Is Silicon Valley still worth it? | Hacker News Reader

Is Silicon Valley still worth it?

14 pointssjohns2119 comments

For years leaders have said "come to the Valley, it's expensive but worth it"

After the past year and a half, that's more debatable than ever

Is moving to Silicon Valley still worth it?

If you're not already established in the area, is it a better idea to set up a new startup in a smaller city / fully remote?

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It's worth it if you go join one of the fast growing start-ups and make a good number of connections.

I've lived here 7 years, and recently spent 12 months away because of covid. You'd be surprised how the basic knowledge of building a product and getting a company off the ground has not really permeated elsewhere. There are small groups of people elsewhere who seem to know what they are doing, but not writ large like it is here.

So, come, I say. You can always leave.

I think it might be worth it to be there for a while if you're young and getting established. It still very much is a tech center and there's a great density of talent and jobs.

Live as light as you can and focus on learning and building your career. If you're not making at least $200k by age 30, leave. That's practically the poverty line if you want to start a family. A "fixer upper" starter house will be over a million dollars. I call the Bay Area the world's only six figure slum.

I wouldn't start a startup there unless it were lavishly funded, or unless it's made up exclusively of young people who are okay with sleeping on couches or living in tiny rooms.

The trend is toward place (in general, not just SF/SV) becoming less and less important over time. The old limitation that you have to be in the Bay Area to raise angel or VC money has been dead for years, and COVID massively accelerated the shift toward remote and distributed teams in knowledge-oriented industries. There is still benefit to going to a concentrated hub for a while to level up, but once you hit a certain level in your career you no longer need to stay.

Sydney is a six figure slum but with fewer six figure jobs!

True. And it's not the only one.

That's one of the things you have to figure wrt leaving/not coming to bay area -> where do you go instead? Once you start doing concrete comparisons.... the bay looks pretty good.

200kUSD is 270kAUD and I doubt there are many dev jobs paying that in Sydney.

That’s my intended point - high property prices but not the dev salaries to match.

The decent 6-figures coming from the business roles but not dev.

270k developer? You can do it if you can write low latency C++ trading code, or get some super obscure but valuable tech contract gig.

I still don't fully understand how some of today's real estate prices are possible. There are not that many buyers of the income or net worth required to afford these prices. How can a large scale market exist with so few customers who can reasonably afford the product?

Simple answer: The customers that can afford the product(s) are buying more than one.

> How can a large scale market exist with so few customers who can reasonably afford the product?

Cheap debt. Nobody has the net worth to afford all these places. So the value of the properties are relative to how much people can borrow. For the last few years, that has meant a borroing a lot since interest rates around 1.5%.

I wonder more broadly if the value prop of a “city” still holds.

The value prop of Silicon Valley was a place to get coffee and work with THE cutting edge tech people. In the same way NYC might be seen as THE place to meet, collaborate, build lasting relationships in finance…

Does the idea of a city as a super hub still make sense? Especially in a tech world where more and more companies are fully or partially remote? Can you build lasting, long term trust based relationships without getting coffee or hanging out at least some?

I also wonder what the answer will be in 1-5 years. We might still be biased by the Covid centric world.

As a long-time big city resident that recently tried a rural house during the pandemic, my thought is that no, the "city" value proposition just doesn't hold in the same way it used to. This isn't due to the virus, they were stuffed before but we only realized when the virus hit.

People have been whining about empty shopfronts, Amazon killing retail, every block being a Chase / Starbucks / Walgreens for some time now. Retail is just such a different beast now. In the not too distant past... cities had a major advantage for getting your hands on lots of stuff with both more variety / cheaper prices, for stuff like books, records/CDs, HiFi equipment, camera gear, musical instruments, these kinds of specialty items for people's profession/hobby. Now those things are all either dead (replaced by iPhones) or online, and in the meantime the bulky big-box stuff that is e-commerce isn't so good for is better outside the city at a Walmart/Home Depot/Best Buy/Staples. I think those places weren't really so pervasive 20-30 years back.

So now the best retail is actually big box in the burbs + amazon, and NYC and big cities like it are just full of expensive 5th ave premium / flagship stuff, with few actual practical advantages.

Have you visited? I'd start with that if not.

I did a couple years ago for a conference and the homeless were very aggressive. One tried to start a fight with me because I wouldn't give him bus fare.

The state of public transport is very poor for such a densely populated place as well. There are almost no taxis. If you don't uber/lyft/whatever, you are invisible.

This was before the reports of tent cities and feces/needles in the streets, so I assume the place has only gotten much worse and less safe.

That was my one and only visit. I would not take a family there. It was bad.

This describes parts of San Francisco. SV is much bigger than that. Once you get out of San Francisco with few exceptions it's safe and full of nice people.

Yes, there are no taxis. Uber/lyft is the way to get around. Public transport is fine if you live in certain places (caltrain and bart stops).

Much less physical connections in SV.

SV is great if you're introduced or already have connections to strengthen your existing position.

SV is also great if you already working here and want to move to low/no tax state and going to win the fight with your HR to not downgrade your salary.

If you starting from scratch - not so sure.

Lots of concerns about growing taxes, reduced freedoms, raising crime, polluted cities with homeless encampments.

I remember reading the old Paul Graham essays where he says one of the main reasons they picked SV is because everyone is always smiling and optimistic, open to new ideas. Is that still the case these days?

source: http://www.paulgraham.com/siliconvalley.html

He is English,so I'm not surprised he wrote like this. There's way less optimism in England, compared to the SV.

They were based in Boston IIRC, and he compared it to that.

I don't think SV has been worth it for many years. There are certainly advantages to living in the area, but there are also huge downsides (not only the COL). For me, the cost/benefit ratio is not favorable. Your mileage may vary, of course.

In my opinion, no. Go remote instead. If you have to go, plan to make a bunch and leave after a few years.

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