Why Austin Is Falling Out of Favor for Tech Workers | Hacker News Reader

Why Austin Is Falling Out of Favor for Tech Workers

wsj.com

43 pointsCharlesW22 comments

This is a little misleading. The data they quote is based on their previous article[1], which just uses this analysis[2] provided by a VC company. Funnily enough the same VC company put a seperate clickbaitish article just a year before that one, claiming the exact opposite findings (about startups ditching SV).

I would guess a lot of these annual trends are just random fluctuations in their dataset, though to be honest I wonder how they're even trying to estimate this kind of information.

[1] https://www.wsj.com/articles/austins-reign-as-a-tech-hub-mig...

[2] https://www.signalfire.com/blog/signalfire-state-of-talent-r...

[3] https://www.signalfire.com/blog/state-of-talent-tech-trends

I think the answer is far simpler. Texas is an increasingly hostile state to live in, and tech workers are taking an opportunity to live in states that aren't. That's what I did; the moment I got a full remote job I left Austin in 2022 and didn't look back, nor do I even think about applying towards companies in that area.

It's not just the state politics that make it hostile, but the shifting climate and refusal of Texas to prepare for these events as well. I was essentially snowed into my apartment during the freeze in 2021 and had about a solid week before I could go anywhere or places started opening up again. I was among the lucky few that still had power too, many of my coworkers lost power for up to a week. Before that point I was already iffy on sticking around, but that event accelerated things massively.

As an anecdotal sample of 1, I moved to ATX in 2019 and moved out in 2024. Reasons include:

- Apartment rents creeped too high near downtown

- The culture dragged down due to gentrification by alcoholic, kidult, uncool office workers

- Too many unfinished megaprojects downtown ruining the charm

- Houses are way, way cheaper anywhere else, especially in the triangle

- The incidence of severe weather is less in pockets around the 100th meridian west

- MAANG curtailed permanent and hybrid WfH with RTO requiring commuting in a major metro like NYC and SV

Seems to just say that entrepreneurs are finding the Austin tech crowd to be lackluster. Though this was funny:

> We've seen one big shift away, and that was Oracle. So they moved from California to Texas during post-pandemic era, and now they've moved to Nashville.

That stuck out to me, as well. How crappy must it be for your company to unexpectedly lift and shift people across the country twice in half a decade? Or are they firing people and hiring new ones?

It's Oracle, I can only assume that hostility to their employees is part of the package, since it seems to be their default state towards everyone else :P

Cue the presentation YouTube vid.

which one?

This is the video and timestamp where Bryan Cantrill goes off about how awful oracle is. It's kinda famous around here. https://youtu.be/-zRN7XLCRhc&t=35m30s

Find more discussion about it by searching for "oracle lawn mower"

They didn't lift and shift many employees. These are primarily legal changes. Safra Catz is still in California (as are most senior execs), Ellison in Hawaii.

Aren't these just openings of new campuses i.e. expansion and they label 1 their "HQ"

MAANGs did passive-aggressive layoffs by requiring RTO and relocation to major metros.

> Austin tech crowd to be lackluster

Is this codeword for the tech crowd expects salaries in US dollars?

Can't imagine why skilled migrant workers arent flocking to red states.

I was born in San Jose and lived on the SF peninsula for most of my life. The tech scene of ATX compared to SF-SV isn't comparable at all.

Please note that moving HQ is not moving the entire company. BofA HQ moved from SF to Charlotte. Musk and Ellison are shopping HQ tax breaks, cheaper labor, and apparently, access to a health care labor and business boomtown (Nashville) after buying Cerner. [0]

[0] https://www.cnbc.com/2024/04/23/oracle-is-moving-its-world-h...

"Called back to the office" is such a weird turn of phrase, like you're cattle being called back to your pen. You people do realize that you have the power, right? They need you so they can make their crappy products. All you have to do is boycott working for tech companies until they let you work remote. We all saw remote work in the pandemic, how productive people became. We all know that return to office "for productivity" is a lie. They just want an excuse to pay for big offices, and an excuse for laying us off at a moment's notice. They will continue mistreating us until we stand up for our rights, together.

There are enough people out of work right now (with bills to pay like mortgages, childcare, tuition, etc) that most potential candidates will be more than happy to work in the office for a paycheck.

I just started seeing this on resumes. We got a letter from a person applying at our office last week who said she is available to work full time in the office. A couple of years ago, a lot of the people were applying for wanting to work from home.

But that doesn't have to happen. If we have a union, and pay union dues, then people can get paid from the union fund during a strike. There'd be representatives advocating for us and the rights we want. We can affect policy to add pressure to prevent future layoffs and make remote work a right. Rather than what we do now, which is anything they want.

We don't actually have to just sit back and allow ourselves to be constantly laid off, or threatened with being fired if we don't move to a specific city and commute every day. There are things we can do. But we have to get off our asses.

Enough of this sort of thing and creative people who plan ahead will label working for you as something that's extremely disruptive and you'll only be able to higher people one step above an LLM.

> They just want an excuse to pay for big offices...

Say what? They're just itching for an excuse to waste money for no reason? I have heard a number of people saying that, and I've never heard anything that sounds like a convincing reason why they should want that.

Don't bother telling me about investments in commercial real estate. First, I've never seen any evidence that the people making these decisions have any such investments. It seems to be a "just so" story rather than anything with any substance behind it. Second, even if they had such investments, the first one who defects wins, and everyone can see that. They should be dumping such investments and then dumping their office buildings.

> ... and an excuse for laying us off at a moment's notice.

WFH does not in any way protect you from being laid off at a moment's notice.

You may be saying that demanding return to office gives them an excuse to lay off everyone who won't comply. That may be true. But they don't actually need that excuse. They can lay you off anyway.

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