What's the Best City for Techies in 2024?
overthinkingmoney.com
overthinkingmoney.com
For example, the chart with the top tax rates. Yes it's technically true that the top rate in California is 13.3% for incomes over $1M. But then they used that tax rate against the "tax adjusted income" but the income was only $300K.
They also have subjective measures that unsurprisingly put the Bay Area lower on the list.
I'm not saying the Bay Area is the best, but I'm saying this analysis is flawed and biased.
I don't even have a strong opinion about the best city but when you see that style of writing a few times you kind of learn to spot it.
I think the best city is the one where you find a sense of belonging and contentness. Data doesn't cover all the nuances of happiness.
But you nailed in on the head -- you have to find ethnic food made by people who know how it's supposed to taste and making it for people who know how it's supposed to taste. If I go into an ethnic restaurant I know it's good if the majority of the customers are that ethnicity.
SF Japantown feels old and rundown like nobody's moving there anymore.
Seattle has unusually good building codes (single-stair is allowed) but no income tax, so in that way it might not benefit from tech as much.
Just a decade ago Fremont was a kind of cultural retirement community for the professional class in their 30s and 40s with an older generation of artists and small business owners. But now it's a retirement community for a lot of people in their 40s and 50s with school-age kids, and that older generation are either dead, retired, or priced out.
It's about an hour walk to Capitol Hill from Fremont and the walk around Lake Union is pleasant most of the year, but not so much in the winter. Driving to Ballard is probably your best option for nightlife around now, which I admit is pretty hit or miss.
So yeah, your perspective makes sense to me. Seattle has "at least one" year round nightlife neighborhood, but you're right that it's nothing like NY or Berlin where you have both full transit coverage and multiple districts to choose from.
Sure the 'average' apartment in NY might be similar to the average apartment in Seattle, but does the latter have a full kitchen in a safer neighborhood while the former is a half kitchen in a rough neighborhood?
Is the average home price both 2M but one of them gets you a 4 bedroom house and the other gets a 2 bedroom condo?
Not to say that there isn't better reasons to live in NYC, but 'CoL' is hard to meaningfully capture by service level stats.
I moved here a few years ago and it feels like the culture nudges people away from defining their life based on their work (compared to SF/NYC at least), but that feels like a generally handy-wavy explanation. Presumably there's enough MS + Amazon money floating around to get a decent angel/venture scene started.
Note that the threshold in WA is around $116K annual salary and I imagine that most senior tech employees would be above this level.
Source: https://foley.com/insights/publications/2023/01/non-competes...
Seattle is a city of transplants who are only there because Amazon/MSFT brought them there.
It is a city that is enjoyed on a big tech lifestyle. Weekend get aways are amazing. The suburbs are nice as far as suburbs go. So the demographics that love seattle and ones that do startups are diametrically opposed to each other.
The city of Seattle itself lacks charm and appeal. The Scandinavian coldness merged with tech introversion makes it the loneliest tech city. Among tech cities, it has the worst weather (if I'm indoors all day, I want sun at will when I do go out).
I have lived in SF, Seattle, Boston and NYC. Seattle is easily the least "city" of the lot.
That being said, those same traits make Seattle an amazing 2nd location for a startup.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Seattle_Freeze
https://rightasrain.uwmedicine.org/mind/mental-health/winter...
Contact info in bio.
I’ve gotten to know many talented non-us devs while working in enterprise but I can’t do a startup with them, couldn’t even hire them.
Their visa makes them indentured servants who will be deported if they’re doing anything other than working at a big company for the next 4-10 years. This exists in every city that’s big in tech, but in Seattle it’s a quantitative difference that becomes a qualitative difference. I’ve worked with at least a hundred developers in Seattle over the last decade and only three of them were from the region or attended undergrad here.
What's missing here when selecting the "Best City" is what sort of variety is there in the market? Surely you don't want to feel as if you have to stay at a company just because there aren't many other options in your area.
In the last table there needs to be a line item for: # of Unicorn Companies, or # of Publicly Traded Tech Companies.
I responded to a comment above about this, but I don't want to come off as a Seattle booster or Bay Area basher. I live in Austin and think my own analysis makes the city seem better than it is. We lived in the Bay for 7 years and both my wife and I agree that if we hadn't wanted to raise kids near our parents (a value we agreed on way before having our first), we would definitely have stayed in CA. So many cool people and interesting roles.
Wow. Just wow. Is there really a mistake this big here?
Yup TFA is misleading and arguably plain incorrect.
If you make $200K in L.A. and $300K in SV, you need to use seriously creative math to deduce that: "How Much Less Do Techies Get Paid Outside the Bay? -50%".
Literally TFA says you're paid "minus 50% less".
Negatives (in both sentences and numbers) are a bitch, especially when there are two negatives or more.
TFA should say "How much more would you get paid by moving to The Bay?" and not use negative percentage.
(raw median)
"How much more would a L.A. dev ($200K) make by moving to The Bay ($300K)? 50% more"
That'd be clearer.
Is it some cultural or linguistical thing where it always has to be X amount more or less and never "Y% of"?
Seriously, though, if you know of a way to proof posts (services, forums, etc), I'd be interested. What I need is an editor as a service. The blog is just a hobby, so I can't afford a real professional editor.
> It used to be that the best city for technologists was the Bay Area.... ...but Covid reordered the world.
The Bay Area governments and surrounding State have/has essentially unlimited budgets. They have no political opponents. The actual problem is the ideas, and I wish they would stay in California where they belong.
> stay in California where they belong
Out of the US biggest 100 cities, CA also has 3/7 top safest from violent crime.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_United_States_cities_b...
> The actual problem is the ideas
No problem with the ideas that cause Alaska, Tennessee, Arkansas, Arizona, Louisiana, Missouri, South Carolina, South Dakota, Oklahoma, Alabama, and Texas to have higher violent crime rates than CA as a whole?
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_U.S._states_and_territ...
Anecdotally, I've been here 30 years and never victim of a "dangerous" crime. Fat chance you move to Mountain View to work at Google and anything happens to you.
The only place in CA someone reading a "Best City for Techies" will encounter crime is Market St. and Tenderloin in SF. The rest of it in deep Oakland, Stockton, Modesto, San Bernardino, and pockets of LA, they will never end up.
Also as of two years ago, the chances that your Catalytic converter was stolen unless you parked your car in your garage was getting near 50% as well.
I suppose if you limit crime to just "dangerous" maybe it comes out on top, but I would prefer to be somewhere that I don't have to worry about 50,000 of my neighbors OD'ing on the street every year.
Also, these statistics measure crime according to the laws, their enforcement and reporting. SF has lax laws, lax enforcement and underreporting.
I’ve never once felt as unsafe in any part of Oakland as I did at the Taco Bell on S. National in Springfield, Missouri on any given Friday night.
If you start analyzing and carving things up other ways, it quickly becomes clear that the “small town and small city America is safer than big city America” thing that a lot of people assume is true, isn’t. Muddled at best, and bordering on simply being backwards.
This makes perfect sense when you consider that violent and property crime correlate with poverty, and small towns and cities tend to be much poorer than big cities. Add in that density effects mean that you might see more crime in a big city while in fact being safer than in a small city, and the picture starts to come together.
In particular, NYC is by far the safest place in the country.
Some facts about FBI UCR:
1) The FBI web site recommends against using its data for ranking because these rankings lead to simplistic and/or incomplete analyses that often create misleading perceptions adversely affecting cities and counties, along with their residents
https://ucr.fbi.gov/crime-in-the-u.s/2010/crime-in-the-u.s.-...
2) they are submitted voluntarily by police departments
3) many police departments don't even participate: "This year about 7,000 police agencies, covering about 35% of the U.S. population, were missing."
https://www.themarshallproject.org/2022/10/08/the-problem-wi...
4) From your own Wiki link: "Often, one obtains very different results depending on whether crime rates are measured for the city jurisdiction or the metropolitan area."
5) The BJS reports that 45% of violent crimes and 36% of property crimes go unreported to police. And I don't know that we can assume the rates of not reporting crimes are consistent across metros.
https://www.waldenu.edu/online-masters-programs/ms-in-crimin...
That's pretty hilarious.
In the 48 hours I was there, I had a homeless exposed his dong to me, another offered to sell me cocaine, then while I was eating at a nice Thai Restaurant, a lady in her underwear smashed the front window of the restaurant with a fire extinguisher.
Literally none of these things have ever happened to me anywhere else in the world in 39 years, except for the 48 hours I was in the Bay Area. Now please tell me about Selection Bias next.
I guess the social side can be deduced easily from the fact that these places are single-party cryptodictatorships, though.
Hardly scientific but I tend to think each city seems to have attracted different kinds of companies, and not all of us are as interested in working for some types of companies as others. Personally I'd rather avoid anything to do with social media, advertising, online shopping, etc.. Health insurance SWE jobs would also not be at the top of my list.
I do wonder if this matters less if you're a PM, as the author is, and whether the fact he's a PM changes his calculation as much. I think if I was a PM company culture and how demanding customers were might be a big factor.
PMs seem to be in short supply even compared to engineers and the pay figures he's citing might reflect that. A lot of places I've worked PM has seemed to be enough of a disaster people don't want to do it. And that's even with it seemingly being easier to move from engineer -> PM than the other way around.
Maybe glass door reviews? Another commenter suggested # of Unicorns?
It's like everything "bad" about tech has seemed to grow out of SV, as if it's become the place for grifty companies to find tech workers who don't care about what they're working on as long as it makes money.
You maybe could have quantified things like how far away workers typically have to live from the office, how bad traffic is in these cities, etc.. Traffic figures are often available in terms of "hours wasted annually".
It seems most of these cities are "horrible" on things like traffic though.
I didn't include crime rates just because unless they are super high, they don't really factor too much into the financial calculus of living in either place.
Total job postings can be wildly inaccurate. I know for example, Google will post a job opening, but you have no idea how many teams are actually hiring. It's much more likely you'll see one or two job openings in LA and the Bay Area, but the latter will have five times as many teams that are actually hiring.
Second is the fact that office flexibility matters a lot. Having to be in an office in Santa Monica 5 days a week is going to drastically impact your lifestyle compared to say, 2 days a week, in which you could live in a much less expensive place.
I live in Orange County and while housing is not cheap, what you can get for 2 million bucks would likely cost 4 million in the bay area.
But, when I ran this analysis, the differences were much less pronounced. Do you know of any way to correct for this bias? Clearly searching on public job boards doesn't appear to be getting at the reality.
Its also a bit presumptuous that seattle wins on “politics”. The author is generalizing based on their own preferences, i am sure plenty choose miamia or texas for the exact opposite reason.
I'm not sure how that error slipped in there. Thanks for pointing it out, I'll fix it. I need an editor for these in-depth analyses. I always end up making at least 1 typo somewhere.
If you are starting a company today and want the top decile of talent, you will mostly find them looking for remote roles. You will find some great workers who live in the big cities, and still want the in office experience, but by far the best people are living remotely.
> But Covid reordered the world. Combined with friendly inquiries, I wanted to re-examine what the best city for techies is in the brave new world of more remote and hybrid work.