this mean that you're actually better off taking unweighted non-honors/AP classes and getting a better grade, rather than taking honors/AP classes and getting a less good grade?

Yeah, that's one unfortunate side effect.

I recall AP classes being weighted 1 point higher, so I often had a GPA above 4, e.g. 4.2. So wouldn't it not make a difference? Get a B in an AP class and it counts as an A anyways

Not under HOPE calculation of GPA which is different than your school's. The point is that they don't weight AP and honors any higher like you're saying. They removed that in order to cut the HOPE budget.

The HOPE GPA does add 0.5 for all AP/IB classes. It doesn't apply to all honors classes, which is unfortunate, but they do recognize that some classes are harder.

It's been split up into two tiers. The HOPE scholarship has a 3.0 requirement, and pays approximately 80% for public colleges. The 3.7 requirement is for the Zell-Miller scholarship, which pays 100% for public colleges. It's obviously not as much as before, but I'd hardly call paying 80% of tuition neutering.

I left Atlanta in 2011 and discovered the closer I was to the West Coast, the more money I made (including adjustments for cost of living). Atlanta has a lot of things going against it, such as a mass transit system that doesn't serve the majority of the suburbs, bad traffic, poor health statistics, low education ranking, and being in the bible belt.

Both my wife and I graduated GT ChE 35 years ago and really liked living in downtown Atlanta. Not many traffic problems downtown, midtown, out east except Ponce at 5PM. Afterwards PHX, Mountain View, Santa Clara, and a delicious stint in '90s SOMA. Now 25 years in the mountains of AZ, lots of experience with PHX traffic. I just got back from 2 days crisscrossing PHX at 80mph, 9AM-3PM.

I've driven in many US cities, and had to suffer the DC traffic horror show for work trips.

My wife's current company HQ is across the mighty traffic river of the 285 from the Brave's fancy new ballpark.

I used to tag along on the twice yearly trips because in theory, downtown and midtown Atlanta are pretty good looking and have a lot of cool urban things; then there are the Buford HW culinary expeditions.

I stopped because even though I had complete freedom to travel in the middle of the day, using Google Maps for advice, I could not get even a single day when one direction did not fail into stupid dumb no way to route around time destruction gridlock.

I watched the Guadalara MX evening commute for 5 days from something like 25th floor of the hotel, and it made me think. A couple of trips to the 'De Efe' MX and stupidly riding a tourist bus at 5pm (no time to spare!) made me think some more. Yesterday I was looking and thinking about Tempe, and its absolutely magnificent building boom. It's a spectacular transformation, for an American City. La Defense, without decent art. I wouldn't want to spend much time in either... Tempe because of the soon to be 130F summer days. LD, because if you're in Paris, why??.

Both Tempe and Atlanta have built a beautiful urban infrastructure with tall business and residential buildings that are generally structured as 3-7 stories of vehicle storage, possibly underground, and a bunch of greatness stacked above.

Tempe is headed toward the worst commutes south of the border, and Atlanta is already there.

Yeah, I haven't mentioned something here. Deh Efe has it and it doesn't matter. Tempe at least has that freight track it will eventually commandeer. Because of city fragmentation, and some uh residual social issues, Atlanta is a lost cause. The future is very, very stupid.

I'm not a transit expert, but I do love to ride the trains.

is this a ML kinda post?

You beat me to this comment!!

Oh no. Only ms to live.

I'm happy for Atlanta - it's about time they got some recognition for the growth that's happening there. However, as someone who started her tech career working at satellite offices for west coast tech companies (in RTP, NC) before moving to Seattle - there's just no comparison to the career opportunity that comes from working at a HQ (or even just in the same timezone as the HQ!). I'm back in NC, which isn't so bad now that I've "leveled up" my resume with FAANG experience and have plenty of remote work skills - but I still recommend that ambitious engineers from the south spend at least a few years in a west coast tech hub. It's possible that NYC works too now, but I'm not sure.

Regardless, this is a smart move for airbnb. I have no doubt they'll get great talented engineers, lower costs, and be able to brag about their diversity numbers compared to other west coast companies as a result. But until there is real startup investment in the south, I'm not optimistic that we'll see anything special come from this trend. That said, if I'm wrong and this means more tech investment in Atlanta for startups too - I'd be incredibly happy.

I think a couple of good things may come out of the pandemic:

1. Big companies being more amenable to remote work. I don't see a total shift to remote to be likely or even desirable but a partial shift is good; and

2. An end to the ultimately unsustainable ultra-concentration of tech jobs in places like SF and NYC.

I see the likely winners here are Atlanta, Denver/Boulder, Dallas/Forth Worth, Austin and Tampa. This may well trickle-down to mid-sized regional centers too. Think Boise, Salt Lake City, Louisville, Nashville, Memphis, etc.

I support this decentralization.

OK I'll bite. Airbnb is a website. A hard-to-navigate, overproduced one, but it's still basically just a website coupled to a database. And it's not even as complex as Uber's because it doesn't need realtime GPS tracking of anything.

Why does Airbnb need a "tech hub?"

Sounds like a good systems design interview question. Design an Airbnb like website operating globally.

I think going through this exercise will show it's more than "just a website"

Most major companies have to build a high reliability, highly-scalable website operating globally. Lots of people know how to build these things [except of course for contractors that the US federal government hires], and most of them don't have "tech hubs" in any major city unless they're ... you know ... actual tech companies. Why do we consider a glorified hotel company like Airbnb a tech company? Just because YC invested in them?

How is a company that is an entirely online marketplace with no physical property not a 'tech company'?

Agreed, meanwhile large banks do things that are technically incredible but get seen as boring.

Such as?

moving billions of dollars daily with csv, tsv fixed-width files and sftp. /s

Petabytes upon petabytes, and it has to be correct, really well archived, and set up for reporting, stats, and ad hoc

Exactly my point. I'd venture to guess that Marriott (another hotel company that actually owns their properties and thus arguably has more at stake) has a tech stack vastly more complicated than Airbnb's, and yet Marriott would never announce they're building a "tech hub" in any city.

I think you are probably overestimating how enterprise does tech. Subcontracting, consultancies are the name of the game

For me at least, I found banking to be incredible, teams of DBAs managing very expensive database servers to perfection and high scale web apps that almost always work correctly

Complexity != Importance.

Airbnb is investing in their business, in what they believe (and they probably know from their numbers) will grow their future. They don't have to rationalize it only if there is complexity involved.

> Why does Airbnb need a "tech hub?"

To agree on different grounds;

They had some remote employees before; have had some remote employees (awkwardly, as an exception while promoting remote work), and will have been all remote for 1.5 years by August.

Will this actually hire jobs in the area? Or is it going to be a reserve office for occasional team building events that is located near a major airport.

Maybe they don't "need" one, but they have contributed in a very meaningful way to the web dev community so I feel that this is a harsh take. Check out Lottie, Mavericks, and their contributions to the React ecosystem.

You're asking the wrong guy; I consider React one of the worst mistakes in technology, and it's the main reason Airbnb's website sucks (I speak as a superhost who has to use the thing a lot).

How does react connect to your experience using the site as a host?

I agree that AirBnB's website sucks, but why do you think this is caused by them using React?

Data that airbnb owns values much more than their website stuff. And you need tech people in ML and data areas to manage and use these data effectively.

First Microsoft and not Airbnb.

As if our traffic didn't qualify us as the LA of the East.

Seriously though, metropolitan Atlanta is a great area to live with three major interstates going through the city and a very well developer surrounding area. With many businesses adopting more lenient WFH policies the drive is not always a concern. Schools are generally a good mix of public and private as with any area.

https://blogs.microsoft.com/blog/2021/02/11/investing-to-gro...

Agree on your points, tech WFH/remote policies should benefit a city (especially more car-centric like Atlanta). If they can prioritize proximity to public transit, mainly rail or core bus route, that really helps, but if not, could also be a reason to make investment in transit to that area.

P.S.: typo? "...and not Airbnb" --> "...and now Airbnb" :)

> As if our traffic didn't qualify us as the LA of the East.

I lived in Athens, GA for almost a decade, and when my wife and decided to move to a bigger city, this was a major factor in us deciding not to move to Atlanta. We're really big on biking and public transportation, and at the time it didn't feel like Atlanta was an option because of this.

That said, I miss Georgia a lot. I don't think people who live in other states realize how cool Athens and Atlanta are.

I'm in Asheville, so not that far away, but I've still never visited Athens. I've heard great things about the music scene though!

When I lived in Seattle, I met a lot of people with very distorted views of Southern cities in general. A lot of people who have never spent much time (or any time) in the south get their whole concept of us from crazy politicians, awful hollywood movies, and jim crow. That said - I've met tons of southerners that stereotype all Californians unfairly negatively as well (they think it's all berkely antifa and LA gangs). This is one big reason I really wish we had a national program like the one Yang proposed, where high schoolers could spend time in different communities across the country. Travel is expensive, but there's really no substitute for it when it comes to dispelling regional prejudices.

I agree 100%! One of the reasons I moved to Athens was I wanted to live in a creative community in a part of the country I had never lived before. Now that I'm a parent I can't until we can travel again so my 4yo can experience some other cultures, here and abroad. There's too much tribalism, and when it comes down to it most of us want the same things[1]

What's funny is when we moved, we actually considered Asheville, too, but decided to go a little bigger. When we lived in Athens it was rare we'd visit Asheville and not run in to someone we knew, or saw that a friend's band from Athens was playing. There is (or was, at least) a lot of reciprocity between the two music scenes.

[1] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ZX5MHNvjw7o#t=6m36s

I have recently moved back to Atlanta from SF and missed the biking aspect of SF dearly. Atlanta is getting much better though, the belt line is connecting many neighborhoods and there is lots of development happening for further bike and walking paths. One day I hope to ride down Peachtree without fearing for my life...one day.

The traffic is really fucking bad, to be honest - I've been considering moving back to metro Atlanta post-pandemic (grew up in Gwinnett County, currently up in NYC, still go back to visit 2x a year) and it's the biggest concern I have with taking a local job. It's definitely as bad as LA or Houston (and the pure sprawl seems to match the latter). I'd probably try to rely on MARTA and that's tricky to do even if you want to.

My sister now lives in Decatur and I've been looking at some of the apartments near the MARTA stations there, and they're unfortunately mostly exclusively new luxury buildings (which I am very lucky to be able to afford on my current salary, but maybe not at a local job, or an adjusted-for-relocation remote one).

Frustrating how there's so little walkable development around the MARTA stations other than Decatur's, and what there is is so expensive. Of course, I could deal with a five minute park and ride, but it's kinda the principle of the thing.

The sprawl of most of the Sunbelt cities (Atlanta, Houston, Phoenix) seems absolutely unlivable to me. A tiny historic core just engulfed by tens of miles of car dependent tract housing and strip malls, all strung together by 8 lane highways is a nightmare to me. You must have to live in your car to get anywhere interesting.

Obviously that doesn't stop people from moving there but I am always shocked more walk-able dense development hasn't taken root.

> I am always shocked more dense development hasn't taken root.

Because it inevitably butts up against people’s desire to not live near lower socioeconomic classes who may not be able to afford a car centric life. See the prevalence of school rankings (proxy for parental wealth) in real estate websites.

Older cities or older areas within cities with dense construction were grandfathered in, but I doubt we’ll see another new city like that in the US. The primary way we separate us from them is with unwalkable distances.

You've just described Silicon Valley outside of San Francisco proper.

"Pay no attention to the second densest city in the country over there."

The solution is to be rich enough to live in the tiny historic core. Those are plenty walkable.

The flip side to that is sprawl is cheap living. SF doesn't sprawl but that means you can't afford a house unless you're rich.

The key is don't live in a suburb. There are plenty of neighborhoods in Atlanta proper that you can buy into that will allow you to get anywhere else in the city in 20 minutes, give or take.

I live in Phoenix and had the same worry when moving here. I'm in the suburbs, and have a fairly long commute with my current job (well, we're still WFH, but it _was_ fairly long). Maybe I can shed some light on one way of living in such an area.

One key, in my suburb area there's reasonably sized community parks all over. Shortly I'll take a 30 minute after-lunch walk, at the park that's a few houses down and big enough for a 30-minute walking loop.

Commute times CAN be long, but don't have to be. I have no idea why motorcycles aren't more used, especially in areas where there's no real winter. In CA you can lane split and _really_ cut down commute times. Here in AZ motorcyclists can't yet split lanes, but we can use the HOV lane. Cuts my commute time in half.

Further, Phoenix doesn't have a great downtown area anyway. There's plenty of interesting restaurants and shops spread throughout the valley. I just don't have to go "across town" very often, so the sprawl isn't that big of a deal.

Lastly, I can be in downtown Scottsdale in 30 minutes if I want, but I can also be in alone in nature, with likely no one around me for miles, in about 45.

> I have no idea why motorcycles aren't more used, especially in areas where there's no real winter.

As a motorcycle rider myself, I think you simply don't understand how bad it gets in ATL (both during summer and winter).

I currently live in Seattle, and it rains quite often, but it is just a drizzle most of the time, and I can still ride quite comfortably. Summer is a bit too hot at times, but nothing wild. Winters are fine too, aside from those very rare snow days.

Before moving to Seattle, I used to live in ATL, and I can tell you I would never ride a motorcycle there for multiple reasons.

1. It doesn't rain as often in ATL as it does in Seattle, but when it does, it comes out of nowhere and it pours buckets. Impossible to ride, even driving a car feels extremely risky with those rains.

2. Winters in ATL tend to be colder than in Seattle a lot of times (not averaged out, but on a day-to-day basis; e.g., one day in January you wear a winter coat, a week after you wear shorts and a tshirt, and another week later you are back to your winter coat), and summers are always much much hotter and much more humid. Weather swings much stronger in both directions. Humidity is a total killer. Riding in ATL during summer is pretty much impossible, unless you invest into cooling solutions (like cooling vests and such, which barely work for longer than 20 minutes at a time, as I found out from my own experience). You mention Phoenix, but the crucial difference is that air in Phoenix is very dry, which is much better for riding (or being outside in general). I witnessed 95F+ temps in Seattle (which also has dry air) a few times, and didn't even blink an eye and was able to stay comfortably outside. In ATL, I couldn't stand being outside even for a few mins once the temps climbed above 75F. Overall, I would say ATL has way way less rideable days than Seattle, and that's despite the Seattle rain.

3. Last, but not the least, drivers. While this isn't the main factor in my decision to never ride in ATL, it could be for a lot of people. Drivers are very aggressive, with many coming from very rural or suburban GA, driving giant trucks and having some animosity towards motorcycle riders specifically. I am not joking about the last one, I legitimately heard multiple people claim they wished it was legal to hit motorcycle riders on the road. But again, this point is just a minor one for me, as it is much more subjective than the first two and can be just written off as my personal experience aka anecdata.

With that in mind, I just want to say that this is not my critique of ATL as a city overall, just when it comes to riding a motorcycle there. If ATL manages to get the career opportunities for devs going with all those tech companies opening big offices there, and it all succeeds, I would consider moving back, despite the weather. ATL has quite a lot of things worthy of praise and appreciation that I miss while living in Seattle.

I'm in Decatur too! I grew up in the suburbs, and after having lived in the city, there's no way in hell I'm moving outside the perimeter. Unless, it's to another state.

I work remotely to avoid any and all traffic.

I'm happy to see larger tech companies planting some roots here.

from my limited experience of atlanta and houston, both seem worse traffic-wise than LA (which i know well). their traffic seems to be bad nearly everywhere, whereas traffic in LA has lots of hotspots, mostly in wealthy areas (coast and hills), where the demand for (sparse) housing has equilibriated poorly with insatiable demand for roads and parking. in the denser parts of LA, public transit and more walkable neighborhoods have kept traffic somewhat in check (bad maybe at rush hour, but not all the time).

Yet residents keep voting down subways: https://abcnews.go.com/US/wireStory/long-resistant-metro-atl....

It’s getting better, but you do have to pay for what you get. MARTA is partnering with developers to build housing in some of the underused parking lots around intown stations. They’ve done this at Edgewood/Candler Park (10 minutes to Downtown, 20 to Midtown) and just announced a project for the King Memorial Station (5 minutes to Downtown, 15 to Midtown).

Also, unlike many transit systems, MARTA lets you bring a bike on busses and trains, so you can extend your effective transit range a bit if you are able to bike.

The article subheading states:

  Airbnb needed an East Coast home.

Why particularly an east coast home vs. just another home? What's the strategic benefit of the east coast in particular?

Most of the US population is on the coasts and their headquarters is on the other one.

Time zones are important if your teams rely on synchronous communication (slack, zoom, etc.). My org has gone "remote" but we still rely heavily on synchronous communication so we still prefer to hire people in the same time zone.

Time zones are also important if you are doing customer or client support.

A considerable portion of the US lives in the southeast. Georgia Tech is a strong CS program that is outputting a ton of qualified graduates. Not everybody living in the southeast wants to move to SF. The Southeast also has much better representation in traditionally underrepresented groups in CS, enabling tech companies to mitigate some of the "pipeline problem" that makes it basically impossible to achieve diversity goals. There are also few major tech companies with hubs in Atlanta, meaning that the first ones to really develop there can scoop up talent more easily.

Atlanta is a mixed bag. I am a person of color, an immigrant and spent about a decade working in the coasts (NYC and Bay Area) before relocating to Atlanta about 6 years ago.

The Pros > relatively newer, affordable housing > decent weather > good public schools > there is room for my young kids to grow in the suburbs > It is green (love the tree cover), though the locals don't seem to care and keep chopping down the trees with no remorse. > not prone to earth quakes, forest fires and gets plenty of rainfall. > Plenty of trails, lakes. You can get to a beach in 5 hours (Hilton Head, Destin etc)

The Cons > Salaries are lower and yes roles are stack specific > Opportunities are limited. > Mindset > Traffic

If I had the means to buy a home at any of the tech centers, I would have not moved. It is always a good idea to stay close to the mother ship(HQ). The network effect of companies attracting engineers and other way around will always work.

Woo boy, I see a lot of people throwing shade at Atlanta here. That's not exactly a new phenomenon. As a native ATLien, let me quote one of our prophets:

The south got something to say.

I too am tired of those close-minded folks.

Hell yeah. Everyone says they care about diversity. But you aren’t going to build a diverse workforce if all your offices are in SF, NYC, London, and Seattle.

I’ve wanted to see big tech expand into the South for years. (Austin doesn’t count.) Atlanta and Nashville please.

If diversity just a euphemism for "non-white", then NYC is as diverse as Atlanta - both with about 40% white population and 60% non-white. NYC is far more diverse than America as a whole - 30% fewer whites, 2x more blacks, and 80% more Latinos, 3x more Asians, and 10x more Jews than one would expect from America's overall demographics.

In fact, by most measures NYC is more diverse than Atlanta. Atlanta is for the most part whites+blacks, whereas NY has an actual latino and asian population.

I thought that tech companies were moving towards remote work.

short airbnb. this is clearly their priority

Airbnb and tech hub in one sentence. Could someone explain to me what one has to do with the other?

>The new Atlanta hub will eventually house much of the company's growing technical and programming work, including a product development team.

RTFA.

I would guess the implication might be that Airbnb isn’t a tech company but an accommodation company?

Is that fair? I don’t know. Feels like there’s a spectrum. Can’t see anything Airbnb have done that’s technically innovative, but rather their main innovation is a very novel (and much criticised) business model.

It literally doesn't matter what they are. They have engineers and they're building an office geared for them. They could bake bread as their business but if they build an office for the 3 software guys that build their marketing website and integrate a 3rd party inventory system while the 1,000 bakers work elsewhere, it would be their tech hub.

Don't let your hate for Airbnb pick apart every single headline.

"Please don't post shallow dismissals, especially of other people's work. A good critical comment teaches us something."

https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html

I have wondered if with a flight from Silicon Valley/NYC during the pandemic, if there would be an explicit focus on convincing people from blue(democrat)-areas to move to political flippable/purple(competitive) states like Arizona, Georgia, Texas. So when I see "move to Atlanta" it makes me wonder if companies, with their progressive employees, might even make this an explicit strategy. If anything for long term political stability in the US, which helps business...

"flight" from the SF Bay Area radically overstated: https://www.sfchronicle.com/bayarea/article/People-are-leavi...

Yeah, home transaction values across CA during the pandemic are accelerating faster than the nation as a whole.

Large companies want to have offices in large cities. Most large cities, Atlanta included, are blue.

Right, but getting 1000+ more techies who mostly lean left into Georgia might change the result of a statewide election.

I did a project in Atlanta which required my presence on-site, so every week a flight to and back. I've spent enough time working there that I had to pay Georgia state tax. Anyway, I consider Atlanta to have one of the worst airports in US. Pathologically long lines through security, even with the rapid pass.

Maybe it won't be a problem in the Covid era, with zoom calls everywhere, but in the pre-Covid era Atlanta was a PITA for travel.

Hartsfield sucks but when compared to other busy airports it’s pretty good. And they have many chick-fil-as.

It's also much bigger than most other airports, double the number of gates as SFO.

Good point, I used to hate it until I experienced other airports.

JFK you have to walk and bus between terminals. DeGaulle you have to bus to planes. LAX you have to walk between terminals.

ATL’s plane train means you’re always 10 minutes away from any terminal. And at least Marta runs into the airport. Atlanta public transport sucks but at least it’s to the airport. It’s weird how many cities don’t have trains going to the airport.

I’m not sure there’s any airport close to busy that works this well. I prefer smaller airports where you can just walk in (OAK, FLL) but they don’t have as many flights to places.

I found the entire Hartsfield experience, ironically, to mirror that of Chick-fil-a. You see a very long line, get a sense of dread of having to wait in it, and in 5-10 mins that whole line disappears.

I remember one time arriving to Hartsfield just an hour before my flight was supposed to take off, saw that the TSA line spilled out into the entrance area of the airport (due to half the security checkpoints being closed for whatever reason), and, at this point, I've made my peace with missing the flight. Just 10 mins later, I got to the front of the TSA line.

The way they managed to unwrangle such a huge line was impressive, and it instantly reminded me of Chick-fil-a at the Georgia Tech student center building. Every time I got to it, I would see a line of 20-30 students, but it never took me more than 10 mins to get my food (from the moment I joined the line, to the moment I walked out).

I don't pretend to be an expert, but what 'tech' is there to AirBNB exactly? A SQL database setup and UI CRUD layers for every popular platform?

Why does this company even need a hub? It could use some extra lobbying power I'm sure, given that it's entire business model is dependent upon them remaining a de-facto monopoly.

Don’t forget a batch job framework such as airflow.

Literally every post about one of these companies has a comment like this. The issue for companies like AirBNB is not that their application is necessarily bafflingly complex (though it is absolutely true that, especially during the nosql era, amazingly baroque and bizarre architectures had a heyday) but that operating reliably at scale is hard, requires good decisionmaking on multiple dimensions, and requires attention to things that "just CRUD app" doesn't capture because none of them actually matter at low scale.

The same could be said about flowers.com, macys.com, or literally any company doing business on the internet. Scale is basically a solved problem so pretending that AirBnb is a "Tech Company" or that they have any interesting tech is incredibly naive.

Scale is not a solved problem at all.

And yes, the came could be said for other, less sexy companies.

Once macys.com gets a page with all the tech they open-sourced that is actually used at a ton of places outside of the company, similar to that of Airbnb[0], then we can talk.

Out of the ones I personally worked with, Enzyme[1] is pretty much the de-facto industry standard for writing React unit tests. Airflow[2] is used very commonly (our team at a big known non-tech company I used to work at used it about 5 years ago), and so is Lottie[3]. And these are just the ones off the top of my head, given that I actually got to use those. They have many many more that seem to have a pretty high usage. And their tech blog is very insightful, I learned quite a bit from it myself when it comes to my development skills.

And no, I neither was nor currently am employed by Airbnb, not a big user of theirs, not paid to say any of this, and I have no particular liking towards them at all.

0. https://airbnb.io/projects/

1. https://airbnb.io/projects/enzyme/

2. https://airbnb.io/projects/airflow/

3. https://airbnb.io/projects/lottie-android/

Does a simple CRUD app process $50bn in transaction across 100 countries ?

Lots of different problems that are complex! For example:

+ Text internationalization system

+ Payment processing

+ User auth

+ User verification

+ A/B testing system

+ User metrics collection from UI