Tech workers swore off the Bay Area, now they’re coming back
nytimes.com
nytimes.com
The prices suck, and if you need to improve your network you can meet the vast majority of tech people online (IRC, Discord, email, online conferences).
Weather?
And not weather directly but there are a fair number of tech people who, to the hiring point, have trouble imaging living other places because of some combination of weather and culture (and choice of jobs without having to maybe move to a different city in another state).
Are most of the bay area developers bay area natives? I was under the impression they were mostly immigrants under H1B contracts that could live anywhere in the US.
I don't and never have lived in CA but I've spent a lot of time there and I do see the attraction other than CoL and some other downsides. And there are certainly areas of the US that for me would heavily weigh against any employment opportunity offered there. (Though I'm full remote at this point anyway.)
I moved from the Bay to Raleigh, NC. If I wanted to start a B2B AI SaaS company here, I could (probably) find dozens of good engineers locally to help me do that. If I want to hire a VPE who's "been there done that" and scaled a B2B SaaS engineering org to 200+ engineers, or 1,000+ customers, or $30M+ revenue... my options are going to be significantly more limited here than SF/SV.
I couldn't imagine an entrepreneur being successful without meeting people in person.
There’s a certain nagging feeling that we’ll never be a “real startup” until we have offices in the Bay Area. And sometimes that views externalized by others. You run into a scenario where you’re talking to someone who’s excited about your tech and vision. Then you mention you’re located in suburban Florida and their enthusiasm just drops out of the floor.
Florida, though, jesus...
Almost like smart people can smart anywhere there's a beach.
Might as well ask why would any tech entrepreneur ever have moved to SF?
Therein would lie the answer
> Hunter S. Thompson, Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas, 1971
I'm pretty sure people have been saying this about the Bay Area since the Gold Rush.
Everybody experiences their special unique unrepeatable time and place. It doesn't matter which decade they lived, or where. For me, it was the early 90s in post-communist Czechoslovakia. Also, "hard to understand if you weren't there".
Free pizza and beer might not hold the same sway they did 10 years ago. You cannot step into the same river twice, etc.
The iphone invented a whole new platform for ideas.
The economy moved substantially online during this time.
It was a transformative moment in technology being driven out of silicon valley / sf.
We chatted weighing the good and bad of going full remote and moving to a less expensive city. Racism in SF or LA is bad, but it's a known quantity. Being a minority and having to deal with racism in Boise, Idaho, for example, was something they didn't feel comfortable with.
Also, as a Miami native who's been to some of the meetups and gatherings (we never really shut down) it's been interesting. So far I've seen more of the finance and marketing side of tech companies than the tech side. I've been meeting with different startups to learn more of their tech stack and to see if they're recruiting and rarely has the architect been there. I'm not sure how that bodes for Miami being a tech incubator if the SWEs are so hard to find.
> Racism in SF or LA is bad...
> ...having to deal with racism in Boise, Idaho, for example, was something they didn't feel comfortable with...
Who are those racists and in what way do they express their racism?
I'm a European who has been on your side of the Atlantic and Pacific quite often for work- and leisure-related purposes over a period of several decades. If I can believe the current narrative things have been going from bad to worse to black people walk the streets in fear of their lives from racist cops in the last few years. This did not use to be the case, America was the "melting pot" or "salad bowl" or whatever metaphor you want to use where people divided by country of origin, religion, personal story and - yes - skin colour all came together under the stars and stripes to celebrate their country on the 4th of July. Now that same flag is being called a racist symbol by leading politicians, the 4th of July supposedly celebrates independence for only part of the population and more of such nonsensical inflammatory political rhetoric.
Either everyone has been blind for decades or the current narrative about racism is a lie meant to achieve some political purpose. I do not believe the former to be true so the latter seems to be the answer but that makes me wonder why the parent poster brought up the bad racism in SF and LA and the racism in Boise, Idaho.
Maybe I should point out that I use the traditional definition of the word racism as can be found in printed copies of dictionaries and encyclopedias from a few years ago. Is that the change which made it possible to claim racism is everywhere and if so, why do people use the new definition of the word?
I think that after the 2008 financial crisis and the following bailouts for the people who caused it, a lot of people got fed up, and occupy wall street was born. Occupy was a class based movement: the ultra-rich vs everyone else. And then something happened, and suddenly everyone had to be divided by every other attribute imaginable - race, sex, gender, disability - class just wasn't as important. Instead of the 1% vs the 99%, the 99% was divided by all those attributes and fought each other over whose issues were more important. Then it quietly fizzled out and nothing was accomplished.
The 1% must be so happy watching the 99% squabble amongst themselves over who's the most oppressed. I think that most, if not all, of the major political/social issues today should be viewed through a class-based lens _first_; everything else should come second. But the users of this tool cannot have that, and here we are: everything is about race/sex/gender and nothing is about class.
> If you are a white European, you will have a hard time seeing racism, compared with people who are not white.
That is a racist statement in and of itself, and you do not even know whether I'm a "white" European, let alone the fact that "white" means just as much as "black" when it comes to indicating the culture people grew up and live in. Since I can only assume you are not a racist I assume you made that statement because it is part of the current narrative - it is called standpoint epistemology [1], part of critical theory - without really giving it some thought.
If you agree that racism is used as a political weapon it is only prudent to make sure you do not unwittingly make yourself become a part of that weapon.
Yes, people tend to react differently to people depending on whether they are from their own group or from the outside, up to and including to telling them to "go back where they came from". This is said to Polish migrant workers in western Europe, to Palestinian migrants in Syria, to Koreans in Japan - in all cases you'll be hard-pressed to find any "racial" differences between the groups. It is chauvinism, nationalism, protectionism or just fear of being overrun by "the other". It is not racism and should not be called such, specifically for the reason you yourself mentioned: racism is being used as a political weapon.
The Dutch knowing nothing of racism is super fucking rich. Read your own history books.
The Rodney King beating was in 1991.
Your whole post is an inaccurate depiction of awareness of race relations pre-internet. Pretending like nobody was aware is just a convenient narrative for people who have made race relations a bigger part of their politics in the recent years.
Because the alternative is admitting that they knew damn well but didn't care about it as much. Which would be the truth, but is too uncomfortable to admit.
Sure, but it was portrayable as an isolated, extreme incident because similar events captured on video rather than by word of mouth and the mass violence resulting from the media attention to it made it less, rather than more, likely that similar incidence, even if similarly captured, would get similar attention from the oligopoly establishment media while it had no mass grassroots alternative.
So, unless you mean that to support GPs point, I’m not sure why you point it out.
> Pretending like nobody was aware is just a convenient narrative for people who have made race relations a bigger part of their politics in the recent years.
Whites who weren't personally perpetrators or direct witnesses of racist acts (and even those that were occasional witnesses) were less likely to be aware of the spectrum of racist harassment and violence experienced by Blacks in the US before universal omnipresent cameras and grassroots media to distribute and virally redistribute recordings made the aggregate of individual instances that would have largely never been recorded previously and most of which, even if they had been recorded would have either been individually too minor for the news to cover at all or to inflammatory to cover in an unfiltered way.
Back then people used to actually talk to eachother instead making some small talk in between stretches of staring at their phones all day.
>Whites who weren't personally perpetrators or direct witnesses of racist acts (and even those that were occasional witnesses) were less likely to be aware of the spectrum of racist harassment
I've never had a conversation with an old timer about what it was like back in their day where they weren't extremely in tune with race relations in their hometown with the kind of specificity and subtleties that twitter and other media today just don't have the capacity for.
I’ve had plenty with white oldtimers that weren't, even oldtimers who clearly think (or thought at the time) that they were. Oh, sure, they'd have a detailed narrative of race relations, but the details in the narrative would often have as much to do with reality as a Baghdad Bob press briefing.
Because, see, I am a bit of an oldtimer, and not-white (but also raised by educated middle class white parents), so not only could I hear the detailed narratives with their convenient stories about rsce relations and all the narratives around culture, education, etc. that painted a rosy picture of race qua race, I also was kind of optimally positioned to see through the B.S. of many of those narratives.
Yeah, people told stories, but they told them within their in-group, and selected and embellished them to fit their own worldview and the image they wanted to project of themselves and their identity group.
Of course, in a sense that's still the same now, but there is a lot more spread of unfiltered recordings of events outside a narrow oligopolistic media system and unfiltered escape of messages sent within one group to those outside of the group.
That's not new, it's just better publicized now:
https://www.nytimes.com/2021/07/12/movies/boyz-n-the-hood-jo...:
> ‘Boyz N the Hood’ at 30: A Vivid Examination of Racism at Work
> ...This is evident when Tre (Cuba Gooding Jr.) interacts with Los Angeles’s finest. As a child he sees how even a Black police officer doesn’t take his father, Furious (Laurence Fishburne), seriously when he reports a home break-in; when Tre is older, the same officer pulls a gun on him during a routine traffic stop. He quickly learns that the cops are there to neither protect nor serve him or his neighbors. What Singleton shows us about the relationship between the police and Black residents may be well understood now, but at the time it was rare for the Black community’s view on policing to be so well embodied by Hollywood. I was always taught to be wary of officers as a young Black man, but this was one of the first times I saw the rationale for that fear onscreen in a major American film.
----
> Either everyone has been blind for decades or the current narrative about racism is a lie meant to achieve some political purpose. I do not believe the former to be true so the latter seems to be the answer but that makes me wonder why the parent poster brought up the bad racism in SF and LA and the racism in Boise, Idaho.
Like most things, it's not that black and white, but a little bit of column A and a little bit of column B.
So let's dig in:
> If I can believe the current narrative things have been going from bad to worse to black people walk the streets in fear of their lives from racist cops in the last few years.
In fact, just the opposite. It was worse before, but has slowly gotten better. Black artists have been making songs and paintings about corrupt and racist police not for years but for over a century. Body worn cameras and phone cameras have made the evidence irrefutable, "the police lie." So, now the NWA song, "Fuck the Police", wasn't just a bop but an actual indictment of the LAPD set to a 3/4 beat.
> that same flag is being called a racist symbol by leading politicians
You must be confusing the American flag with some other racist flag. No leading politician has ever referred to the stars and stripes as racist.
> the 4th of July supposedly celebrates independence for only part of the population
Umm yeah, that declaration was for land owning, white men. Native Americans didn't get theirs until 1965. We celebrated it but we knew it wasn't "for us"
> everyone has been blind for decades or the current narrative about racism is a lie meant to achieve some political purpose.
Great big omissions about the history of this country have been uncovered. And instead of believing the citizens have been intentionally blinded you prefer to think it's some conspiracy. Carry on.
> why the parent poster brought up the bad racism in SF and LA and the racism in Boise, Idaho.
Because when deciding where to relocate in the US some of us don't have the privilege of going wherever we want. One of the questions that get asked is "is X minority there? and if not why not?" Sometimes it's as simple as location (ie, HI, AK) and sometimes it's an old racist law like sundown towns. I bring up Boise as a counterexample. We're familiar with LAPD and know what to expect when dealing with them, and Bloomberg era NYPD. When discussion on moving out of California came up it was to other large cities with large minority populations, a place like Boise is an enigma to us. We don't know what's there and that can be dangerous for us.
> Is that the change which made it possible to claim racism is everywhere
So a country that is built on racism, which the US was, it tends to be everywhere, just not in expressed in objective terms and concepts you'd be familiar with. For example, Washington has an unnaturally low Black population. Because black people were literally banned from an entire state.
Btw, I'm sorry for you other people have a different experience from you, and that makes you feel uncomfortable.
I think it's a bit of both. As the saying goes, "I can tolerate anyone except the outgroup" [1]. Part of that is racism, sure. A lot of it is people being uncomfortable with outsiders in general.
But also the left has found that words like racism, bigotry, xenophobia, etc. are very big sticks, and a big stick is a fun thing to hit your opponents with.
[1] https://www.slatestarcodexabridged.com/I-Can-Tolerate-Anythi...
The most refreshing part of the change is that people are genuinely nicer and more friendly around here than anywhere I lived in California (OC, SD, SF, Berkeley, Stockton for college). I really didn’t expect that, which I think was probably due to crude stereotypes Californians like to spread about Texas. Ultimately I think the grind of just trying to live a decent life in the crowded/expensive parts of CA takes its toll on the populace.
The weather takes some adjusting, but not more than it took to adjust to the Bay Area fogginess for this SoCal native. Most of the year it’s beautiful out here.
Portland likes to spread crude stereotypes about Californians just the same. When I visited San Diego I was truly surprised at how nice everyone was. Outside of Hawaii, it was the nicest encounter I'd had with large groups of people ever.
Some of the folks I encountered in Sacramento, SF, and San Jose definitely lived up to their alleged reputation though... they were not so nice.
4 months a year above 90F, 7 months above 80F. I'm glad it works for you, but that's some adjusting indeed; people don't set their thermostats to 80F or 90F for a reason, and it's not just cost.
Regarding Bay Area fogginess, did you mean SF / Pacific coast fogginess? Most of the Bay Area seems to be fog-free. I don't remember the last time I saw fog in San Mateo.
If we want to go for some real good skiing, Utah or Colorado are short flights and will likely have much better & more consistent snow than CA has for the past decade :)
but he headline seem to be talking SanFran, but I can not know for sure
However actual statewide data, based on US Census totals, shows that over all CA is one of only a few states that have a net Population LOSS over the last 10 years, so much so they are losing a congressional seat.
I will link to some non-paywall sites for you, like proper Netiquette dictates
[1] https://www.politico.com/states/california/story/2021/05/07/...
[2] https://abcnews.go.com/US/wireStory/californias-population-f...
[3] https://www.cbs8.com/article/news/local/california/californi...
Not only did it not lose population, its not even one of the five slowest-growing states.
“The five states with the slowest population growth, all under 2.5%, were: Connecticut, Michigan, Ohio, Wyoming, and Pennsylvania.”
https://www.census.gov/library/stories/2021/04/2020-census-d...
This is simply wrong.
Your links all clearly indicate CA had a population loss for the first time ever in the year 2020. Not for the entire decade. CA lost a seat because growth slowed, not went negative.
Edit: Population, Census, April 1, 2020 39,538,223 Population, Census, April 1, 2010 37,253,956 via https://www.census.gov/quickfacts/CA
I absolutely love Nashville and Tennessee and even bought a house at the height of Covid. The people and southern hospitality are amazing (though I am seeing a lot of California plates lately around which frankly is making me nervous). Nashville is a such a beautiful city, opportunity is unlimited, amazing night life, food, culture, and of course music. Southern is way more my style and speed.
Just like London and New York City are in a different class from little SF.
The heat is kind of unfortunate, but I can tell you that sitting in an air-conditioned home looking out at a sunny day beats sitting in a heated home looking out at a foggy day for me. I wish SF didn't have the fog and was all sunny all the time.
The only thing is the politics, though. Texas politics, which leaks to Austin, is very top-down big-government. SF and maybe CA politics is more personal freedom. Lots more taxes and corruption in CA, as far as I can see, but definitely more personal freedom too (except in gun rights).
I don't see that at all. California is one of the hardest places in the country to run a small business. It's #1 or #2 in high taxes every year. California very restrictive and proscriptive land use laws (Rent control, permitting requirements, mandatory building laws, etc). California also has some of the strictest professional/occupational licensing laws in the country.
Unless you're only focused on getting booze delivered and buying pot, almost anything you want to do is cheaper, easier, and more legal in Texas.
Yeah, there's a lot deregulated in Texas, but for personal freedom it is some seriously big government stuff. In the Bay, I can buy and consume weed or psychedelics, I can drink in the park, I can generally be naked. Texas is very big on government policing personal behaviour. They're not really about individuals having freedom around their person.
From a card-carrying progressive Ezra Klein:
“If progressivism can’t work there, why should the country believe it can work anywhere else?”
https://www.nytimes.com/2021/02/11/opinion/california-san-fr...
I’ve seen plenty of progressives claim “they aren’t true progressives” but that comes across as a bit of a “no true Scotsman” argument that you hear from defenders of communism.
And it begs the question - if no one has been able to attain “true” whatever, is it really even an option?
How a place is governed is different from the party people run on, and the lack of accountability on results is the current failing of SF. Execution matters, not just ideas.
What is it that people think the TX government is better at? What similar challenges has the government of, say, Fort Worth faced as SF, and what solution did it have? NIMBYism and other such fun aspects are alive and well there, so if you throw the rapid change and influx of huge money at it, you're going to see some shit. Show me the policies existing in a TX city you'd use to fix SF.
You'll be helped by the massive amount of land still available to sprawl into... but that's a natural difference, not a political one!
If you had given an example where a really effective policy was instituted that at least made some small aspect better I might agree but even that’s not apparent.
EDIT since you added more: it's not about a purity test for different shades of progressivism, it's that a hyper-capitalistic corporate investment market converging on one city is literally the opposite of anything progressivism has ever claimed to be.
For communism and socialism you are given the definition time and time again but people in your position always choose to ignore it and repeat the no true Scotsman meme.
I can tell you the definition, in exchange of you not using that meme anymore. Sounds fair?
But by the same vacuum-logic, Kansas under Brownback is what conservatism looks like in practice: a massive, unmitigated failure so big that even the conservatives themselves raised taxes. And that’s with all that free tax money from well run states helping out.
There were dozens and dozens of articles in every publication over the last decade or longer about the decline of SF, COL is too expensive, homeless, dodging shit on the street, etc.
Then the pandemic and exponentially more articles about the flight from SF, NYC, etc. people are now fleeing for good.
Of course the actual statistics show a tiny fraction of people left SF. I think an article which focuses on this reality is well warranted.
If anything the people criticizing this article have an agenda in their belief that SF is awful and everyone should leave and anything to the contrary is of course biased.
Not that I should have to say this but there is of course plenty to criticize about SF and the Bay Area. The reality is the overwhelming majority of people are not leaving anytime soon. Only a tiny fraction are leaving.
Who wants to start a company or a business if the local government can arbitrarily shut down your office for several months? Who wants to live in a city that could shut down bars, restaurants, and theaters for a year. I'd rather make my own decisions based on my personal health situation. For several months a vaccinated individual and business owner could not consensually do business without a face mask. Where is the science in that?
Things might be different if there were no other options, but the US is a big place. There is a lot of competition, and life is too short to sacrifice years of your life for the whims of some bureaucrat. Ironically this is the same reason I moved to San Francisco in the first place; it was a place where diverse people and cultures had the freedom to express themselves.
Basically, you don't want to start a business in any of the world's biggest economies, or in the places with the best tech scenes or financing opportunities?
Activities were shutdown because of a massive global pandemic the likes of which the world hasn't seen for over a century. 4 million people are dead, and counting, and there have been at least 4 surges related to new strains spreading.
And you're leaving/left because you had to wear a face mask?
That is not the hill to die on.
CA's lockdowns were based on scientific evidence that COVID19 spreads through the air. Requiring masks was based on that evidence. As there were a lot of scientific unknowns during the past year, the lockdowns were overly broad as a matter of necessity--nobody knew how bad it could get. Moreover, CA's refusal to stick to the lackadaisal CDC guidelines was based heavily on the Trump administration's politicization of COVID19, and especially on the CDC's missteps at the beginning of the COVID19 crisis (i.e., when they were originally advising people not to wear masks...because they wanted to save them for medical workers and had neglected to make purchase orders for masks).
Requiring masks after vaccination was required for several months because it wasn't yet known how effective vaccinations would be in the real world. Once that data was established, the mask mandate ended for the vaccinated.
Also, note that the vaccinated can still get and spread COVID19, especially the newer strains like delta, they simply won't suffer severe symptoms if they do get infected.
If you don't want to live in an environment like CA where science and public health plays a role in decision-making, it's probably for the best that you're not living in CA.
We did some things right, but the state government really, really is not some bastion of good sense.
[1]: https://www.mercurynews.com/2020/12/29/how-can-california-ha...
You really shouldn't put words in the author's mouth. They very clearly said:
> government can arbitrarily shut down your office for several months
and
> a city that could shut down bars, restaurants, and theaters for a year
There are a number of states that managed to keep schools, restaurants, and barbershops open without having worse outcomes than California did. And when the state chose to ignore the CDC for an entire month and keep things locked down, even for vaccinated people, it kinda pushed a lot of people over the edge.
Not arbitrary. Based on evidence that COVID19 is airborne, and that standard office/business filters were insufficient to filter out the virus, most indoor businesses were closed down to limit the spread except those deemed "essential."
There are a number of states that managed to keep schools, restaurants, and barbershops open without having worse outcomes than California did.
That's not true at all. On a per capita basis, those states ended up having significantly higher infection rates and death rates.