Hacker News Reader

Comment by diek | Hacker News Reader

Phoenix has a pretty thriving tech community. I'm in Chandler, and in the last week I have gone to a Cassandra meetup at GoDaddy and am going to an Amazon cloud meetup at the Amazon offices in downtown Tempe tonight.

I run into Ruby and Python devs all over the place. The problem is, like this article touches on, the jobs advertisements I've seen for Python seem to be written for the "hipster" crowd (I've even seen some with "ninja", etc in the title).

Then they end up wanting to pay $30k less than the competition, so most people I know chose to go work at Intel, Freescale, Microchip, one of the aerospace companies... somewhere that has a professional atmosphere, pays well, and you get to work on interesting tech.

View on HN

At the risk of getting flamed as an arrogant bastard. Which I am. The python talent in Phoenix is for the most part not talent.

The guys who want $75K would not fetch $50k in San Jose, and the guys who want $100K would not fetch $70k in San Jose.

I have been lucky to get some really great guys, but most of the guys are script kiddies who have never done anything hard, and are too high and mighty to learn to do the hard stuff.

We aren't competing with LimeLight very often for tech talent. We are competing with Silicon Valley. Because unless you have roots in Phoenix, if you are talented you aren't staying here.

I am very aware that if my guys wanted to leave Phoenix they would do well in Silicon Valley, and I'm very glad they choose to live here.

Does the type of work you have not allow you to go outside of Phoenix, e.g. remote work?

We have VERY rapid dev cycles, and often have to solve things as a team on the white board. We are starting to have some stuff that could be done remotely, but it is very hard to get someone remote up to speed on the vocabulary of the product.

We build things like Search Engines. Which have a Crawler, an indexer, a few dozen scorers, the front end, the Natural Language processor, the content extractor....

And all of those things have to talk to each other and be set up to run on your personal dev environment. That often means borrowing some know how from the guy next to you. That is much harder remotely.

I'm collaborating with some people on an application, too, which also consists of a few components that have to work together.

And all of those things have to talk to each other and be set up to run on your personal dev environment.

For this, we created (and keep updated) a textfile with requirements and a (terse) installation procedure a dev should be able to follow to set things up on his own machine.

That often means borrowing some know how from the guy next to you.

I once worked in a telecom company (open plan) where we also used this way of communication. Perhaps nothing wrong with it (from a social standpoint) but the senior devs were often complaining about being disturbed in their flow.

That is much harder remotely.

An alternative, which doesn't interrupt flow, could be email. But then you might have to wait hours for an answer...

I can only speak to my experience, but I've turned down offers from Google and Netflix to stay in the Phoenix area. The cost of living (relative to salaries) in the valley is crazy, and you're competing for housing with people who just happened to "be around" when their company IPO'd. In Chandler I can afford a nice house near parks and good schools and I don't have to worry about earthquakes.

Speaking to your troubles hiring, I can only generalize based on some job ads that I've seen. Like I mentioned before, some ads just seem too targeted at the "early 20s fresh out of school" demographic that companies think they can lure in with free soda in exchange for 80-hour weeks. Senior devs just don't go for that, so they ignore those ads and go interview at Honeywell instead.

The quality of living is different.

I am working mostly in Python these days. When I was in Silicon Valley I could go talk to Guido. When I had questions about AppEngine from Google I met with the PM's.

Phoenix doesn't have that. Also the place I rent in Tempe is with in 10% of the price of the same thing in San Jose.

That's more about personal connections than the quality of life of a region, right? Granted, geographically if you happen to know those people it makes it hard to connect with them, but most people can't just ring up Guido when they have a Python question.

As far as Phoenix-based Python developers, there appears to be a Python meetup group, 'DesertPy': http://www.meetup.com/Phoenix-Python-Meetup-Group/

As far as real estate... I don't know about your specific situation but as a whole the valley is much more expensive than the Phoenix area. San Jose, through Cupertino, up to Mountain View... on average you're easily paying twice as much for the same square footage (I just checked San Jose on Zillow. 2,000 sq ft is easily 600k).

The Buy is better than rent in Phx, opposite of San Jose.

"nice outside" doesn't happen much in Phx. In Silicon Valley you open the windows and let the breeze in. In Phx you kick up the AC.

Not knocking your decision to live outside of SV, believe me I understand it, but on the purely economic front one thing to recognize that while housing and other expenses may eat a lot of the salary, you are contributing (or rather, can) to 401K and regular savings at a higher percentage level than you would be with a lower priced job. Your standard of living might not be any better while living in SV, but you can invest in your future more in absolute dollars.

The flip side of that is that this place is just endless bubbles. Get on the wrong side of that and you'll never recover.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com