Tech Hubs Are Losing the Talent War to Everywhere Else
wsj.com
wsj.com
It's "funny" to see how many places that deem themselves a progressive yet they fail so hard to tackle the very basics of poverty.
Living in a place where I can get 200k as a white collar while many others have to live in tents because despite being workers can't afford more, it's my idea of dystopia.
An average blue collar should be able to afford rent or buy a small place. If that's not possible in the place you live in, then you're living in a dystopian place.
If they really cared about preventing homelessness, they would pass rent control legislation. Every other western nation has figured this out, if you provide basic (and relatively cheap) safety nets around housing, you don't have thousands new homeless people a year.
Instead they choose to waste taxpayer money to buy London Breed's donors another house in Sonoma
Slumlords can and should be legislated out of existence.
> if the burrito place charges $8 which then increases to $12 with inflation
Where do you think this inflation comes from? If not from uncontrolled rental price increases?
Inflation in the cost of food has many sources, among them, the cost of the food ingredients, and increase in minimum wage paid to employees to make said food are the two other large ones to factor into the cost of food.
This is the prevailing liberal thought these days... the government should be in charge of housing completely.
https://www.hcd.ca.gov/sites/default/files/docs/policy-and-r...
Decentralization of the tech industry (particularly software) is a great trend so that young people who want to build a career won't be forced to move to Silicon Valley. Unless someone has strong personal ties there or gets a really lucrative job offer they should look to other regions.
RO recent-college grads are highly constrained in terms of upward mobility. You don’t get the network. You don’t get the camaraderie. It’s great for employers but bad for the ambitious.
The one thing they should have learned post-pandemic is that talent is global.
Tech workers can work their asses off remotely. Figjam is better than a whiteboard. Home offices are less distracting than open offices. If you hire the right people, they'll work even harder from home.
All business is bundling and unbundling. There are reams of tech workers presently working remote who have proven their work can be done cheaper offshore. On the other hand, there are offshore and remote-only businesses constrained by their model who are advertising opportunity proximate to themselves. Anyone convinced the world will be remote only (or RTO for all) is begging to be disrupted.
What?
> Anyone convinced the world will be remote only (or RTO for all) is begging to be disrupted.
I don't think we've established any evidence for this.
I am also not advicating for either of thise systems because i do t care how concentrated capital gets except for the situation where the accumulation gets to be so much that it allows the holder to exercise market power to exclude competition among other negative things that push prices above marginal cost. It is very market specific.
And we'd need to extend this beyond housing. Just because I'm willing to pay $12 for eggs doesn't mean you should be able to charge or receive that much as the supermarket.
Perhaps when businesses raise prices they have to write an essay about the legitimate justifications for such increases.
Edit: If anything, the big tech companies did a better job in Washington by allowing the non compete ban to pass for only jobs under $100k per year salaries. That way, political support is neutered in the future for any broad non compete ban that would actually affect them. For context, the legal minimum annual salary in Washington will be $90k in a few years.
With the export of American industry and the consolidation of all things agriculture, the solvency of the entirety of the state budget is almost entirely dependent it just on financial services, but specifically on income tax on Wall St bonuses. No sane governor would sign that bill.
The death spiral of agriculture in particular is incredible. Through incredibly incompetent policy decisions, entire regions of rural America are country ghettos, with our food supply dependent on a depleted aquifer in the Midwest and the fickle Colorado River.
The culture this has created and kept going over the last decades is exactly why.
It's not because the laws anymore, it's because the change in the law so many years ago changed the culture, changed the attitude about what was "right" Andover the needle towards favoring innovation and employee talent maximization over their career rather than focus on the profits of individual companies or the output of the company. Its so worker focused, worker aligned - and in an industry that relies heavily on thought leadership type work, that is a very attractive work environment for those types of people.
California explicitly protects ownership of inventions made on your own time/equipment[0].
AFAIK other states tend to default to employer ownership of inventions.
This alone is a huge win for Cali when it comes to HN/maker type folks...
[0] https://law.justia.com/codes/california/2010/lab/2870-2872.h...
I also had to push back against an overly broad non-compete when contracting.
When I was leading engineering at an early startup, I had to push back against our lawyer, who drafted an employment agreement that none of us wanted to sign. It included broad non-compete, and a bunch of other grabby clauses.
That startup one was tricky, because we were getting rumors that supposedly investors were demanding non-competes from tech startups. Silicon Valley notwithstanding. (And a bunch of clauses I hadn't seen before, including things like, IIRC, the company has right to do search and seizure in the home of the employee, on IP grounds. This was pre-Covid.)
It's hard to argue, when you're an aspiring actor, fresh off the bus in LA, and a producer is claiming to you that every role starts with the casting couch.
To resolve the argument-from-authority impasses on the startup's employee agreement, the company reimbursed me to hire a lawyer representing me as an employee. Both for my own interests as an employee, and to provide some kind of balance for the interests of employees in general.
San Francisco has massive infill potential [1]. Its limited, expensive housing is a policy choice.
[1] https://www.researchgate.net/profile/Jake-Wegmann/publicatio...
Convenient for existing land owners..
Non-competes are also judged rather narrowly: they can't ban you from working for any tech company, they need to operate in the same space as the one you worked in before.
The only real zero sum game here remains real-estate, the bulk of the people missing out from all this growth are lower middle class non-tech workers getting pushed out of metro cities.
[1] https://fortune.com/2023/12/20/san-francisco-population-rise...
The article directly addresses this: “A lot of tech innovation still happens in places like the Bay Area—witness the highly concentrated boom of new artificial-intelligence companies there. But as the tech industry as a whole has matured, it is following the pattern of every previous industrial revolution: knowledge, capital and talent is spreading out, across America and the world.”
Losing market share threatens “hub” status. That doesn’t mean everyone is miserable. But there is a real story in the data someone who reads the article will glean.
> as long as you’ve got the clicks
The Journal makes money on subscriptions. You’re describing publications that cater to people who don’t pay for news and don’t read articles.
Submarines aren’t paid for directly, particularly not at reputable publications. They take advantage of journalists’ desire for convenience, not revenue.
It turns out that refusing to build housing to meet demand has serious consequences: homelessness, street crime and filth due to homelessness, inability to hire for any but the highest paid jobs, families leaving because you can’t raise kids, and being passed over for other areas by new talent among others.
I saw a national map recently of places likely to lose congressional representation over the next 5-10 years vs places that will gain. It was almost perfectly a map of places where you can’t build housing vs places where you can.
Refuses to build? If there is demand and nobody builds the market sounds broken.
[1] https://www.lewis.ucla.edu/research/market-rate-development-...
The proper retort to this is to point to all the homeless and ask: if there were a famine, would the slogan be "stop greedy farmers?"
At the far end of that you have a market for what is there. It's nearly impossible to buy a well designed, well built house in many places because there aren't any. But the invisible hand of the market largely just skyrockets prices for limited, poor buildings because it doesn't have much real effect on the rest.
"To build housing in San Francisco, developers must first receive planning approval, known as entitlement, to ensure the city supports the type, size and design of housing proposed for a site. This part of the process took an average of 450 days over the last 18 months, according to recent data from the state."
Housing in the SF bay area is broken, largely due to the efforts of entrenched interests (developers and people who bought 50 years ago for an inflation-adjusted tiny fraction of current prices).
To put this into perspective, this adds 5% to the cost of a project in financing alone [1]. That’s $70,000 for a median home [2], about half of the city median household income [3]. Half of a household’s production in an entire year, just in delays.
[1] https://home.treasury.gov/resource-center/data-chart-center/...
[2] https://www.redfin.com/city/17151/CA/San-Francisco/housing-m...
[3] https://www.census.gov/quickfacts/fact/table/sanfranciscocit...
Parking minimums, setback requirements, "euclidean" single family zoning.
The market didnt break itself, the local governments collectively did.
Tech hubs like San Francisco are seeing their share of U.S. tech workers shrink. Photo: Shelby Knowles for The Wall Street Journal
Silicon Valley and other tech hubs are losing the tech talent war.
Metro areas that consistently attracted huge numbers of tech workers have hit a turning point, according to fresh data from labor-market analytics firm Lightcast, crunched by D.C. think tank Brookings. The share of the nation's tech workers who work in places such as Silicon Valley, San Francisco, Boston, New York, Los Angeles and the greater Washington, D.C. area is actually shrinking."
What do you think the “percentage change in the largest 100 metro areas’ share of digital services jobs, from 2020 to 2022” may is?
Payrates/change in quantity of jobs at certain pay deciles/quintiles would be helpful.
so the largest growth of remote jobs were only included in the data? what about the last year that had the largest tech layoff in 2 decades and RTO mandate?
Looks like i was right after all.
I've never worked in the Bay area except for a short stint a while back, but these articles seem to always pop up every couple years, and they're always wrong. All of the top companies and startups have always come from a very small set of cities - the ecosystem effects are just too strong.
Look at the latest big boom in tech, in AI. The "centers of the universe" for AI are still pretty much the same usual suspects.
Losing market share is losing the recruitment war for a hub. It doesn’t mean everyone will be miserable. But by definition, market share is what defines a hub.